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posted by chromas on Friday March 29 2019, @11:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the or,-you-know,-Carrington-events dept.

In what could potentially be one of the most, or least, significant actions of his term in office, President Trump Tuesday signed an Executive Order requiring federal agencies to strengthen critical infrastructure against ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks.

EMPs occur for a variety of natural and man-made reasons including, most notably, Nuclear Explosions and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), either of which could potentially take out entire sections of the country's electrical grid and other infrastructure and capabilities, requiring require years or decades to recover from.

Members and supporters of the decommissioned US Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse have long warned of the possibility of an EMP attack, with some individuals, such as Peter Pry, who previously led the congressional EMP commission, asserting that an EMP attack on America could kill off 90% of the US population.

This is because a man-made EMP has the advantage of being highly asymmetrical. A small country able to pull one off would cause potentially massive disruption to a large tech dependent country such as the United States.

Past EMP related coverage here, here and here


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:28PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:28PM (#821987)

    No, it's called pork spending on a massive scale. The real purpose isn't protection of the equipment for that which truly must be protected for continuity of government already is so. The real purpose is another several billion for Halliburton, Lockheed, Raytheon, McKesson, Bechtel

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:59AM (#822163)

    Ding ding ding!

    I wonder what the AC OP was thinking. Oh right, Trump supporter, not thinking.

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:18AM

    by driverless (4770) on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:18AM (#822200)

    Ah, of course. So you set the threshold so that eyewateringly expensive equipment from L3 qualifies (do they even do SCADA? I guess they will now) but not ordinarily expensive equipment from Siemens, Schneider Electric, and so on. And you can spend infinite amounts of money "hardening" whatever it is you feel like hardening, and when it collapses anyway in the face of an EMP - the US power grid is nothing more than ten million km of EMP receiving antennae - there won't be anyone left to sue. I mean, there'll still be zombie lawyers crawling around, but no-one else left for them to sue.

    Mind you it might work. The US grid is in a pretty shaky state from a combination of decades of deferred maintenance and trying to tie separate grids together into one super-grid. So you take the EMP funding and (a) use it to deal with the backlog of deferred maintenance and (b) harden it against actual threats, Ukraine-style SCADA hacks, Metcalf transformer attacks - all you need to do there is take out enough of them in various locations to exhaust the strategic reserve, which isn't much of a reserve, you can keep any extras you hit out of action for months if not years - etc.

    So take the money for EMP protection and apply it to the deferred maintenance you haven't been able to get funding for.