Newt Gingrich went to Capitol Hill to warn lawmakers of the dangers of an electromagnetic pulse attack, a nuclear blast in the atmosphere that could damage or destroy American power grids and electronics.
As the threat of nuclear attack from North Korea and Iran escalates, the former speaker of the House said, Americans still don't take the such a threat seriously,
Politico reports.
"This could be the kind of catastrophe that ends civilization, and that's not an exaggeration," Gingrich said during an address to members of the Electronic Pulse Caucus, a House group founded by GOP Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona.
"The reason I began focusing on this a decade ago is there are very few events you can't recover from. You can recover from 9/11, you can recover from Pearl Harbor," Gingrich said.
"This is really different. This creates such a collapse of our fundamental productive capacity that you could literally see a civilization crash and tear itself apart fighting . . . internally," he said, according to Politico.
On Tuesday, Franks introduced legislation in the House to address the vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid from an electromagnetic pulse attack.
"It's known that our grid is vulnerable. It's an invitation. If our grid is not vulnerable, nothing mitigates the threat more than that," Franks said.
An electromagnetic pulse attack "has the potential to be the ultimate cybersecurity threat because it can take our source of power completely away from us," he added.
Experts have long warned that America is unprepared for such an attack, and in May 2009,
North Korea reportedly completed tests on a “super-EMP” weapon capable of disabling the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 U.S. states.
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