Posted on 10/12/2017 3:57:51 PM PDT by bitt
Congress was warned Thursday that North Korea is capable of attacking the U.S. today with a nuclear EMP bomb that could indefinitely shut down the electric power grid and kill 90 percent of "all Americans" within a year.
At a House hearing, experts said that North Korea could easily employ the "doomsday scenario" to turn parts of the U.S. to ashes.
In calling on the Pentagon and President Trump to move quickly to protect the grid, the experts testified that an explosion of a high-altitude nuclear bomb delivered by a missile or satellite "could be to shut down the U.S. electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of up to 90 percent of all Americans."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
BS
I get so sick of some gun owners who think that owning and wielding a gun makes them bullet proof. I'm not saying don't have them (I'll be armed to the teeth), but it's not so cut-and-dry a solution to say that you just shoot all the marauding hordes. You must sleep sometime, or work on finding/preparing food. Or simply go to the bathroom or bathe. Ferals have no compunction about taking you out at such times.
Guns don't give you X-ray vision to see through cover. Nor do they super-rapid shoot all of an advancing crowd of hundreds. Nor do they put out arson-started fires, nor will they stop a high-speed ramming car headed to your front door (even if you shoot the driver.)
It's still going to be a bloodbath, involving you or loved ones around you.
More putting all our eggs in one basket. Sure. Harden the existing grid a bit. But better yet, build a redundant system. Micro generation. Microgrids. Wind power, solar, and renewables; not because of globull warming but to add redundancy and survivability to the system.
Agree as the inverse-square law also applies for EMP bursts.
Total horsesh!t.
Who sold Congress this pile of manure?
Total grid shutdown MIGHT cause 2 to 3 percent of population (medical patients) to croak pretty quick.
Any of the other dead would pretty much be due to stupidity and dependency.
Click the Pic
A North Korean Satellite, lol!
............and IF ONLY the federal government would fund ten trillion for our new fangled anti-EMP whiz bang gizmo we could reduce 90% down to 50%...................
Who dies would be VERY lopsided:
Urban? The urban survival rate without infrastructure will be negligible. How many decent people in cities have or can find food and water to survive six months without electricity? How many of those can resist their charitable natures as neighbors starve and then defend what they have against starving ferals? After looting everything in the city, including each other, how many ferals can make it far enough from a city to find surviving soft targets with supplies? Those who make it out will be very dangerous but also very few in number.
Suburban? That will be mixed. It will depend on lifestyle and distance from the concentrations of predators. Guns, supplies, teamwork, and training will be a big factor. Even close to a city, a neighborhood with 20 families, all hunting buddies, will have fairly good odds. Even near a smaller city, a neighborhood full of commuting accountants who have no outdoor experience and think guns are scary will face a bleak but short future.
Rural? I imagine those in towns under 20,000 will have extremely high survival rates. They will get cold, miserable, and irritable, but they will (mostly) live. They will not be able to harvest all the food they grow, but they will still have more than they can eat. They may be camping in a tent inside their cold homes, to stay warm, but they will not freeze.
I don’t believe the 90% fatality number or anything close to that, but I imagine the true number will be bad enough.
“bullet proof”
The principal rule of war is to kill the enemy until they tire of dying.
You must simply be better at it than they are, and they will retreat/surrender/end the aggression.
And that is the point where you must continue to pursue the fight until none are left.
We’re doomed. Doooomed.
Had we implemented Reagan’s Star Wars we wouldn’t have this concern,
All this angst about an EMP may be legit. But my Mama named me Thomas, so I’m not 100% sold. Remember Y2K? Remember all the hell that was guaranteed to befall us at the stroke of Midnight on December 31, 1999? Man-made Global Warming, anyone? The world will run out of petroleum by the year 2000? Bah. Humbug.
Well, gee.. if the North Koreans are going to kill 90% of all Americans, or some volcano in Yellowstone is going to wipe out the entire population of Planet Earth can we please, PLEASE just put one nasty female ex-Presidental candidate in prison first?
I believe your first two events are far more likely to happen than the last one. I also think you would have better odds on a 40 million:1 lottery.
Last time the Austin, TX area had a bad freeze, they decided to play round robin and cut off the electricity for a while. Of course, either they forgot to turn it back on or when they did, it blew transformers. Their spares were used up in no time. Knowing Austin, they didn’t learn their lesson.
Congress could easily protect much of the grid by requiring power transmission lines that cross state boundaries pass through an AC-DC-AC conversion with trip/trigger active on those lines (basically and industrial scale surge protection). This would stop the power surge from an EMP blast at the state boundaries limiting the damage to roughly a 4 state region for one, even massive, EMP. I should point out that the solution would not be cheap.
However, it is possible for multiple EMPs in the right locations to take out the entire grid even with the above design.
Much cheaper to shoot down the missiles though.
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