Lights Out

Ted Koppel, the longtime television journalist, makes a case that a cyberattack on the American power grid is not a remote hypothetical but a likely event, and that the country is poorly prepared for what would follow. He opens with a picture of the damage: a blackout that stretches across several states for weeks or months. Without a generator, households lose running water, sewage service, refrigeration and light. Food and medicine run short, banks stop working, communication devices go dead, and looting tests the limits of law and order.

Koppel argues that this is a realistic danger. Taking down just one of the nation's three major grids could cripple much of the country's infrastructure, and in an era of cyberwarfare a laptop may be all an attacker needs. He cites a former chief scientist of the NSA who says China and Russia have already penetrated the grid, and a cybersecurity advisor to President Obama who believes independent actors, from hacktivists to terrorists, could pull off an attack too. Centcom Commander General Lloyd Austin tells him it is not a question of if, but of when.

The larger problem, Koppel finds, is what happens afterward. The federal government has solid plans for natural disasters but none for the aftermath of a grid attack, and the Secretary of Homeland Security's advice to him is to keep a battery-powered radio. With no official plan, some people have started preparing on their own. Koppel visits members of the estimated three million American preppers, including one whose retreat features a newly dug three-acre lake stocked with fish, and a Wyoming homesteader who made the thousands of adobe bricks in his house by hand. He also looks at the Mormon church, whose vast storehouses, dairies, orchards and trucking operation reflect a long habit of planning for the worst.

The question running through the book is how ordinary people would get through such a disaster. Koppel brings a reporter's skepticism and a sense of urgency to a threat particular to our time, and weighs the ways the country might get ready for it.