'Swamp' continues to water down realities of EMP threat, says expert

The latest defense bill – the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – was signed into law by President Donald Trump on December 20, 2019. The bill incorporates the president's previous EMP Executive Order.

Although the law is binding upon all departments and agencies, Dr. Peter Pry – executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security – says it has the potential to be undermined if the threat posed by electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is underestimated by those inside the U.S. government.

Those responsible for an underestimation of the EMP threat, Pry argues, would include "Obama-holdovers and Deep Staters" working for Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"[They are] in league with lobbies for the electric power industry – like the Electric Power Research Institute [EPRI] – and are trying to low-ball the EMP threat so industry and the [U.S. government] would have to do little or nothing [to protect against the threat]," he adds.

Pry is convinced the EPRI, DOE, and DHS "collectively have little or no expertise on EMP, but pretend that they do."

"[They] are ignoring the EMP Commission threat assessment that a natural or nuclear EMP event could cause protracted blackout of the North American electric grid, putting at risk the lives of millions," he tells OneNewsNow.

The EMP expert attests the EPRI has produced "junk science" studies, which have been rebutted by the EMP Commission.

"[These studies claim] a worst-case EMP, including a nuclear EMP attack, would be little worse than a hurricane, [affecting] only a few states – not the entire nation," says Pry, and that such an event would "be quickly recoverable, [thus] an EMP would not be an existential threat to the nation."

He continues: "If EPRI's bogus EMP threat assessment is accepted by DOE, DHS, and the White House, the electric utilities will have to do little or nothing to protect the grid from the real EMP threat" – adding that DHS and DOE like the EPRI threat assessment "because it means their emergency plans for hurricane recovery can work for EMP.

"[Consequently] they will not have to work hard developing radically new plans to protect and recover the entire nation – which DHS and DOE have never done before."

The former EMP Commission chief of staff contends that "a small number of real EMP experts" in DHS and DOE understand that the EPRI's threat assessments are "bogus," object to adopting those assessments, and recommend instead using the EMP Commission's threat assessments and recommendations.

"[But] management at DHS and DOE, still dominated by Obama-holdovers and 'the swamp,' has excluded these experts from the implementation of [a plan that protects the nation]," Pry laments.

In one example, Pry shares a frightening statement from Russian General Vladimir Slipchenko, author of No Contact Wars.

"[In that book, Slipchenko] correctly argues an EMP attack blacking-out the U.S. grid would collapse all the other life-sustaining critical infrastructures too – communications, transportation, business and finance, food and water," Pry explains.

"Ninety-nine percent of the electricity required by U.S. military bases comes from the civilian grid," the EMP expert points out, "[and] U.S. military forces could be paralyzed and rendered impotent by an EMP, cyber, or sabotage attack that blacks-out the national grid."

Pry, author of the book Blackout Wars, says the result of attacking electric grids and critical infrastructures could render armies, navies, and air forces obsolete.

"That's why General Slipchenko describes it as a 'no contact war' – because a war can be won just by attacking the electric grid, without the armed forces of opposing nations ever coming into contact," he adds.

Pry concludes by reminding the American people that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, in their military doctrines, "call for using a combination of EMP, cyber, and physical sabotage to collapse electric grids, attacking society's Achilles Heel."

Thus, he argues, protecting the electric grid should be a top priority, as President Trump has suggested and the passing of NDAA warrants.