Achilles Heel

We have talked about it quite a bit in adult ed...the fact that America has become so dependent on cell phones, TV's, computers, and other technologies....all powered by electricity. If terrorists were able to knock out our power grid by either hacking into it or by detonating an EMP (electro magnetic pulse) bomb...America would literally be shut down overnight and most of us would be unable to care for ourselves for even a few days.

Chaos would ensue in VERY short order.

Today in the New York Times we have this headline;
Academic Paper in China Sets Off Alarms in U.S.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

You can read the article here; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21grid.html

The article isn't saying that someone in China is working on it, but you have to know that our enemies have figured out that if they wanted to destroy us....just figure out a way to shut off the power in one grid. This may lead to overload on the grid next door which would short that one out and it simply continues to cascade until the whole country is dark.

You have to wonder when so many people that I talk to simply believe that life as we know it today will ALWAYS be like it is right now. We have most definitely been lulled into a false sense of security. We figure that Cub Foods will ALWAYS have food on the shelves and the water will ALWAYS keep coming from the faucets.

I'm sure the Babylonians, Romans, Greeks and Persian also believed there lives would ALWAYS be the same lives of luxury they had grown used to when their respective countries ruled the known world.

But the one rule that always remains constant on planet earth is that things ALWAYS change.