EMP threat needs to be taken seriously

EMP non-expert Gregory Kiley recently slandered former CIA Director James Woolsey and myself in a Washington Examiner op-ed.

Kiley claims our warnings that an EMP attack is an existential threat that could kill up to 90 percent of Americans is bogus, derived from the novel One Second After (2009).

This is completely false.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on July 10, 2008, Dr. William R. Graham, chairman of the EMP Commission, responding to a question by Congressman Bartlett if 90 percent of America could perish from EMP, replied:

We think that is in the correct range. We don't have experience with losing the infrastructure in a country with 300 million people, most of whom don't live in a way that provides for their own food and other needs. We can go back to an era when people did live like that. That would be — 10 percent would be 30 million people, and that is probably the range where we could survive as a basically rural economy.