> I read the the US government estimates a 80% civilian mortality if the power grid is down for a year.

Our food production, waste and water treatment, hospitals, etc run on electricity, sure. But 80% doesn't seem anchored in reality.

I feel like this irrationality about the risks posed by a blackout is what the article is meant to address.

A year of blackout? Yeah, 80% sounds about right. See, our modern cities are designed around efficient transport (food, sanitation). Back in the day they added sewers to London because it took longer than a day for the nightsoil wagons to get to the dump sites and back - something more efficient was needed.

Today its 1000X that. There's no way to get food to people without efficient transport, which depends utterly on energy. No way to get sewage out. No way to get water flowing. Heck even the traffic lights are needed to keep transport going.

A year without food and water? Without sanitation? Of course nearly everybody dies.

Manual solutions could be found, but its impossible that they could support the current population density. So folks would have to flee the cities. To the countryside, where they just die a different death. After pillaging and destroying any remaining food pipeline.

Food is pretty easy, from my readings of nuclear war survival during the Cold War. E.g. a single semi-tractor trailer, long before their allowed weight was upped to 80,000 pounds, could carry enough wheat to keep 100,000 people fed for one day.

It's the water supply that would be the big killer, you can't go without it for more than a few days, and that just wouldn't be enough time to get enough to everyone.

I'm not sure they'd be so successful in "pillaging and destroying any remaining food pipeline" ... how do you to that to an interstate highway? At most, to the fueling stations, but those are a fairly small scale, and I would expect easily replaced thing. But that would also help to self-limited the radius of the pillaging and destruction, keep it mostly away from the farms themselves, which aren't exactly defenseless if such is needed for only a relatively short period of time.

Its the farms that are vulnerable. Hungry thousands trampling crops looking for anything to eat. Then a breakdown of hybrid seed - that's a delicate pipeline that took generations to build, and can be destroyed in a single season of neglect. Hopeless to rebuild in time to save everyone. We'd be reduced to a percentage of our previous population. Assuming widespread social failure.

But many if not most cereal grain farms (plus legumes besides soybeans?), the ones that count for getting the most calories to the most people, are quite some distance from big cities. And if you only have to deal with an initial wave, you can do a Maximum Effort to keep them out of your fields, it's long term banditry where farmers by themselves inevitably lose because they can't do both at the same time.

Hybrid seeds aren't used for all crops, not for wheat as I recall, I'm not sure about soybeans. Corn is of course the big one, but at least going forward humans wouldn't particularity want to eat corn if wheat is available.

But I agree with your bottom line, on the problem of big cities, well, Dean Ing, in the appropriately titled novel Systemic Shock, put it this way:

The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.

I have a hard time believing that people would sit and wait for death because the lights were out. If they had to walk 100 miles, till with their hands, garden with whatever fibrous, undomesticated vegetables the could find, and fertilize with night soil, they'd make it happen.

I think a US Army report had the figure higher than 80%.

A small thought experiment: imagine that you live in a city and for 1 year there was no electricity, no trash pickup, likely no water to drink and to flush toilets, and no gas for cars and trucks.

I think this scenario is very unlikely, but it is still worthwhile hardening this infrastructure.

I admit to being cautious. If it were up to me, I would also spend a lot of resources hardening computing systems: servers in business, kids' school laptops, home computers, IoT, network infrastructure, etc. would have maximum crypto, and we would have a "going to the moon" level effort pushing those aspects of computer science for general security issues.

Down for a year? I can't really see that happening outside of a nuclear winter.

The triggering event is a high altitude nuclear explosion designed for a maximum EMP pulse. I think China and Russia (and a few of our close allies) are the only actors who have this capability and I think there is an astronomically low chance of them doing this.

Still, spending money hardening our infrastructure would improve general reliability, help prevent deaths do to storm outages, etc. Good thing to do.

This is one of the big worries about Iran's nuclear program. 3 IRBMs, which they have, lofting 3 warheads (you need that many to get fairly complete coverage of the CONUS), they might be able to pull it off.

But it would be a terrible gamble for them, and most any scenario besides total failure results in the country being turned into the proverbial "fused glass parking lot".