On Wednesday evening, I tweeted my thoughts about President Trump’s address to the nation on the coronavirus situation. What I’d like to do here is look at his address, and the ban on travel from Europe (technically, the Schengen zone), from a different point of view.
The Economist publishes an annual installment of “The World If” articles. The articles are about things that could happen in the future (or might have happened in the past), some good, some bad, and what might be (or have been) the consequences. Alternate history articles, in a manner of speaking. One of the articles in 2017 was about the risk that the United States, and other countries, face from a prolonged loss of electricity. It’s low risk, but if it happens … wow. Here are some excerpts from the article:
“On March 13th 1989 a surge of energy from the sun, from a ‘coronal mass ejection’, had a startling impact on Canada. Within 92 seconds, the resulting geomagnetic storm took down Quebec’s electricity grid for nine hours. It could have been worse. On July 23rd 2012 particles from a much larger solar ejection blew across the orbital path of Earth, missing it by days. Had it hit America, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have destroyed perhaps a quarter of high-voltage transformers ….
And that is not the only threat to the grid. A transformer-wrecking electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would be produced by a nuclear bomb, designed to maximise its yield of gamma rays, if detonated high up …. A midrange missile tested by North Korea on April 29th 2017 exploded 71 kilometres (44 miles) up, well above the 40km or so needed to generate an EMP.
Imagine a nuclear blast occurring somewhere above eastern Nebraska. Radiating outwards, the EMP fries electronics in southern Canada and almost all of the United States …. It permanently damages the grid’s multimillion-dollar high-voltage transformers. …
America runs on roughly 2,500 large transformers, most with unique designs. But only 500 or so can be built per year around the world. …
After the surge, telecom switches and internet routers are dead. Air-traffic control is down. Within a day, some shoppers in supermarkets turn to looting (many, unable to use credit and debit cards, cannot pay even if they wanted to). … On the third day, backup diesel generators begin to sputter out. …
Utilities can neither treat nor pump water or sewage. Raids on homes thought to have water become frequent and often bloody. … Deaths from cholera and other diseases multiply.
As relief ships arrive, food, water filters and fuel are offloaded by hand amid chaos, but demand cannot be met even in port cities, much less inland. Where food can be grown without pumped irrigation, rural militias cluster into “aggie alliances” not keen to share with the hordes streaming out of cities. …
The death rate picks up. Eventually, months later, about three quarters of the benighted area has power for at least ten hours a day. It would have been worse had 41 countries not dismantled transformers for reassembly in North America. (The most generous donors have to accept rolling blackouts.) … Roughly 350,000 Canadians and 7m Americans have died. … “
At this point, the article stops its alternate history tale and begins to explain what we can do to address this risk. But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the last paragraph of the excerpt, particularly the part I have highlighted:
“Eventually, months later, about three quarters of the benighted area has power for at least ten hours a day. It would have been worse had 41 countries not dismantled transformers for reassembly in North America. (The most generous donors have to accept rolling blackouts.)”
Obviously, this is a made-up story, but countries and people have responded like this. The Marshall Plan might be one case. Herbert Hoover’s efforts to feed Belgium during World War I and his efforts to feed the Soviet Union after World War I1 are definitely examples of this. On the other side are President Trump’s comments about Europe Wednesday evening.
There are many things this country can be. I would hope, if something like the energy surge in this story happened somewhere in the world, we would be a country that dismantled transformers so they could be used where they were needed to save lives. I did not hear that spirit Wednesday evening.2
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1 See reviews of The Russian Job here and here.
2 Before people on the other side start feeling too good about themselves, consider:
1. In 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to China, she said that, while she would mention human rights, Tibet, etc., to the Chinese leaders, “our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.”
2. Here is what Eli Lake said of President Obama’s decision in 2009 to downplay support for protesters in Iran:
“One of the great hypotheticals of Barack Obama's presidency involves the Iranian uprising that began on June 12, 2009, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced the winner of contested presidential elections. What if the president had done more to help the protesters when the regime appeared to be teetering?
It's well known he was slow to react. Obama publicly downplayed the prospect of real change at first, saying the candidates whom hundreds of thousands of Iranians were risking their lives to support did not represent fundamental change. When he finally did speak out, he couldn't bring himself to say the election was stolen: ‘The world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was.’
But Obama wasn't just reluctant to show solidarity in 2009, he feared the demonstrations would sabotage his secret outreach to Iran. In his new book, The Iran Wars, Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran's green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America's support.”
3. Finally, Democrats justifiably criticized President Trump for his refusal to send military aid to Ukraine in the summer of 2018 unless Ukraine announced an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, aid which was ultimately sent a couple of months later. However, how many of them were urging the Obama administration to supply that very same kind of aid to Ukraine in 2014 or 2015 or 2016, when President Obama wouldn’t send it?
I agree with you. We want to be a country that helps other nations. That is what American is and or at least it was.
Posted by: Sue Allen | March 15, 2020 at 04:03 PM