Electromagnetic pulses and storms are already on the public’s mind after the sun begins going into a new round of extreme activity. But recent reports suggesting North Korea may actually have a weapon capable of disabling the power grid through ought the continental United States has some officials concerned – and all known mainstream media outlets entirely silent.
The weapon, which would have been pioneered in the 1940’s to have less destructive power, but still cripple infrastructures of a wide scope, was designed with gamma radiation in mind. But the EMP weapon would not be as big of a threat for health as it would be strategically crippling to our infrastructure. And there’s a movement, led by concerned strategists such as ex CIA Nuclear Weapons Expert Peter Vincent Pry. Of course not everyone is concerned.
Electromagnetic radiation and the crippling devastation it can cause has been on the minds of several people – including the heads of NASA, one of President Obama’s primary National Security Advisors Gary Samore, and an educated minority of organizations such as EMPact America which compares the current discovery of a vulnerable infrastructure to learning a series of skyscrapers had been built on a fault line. Experts have already projected that losing our electrical infrastructure could affect millions of lives and take up to ten years to recover from.
So then why hasn’t the mainstream media picked up on this dire warning? Everything we know about the mainstream media outlets suggests we should be hearing more about this problem. From the sensationalist angle it could be taken in to the actual real dire threat it poses, there are all the staples in this story that the media normally attaches itself to. And yet lately it seems to be curiously silent about a number of key events – including the possibility that North Korea may have developed a weapon capable of single handedly destroying our infrastructure – and fixing it would cost about 0.025% of the bank bailout and help prevent three times as much ($12 trillion) in damage in the next ten to twenty years. And that’s not taking into account the massive change it would make to everyone’s lives if we suddenly lost power for anywhere from four to ten years – or the loss of life itself. Imagine a world where communication could happen from town to town only by shortwave radio – and when the batteries ran out on those, depending primarily on couriers to communicate – a practice rarely seen outside of cities since the invention of the telegraph.
But who’s convinced North Korea has this weapon? And what evidence is backing it up? For starters, the South Korean defense minister, Kim Kwan-Jin who has been studying North Korea for several years.
So why keep the solution in the dark? Interestingly, this horror story could be a potentially useful tool for an administration preparing to invade a country testing nuclear weapons. Of course the potential hardening of our infrastructure that would cost a paltry 1 billion dollars (at least in 2011 dollars) may, however, be omitted when the story becomes mainstream.