A dark cloud is passing across the nation and the world. When it passes, how will we have changed? How will we react after this national jolt?

In Britain after World War II, there was a period, at the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s, of idealism and common purpose. It ushered in as its prime minister not Winston Churchill, who had won the war, but milquetoast Clement Atlee. One lasting and revered reform of the Atlee government was the introduction of the National Health Service.

In America there was a new confidence, aided by legislation like the GI Bill, which led to the expansion and general contentment of the 1950s.

The tumultuous, jolting 1960s left us changed. Sex was considered an entitlement, the environment an ethic, civil rights a moral obligation, and women gained nominal equality. Reverence for institutions was out and all expertise was suspect. “Some things are too important to be left to the experts,” said the young people who had hated the Vietnam War.

In the 1970s, the revolutionaries of the 1960s were gradually absorbed into the bourgeoisie. Mostly, they seemed slightly embarrassed about who they had been and what they had done.

The killing of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the riots that followed, engulfing major cities from Baltimore to Los Angeles, looked momentarily like a national wake-up call that would unite the nation. Instead, we got a measurable jolt with white flight to the suburbs.

The energy crisis of 1973, which remained with us for two decades, also jolted the American body politic. Here was an external force that could not be internalized: The oil we needed could not be produced domestically. We were at the mercy of foreign powers, like Saudi Arabia and Iran. All the raw materials we had needed up that point appeared to be domestic. Now we had joined the world community in a way frightening to us. Fortress America was breached.

We thought that crisis would change the way we lived. Amitai Etzioni, then a professor at Columbia, and a Wall Street Journal columnist, predicted that we would all have less of everything – and be just as happy, if not happier. We would all wear jeans as daily dress, ride bicycles and drive very small cars. Detroit-made some small cars  — and they were awful. But the move to smaller cars — no more land yachts with acres of chrome and fins — can be seen on the streets today. Something seminal had jolted us and spurred our engineers to do better.

Another jolt was 9/11: an attack of wartime proportions. It fed a new nationalism, an inward turn, with a profound distrust, even dislike for people of different cultures who want to come here from elsewhere. It stirred a somnolent patriotism.

Now, in the time of COVID-19, we are enduring another great national jolt which will have consequences in the decades ahead.

After this pandemic, it is a fair guess, we will be more inclined to believe the experts and to value medical science the same way we have worshiped computer technology. In addition, stock markets might come to be eclipsed by a more representative measure of the national well-being.

Particularly, the indifference we have felt to predictions of existential calamity may be taken way more seriously than before COVID-19. Predictions of disasters that did not happen, like the Y2K computer alarm, have lulled us into thinking bad things will not really happen: A fix would be found.

Now we are struggling with an assault that will be seminal in its impact, personally frightening and economically devastating. We cannot buy or fight our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. An immunization is a year and half away. Will it work?

I would put at the top our list of existential threats climate change and cyberattack. Sea levels are rising, and coastal cities are under pressure. That will get worse. The security of the electric grid also is under a daily attack. Experts are and have been warning of the possibility of parts of the country being blacked out for long periods. A new bipartisan congressional cyberattack threat report has just been released.

Going forward, we dare not think it cannot happen here because it can. It is happening here now.

“ … until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…” — President Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address

 

Often when there is an intimidating mountain of books, one needs something else: another book. One such book was Martin Gilbert’s “In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey,” published in 1994.

Gilbert, author of Churchill’s eight-volume, official biography, must have felt that a smaller book was needed as a guide. Or, more likely, he realized that big works on his subject abounded, so he wrote an informal book about how he wrote the official biography. It is a quick guide to the man Churchill, his habits and eccentricities.

Now comes an important book that, I think, will be invaluable for people who are overwhelmed by the 15,000-plus books on President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War: “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn. It is a small masterpiece, brilliant in concept and exquisite in execution.

Achorn has taken just one day, March 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, as the keyhole through which he gives us a 360-degree view of the Civil War: the players, the issues, the bloodshed, the misery, the sacrifice — and the folly, nobility and the cruelty of the war.

By that March, when Lincoln had been re-elected, the war was drawing to a close. It had claimed an incredible 700,000 lives, left families shattered, and the South in ruins.

At the center of it all was Lincoln, the gangling, ruminating, rube-like figure who wrote with biblical grandeur. Though torn by the war, he ordered that the Confederacy be crushed by whatever means to bring the war to an end — an idea that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s men executed with sometimes barbaric zeal, especially in South Carolina and Georgia.

