How China Will Punch Out Our Lights

On 6 July China’s dictator-for-life, Xi Jinping, ordered his military to “deepen war and combat planning.” At the same time, the Biden administration (and most of Congress) will not recognize that the CCP has already declared war on them and the rest of America. As a result, our international and domestic defenses are vulnerable in many vital areas.

To match Xi Jinping’s preparations for war we must accelerate rebuilding our navy with more ships and submarines, we must create a real ICBM defense, we must stop thousands of Chinese illegal immigrants now flooding across our borders, and we must round up those already hiding in our cities and towns.

1962, Starfish Prime

Our foremost task, however, must be to ensure that our electricity grid is able to withstand an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). Such a pulse can come from nature as a coronal mass ejection – a solar flare – as it did in 1859. That sun flare caused the “Carrington Event,” the most intense geomagnetic storm in our planet’s recorded history. Electronics were rare those days, but telegraph wires acted as antennas for the sun’s energy pulse and it knocked out telegraph systems across America.

The next EMP event was man-made. In 1962, Starfish Prime was a test of a 1.4 megaton H-bomb above the Johnston atoll in the Pacific. Detonated 250 miles above the surface it resulted in an unexpected High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) that reached Hawaii, 900 miles away. It knocked out streetlights, set off burglar alarms, and damaged a microwave link that shut down telephone calls from Kauai to other Hawaiian islands. There was no fallout or blast damage to cities and towns below by that detonation in the stratosphere. It was so far above the surface it could best be seen at night, like the photo below.

Starfish Prime flash as seen through clouds over Honolulu.

China now has EMP weapons on their ICBMs and on ships, submarines, and probably on some satellites

China now has EMP weapons on their ICBMs and on ships, submarines, and probably on some satellites. Their EMP missiles need only to be detonated above our aircraft carriers in the Pacific to render their radars, radios, and navigation systems useless – as well as those of every aircraft they carry. Because of the range of an EMP pulse, they don’t need direct hits. A miss by a mile will do.

But what would happen if a Chinese salvo of first-strike HEMP ICBMs was exploded high above the American homeland? Thousands of miles of power lines will then act as antennas and instantly take the HEMP energy pulse across hundreds of miles to destroy transformers that take two years to build and cost $7 million each.

As with Starfish Prime, there will be no blast damage on the ground, but anything with wiring that can conduct the energy pulse will be damaged. Aircraft will fall from the sky; cars, trucks, and trains will stop and our lights will go out. Everywhere. There are expert estimates that a HEMP attack, delivered by a few ICBMs, will kill 90 percent of the American population within a year. Exaggeration? No. Just imagine no trucks to move food.

In 2020, a report by the Foundation For Resilient Societies showed that it would cost about $25 billion, annually, to defend our electricity grid against a HEMP attack. That’s a fraction of the Biden administration’s proposed spending on “climate change.” But in order to avoid such senseless policies and politics, a simpler solution could be a modest increase in the cost of electrical power for all American consumers. That extra cost, less than 10% per consumer, would pay for high-speed circuit breakers, a stockpile of transformers, and the engineering needed to defend our grid.

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America’s electric power system is “very vulnerable to disruptions from acts of war, sabotage, or terrorism”

Why haven’t we done it a long time ago? Because electric utility companies that should be championing the defense of the grid are nowhere to be seen. Their high-use customers in the chemical, metal, cement, paper, and machinery business don’t want to pay for any increase in their cost of power, so they and their lobbyists pooh-pooh the probability of a solar flare or an enemy HEMP attack. Congress then takes donations from lobbyists and appoints commissions, subcommittees, or conferences to study the issue until it fades away.

For example, in 1981 the Government Accountability Office published a report, “Federal Electrical Emergency Preparedness Is Inadequate.” It said America’s electric power system is “very vulnerable to disruptions from acts of war, sabotage, or terrorism.” Did Congress swing into action to defend us? Of course not.

Then there was the 2013 attack on Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s Metcalf substation in California. A few minutes of rifle fire caused $15 million in damages, took down 17 transformers, and endangered power to Silicon Valley. A former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said the little-publicized attack was a “very well planned, coordinated and executed attack on a major piece of our electric grid infrastructure,” adding that the attack may have been a test run for a bigger strike. The FBI declared the incident was not an act of terror and made no arrests.

Thousands of Chinese illegal male immigrants of military age are crossing our borders right now

Congress subsequently demanded the electric industry establish physical security standards for critical substations. But when all the posturing was done, no physical security measures were ever written or adopted, and in 2022 two more substations were attacked in North Carolina. That attack left 40,000 residents without power in December. So FERC went into action by calling a conference with the North American Reliability Corp to discuss physical security. The conference concluded in August with the electric utilities again stating there is no reason to enhance grid security standards. The result of the charade between government regulatory agencies, Congress, and the electric utilities was announced by the Department of Energy. From January 2010 to June 2023, there have been 1,072 physical attacks on the grid. That’s more than one attack every week.

Perhaps the electrical utilities, their lobbyists, and Congress may think the CCP will not use HEMP ICBMs to punch out our lights, and they might be right. They may think that the meager defenses we now have against an ICBM attack will at least warn us of incoming missiles and China would then be destroyed by our ICBMs. But China has another and better option.

Thousands of Chinese illegal male immigrants of military age are crossing our borders right now, all dressed in a similar type of black uniform. They are unaccompanied and are often carrying large sums of cash. Here are several in uniform at the Darien Gap on their way to the United States.

Are those critical nodes defended? 

We often hear about cyber attacks on our grid that are defeated or do minor damage, but it would be much easier for Chinese saboteurs to do the job. It is known that our grid can be shut down for years if only nine critical nodes are destroyed. Nobody knows the location of those nodes except the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the electric utilities, and the Chinese spies in our government -- from the White House on down.

Are those critical nodes defended? You probably drove by one or more of them. They look something like this:

On your drive-by, did you see those transformers surrounded by walls topped with razor wire, backed up with sensors, spotlights, and guards? How difficult would it be for one trained saboteur to cut through a chain link fence at night and plant explosives? And even if those nine key nodes are defended, are the guards trained, armed, and on a 24/7 hair trigger to repel an attack by, say, twenty heavily armed Chinese saboteurs?

So when a solar flare or a HEMP missile attack or sabotage takes down our electrical grid, Congress, the utilities, and the lobbyists are secure in the knowledge they will not have to listen to agonized calls from a hospital for power.

Their phones won’t have a dial tone.

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