Ted Koppel: reporter, editor, news anchor.

• Author: Wolf, Mark
• Position: ON RECORD - Interview

Ted Koppel, a journalist with ABC for 42 years, 25 as host of "Nightline," has won 42 Emmys, 12 duPont-Columbia Awards and every other major television journalism prize. Koppel is currently a news analyst for NPR, BBC World News, ABC and NBC. In his latest book, "Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath," he warns that America's power grid is vulnerable to malicious hacking and that an attack is likely.

Why this book now?

Because everyone from the president on down has been talking about it without getting much reaction. The president has twice warned about it. Leon Panetta, when he was secretary of defense, warned about a cyber Pearl Harbor. Janet Napolitano, when she gave her farewell address as secretary of Homeland Security, warned about the danger of a cyberattack on the power grid. But it barely got much coverage and it's gotten no reaction from the political class. I decided to look into it and see if the warnings were hyped or exaggerated. An awful lot of people in the intelligence branches of government and the military believe it is inevitable that it will happen. What has been done to prepare the civilian population for the aftermath? I suspected not much, and "not much" seems to be an exaggeration.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Is there a plan to deal with an attack on the nation's power grid?

There is none. It did not surprise me. The best assessment came from Tom Ridge [former director of Homeland Security], who said we tend to be a reactive society. We're very good at reacting but very bad about pre-empting or preparing.

How much preparation is necessary?

The bare outlines of a plan could be pulled together very reasonably,

but it's going to cost a lot of money and it's going to take a lot of time. There is a great deal of competition for the money in Washington and not a great deal of respect paid to people who are planning ahead as much as three or five years. This is going to be a big task but it's one that's going to have to be taken on after the fact, when it's going to be infinitely more difficult. Cmdr. Gen. Lloyd Austin, of the U.S. Central Command, told me it's not a question of "if," it's a question of "when." If you take that at face value, then we're going to have to deal with it at some point. It would be infinitely more useful to deal with it before it happens.

Why do you believe the grid is so vulnerable to an attack?

With the deregulation of the power industry, we now have more electric...