What is an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)
There is deep growing concern in the United States and other countries about the threat an EMP would pose to our modern way of life. My background was in physics before I became involved in consulting for governmental bodies. I have been involved in discussing U.S. technology policy in the U.S., consulting the Pentagon and Congress, and I’ve briefed the White House Homeland Security Council. I have also worked for NATO in missile defence, where I have a very extensive background, along with other technologies. The primary story today, however, is not missile defence. That is an important element but the concern today is related to our infrastructures and what can be done about to harden them against attack.
I think it’s good probably to start with a definition: EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse. The most common way for an EMP to occur is when a nuclear weapon explodes; along with the radiation and heat an EMP is also generated. The EMP can be a valuable weapon in itself. For instance, if a nuclear weapon were to explode above the atmosphere, it would radiate toward the ground a massive pulse of energy that would destroy computer chips, electrical systems, and have a devastating affect on infrastructure. This in turn would eventually cause more deaths by affecting a far larger area over a much longer time than the nuclear blast itself would near ground-level.
If a bad actor from a rogue state had one nuclear bomb and he managed to get it into a city, it would obviously be horrifying; the results would be catastrophic. There would be tens of thousands of people who would die and the region around the centre of the city would be destroyed. If that same weapon were detonated above the atmosphere, that weapon could destroy not only tens of thousands but tens of millions depending on the country and how it was deployed. The radiation would not harm people directly; the risk to people is that all infrastructures are gone.
At first, such an event would seem like a blackout, the lights and the televisions would go out. But then there would be an incredible silence as motor vehicles outside come to a halt, followed by the sound of aircraft dropping from the sky. The biggest problem, however, would be that the water would stop flowing. The shelves would go bare quickly in grocery stores – possibly for years. The fact that the electrical systems are gone and there’s no transportation means that there’s also no food. In the United States there is an on-demand food supply system with about a three day supply in the grocery stores and the warehouses, assuming the pubic doesn’t panic and begin hoarding.
The U.S. government does have an emergency food supply; unfortunately, the legislation for the U.S. for this was written in such a way that the law can be satisfied with money in a bank. Assuming you could get the food to market, agriculture is quite limited, too. In the United States there is enough wheat to provide every American with about half a loaf of bread in the emergency food supply. Worse, since most rely on electronic banking, the lack of a paper trail means proof of assets will be almost impossible for many. So we’re talking about extremely severe effects. A Congressional EMP Commission, which investigated several aspects of the EMP threat, was asked about the societal implications of this. Chairman Graham, who was the president’s science advisor, answered by saying such an event would reduce U.S. technology to about the levels of the 1850s. The question was then, “but sir, in the 1850s our technology was only able to support a population of thirty million people.” His answer was, “so do the arithmetic.” It’s a very, very serious concern and I think this may well be the most severe threat and test that has ever faced democracies.
Often crises do not come without warning, but nothing usually tends to get done until the problem materializes. The West cannot do that this time. In describing an EMP’s effect on the military, the Commission said right at the beginning of their 70 page executive summary that a threat that could be launched by one or two missiles is one of the few threats which look as if it could defeat the US military.
It is clear that there is something going on in the minds of the North Korean leadership that we don’t seem to understand, and that may also be the case with Iran. The EMP Commission conducted a polling study in which they travelled the world to see which countries’ awareness of this weapon happened to be highest. And what they found was that North Korea and Iran were the two countries most aware of this technology. In fact, there was an Iranian military journal containing an explicit article where this was recommended, basically noting that if the major Western nations do not learn to defend themselves against EMP attacks, they will be destroyed. In 2004 Iran mysteriously launched one of its missile tests from a boat on the Caspian Sea and exploded it at apogee. Many believed it was an obvious failure. After all, why on earth would anyone launch a missile test and then explode it at apogee? The EMP Commission’s conclusion was that they were testing a sea-launched EMP attack. No matter which country Iran might attack, this would almost certainly be its method. Whoever launched such an attack could say they were not involved, given the difficulty of tracing ownership of a single nuclear seaborne launch.
