[AndyJackson]

This is the great part about writing in passive voice. You don't have to say WHO warned Congress. The unstated subjects of the active voice sentence are:

William R. Graham, chairman of the former EMP commission and its former chief of staff, Peter Vincent Pry,

Now you can google far and wide to try to understand Dr. Pry's technical qualifications in this area and you will come up empty because he is not a scientist or engineer but some political scientist enmeshed in the swamp business of getting a payoff for running a consultancy advocating for various policy initiatives that will, so the hope goes, result in a massive payoff for his paymasters, some other defense consultant contract who will also get paid even bigger bucks to study the problem.

There are experts in this area. They are at places like Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the nuclear weapons laboratories. But we don't here much from them on this subject. It isn't about solving a problem, but horning in on the business of national security consulting.

[spankalib]

Good analysis - thanks.
As an aside, it occurs to me that such insight provided by helpful FReepers is WHY I often don’t waste my time reading articles, so thanks again - for saving me TIME ;)

[rktman]

Well that’s crazy. “THEY” warned CONgress. Sheesh. Do I have to spell it out for you? LOL! Maybe it was those two highly placed anonymous sources from the white house. “THEY” usually leak stuff like this.

[CommerceComet]

Now you can google far and wide to try to understand Dr. Pry's technical qualifications in this area and you will come up empty because he is not a scientist or engineer but some political scientist enmeshed in the swamp business of getting a payoff for running a consultancy advocating for various policy initiatives that will, so the hope goes, result in a massive payoff for his paymasters, some other defense consultant contract who will also get paid even bigger bucks to study the problem. Even then, I would expect that portions of our country would emerge from the attack relatively unscathed. The military would as they have been prepared for a nuclear battlefield with EMP present for decades. There are experts in this area. They are at places like Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the nuclear weapons laboratories. But we don't here much from them on this subject. It isn't about solving a problem, but horning in on the business of national security consulting.

This is important to note. Not everyone who testifies to Congress is necessarily qualified or credible.

I don't dispute that an EMP has the ability to create damage but not nearly on the scale of the wet-dream fantasies of the doomsdayers. To totally devastate a nation as large as ours with EMP could only be done with assurance by the sun. For a human military to accomplish this level of destruction would require a co-ordinated, multi-layer attack of nuclear weapons with enhanced EMP capabilities launched from satellites and detonating in the atmosphere all around the country. Our military might be able to accomplish this and maybe the Chinese and Russians but not the North Koreans.