Could The Chinese Balloons Be Carrying EMP Weapons That Could Wipe Out Our Power Grids?

In February the U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the Atlantic coast of the United States. The balloon had previously drifted over the United States and, apparently per directions being sent electronically from Beijing, passed over a whole series of our most sensitive nuclear sites. Only after it had completed its collection mission and sent all the data it had collected back to China did Joe Biden order it destroyed.

After the fact, Amir Siraj of the Galileo Project announced that his calculations showed the balloon had been launched from a site in Inner Mongolia. That is China. Since Siraj’s job is to track near-earth objects & planet-killing asteroids and warn us before we experience an extinction-level event, let’s go with the presumption that he has some idea of what he is talking about.

We should also add that the Chinese balloon launch facility in Inner Mongolia is visible on commercially available imagery.

The Chinese in fact have a long-standing and well-known program focused on the use of balloons and other ‘lighter than aircraft’ for military purposes. They are known to launch balloons as well from Hainan Island. They also have a very large facility in Xinjiang Province in Western China that is part of that effort.

The facility in Xinjiang also shows structures and equipment for use in the testing of EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapons.

An EMP is a powerful wave of energy that causes dramatic voltage surges in electric systems. It is generated when a nuclear device is detonated at altitude. The United States discovered this effect when it detonated a nuclear device at altitude during the Cold War as part of Operation Hardtack. Even a relatively small device at the right altitude can have a devastating impact.

An EMP blast can shut down vast areas of electric grids, systems, and devices while overheating, degrading, or destroying their components. EMP works at a physical level. It fries your electronics including those in car engines, cell phone transmitters, transformers, and power generator systems.

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The impact of an EMP attack in the U.S. would be catastrophic. Former CIA director James Woolsey called it “one of the greatest national vulnerabilities.” In the aftermath of an EMP blast your car won’t work. You will be without electricity at home.  The banking sector will be dead. Hospitals won’t have power.

You will be back in the Dark Ages.

The 2018 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack estimated that over the course of a year following an EMP attack, millions of excess deaths could result with the upper range of a successful EMP attack being in the 90% casualty range.

Chinese military writings are full of references to making EMP attacks against the United States as a means of prevailing in war. The  People's Liberation Army textbook – Shen Weiguang's World War, the Third World War – has this to say.

“As soon as its computer networks come under attack and are destroyed, the country will slip into a state of paralysis and the lives of its people will ground to a halt. Therefore, China should focus on measures to counter computer viruses, nuclear electromagnetic pulse...and quickly achieve breakthroughs in those technologies in order to equip China without delay with equivalent deterrence that will enable it to stand up to the military powers in the information age and neutralize and check the deterrence of Western powers, including the United States.”

The threat posed by an EMP attack has been recognized for many years. In 2015 Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote:

“Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.”.

“A high-altitude balloon could be designed, created, and launched in a matter of months. There is nothing to prevent several hundred pounds of weapons material from being delivered to altitude.”

Recently Stuckenberg had this to say:

"China’s recent balloon flyover of the United States is clearly a provocative and aggressive act. It was most likely a type of dry run meant to send a strategic message to the USA. We must not take this for granted.”

Per Stuckenberg,  an EMP device detonated over the eastern United States would collapse the grid at the speed of light. “Virtually any nuke detonated anywhere over the Eastern Grid will collapse the entire Eastern Grid, not just the area within the EMP field, because of cascading failures that will ripple outward.”

After the February shootdown of the Chinese balloon, Texas state Senator Bob Hall said:

"It's a real threat. The first high-altitude nuclear test was done using a weather balloon to determine its efficacy. We know it's been in the arsenal of our enemies for quite a while. While a balloon wouldn't be quite as effective as a rocket that carried it higher, probably five or six would be enough to take out the entire United States. But just one would be so catastrophic that there is a possibility it could bring down the rest of the power grid by itself by just the nature of the grids depending on each other."

Imagine if the February balloon that Biden allowed to proceed on its way unchallenged had been carrying an EMP device. Imagine that device detonated over our ICMB fields and bomber bases in Montana. Some of the military systems on the ground might be hardened enough to survive. Many would not. All civilian infrastructure would be dead.

That means those alert rosters for the aircrews for our bombers would be useless because the cellphones carried by the airmen waiting to be ‘called in’ would be dead. It means even if those crews got the word, they would have no means of getting to base because all cars would be inoperable. The same would apply to the vehicles on our military bases that haul fuel and munitions and clear runways of snow, etc.

Some communications might still work where they had been hardened against an EMP attack. Most would be offline. In one instant, our strategic nuclear deterrent capabilities would have been crippled.

By the grace of God, no such attack happened this time, but only by the grace of God. Nothing we did would have in any way prevented such an attack from proceeding.

It could, in fact, happen tomorrow. We could find our entire nation crippled by a handful of EMP devices carried by balloons, and apparently, we would just sit back and watch.

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Related:

Here We Go Again - Another Balloon Headed Our Way