Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Seven: War and Terrorism 83temporarily blinded the pilot and crew of a Los Angeles Police Department helicopterin October 1981), gas and plasma cutting torches capable of penetratingany material, robots, and computers. Within a few years, “research” rocketscapable of sending hundreds of pounds for thousands of miles will becomecommercially available, and so will accurate inertial guidance systems.•Military munitions, available to governments worldwide via the generousexport policies of the major military powers, add a new dimension to the previouslist, because such munitions are often even more effective for the specializedtasks for which they are designed. 123 For example, some aerial bombscan reportedly penetrate ten yards or more of concrete, 124 and certain artilleryrounds can pierce five feet of concrete after travelling twenty miles. Newlydeveloped munitions can apparently penetrate heavily hardened targets andthen explode inside them. In the coming years, the gradual evolution andspread of military hardware can be expected to offer terrorists more channelsfor obtaining this specialized equipment, just as they have done in the past.The point of this catalogue of terrorist resources is not to claim that all themeans listed have been used to attack energy facilities (though in fact manyhave). Rather it is to give fuller meaning to the description, in the next fourchapters, of the specific characteristics which make four major types of energysystem highly vulnerable to attack—including especially their potential notjust to stop working but to do great harm to their neighbors.A growing dangerThere are, unfortunately, many people eager to exploit any potential to dogreat harm by a dramatic act. In the past decade, “there have been on the averagetwo terrorist incidents per day somewhere in the world.” 125 Increasingly, asthe previous and following examples show, those attacks have focused on centralizedenergy systems. As a U.S. Department of Energy compilation shows,between 1970 and mid-1980 there were at least one hundred seventy-four incidentsof sabotage or terrorism against energy facilities in the United States andat least one hundred ninety-two abroad, as shown in Table One. 126Thus, by this official count, attacks on energy facilities are already occurringat a rate averaging one every three weeks in the United States and one everyten days throughout the world. That rate, as the citations in the followingchapters show, is rapidly accelerating. To understand the dangers of thisemerging pattern, we must understand not only what has already happened,but what could happen in the future—if we do not begin to make the energysystem far more resilient.