Archive for the ‘National Emergency Preparedness’ Category
NORTH KOREA POSES EMP THREAT
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016
The possible catastrophic damage from an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) attack has been known for decades and yet very little has been done by our government to protect our country by hardening our electrical grid and damage proofing our various means of transportation . This article warns of North Korea’s latest satellite launching as a potential danger to us by an EMP as we are very vulnerable.For more information on this threat, ICON Lectures’ May 17 presentation will be on “The EMP Threat” given by James Jay Carafano, PhD, at 200 South Elliott Road, Chapel Hill at 7 p.m. Dr. Carafano has the responsibility for the Heritage Foundation’s entire defense and foreign policy team. For tickets and more information, please go to www.iconlectureseries.com NancyAMERICAN THINKERMay 2, 2016North Korea Poses EMP Threat
The nightmare scenario of an America sent back centuries in time before electricity, refrigeration, and smart phones has grown unnervingly closer with the presence of two North Korean satellites with orbits over a blissfully unaware American populace and an Obama administration indifferent to the apocalyptic threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
On Feb. 7, North Korea launched a second satellite, the KMS-4, to join their KMS-3 satellite launched in December of 2012. In an article in the Washington Times on April 24, R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Peter Vincent Fry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security as well as director of the Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, warned of the dangers of an apocalyptic EMP attack that these and similar satellites pose:
Both satellites now are in south polar orbits, evading many U.S. missile defense radars and flying over the United States from the south, where our defenses are limited. Both satellites — if nuclear armed — could make an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could blackout the U.S. electric grid for months or years, thereby killing millions.
Technologically, such an EMP attack is easy — since the weapon detonates at high-altitude, in space, no shock absorbers, heat shield, or vehicle for atmospheric re-entry is necessary. Since the radius of the EMP is enormous, thousands of kilometers, accuracy matters little. Almost any nuclear weapon will do.
EMP THREAT – REAL AND GROWING – ICON LECTURE
Wednesday, April 20th, 2016Please scroll down to read the U.S. News & World Report article entitled “The EMP Threat is Real and Growing” which discusses a possibly catastrophic threat to this country that very few people are aware of.
US NEWS & WORLD REPORTThe EMP Threat Is Real and Growing
Building defenses against the electromagnetic threat has never been more urgent – or more doable.
We must harden our infrastructure to withstand electromagnetic threats.Ongoing crises make it difficult for policymakers to devote sufficient attention to electromagnetic threats, which are less prominent but potentially catastrophic. Events that reflect our growing vulnerability to these threats often slip quickly from the front page, as did the cyberattack against Sony Pictures. Others, such as solar storms across Alaska in March and the accidental power station explosion in April that left Washington, D.C. in the dark, go mostly unnoticed. And even events that dominate headlines, like the Iran nuclear agreement, don’t tell the whole story about electromagnetic threats. As a nuclear threshold state, Iran may quickly race to build a bomb that could be used to conduct a devastating electromagnetic attack against the United States.
THE MELTING OF OUR ELECTRIC GRID – AN EMP STRIKE
Monday, May 4th, 2015
The Pentagon is moving the headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) back into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., a decade after having largely vacated the site.
Why the return? Because the enormous bunker in the hollowed-out mountain, built to survive a Cold War-era nuclear conflict, can also resist an electromagnetic-pulse attack, or EMP. America’s military planners recognize the growing threat from an EMP attack by bad actors around the world, in particular North Korea and Iran.
An EMP strike, most likely from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space, would destroy unprotected military and civilian electronics nationwide, blacking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure for months or years. The staggering human cost of such a catastrophic attack is not difficult to imagine.
The primary headquarters for Norad, which provides early warning and command and control for the defense of the U.S. against nuclear attack, has for a decade been at nearby Peterson Air Force Base. Critical Norad operations are being moved back into Cheyenne Mountain, and the Pentagon recently awarded a $700 million contract to Raytheon RTN 1.04 % to upgrade electronics through 2020. (more…)
VIDEO – MARK LEVIN – U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES BUYING VAST AMOUNTS OF AMMUNITION
Monday, February 18th, 2013MORMONS AND WELFARE
Monday, February 20th, 2012- FEBRUARY 18, 2012
What the Mormons Know About Welfare
Mitt Romney has raised the issue of the social safety net. Washington could learn from the lesson of his church.
By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY
Salt Lake City
Ever since Mitt Romney said he was “not concerned about the very poor” but would fix America’s social safety net “if it needs repair,” conservatives and liberals have been frantically making suggestions. Gov. Romney says he would consider options like restructuring Medicaid. But if he wants to see a welfare system that lets almost no one fall through the cracks while at the same time ensuring that its beneficiaries don’t become lifelong dependents, he could look to his own church.
As I ride in a golf cart through a new 15-acre warehouse on the outskirts of Utah’s capital, I can’t help but wonder: How many Wal-Marts would fit in here? How many burgers can you make from 4,400 industrial pallets of frozen meat? And how do they keep this place cleaner than my kitchen floor?
Dedicated last month, the Bishops Central Storehouse contains a two-year supply of food to support the Mormon church’s welfare system in the U.S. and Canada (primarily for church members in need) and its humanitarian program, which sends food, medical supplies and other necessities to the needy (of all faiths) world-wide.
In addition to goods from canned peaches to emergency generators, the facility also houses the church’s own trucking company, complete with 43 tractors and 98 trailers, as well as a one-year supply of fuel, parts and tires for the vehicles. Just in case.
The storehouse is not only a kind of physical marvel—it has been built to withstand an earthquake with a magnitude as high as 7.5—but also a symbol of strength and self-sufficiency.