For me, the sorry plight of the prisoners of war is especially hard to take. On both sides, they suffered and died in degradation of disease and starvation. Yet Lincoln stopped the prisoner exchanges for two and a half years, adding to the death and misery on both sides.

The author — a deft hand at scenes and people — paints a vivid picture of the Washington of 1865, from a society party thrown by the rich Chief Justice Salmon Chase and his beautiful daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, which lacked nothing in sumptuousness, to the romance between Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and Lucy Lambert Hale, the daughter of Lincoln’s ally and confidant New Hampshire Sen. John Parker Hale.

Achorn tells us of the mud that oozed and sloshed everywhere for the inaugural, as it had rained hard that day and the previous one. He details the permanent stench that came from the Washington City Canal, near Capitol Hill, which was failing as a commercial waterway. The canal was filled with human and animal feces, dead animals and other detritus of the city.

He also tells us of the social life, where young people met each other at fashionable tea dances at the National Hotel.

All this while the wounded lay in terrible pain in inadequate hospitals. This suffering recorded by the poet and reporter Walt Whitman, who went daily to comfort the hurting soldiers, and the pioneering nurse Clara Barton, who sought to talk to Lincoln about the missing.

Washington was a cauldron of a place that year. A place of hopeful African-Americans, freed from slavery but owning nothing, as well as profiteers, social climbers and office seekers, deserters and those who had fought and had been wounded.

There were those aplenty who hated Lincoln with passion and thought a second term would destroy the country. At the Capitol on that day of inauguration, when Lincoln delivered one the great pieces of American oratory, just 701 words long, there were admirers, like another great orator of the time, the freed slave Frederick Douglass, and haters who wanted him dead, including Booth, who had originally hoped to kill Lincoln during the ceremony.

Achorn is journalist, and he uses the skills of his trade to bring us as much of the flavor from contemporary accounts as he can find in letters and newspapers without, as academics often do, weighing down the narrative with whole letters and articles. This is a book that moves on efficiently, parading its characters, from politicians and newspaper editors to actors and prostitutes (a Booth weakness).

With skill and massive research, Achorn brings it all into one place on one day for us to see, feel and ponder.

A “scram” is the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant. Control rods, usually boron, are dropped into the reactor and these absorb the neutron flux and shut it down.

President Trump, a supporter of nuclear power, has in a few words scrammed the whole nuclear industry, or at least dealt its orderly operation a severe blow.

Scientists see nuclear waste as a de minimus problem. Nuclear power opponents — who really can’t be called environmentalists anymore — see it as a club with which to beat nuclear and stop its development.

The feeling that nuclear waste is an insoluble problem has seeped into the public consciousness. People, who otherwise would be nuclear supporters, ask, “Ah, but what about the waste?”

For its part, the nuclear industry has looked to the government to honor its promise to take care of the waste, which it made at the beginning of the nuclear age.

In the early days of civilian nuclear power — with the startup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania in 1957 — the presiding theory was that waste wasn’t a problem: It would be put somewhere safe, and that would be that.

Civilian waste would be reprocessed, recovering useful material like uranium and isolating waste products, which would need special storage. The most worrisome nuclear byproducts are gamma, beta and X-ray emitters, which decay in about 300 years.

The long-lived alpha emitters, principally plutonium, must be put somewhere safe for all time. Plutonium has a half-life of 240,000 years. It’s pretty benign except that it’s an important component of nuclear weapons.

If you get it in your lungs, you’ll almost certainly get lung cancer. Otherwise, people have swallowed it and injected it without harm. It can be shielded with a piece of paper. I have handled it in a glovebox with gloves that weren’t so different from household rubber ones.

But it’s plutonium that gives the “eternal” label to nuclear waste.

Enter President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He believed that reprocessing nuclear waste — as they do in France, Russia, Japan and other countries — would lead to nuclear proliferation. Just months in office, Carter banned reprocessing: the logical step to separating the cream from the milk in nuclear waste handling.

Since then, it’s been the policy of succeeding administrations that the whole, massive nuclear core should be buried. The chosen site for that burial was Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Some $15 billion to $18 billion has been spent readying the site with its tunnels, rail lines, monitors and passive ventilation.

In 2010 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — then the majority leader in the Senate — said no to Yucca Mountain. It’s generally believed that Reid was bowing to casino interests in Las Vegas, which thought this was the wrong kind of gamble.

