What if someone turned off all the electronics?

No electricity to power your computer, your phone, your television, your lights, your radio, your refrigerator, your freezer, your stove, your air conditioning. Few if any functioning cars or trucks. No civilian airplanes. No fuel pumps. No banks. No fresh water. No sewage system.

Do you have enough dried beans and rice to survive?

All it would take is for some lunatic rogue nation or even a terrorist to detonate a relatively small nuclear device in the atmosphere over the heartland of America. It would release an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would virtually shut down all technology.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, Dr. Peter Pry testified before Congress this week that an EMP event could wipe out 90 percent of America’s population.

“Natural EMP from a geomagnetic super-storm, like the 1859 Carrington Event or 1921 Railroad Storm, and nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states, as practiced by North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 2013, are both existential threats that could kill 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse,” he said.

There is a bill in the House, H.R. 3410, that would start the relatively inexpensive process of hardening the nation’s grid against such an attack, but it is languishing. Nevada Rep. Joe Heck is a co-sponsor.

Is this some startling new revelation? Hardly, I first wrote about it in February 1980 and it was old hat then.

Rep. Trent Franks, R.-Ariz., who introduced H.R. 3410 in October, said “every single facet of modern human life” would be “crippled” by an EMP event. “It strikes at my very core when I think of the men, women, and children in cities and rural towns across America with a possibility of no access to food, water, or transportation,” he said. “In a matter of weeks or months at most, a worst-case scenario could bring devastation beyond imagination.”

Most military equipment is hardened against such an attack but the populace is naked.

You may have read that North Korea’s state-run news agency called Obama a monkey, but you’ve probably not read about the real threat to your life that nation poses. There was almost no coverage of Pry’s testimony outside of the Free Beacon and an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily. The Apocalypse is such a downer.