Posted: Monday, July 21, 2008 12:00 am
If you don't want to become paranoid, it's probably a good idea not to lose sleep over every potential threat. But our recent experience with oil gives us a plausible warning about something completely different that may well be worth worrying about.
For more than half a century America built a civilization based on the availability of oil as the source of cheap motor fuel. Now that motor fuel is suddenly no longer cheap, and oil is harder to come by, the consequences affect us all in often unpleasant ways.
Our civilization now also is dependent on something else: electronic data handling and storage. Without that, we can't do anything of an economic nature. We can't buy anything, and we can't work. We get a taste of this dependency now and then when a server goes down temporarily or a cable is accidentally cut. Transactions stop.
So what if electronics just suddenly ceased across the whole country or a big part of it, all at once?
It could be made to happen, according to various published and online sources, by setting off an electromagnetic pulse of sufficient intensity high above the atmosphere, about 100 miles up.
Such a pulse theoretically could be created with a nuclear bomb. And obviously, if a terrorist organization or country could build, deliver and explode such a device, it could destroy the United States economy - not slow it down, but wipe it out - with one single blow.
No computer would work. Nor would any machines controlled by electronic devices, and all records could be lost.
There may be ways to protect our equipment from a massive electromagnetic strike. Some sources mention "Faraday cages," which shield vulnerable componments. Or we might develop parallel systems that don't depend on electrons - pencil and paper, for instance. But that would be cumbersome and slow, and we're not going to do it.
This is all just speculatuion. But it sounds at least a little like the speculation of 20 and 30 years ago about what would happen when and if the oil started running out. We didn't worry about the oil then, and look where we are now. (hh)