If GPS Failed, We’d Be More Than Lost - cetusnews

If GPS Failed, We’d Be More Than Lost - cetusnews:
"North Korea and Russia pose increasingly serious geopolitical threats to the U.S. and its allies. While these rogue nations possess nuclear weapons and formidable conventional forces, they have also used unconventional methods like hacking to attack government institutions and private companies.
Add another target to the list of concerns: the Global Positioning System.
Built primarily for the U.S. military, GPS is now used by civilians across the globe.
Smartphones, personal navigation units, and air-traffic control all rely on it.
They’re part of modern life, constantly performing trivial and critical functions all over the country. Fifteen of the “18 Critical Infrastructure and Key Resource sectors” in the U.S. are GPS-reliant, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Temporary, local GPS failures have already proved chaotic.
A truck driver in New Jersey used an illegal but easily acquired GPS jammer to prevent his boss from tracking him. 
As he drove past Newark Liberty International Airport, his jammer blocked air-traffic control signals. No one was injured, but someone setting out to do deliberate harm could pose a security risk in the future.
As troublesome as a minor threat is, what if GPS as a whole were attacked?
The detonation of a nuclear device high in the atmosphere—and the creation of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that would follow—present the most likely threat to the satellites that underpin the system.
In September 1962, a nuclear test conducted by the U.S. accidentally destroyed a British satellite and streetlights in Hawaii, demonstrating the potential devastation of an EMP.
Anything that requires precise timing would be affected because GPS satellites serve as global timekeepers.
The loss of clock synchronization across the world would cause the internet to stall and financial transactions to cease.
Our ability to monitor and forecast the weather would be hobbled, too.
Even if America’s adversaries are not capable of pulling off such a feat, Mother Nature certainly is. In 1859, a ferocious solar storm known as the Carrington Event shot charged particles from the sun toward Earth.
 If it were to happen again today, experts believe that satellites all over the world could be destroyed. NASA warns that they can’t be protected.
The U.S. would be wise to stockpile communications satellites to replace the ones the sun obliterates.
A better option is to build a land-based navigation system..."
Read on!