미등록EMP, 美 전력망 최대 70% 파괴 가능…’산업화 이전’으로 되돌릴 수도 [팩트매터]

With less than two months to go until Election Day, and with people across the whole country now frantically trying to decide who to vote for, as well as whether or not cats and dogs are being eaten in Ohio, very important questions, well, there's a threat that's not being discussed at all, which cuts right across party lines. That's because regardless of whether there's a Democrat or a Republican in charge, Americans face the real threat of a hostile foreign actor, like Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and a handful of others, using what's known as an EMP attack to destroy our technological advantages. In case you've never heard of it before, an EMP attack, otherwise known as an electromagnetic pulse attack, is one of the most deadly threats facing our country. The way that it works is that a nuclear weapon can be detonated in the stratosphere above the United States. This type of an explosion, it would not kill anybody directly, but instead what it would do is cripple the entirety of our electrical grid, setting us back 100 years in the blink of an eye. At its essence, a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse is achieved when you have a nuclear warhead get detonated anywhere between 20 to 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. This can be achieved by multiple ways. You can strap a bomb to a satellite, or onto a missile, or even onto a spy balloon. The key is just to make sure that the nuke is high up in the air enough, right above the target that you want to take out. And notably, these bombs, they don't need to contain a huge nuclear yield in order to generate a large EMP. Even a payload as small as, let's say, 10 kilotons, can produce large enough electromagnetic pulses to critically disrupt the U.S. electrical grid. Now, one thing that's relevant to know about nukes when discussing EMPs is that besides the destructive fireball that we usually see in movies, the one that destroys everything in a given path, a side effect of a nuclear explosion is the release of an intense pulse of electromagnetic radiation that covers everything in the line of sight from the epicenter of the actual explosion. And so here's a map to give you an idea of what this looks like in practice. If a nuclear warhead was detonated about 18 miles above the surface of the Earth, it would generate an EMP that would cover several states. At 62 miles above the Earth, it would cover several more states. At 125 miles, it would cover almost the entirety of the U.S. And at 250 miles, it would cover not only the entirety of the continental United States, but also a giant part of Canada as well as Mexico. Now, what's interesting to note is that unlike a typical nuclear attack, an EMP attack, it doesn't really have the associated physical destruction. You're not going to see buildings get toppled over or cars melted to the ground or things like that. But what you will experience is that all of your electronic devices immediately stop working as the electromagnetic pulse waves completely overload and fry the circuits. And so basically everything, elevators, cell phones, electronic billboards, the ATM, your electronic stove, the microwave, everything shuts down. Although at this point, you might be asking the obvious question. How do we actually know this? If an EMP attack has never been done before, how do we know how it actually works? Well, the answer is rather simple. The U.S. has been running these tests. You see, the knowledge that we have about these EMP attacks date back to 1962 when the U.S. was conducting nuclear experiments off of the coast of Hawaii. At that time, officials within the defense sector of the U.S. federal government, they had this worry that if the Soviet Union were to detonate a nuclear bomb in the space above the United States, it could damage or even destroy our intercontinental ballistic missiles. And so to face this threat, the U.S. federal government, they authorized and they conducted something known as Project Visible, where they set up a series of these high altitude nuclear weapons tests to find out for themselves what actually happens when nuclear weapons are detonated in space. And one of those tests was called Starfish Prime. And it was during the Starfish Prime experiment that the U.S. learned about the dangers of an EMP attack for the very first time. What happened was that a nuclear device was set off at an altitude of 250 miles above Johnston Island over in the Pacific Ocean, which was high enough in the air and far away enough from mainland Hawaii that the scientists conducting the test assumed that it was all safe. But the experiment proved otherwise. That's because over in Hawaii, which is about 900 miles away from the blast, well, you had streetlights that began to fail, circuit breakers were tripped, you had alarms that were triggered and a telecommunication relay was damaged. Additionally, going in the other direction, several U.S. satellites that were in orbit at that particular time, they were damaged by the resulting EMP from this nuclear blast. And it was at that moment that these nuclear scientists, they realized that this was a potential danger. But the U.S. was not alone in this testing. That's because starting in October of that very same year, in 1962, the Russians also detonated several nuclear explosions over Kazakhstan in order to calculate the impact of an EMP blast on the electrical grid. The Soviets, they eventually wound up conducting seven of these nuclear experiments, each time changing up the height of the blast, as well as the payload in the actual bomb in order to assess the difference in damage when you change up those two variables. Now, the results of their experiments are still largely classified. But back in the year 1994, during peace agreements between Russia and America, some of the findings were handed over to U.S. scientists. And according to what the Russians revealed to Americans, and then subsequently what the American scientists revealed to the public, the EMP blasts over in Kazakhstan, they destroyed transformers, they destroyed generators, entire communication systems, switchboards, and almost all electronic devices in a given locality. And so taking that knowledge, you fast forward to today, and if you were an up-and-coming world power like China, or a regional power like Iran, or let's say somewhat of a rogue nation like North Korea, and you're looking at the United States, a technologically superior country that you might not be able to win in a head-to-head match, well, what do you do? The answer is obvious. You destroy the very foundation of the infrastructure that makes your enemy superior. And this is not speculation. For instance, in May of 1999, during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, there was a meeting held in Austria between high-ranking members of the Russian parliament and a U.S. congressional delegation. And while discussing the war in Yugoslavia, the Russian delegation, they raised the specter of an EMP attack against America. In a declassified report that you can see up on your screen, here's what Congressman Roscoe Barlet recalled was said during that meeting by his Russian counterpart. Quote, at one point, Vladimir Lukin looked up. He said, And Alexander Shabanov, the handsome blonde communist, smiled and said, This kind of puts in context the threat that we face. And just for your