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Craig discusses Electromagnetic Pulse as it relates to the DHS warning that China might be planning something around our election. What would it mean? How would we deal with it? 

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] If you’re not familiar with the Carrington event, stick around because the odds are great we’re going to have to live through another one of these. Even though it’s been more than a hundred years, we’re going to talk about EMP attacks and a real warning about it.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for listening.

Hey, if you have your Google smart speaker, Google Home, just say, Hey, Google play. WGAN and you can listen to us any time. I probably just turned on your Google speakers. Sorry about that. But it is really handy. That’s what I use when I’m up in the shower, et cetera, these smart devices.

Now let’s get into this. Very interesting article that just came out this week from Zero Hedge. Tyler Durden is the one that brought this up. We have in fact been given some really great information about this as part of the FBI’s InfraGard program.

Now, if you are responsible for IT and more particularly responsible for security, you really should join the FBI’s Infragard program. I N F R A G A R D.org is where you’ll find them online. This is a channel that the FBI uses to let civilians, as well as military contractors and frankly, even various government employees of the federal and state level. It lets them disseminate all of this type of information.

It’s absolutely fascinating. Some of them, the stuff I can share with you, some of the stuff is on a need to know basis. Obviously I can’t share all of it with you, but I do try and bring some of these things up like this one.

The US Department of Homeland security has released a new report that’s warning about a potential electromagnetic pulse. Now, specifically, this is talking about an electromagnetic pulse as part of an attack against the United States. I mentioned at the very beginning, something called the Carrington event. It’s fascinating and this is something that we’ve talked about on the training for the FBI’s InfraGard program that I conducted and you probably know I did that for a couple of years. It’s a volunteer position and I did a whole bunch of different pieces of training.

This particular event occurred in September 1859. Now think back to 1859, there was not much going on from the electrical side, 1859. They didn’t have too many computers, right? Obviously they didn’t have any of them, but back then they did have a couple of things they did have Telegraph for one. What they found happened was that these Telegraph machines were getting burned out by this event. They weren’t quite sure what it was, what was going on. They even had Telegraph operators that were injured from it.

There is something called a solar coronal mass ejection. This is a sunspot back in 1859, for those of us, like I ham, you know that right? I have an advanced class ham license. Yeah, totally. Am I funny? But I have a license from the federal communications commission. This is called solar cycle number 10, which one from 1855 to 1867 and us hams keep close tabs on the solar cycles because they affected the weather. They affect the temperature on earth and solar cycles also affect the propagation of radio waves. Why do they affect it? It’s because these ejections from the sun come, they hit the Earth’s atmosphere and they charge it.

If you’ve ever seen the Northern lights, that’s an example of solar radiation hitting our Earth’s atmosphere for lack of a better term. It’s really hitting our Magnetosphere, but I don’t want to get too detailed here.

This is very fascinating because back then they called it a white light flare. That is a British astronomer Richard Carrington, as well as co-astronomer here, Richard Hodson. It was named after Carrington though. It basically burned out telegraph systems.

Now you think about a mass ejection from the sun. Think about it being very kind of limited in scope, right? How big is it? You probably have seen pictures, videos of these injections coming up from the sun’s surface. Well, what ends up happening is our entire earth’s upper atmosphere and the Magnetosphere ends up getting charged by these. So it doesn’t just affect one area. Like it’s aimed like a, like a laser beam down in Missouri and hits the center of the country and that’s the only problem.

Now what happens here is that will affect us worldwide. It will affect some areas more than others, certainly. But it’ll affect us worldwide. It will knock out our satellites that are up there right now. It will cause blackouts. We saw that already some extended outages of the electrical grid here in the Northeast. This particular storm I’m thinking of was when was that?  I think it might’ve been 84, the storm up in Quebec that knocked out the power to the province of Quebec from a solar storm.

So we could be in a whole lot of trouble. It could also damage all of our, or some of our major transformers. We do not keep those in inventory. These kinds of super transformers, if you will, there’s a number of them located across the country. And knock out grids across the country. It could take from many months to years to get back all of our electrical infrastructures depending on what happens.

Here’s what Homeland security is also worried about. It. Isn’t just a solar flare and they are worried about that and I can tell you, I have had people on the webinars. I ran for the FBI that are telling us that indeed they have been working with the power companies, et cetera, to put in some controls, it would stop the problems from one of these coronal mass ejections these solar flares. So we’re pretty much already set for those or we will be within the next couple of years.

What we’re worried about is what the Chinese I’ve been up to. Apparently the Chinese government has been working for the last 25 years on plans to defeat the United States and kind of their lead plan appears to be an EMP.

Basically what they’re looking at is a cyber Pearl Harbor attack and they’ve been looking at that because it’s easy to do. All they have to do is set off a nuclear bomb up in the atmosphere above the United State s and it could cover the US coast to coast 1500 miles. If it was set off at 300 miles above the surface of the earth and conditions were right. Could be very, very bad.

We ve gotta be careful. China has been exploiting some of our weaknesses. I remember 2004, you might remember the power grid outage, we had up here in the Northeast and it started up in upstate New York and various rumors about it actually, surely having been an attack attempt. Just kind of testing things out and it went awry.

There are other reports so that things happen and hard to say, but we do know. That China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, as well as international terrorists have hacked some of our key infrastructures out there. Something like this could be very, very bad there. DHS Homeland security is field testing, a more resilient, critical infrastructure, which is really good. They’ve got a number of demonstration and pilot projects planned and others underway. So, we’ll see what happens here with the EMP vulnerabilities that we have. President Trump back in 2019, signed in an executive order that is really trying to speed things up here. They delegated power to the White House for EMP preparedness.

Hey, stick around. We’ll be right back. And we’re going to be talking about the 2020 election interference and what is the US doing here when it comes to Russia?

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