The Next Blackout

Despite its inherent illogic, the notion that last week’s massive, cascading electrical blackout was a "wake-up" call seems now to have become as much a part of the political landscape as has the effort to assign blame for this costly man-made disaster. The question occurs, however: To what exactly is it that we have awakened?

The obvious answer is that there is an acute and long-neglected need to upgrade the nation’s power grid. The thing to which we better have awakened, however, is the possibility that was on everyone’s mind as the lights went out across much of the northern tier of the United States and Canada’s most populous cities: Could terrorists have perpetrated this disaster? And, if so, was the blackout but the first blow in a lethal one-two punch?

The good news is that this episode apparently was not the work of Osama bin Laden or his ilk. The bad news is that, given the extensive vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid it has only been a matter of time before someone decided to exploit them. And, having witnessed over the past few days what the immensely destructive effect of even minor disruptions of that system could be, is there any doubt that from now on the terrorists’ target lists will surely include attacks on our critical infrastructure?

In a new op-ed in today’s Washington TImes, Center President Frank Gaffney argues that we had better be awakened, though, to one other, particularly ominous prospect: Determined terrorists could inflict lasting, if not actually permanent, damage on the United States’ electrical and other computer-based systems by employing small nuclear or non-nuclear devices that generate what is known as electro-magnetic pulse (EMP). The short, intense spike of energy that these EMP weapons create can do irreparable harm to electronic devices (even those not in use, such as replacement microcircuits, chips and memory boards in warehouses) unless expensive measures have been taken to shield them. Under a worst-case — but not implausible — scenario, a large, ballistic missile-delivered EMP weapon could within seconds reduce half the country to pre-industrial age conditions for many months, if not years.

Thanks to the tenacity of one of Capitol Hill’s few bona fide scientists, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Maryland Republican, who has long warned of the EMP threat, a blue-ribbon commission led by President Reagan’s science adviser, William Graham, is now conducting a congressionally mandated study to assess this danger. If anything, the recent grid failure adds urgency to the completion of the Graham Commission’s work.

As the nation rouses itself to address the lessons learned from last week’s blackout, it better focus not only on how to avoid a repetition but also on a possibly vastly more serious blackout next time.