One misunderstanding is the belief that those willing to use an EMP are not going to have the technology to create an EMP weapon. However, any small nuclear fission bomb would have this effect. In fact, without going into details, there are ways to enhance the effect that would use a very small bomb. Certainly a Hiroshima-sized bomb would be adequate; a thermonuclear bomb, a fusion bomb, would not make it any larger. That means the capability to do this is in the hands of anyone who can find a boat, for example – were they to use a short-range missile – so it doesn’t have to be an ICBM. Hezbollah has 300km missiles that carry half-ton warheads, which would be more than adequate and al Qaeda is also well-situated in this regard. And launching from a ship minimizes the fingerprints.
EMP History
Before I continue about the different effects and causes of an EMP, I think it would be good to discuss a little bit of history. During the Cold War it was a primary issue the United States and the Soviet Union faced. EMP was discovered in 1962 during the first successful upper atmosphere nuclear test by the United States, dubbed Starfish Prime. This test occurred somewhere over a remote area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and went off as planned with the one exception that in Hawaii, 800 miles from the test, street lights went out, radios stopped working, and electric lines were fused. Residual effects from the 1962 event also included neutrons left over after the blast which formed a belt that in turn took out all the satellites including Telstar and everything else. So when you consider the command and control systems being affected as well it then adds another dimension. As the blast radiates in all directions, the only limitation on the ground is the curvature of the earth. In other words, if an EMP is set off high enough, for instance, about 250 miles above Kansas in the middle of the United States, it would destroy almost the entire infrastructure in the whole country, since from that altitude the horizon is beyond the edges of the continental United States.
When scientists saw this, it began a new race in the Cold War, in which a nuclear exchange would start with an attack intended to disable or destroy infrastructure. During the Cold War, the United States had engineers whose entire professions were simply to do EMP testing; either in laboratories or with underground nuclear blasts. They also protected hardware and command and control systems from these kinds of effects.
An example of EMP as a Cold War tactic actually came after the Cold War. In 1995, Norway decided it wanted to do an upper atmosphere weather test so they asked NASA to use one of its decommissioned nuclear boosters. Norway notified the countries in the area including Russia that they were going to launch this weather test, but the person in Russia responsible for taking this information to the defence authorities was sick and his replacement did not understand the protocol. In Russia, there are three individuals who can recommend a nuclear attack to the president: the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and the Interior Minister, each of whom could do so independently. On this occasion, all three were together meeting with the Russian president when someone ran into the room, interrupting that they saw a launch coming from the North Sea. The Defense Minister turned to Boris Yeltsin and said, “Do it! Do it now! This is it, this is the attack! Launch all of our missiles!” Yeltsin opened his little black box but did nothing.
When I first heard this story, it made no sense to me. Why would all of the warheads be launched with one missile coming in before it’s even clear that it’s heading toward Russia? Obviously, if they had waited a little bit longer they would have seen that it was only heading in the general direction, but this harkens back to the Cold War mindset. Both sides were so worried about the possibility of their infrastructures being destroyed by EMP and that they would not be able to launch a counter strike, that the protocol said that if there was one missile coming in and it looked as if it could be an attack, a response must be made very early. This is the reason there is so little time. Fear of an EMP attack in 1995 almost launched World War III. The EMP threat is the reason the U.S. president still walks around with someone following him everyday carrying what they call the presidential “football”. The EMP was a primary focus of the U.S. military during the Cold War. Thereafter, with a sense that the nuclear threat was diminishing, the focus on EMP also diminished. However, in more recent times, the Pentagon is beginning again to take it seriously by hardening infrastructure and adopting all of the EMP Commission’s recommendations.
Solar Causes
There is another aspect of the EMP threat in which means that even if we had no enemies we would not be entirely safe. A few months ago in the United States, NASA funded the National Academy of Sciences to investigate how often major solar storms occur with about the same level of electric field intensity on the surface of the earth as a nuclear bomb-generated EMP. Their conclusion is that about once per hundred years, the sun produces an electric field that strikes the earth at about the same intensity as an EMP. The last time there was a major solar storm of this magnitude was 150 years ago in 1859. That year, the British astronomer Richard Carrington identified this as being the cause of the magnified Northern Lights, which were far more brilliant than previously recorded and were visible as far south as the equator. The only electrical system that existed on the earth at that time was the telegraph, which went down all over the earth. We no longer live in a world where our most sensitive components are the telegraph. The good news is that the weather on the sun right now is calm. However, the solar cycles run from nine to 13 years and the next peak is around 2012. There is no way to predict if 2012 will produce an event as we saw in 1859 or which peak of the solar cycle will have these kinds of effects, but since we expect them roughly every 100 years, it seems likely that fairly soon we can reasonably expect another major event to occur.