The industry had pinned all its hopes on Yucca Mountain being revived under Trump: He had promised it would be. Then on Feb. 6, and with an eye to the election (he failed to carry Nevada in 2016), Trump tweeted, “Nevada, I hear you and my administration will RESPECT you!”

In the Department of Energy, which was promoting Yucca Mountain, gears are crashing, rationales are being torn up and new ones thought up, even as the nuclear waste continues to pile up at operating reactors. No one has any idea what comes next.

Time, I think — after watching nuclear waste shenanigans since 1969 — to take a very fresh look at nuclear waste disposal. Most likely, a first step would be to restart reprocessing to reduce the volume.

I’ve been advocating that to leave the past behind, a prize, like the XPRIZE — maybe one awarded by the XPRIZE Foundation — should be established for new ideas on managing nuclear waste. The prize must be substantial: not less than $20 million. It could be financed by companies like Google or Microsoft, which have lots of money, and a declared interest in clean air and decarbonization.

The old concepts have been so tinkered with and politicized that nuclear waste is now a political horror story. Make what you will of Trump being on the same side of nuclear waste management as presidents Carter and Barack Obama.

It’s hard for me to believe that Donald Trump is president. Really hard. Equally hard for me to believe that Bernie Sanders is the Democratic front-runner, especially after the Las Vegas debate.

I can take Sanders’s passion, although it’s so consuming it gets to be frightening. I can take his calling himself a democratic socialist, although I don’t know to what extent his form of socialism pits him against capitalism. Enough, I fear.

Some of what Sanders had to say in Las Vegas was downright risible, or has been tried and failed, or, worse, would set in place a series of negative dynamics, damaging the country in many ways without bringing about any of the gains he wishes to achieve. Listening to him, I think, “This donkey wants his feedbag.”

In his way, Sanders is as committed to conspiracy theories as is Trump. Sanders sees vast, secretive forces in fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, bankers and billionaires as being united in a scheme to keep the rest of us poor and ill-served by government.

Here are three of his big fallacies:

1. Companies would be better if they were partly owned by the workers. This is real socialism and it hasn’t worked when it’s been tried.

Sanders would be well-advised to read up on the history of the cooperative movement in Britain. The very first casualty would be innovation because worker governance isn’t risk-taking.

I say this having been very familiar with the British coop movement and having headed a trade union local, the Newspaper Guild, in Washington. Collective decision making is not creative, risk-taking or forward-looking.

2. The technology of fracking to extract oil and natural gas from tight rock formations should be stopped in order to combat global warming. That would deal the economy a body blow while doing nothing for global warming.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are coming down, and on the horizon is the technology of carbon capture, utilization and storage and other technological fixes for carbon emissions.

Technology has enabled fracking and technology, not cessation, will clean up emissions.

3. The current health care mess should be replaced root-and-branch by a national health system. That we need a stabilizing public option in health care is more apparent daily. But health reform needs to be introduced like good medicine, prudently with the dosage corrected in relation to the progress of the patient.

Sanders’s approach to most issues can be summed up by what author H.G. Wells, a socialist, said of playwright G.B. Shaw’s ideas. He said the trouble with Shaw, also a socialist, was that Shaw wanted to cut down the trees to erect metal sunshades. Quite so.

In Las Vegas, Sanders was out to cut down every tree he could see. These included what is part of the American Dream: Anyone with pluck and hard work can improve their situation, and maybe grow rich.

Sanders’s assault of Mike Bloomberg was that Bloomberg didn’t accept some mythical belief that money is inherently bad and that those who’ve made a lot of it are evil and constantly conspiring to keep the rest of us in penury — at least those who earn up to the Senate salary of $174,000 a year.

The long-term evil of money isn’t in the generation that makes it, but in the families that will inherit it down through the generations, creating an oligarchy the likes of which we haven’t seen since the fall of the serf-exploiting Russian nobility.

Someone should take Sanders on one side and tell him about failed experiments in worker ownership, the value of evolution over revolution, and that every American would like to be rich.

We are an optimistic people. And in today’s world, there’s the rub.

By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.

Maybe not this time.

The norms uprooted by President Donald Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.

Consider just some of his transgressions:

— We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.

— America’s good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces treaty.

— The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.

— The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.

But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.

Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Attorney General Bill Barr — his new Roy Cohn.

The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.

The liberal media rails — indeed enjoys — railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).

But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice and even names for revenge.

There are two conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.

I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.

In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.

After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.

The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.

Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.

Maybe it will list more.

