“Everyone overdraws from the grid. Just this morning I held a meeting with power officials from the states and I gave directions that states which overdraw should be punished. We have given instructions that their power supply could be cut,” he told reporters.
“The situation is very grave. We are doing everything to restore power,” the Power Minister said.
Last week, the Texas power grid was “4 minutes 37 seconds away from a total collapse,” meaning a statewide blackout, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) officials said at an emergency board meeting Wednesday. Had it happened, Texas would have been in the dark for weeks if not longer.
“This was a devastating event,” one official said in his opening statements. “Power is essential to civilization.”
ERCOT officials said controlled outages were implemented to prevent a statewide blackout, saying the storm was unlike anything Texas has experienced before.
Three-hundred and fifty-six generators were knocked offline during the storm event.
In his first sit-down interview with an American news outlet, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Friday that Israel has updated its target list and is preparing to strike Iranian nuclear sites if the world does not act to stop Iran’s nuclear development. Gantz said Israel has found numerous targets in Iran that would slow its nuclear development if attacked.
Gantz said Israel has identified thousands of rocket sites targets along the Israeli border with Lebanon, including many that are in civilian areas.
If the United States and Russia waged an all-out nuclear war, much of the land in the Northern Hemisphere would be below freezing in the summertime, with the growing season slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas, according to a Rutgers-led study. Indeed, death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people, according to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.
Lead author Joshua Coupe and other scientists used a modern climate model to simulate the climatic effects of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Such a war could send 150 million tons of black smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas into the lower and upper atmosphere, where it could linger for months to years and block sunlight.
“This means that we have much more confidence in the climate response to a large-scale nuclear war,” Coupe said. “There really would be a nuclear winter with catastrophic consequences.”
In both the new and old models, a nuclear winter occurs as soot (black carbon) in the upper atmosphere blocks sunlight and causes global average surface temperatures to plummet by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit in some cases.
EPIGRAPH
In any large-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers, global environmental changes sufficient to cause the extinction of a major fraction of the plant and animal species on the earth are likely. In that event, the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded.
If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks off the blanket.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
NUCLEAR WINTER II
ARMAGEDDON
In 1961, President Kennedy issued a letter to all American citizens, warning them about the threat of nuclear Armageddon. His solution was to build fallout shelters. The letter read, in part:
“We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country. The time to start is now. In the coming months, I hope to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of an attack. I know you would not want to do less.”
PROLOGUE
Friday, October 25
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)
Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
DEFCON 1. The cocked pistol.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command—commonly referred to by its acronym, NORAD—was the nerve center of the U.S. military, especially during times of heightened tensions around the world. Two days following the nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, the entirety of the nation’s defense forces was elevated to DEFCON 2, the next step in preparation for nuclear war. U.S. armed forces were ordered to be ready for immediate deployment, a status that assured they could engage the enemy in any manner within six hours. Once before, the U.S. had reached DEFCON 2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The nation had never reached DEFCON 1, the maximum state of readiness indicating a nuclear missile attack was imminent, until that morning.
Referred to as the cocked pistol, military personnel operated at DEFCON 1 every minute of the day. Around the globe, as well as from space, ground-based sensors and satellites transmitted data to NORAD’s advanced artificial intelligence systems for evaluation.
Like the operation of a human brain, NORAD’s AI collected information from these various sensors and compiled the data in one place for analysis. The military strategists located within Cheyenne Mountain pulled it together, made sense of it, and then passed it along to the commanders who made the decisions that defended America.
Cheyenne Mountain was truly the dragon that never sleeps. Native American folklore claimed Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain was a sleeping dragon that saved the Ute Indians from a massive flood that invaded the valley surrounding the mountain. The Utes believed they were being punished by the Great Spirit, but after they repented, the dragon was sent to drink the water. The dragon then fell asleep, became petrified, and thereafter became known as Cheyenne Mountain.
Unlike the legend, Cheyenne Mountain, which was located outside Colorado Springs and just south of Denver, hadn’t slept in over half a century. Once made fully operational in the spring of 1966, the country’s most important military installation was home to NORAD.
The stress levels in the operations center were high for the airmen, whose focus was on detecting and tracking incoming nuclear threats to the U.S., but not from what might happen if a nuclear attack was initiated. The nerve center of NORAD was determined to detect a possible attack in order to give the nation’s defense network maximum response time.