A former top CIA analyst says the United States is a sitting duck for a terror attack that could wipe out the nation's power grid and kill as many as nine out of 10 Americans.
"It's a high tech way of killing people the old fashioned way, through starvation and disease and societal collapse," Dr. Peter Vincent Pry told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
And making the threat even more real, Pry said, is that such a diabolical assault would be compliant with strict Sharia law as practiced by Muslim extremists.
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"It's a Sharia-compliant use of a nuclear weapon … because it doesn't directly kill people, it indirectly kills people," Pry said.
"Their reasoning is that because we have elevated technology to the status of a god and we live a corrupt, materialistic lifestyle, in a way we're dying by our own sins when we die from an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] attack."
Pry is author of "
Apocalypse Unknown: The Struggle to Protect America from an Electromagnetic Pulse Catastrophe and Electric Armageddon," published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
And as ex-director of the EMP Task Force, Pry believes the possibility is something that must be taken as deadly serious.
"A congressional EMP commission concluded that up to nine of 10 Americans could die … [because] we're an electronic civilization and everything depends directly or indirectly upon electricity," he said.
"Without electricity, there's no communications, no transportation, business and finance doesn't work. Even food and water would not work or be available to the public."
And the threat grows day by day, according to Pry.
"North Korea has an ICBM with a miniaturized warhead that can reach the United States and do a nuclear EMP attack," he said.
While the Department of Defense has taken steps to strengthen the nation's defense against such a horror, he said, Congress remains stuck in passing a bill prioritizing the issue.
"We have been trying to pass bills ever since the EMP Commission closed its doors back in 2008," Pry said.
"Some of these bills have had the unanimous support of Congress. Democrat and Republican bills alike have passed the House unanimously.
"But Washington is so broken, you've got a situation where a single senator — a single senator — can put a hold on a bill."
There's another stumbling block — the nation's mammoth power companies.
"The electric power industry owns half of K Street and they don't want any additional government regulations," Pry said.
"They don't want any additional requirements levied upon them, and so they lobby against these bills," he said.
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