How different President Trump’s State of the Union speech would’ve been had he included something like this: “At the White House, we are overjoyed at the arrival of a new friend and counselor, Lancelot, a stray from a Washington animal shelter.”

He could, of course, have gone on about what a joy the dog would be to his 13-year-old son Barron; how the boy could learn about perfect love, forgiving adoration, uncritical companionship and eternal job approval — things otherwise missing from the political upbringing and life in Washington.

But Trump didn’t. He didn’t care about all the wonders that enter a human life when four feet come through the door, intent on forever residence.

Barron won’t know those wonders. And the president won’t get the one-issue dog voters.

Trump has said that he’s too busy to have a dog. Well, having watched presidential dogs from Richard Nixon’s King Timahoe, an Irish Setter, to the hypoallergenic Portuguese Water Dogs favored by the Obamas, I can attest there’s help aplenty at the White House for a dog.

They needn’t inhibit an arduous golf schedule. They’re always the darlings of the media, the Secret Service and pro-pet Cabinet members and dignitaries. Queen Elizabeth used to get though meetings with people she had nothing in common with otherwise with a few words about her Welsh Corgis.

Trump’s doglessness is, in my view, a cold heart problem. How he could’ve warmed his self-aggrandizing State of the Union speech with a line or two about a dog. Dogs are so humbling: It’s hard to be pompous when cleaning up after a puppy accident.

Clearly Trump’s love of Trump is so complete there’s no room for a bundle of furry joy in his heart, filled as it is with self-regard.

In our house, Valentine’s Day is Dog Day. My wife Linda Gasparello says Feb. 14 is the birthday of all dogs with no known day of birth. Love, you see.

It all began because one Valentine’s Day, I gave her a shelter dog of uncertain age and parentage. She had some German Shepherd in her, definitely some Airedale terrier, and a pinch of this and dash of that.

What she had was a deep commitment to taking over running the house and stable — and disciplining our Siberian Husky. Her love and loyalty were total: Even when she was old and arthritis had slowed her, as it does so many dogs, she would drag herself up the staircase to sleep in our bedroom.

We named her Valentine, although the shelter workers in Leesburg, Va., told me the family who turned her in named her Gal. She was no gal. She was a dame, made to preside.

Of the many dogs we’ve had, I believe Valentine was the cleverest. She thought and she worried. The cure for her anxieties was routine and order; things in their places and activities at given times, like going on a hack or hosting a dinner party.

Whenever she would hear Linda speaking on our PBS program “White House Chronicle,” turned on in the living room, and speaking at the same time in the kitchen, she was distraught: This couldn’t be. She ran to Linda in the kitchen to be assured and back into the living room to be unassured, and back again into the kitchen, deeply upset that someone could be in two places at the same time.

To go through life without a dog, a Valentine of your own, is to miss one of the great dimensions of love: that between dog and owner, although it’s debatable who owns whom. Valentine owned us.

So, The Donald has no dog and the White House is, in that sense, incompletely furnished. No great bounding down the driveway to meet visitors coming through the Northwest Gate (where reporters enter too), no conversation starter with heads of state, and no care for the Dogs Come First voters.

Of course, there are those, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who hope that come November, Trump will need a dog: a comfort dog.

Hydrogen as a clean fuel is back with a new mission and better ways of producing it.

Jan Vrins, a partner in Guidehouse (formerly Navigant), a leading consulting firm, says hydrogen is a critical component in the carbon-free future of electricity. He told a press event at the National Press Club in Washington that the role of hydrogen as a storage medium as well as a clean fuel will be vital going forward.

Vrins, who heads a team of 800 consultants and researchers at Guidehouse, told reporters that Europe is ahead of the United States in the new uses of hydrogen and in offshore wind development as a hydrogen source. The two are linked, he said, and hydrogen will grow in importance in the United States.

In the bleak days of energy shortage in the 1970s and 1980s, hydrogen was hailed as a magical transportation fuel. Cars would zip around with nary a polluting vapor, except for a drip of water from the tailpipe.

But this white knight never quite got into the saddle. Hydrogen wasn’t easily handled, wasn’t easily produced and wasn’t economically competitive.

Now hydrogen is back as a carbon-free fuel — a means of sopping up excess generation from wind and solar, when production from those exceeds needs, and as an alternative source of energy storage besides batteries.

In theory, hydrogen may yet make it in transportation via fuel cells. But that puts it in competition with electric vehicles for new infrastructure.

