(The Week) – You might find your car dying on the freeway while other vehicles around you lose control and crash. You might see the lights going out in your city, or glimpse an airplane falling out of the sky. You’ve been in a blackout before, but this one is different. In critical facilities across the country, experts predict that it is only a matter of time before the electrical infrastructure holding society together undergoes catastrophic failure. According to a 2017 report of the United States Congressional Commission
appointed to assess the risk, we face the threat of “long-lasting disruption and damage” to everything from power and clean water to electronic banking, first-responder services, and functioning hospitals. Until now, such a dire prediction has typically been associated with only the most extreme doomsday true believers but William Graham, the former chairman of the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission, says that in this case they could be right. In the broadest sense, an EMP is a sudden burst of extreme electromagnetic interference that causes systems using electricity — especially devices controlled by chips or computers — to fail when the load gets too high. FULL STORY