reference, it was exactly this threat at this meeting which led the U.S. Congress to set up something called the EMP Commission two years later to study this threat in greater depth. But of course, it's worth mentioning that it is not just Russia. For instance, in that very same meeting, the Russian representatives, they also informed the American diplomats that Russia's knowledge of how to build a strong EMP nuclear weapon was accidentally shared with the North Koreans. That's amazing. Likewise, there is a Chinese textbook that was published by the People's Liberation Army called The Third World War, Total Information Warfare. And as a part of the doctrine stated in that book, or rather you could say as a part of the curriculum in that book, here's what the textbook states. Quote, And neutralize and check the deterrence of Western powers, including the United States. And this is not just an academic argument in a textbook. As recently as March of 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, you had the Chinese Communist Party openly threatening the use of EMP devices against American naval ships in the South China Sea, meaning that this is a real threat that the Chinese Communist Party is openly flexing about. And the death toll from an attack like this on the American homeland, it might very well be devastating. In fact, back in 2001, as I mentioned earlier, the U.S. set up something called the EMP Commission in order to study in greater depth the threat that these weapons pose. Three years after being set up, this committee published their report. You can see it up on your screen. And they found that an EMP attack, it could result in the destruction of up to 70 percent of the U.S. electrical grid. It could cause a nationwide blackout for well over a year. And that blackout, it could result in the deaths of up to 90 percent of the American population through both starvation as well as general societal collapse. Again, this blackout would lead, according to the experts who looked into it in great depth, to the deaths of tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of Americans. And the reason for why this is so is unfortunately rather simple. We currently live in a time where almost everything we do requires some form of electricity. I mean, every single industry that we rely on depends on electricity to function. And so without electricity, businesses would shut down. Most people, they couldn't heat or cool their homes. Both gas and oil pipelines would shut down because both of those systems run on electricity. And when the oil stops flowing, well, that's a hard stop for delivery trucks providing food. Fresh water stops flowing into people's homes. The Internet obviously goes down. Phone lines stop working. Nuclear reactors are suddenly unable to maintain their core temperatures and they might melt down. The ATM no longer works and the banks are shut down so you can't get your money and so on. There are literally thousands of problems like these that the country would face if the electrical system was suddenly destroyed. And you can also imagine that it would not take long before society itself disintegrates and people start resorting to any and all means necessary to fight for both their own as well as for their family's survival. Now, let me ask you. How many people do you think right now in this country could survive a situation like that? How many people have the knowledge, the skills, the abilities and the available resources to survive a situation where in the blink of an eye, we're thrust back into pre-industrial times? Well, again, the researchers who look deeply into the scenario, they estimate that number to be about 10%. About 1 in 10 Americans, mostly located in rural areas far away from the cities, will be able to take care of themselves. In fact, the U.S. government recently declassified a very important document having to do with these EMP attacks. And inside of this document, you have an exchange that took place in a closed-door meeting before the Armed Services Committee wherein Dr. William Graham, who was the chairman of the EMP Commission, he presented a rather stark assessment of what America would look like following an EMP attack. Here's how this declassified exchange took place. It starts with Congressman Roscoe Barley from Maryland asking the following, quote, I read a pre-publication copy of a book called One Second After. I hope it does get published. I think the American people need to read it. It was the story of a ballistic missile EMP attack in our country. The weapon was launched from a ship off of our shore, and then the ship was sunk so that there were no fingerprints. The weapon was launched about 300 miles high over Nebraska, and it shut down our infrastructure countrywide. The story runs for a year, and it is set in the hills of North Carolina. At the end of the year, 90% of our population is dead. There are 25,000 people only still alive in New York City. The communities in the hills of North Carolina are more lucky. Only 80% of their population is dead at the end of the year. I understand that this is a realistic assessment of what a really robust EMP laydown could do to our country. And so to that very bleak scenario, Dr. Graham responds by saying this, quote, we think that this is the correct range. We don't have experience with losing the infrastructure in a country with 300 million people, most of whom don't live in a way that provides for their own food and other needs. We can go back to an era when people did live like that. That would be 10% would be 30 million. And that is probably the range where we could survive as a basically rural economy. And so that is an obviously rather bleak assessment. And at that point, whether the remaining Americans would be able to fend off an attack from Chinese communist invading forces would be a whole other question. And so there you have it. While the media in this country has been focused this election on whether or not cats and dogs are or are not being eaten over in Ohio, which granted is an interesting question in and of itself. Well, the true threats facing this country are hardly ever discussed seriously. And for anyone watching this video who assumes that that could never happen, that the U.S. military would never allow a nuclear warhead anywhere near the heartland. Well, do consider the fact that a Chinese spy balloon made it all the way across the U.S. before then getting shut down. Or consider the other fact that within just the last two months you had two separate would-be assassins that made it within a few hundred yards of President Trump. And so perhaps don't assume that our nuclear armed enemies won't be able to sneak one past us and get an EMP attack off if they so wish. I hope it doesn't happen, but it's important to consider that this is an actual real threat because it is. If you'd like to go deeper into the potential of these EMPs, their histories, as well as to the links of the several reports that I mentioned in today's episode, I'll throw those links down into the description box below this video if you're the type of person that likes to dig into the weeds. And all I ask in return is that as you're making your way down there to the description box, take a small detour to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this vital information can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times. Stay informed. Most importantly, stay free.