we know that the government -by their own admission- has not hardened any electronics on dams, waterworks, nuclear powerstations, etc; We know that Obama is against missile defense; we know that Obama doesn’t take rogue regimes at their word when they say they want us dead and will use any means necessary to attain that end; we know that Iran is trying and N.Korea has succeeded in developing nukes and deployment mechanisms; we know that the Iranians have worked to convert container ships into deployment platforms capable of launching nukes and we know or should know that all of our emergency services are completely inadequate in the face of such a threat.

Regardless of what year cars were made all would be next to worthless as we couldn’t even pump gas into them if the grid is fried.

Are you sure it is his fault or can he blame it on Clinton like the Bush Administration did?

Saying the danger has always been there is not “perspective”. If you’re standing at the edge of a 1000ft cliff without realizing it and someone comes along and tells you that you’re standing at the edge of a 1000ft cliff, has that person given you “perspective”? No, they’ve simply made you aware of a clear and present danger which you were previously unaware of.

Sam, the perspective to which I referred is that of time vis á vis the issue of EMP. I’m sure that I’m quite a bit older than you are, and I’ve been both witness to and interested in our EMP preparedness level for a lot longer than you probably have. I can clearly recall EMP and it’s physical/social ramifications being discussed in the popular press from the early ’60′s on. I can also recall there being discussions of our lack of preparedness to cope with the effect of EMP following a nuclear attack in the same time frame. So now, here in 2010, some group is raising the concern again. It is old news in that it’s been raised before by other groups. And that’s the perspective I wanted to share.

What’s also old news is our relative unpreparedness to cope with the impact of EMP on our public infrastructure – specifically the power grid, the telephone system and city water/sewer systems. Granted, that has been made far worse by our modern dependence on electronics in our daily lives. But the basic problem has always existed and we damn well knew about it from the early days.

I also used the word perspective because at one time in our history, we had a much greater commitment to hardening our government, civil defence and military command and control infrastructures against EMP. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we veered away from such hardening because it’s expensive, physically cumbersome and operationally difficult. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was seen as largely unnecessary by the leaders of the time. Too bad that was the about the same point in time at which we dived headlong into being a truly high-tech society and military, increasingly dependent on fragile solid-state electronics.

But the fact is that there have been people sounding the clarion call about this issue ever since the 60′s, at least that I can recall. In that regard, this report is neither novel in its content nor unusual in its publication. Put in perspective, this is another in a long line of reports issued by various groups about our vulnerability to EMP, with respect to public, government and military infrastructure.

Neither is this “old news” because until recently there was no serious danger of our infrastructure being wiped out by an EMP weapon because A) EMP weapons did not exist…

Sorry Sam, but the point you’re making here is just bunkum. EMP is a natural consequence of any nuclear or thermonuclear explosion. It’s a matter of basic particle physics and it’s been around and known about since 16 July, 1945. You don’t need a EMP bomb to produce an EMP event. In fact, early government and military leaders were counting on the EMP effect to make it impossible for an enemy nation to respond to even a limited nuclear strike. And since the days of Hiroshima, military strategists understood that detonating nuclear devices in the air amplified the degree of physical damage it caused, thus the air burst has been a key ingredient in our nuclear strategy. I believe that Fat Boy was set to detonate at about 1500 ft altitude. As the elevation of the blast increases, the line-of-sight to the horizon (and therefore the effective EMP radius) increases. It was only a matter of time until some bright boffin put two and two together, eh?

What hadn’t been “invented” in the early days of the nuclear age was the strategy of using a nuclear device only for its EMP capabilities. IIRC, it was a high-altitude test of an air burst over the middle of the Pacific sometime in the later ’60′s that serendipitously fried some civilian electronics in Hawaii, which opened the door to thinking about using nuclear/thermonuclear devices solely for their EMP “value”. But clearly, by the early ’70′s onward our nuclear strategy always included a few high altitude air bursts to ensure that the juicy EMP goodness would reach all corners of the USSR.

B) nations willing to wage war with EMP weapons did not exist…

Really? From the things I’ve read, the Soviets were counting on using the relatively “advanced” US civilian reliance on electricity as a military vulnerability back from the early days of their nuclear strategy under Mr. Stalin. That tells me that they understood the military ramifications of EMP, among other things. That position was later reflected in Mr. Kruschev’s “we will bury you” speech. And most experts of the time seemed to be of the opinion that a limited nuclear war with massive and widespread EMP was far more likely than the full-on mutually assured destruction scenario.

C) most of the stuff that would be damaged by an EMP (i.e. microchips and digital technology) was not invented or widely available until recently.

Yes, the world has become increasingly dependent on solid-state electronics in the 50-odd years since the nuclear warfare age began. Which is a point I made in my original comment.

However, what hasn’t changed in the least is that we have hundreds of thousands of miles of unprotected electrical and telephone cables mounted in the air over the breadth of our nation. In the case of either an EMP attack (or a sufficiently large coronal mass ejection strike for all you science buffs out there), all that cable will serve admirably as an antenna into which a massive spike of voltage will be induced. Anything physically connected to either grid will be subjected to a massive jolt of voltage. Voltage high enough to hop right past an On/Off switch. Voltage high enough to burn circuit boards regardless of whether those boards hold vacuum tubes or integrated circuits.

What hasn’t changed is that most automobile’s electrical systems will be fried by an EMP event and won’t work. For non-diesel engines, it matters little about the sophistication level of the automobile if you can’t deliver a spark to the spark plug.

What hasn’t changed is that our existing means of mass communication whether it’s terrestrial-based or space-based will be utterly destroyed by an EMP event.

Our infrastructure was in grave danger back in the 1960′s and we knew about it, just as it is today and we still know about it.

“you just have to be able to live without that power for a few days at least”

Not days, my friend: years. Possibly the rest of your life. An electromagnetic pulse will not just shut the generators down; it will fuse the circuits and melt the motors. Every affected power station will have to have its gigantic, house-sized generators replaced. And the machines that make the parts? Well, they’re fused, too. But without power to run them, that doesn’t matter much. In the end, we’d have to have complete replacement power stations shipped piece by piece from someplace that wasn’t affected and transported to every power station site and built. If you live in a major population center (which may not be the current major population centers, of course) and survive the first few years, you just might see the lights go on again in your lifetime. But you’ll probably never just walk into a room and flick a light switch again.

You are both correct – I was trying to point out that blast deaths would not occur. Pain, suffering, famine, disease etc would be close behind.

Diabetics wouldn’t last long.