Smoking Skillet

by Ron Foster

  The electromagnetic anti-drone rifles the North Koreans had already developed and fielded known to all military were basically a GPS neutralizing device that also shuts down all Wi-Fi, 3G, and LTE signals within a radius of one kilometer of its electromagnetic beam, which is invisible to the human eye. You can create a lot of mayhem with such toys depending on what it was you were trying to accomplish and what you were aiming at. At the very least you can confuse any first responder’s communications and by shutting down traffic lights create massive gridlock for a short period of time to allow your infiltrator or commando to escape to do more sabotage.

  The next crash will spell the end of banking in its current form. It has been predicted for years to happen to the world and has been an option for strategic war planning between opposing forces for centuries. Although warring armies have always operated on “To the victor go the spoils” and replaced the subjugated and defeated citizen’s accepted currency with their own for a millennium, nobody ever tried yet successfully to just crash the entire worlds financial system especially without a well thought out replacement. Kim couldn’t be troubled with such a capitalistic notion nor could Mao. They cared not for what other countries would do in a financial crisis but instead enforced with an iron hand and a self serving ideology what would be an acceptable form of payment in their own countries. If the reader is a researcher, the author of this book suggests you look at the wide spread indoctrination and propaganda that is spread in North Korea about Kim sending humanitarian aid to the populace of America living in poverty and without medical help after a disaster. Its amusing at best until you realize his state also says he is a divine leader that doesn’t even need the human function of using the bathroom that you must accept or have you and your whole family sent to a prison death camp for reeducation. Millions believe this just like they believed the Emperor of Japan was divine and would fight to the death without reason or humanity in ``W W II. That the Iranians fervently believe a nuclear strike on the United States will bring about their Prophet the “Mahdi” and start a new age of Muslim caliph rule after Jesus teams up with him and tells Christianity the error of their ways is another matter of extremism and historic fact.

  The chief of US Cyber Command has said it's a matter of "when, not if" the US power grid is hit by cyber attackers. And a recent high-profile attack by Russia that shut down power in the Ukraine showed it's certainly possible and feasible infrastructure target.

  The goal of a cyberattack like that against the United States infrastructure from a nation-state … is going to be not just to turn the power off, but be an extended effort to keep it off for an prolonged period of time impacting millions and millions of people. If you add to the mix physical attacks on the grid with explosives, EMP weapons, sniper fire etc. you can accomplish this goal rather easily and efficiently. Time for a wakeup call America, we are sleeping too sound it seems. All bets are off, technology will fail some day and yes it will affect you like a light switch so prepare!

  Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer," a government analysis obtained by the Wall Street Journal concluded in 2014. Guess where those big transformers of ours that take a year to build come from? That’s right South Korea!

  The government called this the "9 substation problem." As a government study showed, there are approximately 55,000 electric substations — most of which have little security beyond fences — 30 of which are deemed "critical." If just nine transformers of those 30 were messed with, it would be lights out for quite a while.

  Let’s look at some possibilities, a conventional attack with a mortar, a bazooka, a sniper rifle and explosives you name it, all of which can be had on the black market but you don’t have to get even that conventional weapon sophisticated or costly to turn the lights out on the heartland for a long time..

  A Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) power substation was hit with gunfire not long ago which was deemed an act of vandalism; PG&E spokesman Jason King said the gunshots caused a cooling oil to leak from the substation. Little did they know or want to admit to that this was actually a trial run by a terrorist group using just a hunting rifle.

  Perhaps most disturbingly, the California substation attack, in which snipers with AK 47 variant rifles destroyed 17 transformers, "demonstrates that it does not require sophistication to do significant damage to the U.S. grid," according to FERC.

  Then there are all of the rural electric cooperatives to be concerned with, there are roughly 1,000 companies responsible for distributing power to tens of millions of Americans. Although these grids aren't the biggest targets, they have been called one of the biggest risks based on their relatively limited security measures. A small team of North Korean commandos could take one over within minutes. You could probably pay the MS 13 street gang or a bunch of meth heads to do it or run interference for a few operatives to do it without much cash or problem. North Korea already had its elite teams of commandos poised on the border of South America as well as infiltrating America that were already known of, the same with the Iranians who had supposedly massed at least 50,000 soldiers in South America. And if you think about it getting a bunch of suicidal jihads together to attack the infidel ain’t that hard to do.

  Both Iran and Korea could pay to have it done by any number of groups and give them state sponsored aid to help complete their missions. Wasn’t, us they could deny, it was those crazy Al Qaeda boys the U.S. already had trouble with or perhaps it was them Muslim ISIS folks you been warring with etc. Hey America they declare, you lift these sanctions off us or we are going to do this or that to you… same old BS repeated for another day. The evil alliance would have no trouble wearing America’s resolve down further and accomplish the mission to make its citizens question their government and commence to riot and protest to cause even more havoc was one of the aims.

  Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, wrote in his 1982 book Brittle Power that "a few people could probably black out most of the country." The book surprised and rightly concerned people when it came out by citing frequent instances of grid terrorism throughout the 1970s, such as transformer shootings and substation bombings. This was one of Communist Kim’s favorite books and it sat on his desk in the war room bunker far underground. He used it like a board room map pointing here and there to targets he wanted his Generals to arrange to take out.

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  Milestones On The Road Towards Armageddon

  Standing outside the main office of a power company in California a hacker the North Koreans had employed known as Drago pulls an employee's electronic badge out of his pocket and waves it at an outside sensor. The door unlocks, even though it’s a fake card made with data stolen earlier that day.

  Once Drago gets inside the building which oversees various sites and substations delivering power to around 150,000 customers he is happy that no alarms sound or security guards appear to stop him. Cameras silently watch the hacker as he heads toward a room where the servers are located, aka the "treasure room," intent on taking over as many of the company's systems as he can.

  Drago stops, looks around and then rifles through the desk of an information technology (IT) employee looking for anything useful. He moves under the desk, looking for a suitable place to install custom hardware that will call back to him later over the internet. He then unlocks an iPad to look through a few confidential emails before moving on to a stack of notes on the desk.

  “I see said the blind man. You evidently didn’t get the latest homeland security warnings or the corporate memo on not leaving passwords lying around on sticky notes. I've got a root password here," he says, holding a yellow bit of paper with the word root and a weak, five character passwords. He's just uncovered the crown jewel in this little foray! This appeared to be possibly a top administrator password that likely would give him unrestricted access to just about any computer on the network. It was
n’t like he needed to ever worry about paying his power bill again; he had plenty of bitcoin and a Swiss bank account box full of cash that nice Korean guy had paid him for a little covert surveillance hacking.

  Later on he needed to dig a little deeper into the network to figure out just how much he can do, it's highly likely his find could result in the theft of corporate proprietary information on the company, leaks of private customer details like SSNs, home addresses, or even access to critical systems that could take electricity offline but he didn’t care. He quietly slipped out of the building the same way he came in and went home and waited for the next power company operator to log on.

  Over in Washington DC another hired hacker carefully gained access to the districts welfare and food stamp distribution computers before heading to Mexico to enjoy her ill gotten gains. Who cares if someone wants to charge the system for some more free food and money? Everyone that’s on it will still get it or so she thought….

  The skillet was hot now and Kim Jong Un decided it was time to turn up the heat and get some smoke going. Terrorist-set wildfires in the west were already creating havoc, silly Californians were blaming the mythical climate change thing... The terrorists and rebels of the world had figured out long ago about using fire as a tactical weapon of war. This was perhaps the simplest form of economic warfare they could think of by causing wild land arson. This tactic allowed them to inflict significant damage with very little investment or risk, fire is an extremely high-leverage weapon of mass effect. The economic damage caused by setting fires in U.S. forests and grasslands was significant as well as tied up many resources. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the New York-based American Center for Democracy's Economic Warfare Institute had previously warned that last a few months ago "al-Qaeda's English-language online magazine, Inspire, published an article called 'It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,' which featured instructions on how to build an incendiary bomb to light forests on fire. A few months later, Russia's security (FSB) chief, Aleksandr Bortnikov warned, 'al-Qaeda was complicit in recent forest fires in Europe' as part of the terrorists' 'strategy of a thousand cuts.' All these things were but distractions however as the enemies of the Untied States and its Allies networked its minions to create hell on earth.

  The tempest of World War III loomed on the smoke filled horizon most people thought, they started publicly thinking and talking of a nuclear exchange as the war drums beat louder to end these blatant tests or attacks but saner heads tried to prevail. Neither North Korea nor Iran had “demonstrated or “tested” a full blown nuclear device above ground that had damaged anyone as of yet. They hadn’t directly caused sufficient undeniable or blamable damage to our infrastructure computers as of yet we could point more than a finger at.

  Israel was on a hair trigger and threatened to take care of Iran itself if the US didn’t hurry and step up to the plate. They were already bombing the hell out of the various terrorist factions threatening its borders as the world began to get even crazier. America’s borders were under continuous siege as numerous Mexican gangs linked to the drug cartels smuggled in so called “refugees” or foreign freedom fighters they didn’t care which and didn’t mind selling them or anybody else that wanted them, guns, explosives or ammo..

  The Sun was entering solar minimum and it was throwing off unprecedented coronal mass ejections of enormous size, volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes plagued the globe. Various plagues and pestilences were occurring throughout the world as scientists struggled to combat them and find effective cures. A whole Pandora’s Box of woes had seemed to have been wildly let loose in the world.

  Weather wars seemed to be occurring as countries accused one another of this or that dastardly deed and tried geoenginering to either offset a wildfire by making rain or in the United States and China and Russia’s case of causing earthquakes and other supposedly natural disasters to get a point across. Could be the US had caused North Korea’s underground nuclear testing mountain to collapse, who knows.