Launched during the Great Depression, the Mormon welfare system was designed by church leaders as a way to match the armies of the unemployed faithful with some of the nearby farms that needed temporary labor. As storehouse manager Richard Humpherys explains, goods and services were traded so that if a father needed food for his family he could get some in exchange for, say, repairing the fence of a widow down the road.
Associated PressMormons and U.S. Marines carry aid to landslide victims in central Philippines in 2006. (more…)
AN EMP (ELECTRO MAGNETIC PULSE) STRIKE AND GINGRICH
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011- DECEMBER 19, 2011
Gingrich’s Worthy Brain Pulse
An electromagnetic pulse attack is not a fanciful notion.
- Newt Gingrich’s rise in the polls has brought attention to his various “big ideas,” and plenty of derision from other GOP Presidential hopefuls and the media. Among the most undeserved targets is the former Speaker’s concern about an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack.
In speeches and articles over many years, Mr. Gingrich has sounded the alarm about this vulnerability. A single nuclear explosion high in the Earth’s atmosphere would create an electromagnetic pulse that could do enormous harm by destroying electronic circuits on the ground. “Such an event would destroy our complex, delicate high tech digital society in an instant and throw all our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages,” he wrote in an introduction to “One Second After,” a 2009 science-fiction novel by William Forstchen. He has returned to this theme during the campaign.
The usual media suspects have recently run skeptical stories on his “doomsday vision” and “silly science.” They claim that terrorists aren’t close to getting a nuclear weapon and that no country would dare try an EMP attack. But then few imagined a terror attack using airplanes against the twin towers or anthrax in letters.
A single nuclear weapon detonated above the U.S. might not kill anyone immediately. But in the worst case millions could subsequently die from a lack of modern medical care or possibly food, since farmers couldn’t harvest crops nor distributors get food to market. Access to drinking water could be cut if many of America’s dams, reservoirs and water-treatment facilities were shut down. The U.S. would also then be more exposed to a secondary attack by conventional weapons.
These scenarios aren’t Mr. Gingrich’s inventions. They come from a commission created by Congress in 2000. In a 2008 report, the commission called EMP “one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.”
Mr. Gingrich deserves credit for bringing EMP to public attention. The commission recommended better intelligence, especially in coastal waters from which a Scud missile with a nuke could be launched, robust missile defenses, and hardened protection for the civilian electrical power grid. Denial of EMP, or scorn for the messenger, offers no protection
MOVIE REVIEW: CONTAGION
Saturday, October 15th, 2011‘Contagion’ all too real
Film exposes true biodefense vulnerabilities that need solutions
By Tevi Troy Tevi Troy, a former deputy secretary of health and human services, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and at the Homeland Security Policy Institute. –
The Washington Times
Thursday, September 15, 2011
“Contagion” was the No. 1 box-office movie on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 – and with good reason. The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick called the Steven Soderbergh-directed thriller about a killer virus “easily the scariest of the disaster films” since Sept. 11, and the film keeps viewers squirming and in suspense until the revealing and harrowing final shot.
One of the reasons the movie is so frightening is that it is so realistic, and verisimilitude clearly is something the filmmakers were striving to attain. The film thanks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense for their assistance, suggesting that those entities did not have significant disagreements with the way the film portrayed the government’s earnest but not always effective response to the film’s fictional MEV virus. Nor should they. For the most part, the film shows U.S. officials to be smart, hardworking, dedicated and self-sacrificing, and the government plays a key role in the creation of an anti-MEV vaccine that helps humanity fight back against the deadly viral threat.
Based on my experience with U.S. biopreparedness efforts, the U.S. government’s role is depicted fairly accurately in the film. At the same time, even though the government comes off pretty well in “Contagion,” the scariest part of the film is the vulnerabilities the film highlights in our current system. Despite spending $60 billion in biodefense efforts since the 2001 anthrax attacks, we still are not fully prepared for a full-on bioevent, whether it be made by man or by nature. The film identifies at least four biopreparedness weaknesses, all of which could be addressed by smart government planning: (more…)
THE GREATEST THREAT TO AMERICA – AN EMP STRIKE
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011September 27, 2011
EMP: The Greatest Threat to America, and
What We Can Do about It
It’s bewildering. Pathetic. Frightening. And it seems that the mainstream media avoids talking about it for fear that Americans will panic. Well, Americans ought to be panicking — anything to get them to bang on Congress’s door and force our representatives to immediately act on the pending legislature now in Congress called the SHIELD Act — a bill based on the previous HR 5026 — that unanimously passed in the House of Representatives on June 9, 2010.
The disaster I am referring to is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which can easily be caused either by Mother Nature as a geomagnetic solar storm or by an enemy with a low-cost, short range, ship-launched missile armed with a nuclear warhead. The national consequences of an EMP destroying our electrical grid are far-reaching, with long-lasting, continent-wide crippling effects to our electricity-dependant infrastructure.
At the press conference organized by EMPactAmerica on September 23, 2011, this dangerous threat to our national security was exposed for what it truly is — the most likely event to happen to the U.S., naturally or man-made, that has the potential to bring the country to its knees.
The National Academy of Science points out that protecting the grid against this threat is critical, and getting a bill passed is necessary to do that. An EMP, if not deflected, will shut down and paralyze our country. Just think about the role electricity plays in water, food, heating and cooling, communications, transportation, distribution, the economy and banking. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, who made a statement on the floor of the House in support of the HR 5026, told Congress that an EMP attack would create $1-$2 trillion in damages and take four to ten years to recover. The truth is that within one year we would no longer be a sovereign nation. (more…)