Unlike the 197os and 198os, today there is natural gas aplenty for producing hydrogen. Vrins calls this a “bridge” until hydrogen from water takes over.

Hydrogen doesn’t have the same properties as natural gas, and these must be accounted for in designing its use. It has greater volume than an equivalent amount of natural gas and it’s very volatile. But it can make electricity through fuel cells or burning.

Hydrogen isn’t found free in nature, although it’s the world’s most plentiful element — water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. To get hydrogen, coal or natural gas must be steam-reformed, or it can be extracted from water with electrolysis — a development that isn’t missed on companies like Siemens which makes electrolyzer units. Siemens is a leader in a field that is fast attracting engineering companies.

Hydrogen needs special handling and must be engineered into a system. It can’t be treated as being a one-for-one exchange with natural gas at the turbine intake. It has a lower energy density which means it must be stored under pressure in most instances.

Adam Forni, a hydrogen researcher at Guidehouse with an extensive background in natural gas and hydrogen, told me the emphasis today is on reforming natural gas and desulfurizing it in the process with carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) technology. This gas is known as “blue hydrogen,” as opposed to gas from electrolysis which is known as “green hydrogen.”

Green hydrogen is the long-term goal of Guidehouse’s Vrins and his team. It makes alternative energy more efficient.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has announced  it will convert an 1,800-megawatt coal-fired power plant located in Utah to 800 megawatts of all hydrogen. Initially, the plant will burn 70 percent blue hydrogen and will convert to 100 percent green hydrogen by 2045.

But even blue hydrogen with CCUS is a clean fuel, emitting no carbon. Natural gas when burned emits about half the carbon of coal; blue and green hydrogen, zero.

At the Washington press event, Vrins said hydrogen will help in the creation of microgrids which are the coming thing as utilities reorganize themselves. He said natural gas could be piped to the site and then reformed into hydrogen or, better yet, green hydrogen could be made on-site with the surplus electricity from windmills and solar installations.

Vrins sees a future when the grid or microgrid doesn’t need all the power being produced it can be diverted to electrolyzing water and making hydrogen, thus acting as an energy storage medium with greater versatility than batteries. Batteries draw down quickly, whereas hydrogen can be stored in quantity and used over time, as natural gas is today.

Hydrogen is one of the tools as utilities go green. It’s back all right.

He is an unlikely person to have reinvented foreign aid. But, in his way, that is what Barry Worthington has done. He is the executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, and he has brought hope to troubled energy companies around the globe, first in Eastern Europe and now in Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

Thirty-one years ago, when Worthington came to Washington to assume the role of USEA executive director, he was young and had not traveled widely. Now he is perhaps the most traveled man I know. A member of his staff says, “He is the globe-trottingest.”

Worthington makes at least 30 trips a year — most are overseas. He has been known to fly to a distant capital, say Beijing, hold a meeting and fly back the same day.

But Washington influence and globalism were not on the horizon when Worthington, his bride, Louise, and young son Barry, now an award-winning filmmaker, (daughter Kelly was yet to arrive) first moved to Washington.

This most-American of men, educated at Penn State and the University of Houston, looked for a career in the electric utility industry, where he was hired as a junior executive by Houston Lighting and Power. He had embarked on a quintessentially American career.

Then he was offered a job at the nonprofit Thomas and Alva Edison Foundation. “I took it because it was twice the pay and we were young and broke,” he told me.

The foundation was foundering, and he accepted an offer to head USEA. It was not, on the face of it, an auspicious move.

USEA, the U.S. branch of the World Energy Council, was in dire straits itself. It had made good money on the World Energy Conference, held in Detroit in 1974. But USEA, supported by a modest dues structure, was headed for oblivion when that conference money was exhausted. In fact, the association was down to Worthington and a secretary.

“It had expenses of $250,000 and revenues of $200,000,” Worthington told me over lunch at the National Press Club in Washington. Last year its revenues were $9.4 million, and membership dues account for only 3 percent. “It was our best year yet,” he said.

USEA does not lobby and supports all fuels as an information source and a clearinghouse, and a place where diverse energy interests meet. It runs five major conferences a year and 40 informational briefings.

Worthington looked for new revenue sources, and the unlikely saviour he found was the U.S. Agency for International Development.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States wanted to help the former Soviet satellites. But the usual aid, handed out for bridges and roads, did not fit the situation. Expertise was required, very specialized expertise, and Worthington’s members had it, particularly in the electric field.

