Terrorists could bring down U.S. grid with radio waves

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WASHINGTON – Terrorists armed with inexpensive radio frequency weapons that can emit powerful electromagnetic microwave energy could cause blackouts that would offer operational advantages over assault rifles and bombs, according to an EMP expert cited in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Peter Pry, executive director of the congressional advisory Task Force on National and Homeland Security, told G2 that radio frequency weapons, or RFWs, are a non-nuclear EMP weapon capable of emitting a pulse similar to an E1 EMP from a nuclear weapon, except with less energy and a much shorter radius, out to a distance of less than a mile, Pry said.

“Thanks to RF Weapons,” Pry said, “we have arrived at a place where the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area could be toppled by a single individual.”

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He gave an example of how terrorists armed with RF weapons could use unclassified computer models, duplicating a recent U.S. study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, to coordinate attacks on each of the nation’s three separate electrical grid systems to collapse the entire power network.

In all, the U.S. has some 55,000 electric transmission substations with about 200,000 miles of transmission lines that comprise the U.S. power grid system.

In duplicating computer models of the system from open source FERC data, Pry said, terrorists could identify nine crucial transformer substations which, if attacked, would black out the entire national grid for weeks or months.

For security reasons, FERC won't identify the nine critical stations. However, Pry said that they could be determined by studying already available information on the nation’s grid system.

“RFWs would offer significant operational advantages over assault rifles and bombs,” Pry said. “Something like the EMP Suitcase could be put in the trunk of a car, parked and left outside the fence of an EHV transformer or SCADA colony, or hidden in nearby brush or a garbage can, while the bad guys make a leisurely getaway.

“If the EMP fields are strong enough,” he said, “it would be just as effective as, and far less conspicuous than, dropping a big bomb to destroy the whole transformer substation.”

A major concern about RFWs, Pry said, is that they can be built relatively inexpensively using commercially available components and design information available on the Internet and from any electronics store.

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