Protecting the Grid: A $4 Billion Fix for a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Risk

Imagine waking up tomorrow to a world without power. No lights. No phones. No internet. No refrigeration. Within days, grocery stores are stripped bare. Within weeks, hospitals close. Within months, millions are dead.

That isn’t science fiction. It is the very real danger of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, and it is what keeps national security expert Tommy Waller awake at night.

A Threat Hiding in Plain Sight

Waller is not given to exaggeration. A retired U.S. Marine officer who commanded 3rd Force Reconnaissance Company and later served on the U.S. Air Force’s Electromagnetic Defense Task Force, he is now President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy. When I asked him what the biggest overlooked danger to America might be, he didn’t mention terrorism or cyberattacks.

“It’s EMP,” he said flatly. “It can come from two sources, human or natural. Either way, the effects could be catastrophic. And it’s a 100 percent certainty that sooner or later, the natural form of EMP – from the sun – will collapse America’s unprotected electric grid.”

Civilization’s Weakest Link

Think about how fragile our modern life really is: food supply chains, transportation, banking, health care. Every one of them depends on electricity.

“According to a report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, if the grid went down for a year, up to 90 percent of Americans would die,” Waller told me. “Before electricity, the North American landmass could support maybe 30 million people. Today we’ve got 330 million. The math is brutal.”

And unlike our ancestors, we’ve lost the skills to survive without power. “People say, ‘That’s too apocalyptic to imagine,’” Waller said. “Well, before 9/11, our nation’s leaders couldn’t imagine planes crashing into skyscrapers either.”

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