Are fears of cyber attacks that paralyze electric grids overstated? In a new Foreign Policy piece, Douglas Birch argues in the affirmative. An excerpt about the dual mass power outages from last summer in America and India:

“The most important thing about both events is what didn’t happen. Planes didn’t fall out of the sky. Governments didn’t collapse. Thousands of people weren’t killed. Despite disruption and delay, harried public officials, emergency workers, and beleaguered publics mostly muddled through.

The summer’s blackouts strongly suggest that a cyber weapon that took down an electric grid even for several days could turn out to be little more than a weapon of mass inconvenience.

‘Reasonable people would have expected a lot of bad things to happen’ in the storm’s aftermath, said Neal A. Pollard, a terrorism expert who teaches at Georgetown University and has served on the United Nation’s Expert Working Group on the use of the Internet for terrorist purposes. However, he said, emergency services, hospitals, and air traffic control towers have backup systems to handle short-term disruptions in power supplies. After the derecho, Pollard noted, a generator truck even showed up in the parking lot of his supermarket.

The response wasn’t perfect, judging by the heat-related deaths and lengthy delays in the United States in restoring power. But nor were the people without power as helpless or clueless as is sometimes assumed.”