On Tuesday, Franks introduced legislation in the House that he hopes will spur industry and government partnerships to address the vulnerabilities of the power grid from an EMP.

“It’s known that our grid is vulnerable. It’s an invitation. If our grid is not vulnerable, nothing mitigates the threat more than that,” Franks said.

Franks warned that increased provocations from North Korea and Iran made it more necessary than ever for the U.S. to prepare for a potential EMP attack

“The real problem is that we have essentially become victims of our own capability, of our own sophistication, where we’ve engineered our electric grid to the point of great vulnerability,” Franks said. “[Electromagnetic pulse] has the potential to be the ultimate cybersecurity threat because it can take our source of power completely away from us.”

Gingrich has long warned of the threat that an EMP attack could pose to the United States, and he says Americans aren’t taking the threat seriously.

“The reason I began focusing on this a decade ago is there are very few events you can’t recover from. You can recover from 9/11, you can recover from Pearl Harbor. This is really different,” Gingrich said. “This creates such a collapse of our fundamental productive capacity that you could literally see a civilization crash and tear itself apart fighting … internally.”