Bronius Cikotas--Exit the Unknown Heroes
by DR. PETER VINCENT PRY
On Wednesday, December 10th at 2:30 PM, his heart stopped beating, and we lost another one of our precious unknown and uncelebrated scientist heroes. Bron Cikotas did more than generals and Presidents to keep America safe. But few have ever heard his name.
Bron was a scientific genius who dedicated his life to protecting our national security.
During the Cold War, he devised new means for safeguarding military communications from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Among his fellow defense scientists Bron was famed as "the Father of GWEN" for his invention of the Ground Wave Emergency Network. GWEN protected the survivability and preserved the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Bron Cikotas EMP hardened the White House.
Scientists like Bron are the reason the Cold War ended peacefully, without the Evil Empire that was the USSR trying to save itself by rolling thermonuclear dice.
After the Cold War, Bron served on the Congressional EMP Commission. His still classified work proved that natural EMP from a geomagnetic super-storm like the Carrington Event could kill millions of Americans. He traveled far and wide educating the public and policymakers about the previously classified fact that nuclear or natural EMP constitutes an existential threat to modern electronic civilization.
Bron's testimony to the Maine State Legislature was instrumental in moving Maine to become the first state to protect its electric grid from EMP while also mitigating all other threats, including cyber attacks, sabotage, and severe weather.
And Bron was inventing new solutions to EMP. He patented dozens of inventions. He was working on a new way to protect a transformer that would lower the cost from $150,000 to $3,000, just before he died.
Bron knew that we as a nation are running out of time to protect ourselves from an EMP that could kill 9 of 10 Americans from starvation, disease, and societal collapse.
In July, NASA warned that the Earth in 2012 narrowly escaped an encounter with a geomagnetic super-storm that could have caused a planetary blackout and put at risk the lives of billions. NASA estimates the likelihood of such an event as 12 percent per decade--which virtually guarantees the we or our children will experience a natural EMP catastrophe.
We are also running out of talent to protect ourselves from EMP and other threats. The Congressional EMP Commission warned that we are not training a new generation of scientists to replace EMP experts and geniuses like Bron Cikotas.
The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission warned that we are not raising up a new cadre of scientists and engineers capable of replacing the Cold War generation who built our existing nuclear weapons, strategic missiles and bombers, submarines and aircraft carriers. America slowly but surely is losing its best defense scientists to mortality.
Instead of educating scientists and engineers, our universities are churning out lawyers.
By contrast, our adversaries have plenty of work for their new generation of defense scientists.
Houston Hawkins of Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a recent article for the American Center for Democracy, writes: "Just as the United States surprised its adversaries in World War II with technological advances such as the atomic bomb, its adversaries today can do the same to it. Today, in contrast to what is happening at the American counterparts...Russian institutes are seeing...year-round experimentation at their Novaya Zemlya Test Site, which is leading to development and deployment of new Russian nuclear weapons for newly designed delivery systems....China's nuclear weapon program is enjoying similar...vigor and is directly benefitting from the rapid infusion of foreign advanced technologies."
What is to be done?
I have a modest proposal for Senator Harry Reid, who I hope will not mind my disclosing that he and his staff have been very helpful to those of us trying to protect the nation from EMP. Senator Reid, before this Congress ends, please pass the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act (CIPA) that on December 1 passed the House unanimously. CIPA would protect our nation's critical infrastructures and peoples from the existential threat of a natural or nuclear EMP catastrophe, and would secure your legacy.
But please share the credit a little, and rechristen it the Bron Cikotas Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.
