The Golden Dome Is A Brilliant Idea – Now We Need The Same Kind Of Protection For The Grid

President Trump has proposed the building of a Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that would protect America from enemy attacks with conventional and nuclear missiles. This is a brilliant and long-overdue initiative. We have the technology. All we need now is the will.

We also need the same kind of mental approach toward our power grid.

Without electrical power, this country would be back in the 16th century in a heartbeat. Take a moment. Conduct a thought experiment. Imagine you are sitting at your computer in your home, and suddenly, the power goes out.

Then imagine it is not coming back on.

You have no lights. You have no water. The food in your freezer and your fridge will soon begin to rot. You have no email. You have no cellular phone. You cannot place an online order.

You cannot call 911.

You have what gas is in your vehicle’s tank. No one is going to pump more without electricity. It doesn’t matter really. Other than the cash in your wallet, you have no money. Your bank account effectively no longer exists. You have no means of accessing it anyway.

You are living in the past, but you are much worse off than those who lived in those times. You can’t walk to the store, which is miles away. The food there is rotting in any event. You don’t have a well from which you can draw water by hand. You don’t grow your own food. Your whole life is structured around the availability of electricity, and now that is gone.

And, no one knows how long it will take to get the power back up and running. We are not talking days, weeks, or months. We are talking years.

The Chinese have positioned themselves to attack our grid and make this thought experiment a reality. They have worked at it diligently for years, and they are perilously close to being able to actually pull it off:

- There may be as many as 500 large transformers in our power grid that were made in China. We know as a documented fact that these transformers have been manufactured to allow them to be remotely “killed”. That does not mean simply switched off. That means destroyed.

- “In summer 2019, federal authorities seized a massive 500,000-pound Chinese transformer at the Port of Houston. Rather than delivering it to its intended Colorado substation, officials diverted it under escort to Sandia National Laboratories for examination. What they discovered was alarming: backdoor hardware deliberately inserted that would allow operators in China to remotely disable the transformer.”

- Recent news reports have shown that the Chinese have sabotaged components being put into solar farms around the country with the same intent.

- Repeated reports by the FBI and private security firms have warned that the Chinese have successfully hacked into our critical infrastructure and are prepared to take down that infrastructure in a deliberate attack on our nation.

- Expert after expert has warned for many years that the Chinese could detonate an electro-magnetic weapon in orbit and fry most of our electrical grid at one time.

These are examples only. The Chinese are attacking the grid all day, every day, in a multitude of ways. They are positioning themselves to launch a cyber Pearl Harbor.

“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist.”

Former FBI Director Wray

A blue-ribbon commission convened by the Congress.. concluded that, if the power went out and stayed off for more than a year in large parts of the U.S.—a prospect it found was plausible—as many as nine out of ten Americans would perish.

Almost twenty years ago, the U.S. Government demonstrated via the Aurora Project that a transformer could be physically destroyed by a cyber attack. That does not mean it was switched off and could be turned back on. It caught fire and started belching black smoke. Almost all our large transformers in this country are made in China.

What do you think the likelihood is that the Chinese will sell us transformers to replace the ones they just destroyed in a cyber attack?

It takes on average 2.5-5 years to get a new large transformer right now under normal conditions.

We are not talking about inconvenience. We are talking about a civilization-ending event, and the Chinese are perilously close to being able to pull it off. By all means, let’s build a missile shield and protect ourselves from increasingly common nuclear weapons held by madmen. At the same time, let’s confront the threat of an attack on our critical infrastructure and let’s do so by taking some very real, concrete steps.

Let’s harden our electronics against an EMP attack. Let’s ban all Chinese components from use in our critical infrastructure. Today. Let’s ban any Chinese company connected in any way to a cyber attack on the United States from ever doing business here again. Let’s make it a top priority to have a grid that is completely invulnerable to attacks by the Chinese and guaranteed to sustain our way of life and our economy.

Let’s put in place what amounts to a Golden Dome for the grid, and let’s do it now.