Homeland Security: no precautions for imminent threat.

The Free Beacon freely quoted Chairman Ron Johnson of the Homeland Security oversight committee:

“We’ve allowed government dysfunction to prevent us from doing even the most basic things to protect ourselves,” said Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), the lone representative present at the beginning of the hearing.

“I wish every member of the committee was here to hear this. Let’s not make perfect be the enemy of good,” Johnson said. “Let’s not sit back and say, if you cannot protect everything, protect nothing. Let’s start protecting things. We spent $800 billion in 2009 and 2010 on a stimulus package looking for shovel-ready projects—this would’ve been a good shovel-ready project.”

We have all seen those disaster movies about how electromagnetic pulse could destroy the nation. It could result from a high-altitude nuclear detonation, more than 100 miles above the ground, launched either by a nuclear warhead or satellite delivery system. Not even Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible crew could help.

And they there are natural disasters…

In 1859, a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun, known as the Carrington Event, contacted the Earth’s magnetosphere and induced one of the largest GMD’s in recorded history. A comparable solar storm hitting Earth today, would essentially would destroy the entire global electric grid, setting humanity back over 100 years technologically. Billions would die.

Read more of the Free Beacon article here.

And it is not far fetched…

“I emphasize that a once-per-century event could occur next week. It has a probability of 10 percent of occurring in the next 10 years, a time in which we can and should take measures to reduce and essentially eliminate its impact on the bulk power system of the United States,” said Dr. Richard Garwin of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

No Worries.