  That Kim Jong Un was in back of a lot of this mayhem was a given, what to do about it and him was the problem. The president can order a nuclear strike in about the time it takes to write a tweet. He can easily turn that North Korean fat boy Kim into a Tostito but there were major potential repercussions from Russia and China to consider. They were not likely to be appreciative of the radioactive fall out that might come off such a strike and cross their borders... The president kind of felt like he was being pistol whipped and held hostage by the North Korean atomic threat. Level the playing field is what Kim Jong Un had accomplished in his devious mind. The US didn’t want to fight him conventionally he thought and his threat of nuclear response if attacked held them at bay for now as their country lost power and influence daily.

  In a war of attrition, both sides have the same approximate strength, and each attempts to force the other to surrender by wearing the other down. The prevailing side simply outlasts the other, forcing continuous losses of people, equipment, weapons, or food. Tomorrow Kim Jong Un would turn off half of America’s lights and cut off millions of people on welfare and food stamps... By the time the stupid Americans figured out who was truly at fault in this blame game, it would be too late to care about him.

  Millions of starving citizens would take to the streets angrily mad at the government for not giving them their dole in few days rioting in a frenzy of unjustified race allegations etc. Kim hoped and this outpouring of America’s ghettos would tie up the military and police. Take down America from within by smartly using its own people to cause even more societal breakdown, vandalism, arson and violence. That was the plan! Of course he wasn’t done playing the game by a long shot yet and neither was Iran. Next week or next month they would both cause the rest of the electrical grid to go down in Europe and the US.

  Kim Jong Un picked up his favorite book and reread one highlighted quote again for the umpteenth time.” Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer." And called for his aide to take a memo…. “Where was that book that said the American EMP commission had predicted 90% of its population would be dead in 1 year after the electrical grid was taken down?” Kim thought to himself. Ah yes here it is he murmured.

  Director James Woolsey and EMP Commission Chairman Dr. Vincent Pry from the Task Force on National and Homeland Security published an article on TheHill.com, where they argued that a nuclear EMP attack could wipe out 90% of the U.S. population. Woolsey and Pry cite the Congressional EMP Commission, arguing, “a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year – killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse.”

  The Threat to America’s Electrical Grid Is Much Bigger Than You Can Possibly Imagine! Do Some Preparations! Wake Up!

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  The Big Meltdown

  The many factions of extremists who historically continually and opportunistically attacked U.S. interests by any means possible, sometimes on U.S. soil, sometimes abroad at a military installation, base, or embassy now had allies with nuclear armed armies to assist them in their own vegenefull full terrorism. The stated goal for some was to wear the U.S. down so that it eventually gave in to their demands but for others it was to establish Sharia law and a new Islamic caliphate. A precipitous collapse of the U.S. was in sight but she wasn’t going down without a fight. The nukes did fly eventually towards Iran and China and did even help kick North Korea’s butt in unconventional warfare but the damage was done. The electrical grid was down in Europe, the US and parts of China. Russia had its own share of terrorists and problems.

  South Korea attempted to dig itself out of the rubble as a darkened Japan attempted to control its leaking nuclear reactors hit by missiles fired from North Korea. Turmoil and death like the world had never seen ensued and the age of dying began just as a mini ice age beg
an from the solar minimum and all the ashes and smoke in the air.

  The grid had only been totally down and out for a week when the U.S. had eviscerated Iran and North Korea. The rally around the flag and make America great again after this great calamity messages on the Emergency Broadcast channel by the President eventually went unheeded by the populace. The declaration of martial law held some of the chaos and societal breakdown at bay for awhile, but the dregs of society toads soon surfaced and made peaceful reconstruction for the more civilized majority an impossibility for now. Gang wars, rioters and cops, patriots and terrorists you name it eventually went at it until they had their own war of attrition finding something to eat.

  That’s when the military came in under emergency power acts and tried to start sort of a feudal system of raising food and brutally suppressing dissent. This went on in some areas longer than others but the army travels on its belly and dissent in the ranks and food shortages had them staying on bases and trying to run civilian labor campaigns to feed itself as well as the workers. Lots of people participated willingly in this process but many did not and were sometimes forced into labor gangs for their own good or so it was said.

  Everyplace was different, just as every commander or leader who was in charge of a base or relief camp was in policy and conditions. Oh yea America still had her government, got's to have “continuity of government” at all costs and they had a plan of sorts for this type of event occurring. They had one for themselves that didn’t include everyone else.

  They would hide in a safe place with their families somewhere with tons of food and command what was left of the country from there. But it doesn’t really work like that, well not at first anyway. You see it took them way too long to come up with much of anything at all to offset this disaster on the populace. They got the ready set go military part done pretty quickly about nuking Iran and Korea; they even let Israel take out Damascus. I think that was because the President picked up the Video phone and addressed the Congress and Senate and said “Look guys there is transportation for you out waiting out front to go to your designated shelters. I as President of the United States told the Strategic Air Command to take a little trip and go somewhere for me in 15 minutes. Oh yea, no worries about the other big powers for now. Russia and China are mumbling something but they are aware of our efforts and accept our apologies for any external damage we do to their borders with our enemies. Now then gentleman I suggest that you now exit the building and board your buses, “and the president walked away from the podium as the vice president stepped forward to another one on the far side of the country.