The ticket, the Worthington solution, was to pair American utilities with Eastern European ones and show them “best practices.” The first challenge Worthington said was to get them off power at 48.6 cycles and to boost their output to the European standard.

“Frankly, it was an ethnicity play,” Worthington said.

He explained that he was able to find U.S. companies who had engineers who were either from the Eastern European countries or were first-generation Americans. Houston Lighting and Power, for example, had not one but two émigré senior engineers from Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.

The cost to the U.S. companies is minor and the sense of helping and being part of history is major. USEA costs — management and out-of-pocket — are borne by USAID. To the agency that is a pittance to pay for an incontrovertible success.

These partnerships have been an eye-opener to all involved in foreign aid and the idea is spreading. Latest to seek help from Worthington and his 25-person team is the U.S. Department of Energy, realizing it is better to give away skill than money. Skill sticks, money evaporates. The proof of that is the Worthington formula, still spreading useful skills in everything from dispatching electricity to designing rates.

In a town of strivers, Worthington plays in a mellow tone. He dresses modestly, makes conversational speeches and, in my experience, ruffles no one. An unpretentious man who wanted to work in an electric company has left his footprint on the world — USEA has executed more than 80 partnerships.

When tensions got white-hot between the United States and Iran over the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, it was widely believed the U.S. electric utilities would bear the brunt of Iranian reprisals. The nation’s electric industry leaders spent anxious hours wondering where, when and how bad?

It did not happen, but the alarm was well-founded. It followed mounting concerns flagged last December by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and followed by an equally alarming report this month from Dragos, a leading cybersecurity consultancy that issues a threat assessment annually.

The Dragos report predicts a possible multi-pronged attack, striking at vulnerabilities in the utilities including those in the supply chain. Dragos identifies threats from attacker groups Magnallium and Xenotime. These have, according to Dragos, migrated from attacking oil and gas installations to electric utilities. It does not name countries.

Dragos states that the complete energy infrastructure is under attack and that the attacks are getting more sophisticated. A group identified by Dragos last year, Parasite, has been focusing on remote connectivity and virtual private networks as points of entry.

It is easy to read these warnings, and another by the Congressional Research Service, as announcing inevitable gloom. But a lot of people in and out of government are now centered on the cybersecurity problem. These include the departments, of Energy, Defense, Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies that prepare the counterattack capability.

As attacks get more sophisticated and penetrating, so too do the defenses and the ability of the targets to “lock out” invaders. Defenses can also include hardening systems that are not involved in electricity production and distribution — communications, for example.

Morgan O’Brien is a legend in the telecommunications industry. He was the co-founder of Nextel, the company that gave the world cellphones. He now works in the utility space: His mission is to harden communications by providing private broadband networks that are independent of everything — including the internet — and will survive most disasters, natural and man-made.

O’Brien is president and CEO of Anterix, which offers secure broadband via the 900 MHz spectrum that it has acquired. He told me, “People do not have to use imagination to understand what may happen to them in the event of a wide-scale power outage. Who can forget watching the collapse of civilization within a day or two of Hurricane Katrina?”

The good news, according to O’Brien, “is that progressive utilities and regulators are preparing for the worst by redesigning the architecture of the electric grid to pinpoint grid failures and in near real-time reroute power to isolate the failure, thus curtailing cascading power shutdowns.”

The magic number for O’Brien is 1.4 seconds. That is how long he says it would take the electric utility to learn of a failure using one of his company’s private networks. So, if a power line fails, in almost real time the utility will know. Remediation or isolation can begin.

Most security is directed at protecting and isolating industrial controller systems, the computer-driven programmable devices that are at the heart of all industrial installations including utilities. But there are other vulnerabilities, not all to do with cyberattack.

The New York Times reported graphically last October on the failure of communications at Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant San Francisco-based utility beset by wildfires. Everything went wrong and the company lost its ability to tell its customers, including nursing homes and other essential users, when it was cutting off the power. Even the state emergency services could not reach the utility control room, while, to quote the Times, “chaos unspooled outside.”

How vulnerable is the grid? While no one will quantify the threat, everyone I have talked to says it is there and very real. Fixing and it keeping it ahead is part of the new need for an ever-evolving  infrastructure.

But as O’Brien says, “For sure, the grid is under attack daily by bad cyber-activists and is routinely hammered by weather phenomena. The doomsday scenario is plenty scary, but I’ll put my money on American technology and determination to keep the lights on.”

The enemy is out there in a hostile world, but the battlements are manned by old and new forces.