Lights Out By: Ted Koppel

Because he’s Ted Koppel, he gets to interview cabinet secretaries and their senior staff, as well as senior civil servants, politicians and agency heads. To set up interviews across the country, he simply called US Senators. That quality alone makes Lights Out a higher level read. The other plus is the way Koppel has organized and written this book. It is broken out into bite-sized chapters, like television news items, keeping interest but delivering the salient points succinctly. And he leaves no stone unturned. Every time you think “Yes, but…” he has the answer in the next paragraph, page or chapter. So Lights Out is both challenging and satisfying, fascinating and horrifying. And important.
The core of the horror is our electrical grid. It is no secret that it old, old fashioned, creaky, decrepit and vulnerable to physical attack. Koppel adds that in addition, it is even more vulnerable to cyberattack. Hackers could, if they so desired, crash the whole electric grid, much as the United States and Israel ruined Iran’s uranium processing plants and as Iran turned 30,000 Saudi computers into useless doorstops. We have the technology; we have successfully deployed it ourselves. If similar efforts were made against the USA, it would mean weeks and months before power was restored. Water would stop flowing, gas would stop flowing, gas stations would close, hospitals would close, banking systems would cease. Debit and credit cards would not operate. Replacements for Very Large Transformers run to over a year lead time. The US has hundreds, all custom made.And the government? Clueless? I think not.