CHICAGO – North Korea doesn’t have anything that could reach the U.S. Or do they? The threat of nuclear bombs is such a remote possibility today that no one really thinks about it these days. Is this really true?

Perhaps you should rethink that threat when you see how many bombs could potentially come to your city. Check out the nuke-o-meter and plug in your city to find out approximately how much of a threat there is for your city.

Try Chicago. Surprised? I was.

Now put in some of the east and west coast cities. It’s funny how Chicago has a potential of more nuclear missiles that can reach here than places including D.C., New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Can someone explain that to me?

If you read some of the extremists from both sides, you get a range of comments. For example:

New America paranoids have a very special flavor of craziness. It’s the belief that the country will be devastated by an electromagnetic pulse attack and not enough is being done to combat the grave threat.

There are also people on the conservative side saying we better take heed of this type of attack.

In an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack, the damage to power lines, supervisory control and data acqui¬sition control systems (for utility systems infrastructure) and commercial computers would very likely be permanent due to fused power lines and lost data.

This would require replacing the entire electric system in the affected area.

One esti¬mate warns that the likely costs from the detonation of an EMP weapon over the Washington, D.C. met¬ropolitan area could exceed $770 billion. Millions of Americans could suffer death or injury and social chaos could ensue.

Building a better electronic infrastructure should be one of the priorities from the federal stimulus package in order to leave some residual benefits for future generations.

I love the naïve people who put up some nuclear-free zone sign as if that’s going to protect them from reality. That’s like putting on some aluminum foil over your head and thinking that will protect you from radiation.

How Vulnerable Are You From an Attack?

In the era of EMP bombs, you don’t need a sophisticated launch platform and control system that can provide pinpoint accuracy from several thousand miles away. All it has to do is detonate in the atmosphere above the Earth.

An EMP bomb can be launched offshore from a ship or submarine. All it has to do is reach about 100 to 150 miles in the atmosphere, detonate and fry all the unprotected circuits and electronics that are in a thousand-mile radius (or more).

One bomb can devastate much more territory without turning the landscape into toast. Think of it as a giant umbrella over the Earth making vulnerable everything underneath the blast that has unprotected circuits.

That being said, the probability of an EMP attack is more likely than an all-out nuclear attack especially from someone like Kim Jong Il who likes playing the game of chicken. Getting to a point off either coast is not beyond the realm of possibility for countries that at first glance would not even be viewed as a threat.

This type of devastation may not even come from an attack of a rogue nation. It could just be part of the weather.

The strongest geomagnetic storm on record is the Carrington event of Aug. to Sept. 1859, which is named after British astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the instigating solar flare with his unaided eye while he was projecting an image of the sun on a white screen.

Geomagnetic activity triggered by the explosion electrified telegraph lines. It shocked technicians and set their telegraph papers on fire. The Northern Lights spread as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. Auroras over the Rocky Mountains were so bright that the glow woke campers who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.

“A contemporary repetition of the Carrington event would cause … extensive social and economic disruptions,” the report warns. Power outages would be accompanied by radio blackouts and satellite malfunctions. Telecommunications, GPS navigation, banking and finance and transportation would all be affected.

Some problems would correct themselves with the fading of the storm. Radio and GPS transmissions could come back online fairly quickly. Other problems would be lasting. A burnt-out multi-ton transformer, for instance, can take weeks or months to repair.

The total economic impact in the first year alone could reach $2 trillion. This could be some 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina or, to use a timelier example, a few TARPs.

Wake Up

There is a time for fear mongering and a time to wake up to the facts. Now is the time to wake up to the facts. The media should be covering EMP bombs rather than the latest political sex scandal.

In all disaster recovery plans for both municipalities and corporations, are there any provisions for EMP protection? There should be because EMP bombs were a threat in the Cold War. If you are at a company or municipality, that might be a question to bring up at the next executive meeting.

Disaster recovery or business continuity plans (unless mandated by regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) usually are not as viable as you might think. One thing that was clearly evident after Sept. 11, 2001 is that most companies at the World Trade Center that were affected had poor disaster recovery plans. They fell into three categories of preparedness:

For most organizations, the first thing they have to do is dust off their disaster recovery plan or their emergency response plans in the case of municipalities. In some cases, chances are they have not been updated or even tested.

Carlinism: The people who disregard real threats are the same people wandering around after a disaster they thought could never happen and asking what someone else can do for them.

James Carlini is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. He is also president of Carlini & Associates. Carlini can be reached at james.carlini@sbcglobal.net or 773-370-1888.
Click here for Carlini’s full biography.