NBC's 'Revolution'—Life In U.S. After An EMP Attack

Posted 08/17/2012 07:03 PM ET

IBD Editorials

National Security: A new TV series demonstrates graphically how vulnerable our society is to an attack using weapons our enemies, including rogue state Iran, could use tomorrow — and the importance of missile defense.

Set in a future "where every single piece of technology — computers, planes, cars, phones, even lights — has mysteriously blacked out forever," according to the promos, the drama series is fiction, but the threat it depicts, the end of technological society and life as we know it, is a frighteningly real possibility.

We've warned of the threat many times, but the damage an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a high-intensity burst of electromagnetic energy caused by an explosion of charged particles, such as by a high-altitude nuclear detonation, is a subject that makes eyes glaze over.

Let's hope this series will show the apocalyptic nature of this threat in terms average people can understand.

Eric Kripke, one of the show's executive producers, said, "We did our homework and came up with something that's actually plausible." Indeed, the script could have been taken directly from a report from the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse, which was established by Congress to assess the dangers of an EMP attack.

The report warned that it "has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power."

As the Heritage Foundation reports, an EMP attack "would fundamentally change the world. Airplanes would fall from the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services and even cyberspace would collapse."

The attack works like this: A solitary ballistic missile, perhaps an ICBM launched by a decaying North Korean regime or an Iranian mullah, or a terrorist Scud launched from a ship off the Atlantic Coast carrying the first Islamic nuke, detonates its warhead 25 to 300 miles above the U.S. mainland. Nobody is harmed or killed right away. But normal life in the U.S., the world's only superpower and largest economy, comes to an abrupt halt as a country dependent on 21st-century technology regresses almost a century instantaneously.

Millions could die as hospital systems shut down and rail and air traffic control systems collapse.

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