PUTIN’S RESET

methods and motivations of Russia-directed efforts.” Obama and Clinton campaign
said meant U.S. intelligence agencies had determined Russia was behind these hacks.
(Which it had not done, at least not publicly.) Obama officials later said the United
States would conduct a “proportional” cyber response to alleged Russian hacking of
Democratic Party computers. 281
Pressure on the Obama administration to retaliate against the Russian hacks
grew in October 2016 after Wikileaks began to release thousands of mails of Clinton
campaign members. While many of these emails were highly embarrassing to the
Clinton campaign, they received little press attention.
What is worse is that Russia has apparently weaponized cyber for use in
military conflict as well. As just one example, Russia is widely suspected to have used
cyber weapons to take down the Ukrainian power grid. According to a January 2016
Bloomberg.com article:
A successful cyber-attack on a power grid is a nightmare that keeps intelligence
services and security experts awake at night. Now the threat is no longer
theoretical: A grid in Ukraine has been brought down by hackers. The
vulnerability they used? As so often with hacking, human stupidity. 282
The engineered blackout scenario is so scary that Ted Koppel, the former
ABC Nightline host, recently published a book about it. In "Lights Out: A
Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath," Koppel claimed the
U.S. is unprepared for an attack on one of the three power grids that distribute
electricity throughout the country. He wrote:
If an adversary of this country has as its goal inflicting maximum damage and
pain on the largest number of Americans, there may not be a more productive
target than one of our electric power grids. 283
Ukraine has an adversary that may be interested in inflicting just such damage
and pain: Russia.
Taking down the power grid may be the ultimate weapon in economic warfare.
Cyber is one means of accomplishing this devastating attack. An electromagnetic
pulse (EMP) weapon is another. Regardless of the cause, a long-term power grid
outage (a year of longer) would be a nation-ending event, as noted by Dr. Peter Pry
and Ambassador James Woolsey in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed:
In a recent letter to investors, billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer
warned that an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is "the most significant threat" to
the U.S. and our allies in the world. He's right. Our food and water supplies,
communications, banking, hospitals, law enforcement, etc., all depend on the
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