U.S. Intelligence Director warns of Chinese attack on power grid causing Armageddon; have you prepared your family for the collapse?

(NaturalNews) A special unit of the Chinese People's Liberation Army is dedicated to waging cyber warfare against the United States should the two nations become embroiled in a conventional conflict, with the goal of knocking out American infrastructure that is vital to the nation's survival.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told Congress that China's and other countries' cyber capabilities are so sophisticated that they are believed to even be capable of disrupting the entire U.S. power grid. If the outages are prolonged, it is believed that it could kill up to 90 percent of Americans, experts told a congressional panel in 2014.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September, Clapper said that the Chinese in particular have the capability to launch "a massive Armageddon-like attack against our infrastructure." He did not say whether the U.S. possessed similar cyber capabilities, but it's believed that the Pentagon's cyber war capabilities are second-to-none.

The Chinese unit is known in military and intelligence circles as "Unit 61398."

China "building cyber war capability"

In November 2014, Navy Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that once a hacker gained access to the power grid, there are any number of things that could be done to disrupt or even destroy wide swaths of the U.S. power grid.

"Once you're into the system...it enables you to do things like, if I want to tell power turbines to go offline and stop generating power, you can do that. It enables you to shut down very segmented, very tailored parts of our infrastructure that forestall the ability to provide those services to our citizens."

CyberWar.news reports that a significant and growing portion of China's expanding military budget is devoted to improving the nation's cyber warfare capabilities.

In early 2014 after Chinese President Xi Jinping took control of the Central Internet Security and Informatization Leading Group, the state-run news agency, Xinhua, said he viewed internet security as "a major strategic issue concerning a country's security and development as well as people's life and work," according to a Sept. 1 report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The news agency said the president also added that "efforts should be made to build our country into a cyber power," according to the CSIS report, as quoted by CyberWar.news.

"It strikes at my very core"

The results of such a widespread attack on the national power grid would be catastrophic.

In testimony before a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee's Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies in November 2014, a host of experts warned that loss of power from an electromagnetic pulse event due to a nuclear explosion or a massive solar flare or other cause would essentially be a game-changer, one that panel members took note of.

"Some would say it's low probability, but the damage that could be caused in the event of an EMP attack, both by the sun, a solar event, or a man-made attack, would be catastrophic," said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. "We talk a lot about a nuclear bomb in Manhattan, and cybersecurity threat to the power grid in the Northeast, and all of these things would actually probably pale in comparison to the devastation that an EMP attack could perpetrate on Americans."

"It strikes at my very core when I think of the men, women, and children in cities and rural towns across America with a possibility of no access to food, water, or transportation," added Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz. "In a matter of weeks or months at most, a worst-case scenario could bring devastation beyond imagination."

"The civilian grid, in my judgment, is very vulnerable," he said. "Some of the largest transformers, the very largest ones, have an inherent resistance to all but the more intense electromagnetic pulses. But the fact is, we have enough of those mid-range transformers where a major event would be catastrophic."

In the event of of such a widespread collapse, it's easy to believe that most Americans wouldn't be prepared for it.

Sources include:

AllNewsPipeline.com

TheBlaze.com

CyberWar.news

NaturalNews.com

Bugout.news

Collapse.news