Winston Churchill's "The Gathering Storm" describes how Nazi Germany conspired to conquer the democracies, which were unwitting, unprepared and nearly defeated when the storm of World War II finally burst upon them. London stood alone for a time, the solitary champion of freedom in a new kind of war, fought with the revolutionary new technology of massed airpower, in the warring skies over the bombed homes of the heroic city.
Victory went to the Allies and freedom prevailed over tyranny in World War II only because a handful of visionary statesmen, scientists and captains of industry prepared for the gathering storm.
Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt did what they could to prepare their reluctant nations to transition from peacetime to a war economy. Rep. Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, insisted that a skeptical peacetime U.S. Navy build aircraft carriers.
Howard Hughes and other pioneers of aviation, during the peace before Pearl Harbor, designed fighters and bombers that won the air war. Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and other nuclear physicists started the U.S. down the path that became the Manhattan Project and beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb.
Today, another gathering storm threatens freedom and the survival of civilization: cyberwarfare.
Terrorists and rogue states are making cyberattacks on a daily basis, using computer bugs to probe defenses of U.S. critical infrastructures. The most important critical infrastructure is the electric power grid. Electricity runs and makes possible the operation of all the other critical infrastructures -- communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water -- that sustain modern civilization and the lives of millions.
The biggest cyberthreat is from electromagnetic pulse, which in the military doctrines of potential adversaries would be part of an all-out cyberwar. A nuclear missile, perhaps launched from a freighter, detonated at high altitude over the U.S. could black out the national grid for months or years, killing an estimated 90% of Americans by starvation, disease and societal collapse. (And there is also a natural threat: The sun could inflict a worldwide natural EMP catastrophe with a solar flare that generates a rare geomagnetic superstorm, like the 1859 Carrington Event. Such a storm could collapse electric grids everywhere on Earth, endangering billions.)
Statements made in Iran, North Korea, China and Russia lend credence to the possibility of EMP attacks against the U.S. Iran has practiced missile launches from a ship, and North Korea has demonstrated its ability to launch a satellite. Either of these platforms could be used to launch EMP attacks against the United States with little warning. In July, a North Korean freighter detained for drug smuggling was discovered to have nuclear-capable missiles aboard.
In a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of U.S. infrastructure, in April, saboteurs using AK-47s attacked and damaged electric grid transformers near San Jose.
The gathering cyberstorm draws near.
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