The nation’s leading expert on protecting the electric grid from attack urges governors to take the lead because the Biden administration won’t.
In a new alert, Peter Vincent Pry, the executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, said concerns are growing that Russia, North Korea, and Iran are inching closer to testing an electromagnetic attack on the U.S. grid, or parts of it.
He noted the current crisis in Ukraine could spark a Russian attack, and he cited state media making the threat in the past.
“In April 2021, during the previous big crisis between Russia versus the U.S. and NATO over Ukraine, Moscow’s state-run TV broadcast to the world that: ‘War is inevitable…it will be a Cyber War,’” Pry said in his note, shown below.
He said Florida has been threatened “to deter the U.S. from helping Ukraine.”
And he said just last month, a member of the Russian Duma (the country’s Congress) “proposed warning Washington that Moscow is serious about nuclear war over Ukraine — by launching a hypersonic warhead to detonate on or over the Nevada nuclear test area. A nuclear or non-nuclear EMP demonstration could blackout Nevada or the entire Western Grid.”
Former President Donald Trump took some steps to protect grids around the country, but they remain open to either an attack or a natural hit from a solar flare.
With Washington stalled, he suggested governors take the lead and even drafted a model executive order they could use.
“The White House and Congress have tried to protect the nation’s electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures through executive orders and legislation. But federal departments, agencies, and regulatory bodies, through incompetence or corruption or both, have all failed to make our nation safe from EMP and Cyber Warfare,” he said.
In a recent report on the impact of a power grid outage, Pry warned that up to 90% of the U.S. population could die during a year without power.
