When Americans are asked which party they believe is better equipped to handle matters related to national defense, they are more likely to select the Republican Party. That condition might be due, at least in part, to the fact that Republicans are far less likely to find legitimate national security threats positively hysterical.

In both Thursday’s “under card” and prime time Republican presidential debates, the issue of America’s critical civilian infrastructure was raised by candidate and moderator alike. Twice, Republican candidates for president addressed the genuine threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack – that is, the detonation of a nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere that produces a charge which can permanently disable unsecured electronic equipment.

When asked about the threat to American infrastructure, Rick Santorum called it a genuine and pressing danger that has been made only more acute by the proliferation of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery vehicles. “And we have done nothing to do anything to harden our grid,” he warned. “There is actually a bill in Congress that would put money forward to try to put redundancy and harden our electric grid so it could actually survive an EMP.”

The issue was raised in the prime time debate as well, albeit by the candidate who is perhaps the least well equipped to discuss the issue cogently: Dr. Ben Carson. “[W]e have enemies who are obtaining nuclear weapons that they can explode in our exo-atmosphere and destroy our electric grid,” Carson said when asked to define the threat from ISIS. “I mean, just think about a scenario like that. They explode the bomb, we have an electromagnetic pulse. They hit us with a cyber attack simultaneously and dirty bombs. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue at that point?”

The exaggeration of the prospect of that kind of spectacular state-directed attack on the United States combined with asymmetric terrorist and cyber-attacks was probably crafted for maximum effect rather than predictive value. Still, the threat to America’s civilian infrastructure is real, and the effects of a prolonged power-grid failure would be terrible beyond words. It is a wonder then that the nation’s left-leaning reporting establishment found the matter hilarious.

“CAN AN EMP END THE RACE WAR?” wrote Washington bureau chief for BuzzFeed News John Stanton.

“Carson’s EMPs only exist in movies,” declared the self-described global news community geared toward a millennial audience, AJ+, in a meme featuring Kermit the Frog.

“Again with the EMP,” read an exasperated tweet for the financial and investment news site The Street. “Were all these people in some sort of bad sci-fi book club?”

“EMP again!” Politico foreign affairs correspondent Michael Crowley marveled. “I recently asked a very senior Obama security official whether this threat is high on his radar. He rolled his eyes.”

That’s some appeal to authority.

“[A]s it turns out, the scenarios proposed by Santorum and Carson are pretty close to fiction,” wrote the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump. He reported the threat posed by a rogue state attempting to knock out the power grid via a nuclear airburst is hard to imagine for several reasons. First, because it requires a nuclear payload greater than anything manufactured by, say, North Korea. Second, you need precision targeting and detonation in order to create an EMP. And, finally, the rogue state would need to accept the consequences associated with a likely disproportionate retaliatory nuclear strike.

None of that seems particularly funny, but it is at least modestly reassuring. The key word: “modestly.”

“I’m not trying to minimize the vulnerability. The vulnerability is there,” National Defense University Professor Dr. Yousaf Butt told Bump. Indeed, while the prospect of an EMP attack and the associated war it would invite are less likely (but far from impossible), the notion that America’s civilian infrastructure is vulnerable to catastrophe is not all that outlandish.

“A coronal mass ejection from the Sun could send a magnetic field toward Earth that could cause an E3-like effect on the transformers that make up our electrical grid,” Bump said. “Butt repeatedly noted that while the threat of a nuclear EMP was small, the threat of a solar one was real.” More to the point, the nation’s power grid is vulnerable to threats much closer to home.

In what amounts to a woefully underreported terrorist attack in April of 2013, more than one sniper opened fire on a California electrical substation. Just after 1 a.m., the shooters methodically hit and disabled 17 large electrical transformers, forcing electric grid officials to redirect power from across the state in order to avoid a blackout. It took nearly one month to make the necessary repairs. The assailants were never caught.

It doesn’t take a physical attack to disable a nation’s electric infrastructure. On December 23 of last year, the power that services most of Western Ukraine including the capital city of Kiev shut down and stayed down for several hours. The country’s security officials soon blamed hackers for plunging more than a quarter of the country into darkness. “Specifically, the officials blamed Russians for tampering with the utilities’ software, then jamming the power companies’ phone lines to keep customers from alerting anyone,” Bloomberg reported. Thirty of the nation’s 135 power substations were disconnected and rendered inoperable by a sophisticated cyber strike for hours before the system could be repaired and brought back online.

These are signs of things to come.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in 2014, former CIA director James Woolsey and CIA veteran and congressional EMP Commission member Peter Vincent Pry warn not only of the threat posed by an EMP strike but by the havoc that would follow extended periods of blackout. “What would a successful EMP attack look like?” they ask. “The EMP Commission, in 2008, estimated that within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown.” For what it’s worth, these two former federal officials, who have spent years studying the threat posed by a rogue electromagnetic pulse attack, do not suggest that the bar for creating a successful EMP strike is anywhere near as high as the Post’s Bump sets it.

That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that should inspire guffaws. Indeed, save for a handful of journalists and millennial-themed news websites, no one is laughing.