Days ahead of the first presidential caucus in Iowa, Peter Vincent Pry went to the Hawkeye state to brief presidential candidates about his life’s work — preventing a nationwide blackout of the power grid.

Amid the voter rallies and the pancake breakfasts there, he talked to Republican candidates about a threat that worries very few people outside national security circles — that of electromagnetic pulses.

EMPs are bursts of radiation triggered by solar storms, or more worryingly to defense officials, by nuclear explosions. A 1989 solar storm that knocked out Ontario’s power grid, for example, deprived millions of people of power in the midst of a Canadian winter. The US electric grid is still dangerously vulnerable to such surges, warn experts like Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a Congressional advisory board that addresses the threat of EMPs.

Pry said he found in Des Moines a receptive audience in one longshot candidate, Donald Trump.

"He got it,” Pry told BuzzFeed News. “He's a smart guy. He basically said, 'If I'm elected President, I'll knock their heads together and solve this problem.'"

National-security conservatives, most prominently Trump confidant Newt Gingrich, have for years trumpeted the threat of an EMP attack on the electric grid.

"The threat is real, and we as Americans must face that threat, prepare, and know what to do to prevent it," Gingrich wrote in the foreword to "One Second After," a novel about an EMP attack.

The Obama administration’s Energy Department announced $3.9 billion in “smart grid” funding available to the nation’s utilities in 2009, largely for upgrades to defeat normal blackouts and permit home meters to talk back to power companies, but these EMP hawks still warn the overall grid is vulnerable to a knockout punch.

Now under President Trump, who is eager to build infrastructure and appear strong on national security, they may finally have an ally in the White House.

“We will protect our critical infrastructure such as power plants and electrical grids,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Jan. 31. “The electrical grid problem is a problem but we'll have it solved relatively soon.”

That day, Trump was set to issue an executive order on cybersecurity, but the signing was postponed for undisclosed reasons.

Before the cancellation, one White House official said the executive order would instruct the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies in the electricity business “to provide whatever resources we can to help them protect their systems," according to the White House pool report.

When asked when the president will sign the cybersecurity executive order, the White House did not respond to BuzzFeed News.