EMP and Our Electrical World
So what we are looking at are two different causes that can have the same effect of destroying electrical systems and electrical grid infrastructure. In Los Angeles there once were thousands of electricians who kept the electric grid operating, the street lights, traffic lights, everything electric in the city running, not to mention the water system. They have all but a few been replaced by extensive distributive remote control systems. It’s a very effective way to control the system, but it incredibly delicate and difficult to repair in cases of massive damage. Every modern society’s critical infrastructure – as well as many of the things that depend on it – uses these tiny sensitive microchips. They are so sensitive that surge protectors are almost universally used on home computers because if there happens to be a little spike on the line it could wipe them out.
As already mentioned, the most severe damage in an EMP will be to the electric grid. With electric grids in Western countries today the electricity is distributed by massive $50 million transformers that take years to build. Worse, there currently is only one country in the world that makes them. The most immediate problem either with a solar event or an attack would be that the electric grid is destroyed by a field that induces thousands of amps to melt the wiring to slag.
Let’s talk about another vital infrastructure: water. The water in your home is driven and controlled by electric pumps. Those electric pumps are controlled by sensors, which are controlled by computer processors. There will be no more water. Everything that depends on these systems, such as drinking water, personal sanitation, healthcare, and emergency services will be gone. Additionally, trucks, cars, anything with an electronic ignition in anything that was built since the 1990s, at least, and all of our newer vehicles will be dead, which means the food supply collapses.
Nuclear power plants are only safe when their control systems which have fail-safe systems built in and have also safety measures built in to those, work properly. But have all nuclear power plants in the world been adequately protected against EMP? My deep suspicion is that they have not. If all of the systems we use to control them don’t work or are behaving randomly, the consequences obviously are not pleasant to think about.
But an EMP can also be very localized if so desired. For instance, a terrorist might go down to the library and pull out a 2000 issue of Popular Science with an article on how a small, van-sized EMP can be made to wipe out everything electrical in a few buildings in a downtown district. It’s not complicated to do, but it would be very limited in its extent. This provides even more reasons to harden the national infrastructure. One of the areas the EMP Commission recommended be examined was in business and finance, in which communications and data systems cannot be offline for even a few minutes without creating a crisis.
The EMP threat also has missile defence implications. However, depending on the deployment, it’s usually easier and more cost effective to decide to engage the threats later when they’re closer to you; however, if missile defence is meant to address the EMP threat as well, you need to think about engaging sooner over a broader physical area. If you can prevent your enemies from creating an EMP, that’s ideal. But the most critical and urgent thing that must be done quickly is harden the infrastructures. We have inadvertently created a vulnerability which makes almost everything in our societies come apart with the launch of potentially one, or in the case of the United States, maybe two bullets. It’s astonishing and quite dangerous.
Solutions
The good news is there are very good things that can be done. The most urgent, most critical steps are simply to protect our infrastructure. Within a year or less we could get enough control over this problem that an EMP event would be a recoverable event. If we have another year after that to work and we spend a little more money, then we would do better. The Commission’s conclusion for the United States to implement everything would cost about $4-5 billion a year and would take about five years. For Great Britain, obviously we are talking about much less. The EMP Commission, working with a small company, also developed what is essentially a giant surge protector designed to protect transformers and it has already been tested. These surge protectors have not yet been implemented so that is the next step.
The following step after that is to harden the most critical parts of the infrastructure, such as the water system, establishing an emergency food supply, and so forth. The problem has been converted from what could be a devastating issue into potentially a simple political problem that must be addressed politically with civilian technology. It’s not hard or expensive to protect transformers. First of all, if you had a spare transformer and it was not plugged in, it probably will be ok, but it would be wiser to set aside spare units – around 10 percent of the total number – and store them underground or in a Faraday Cage. As for the smaller components, such as transistor radios, you may at times be able to use the Faraday Cage model, placing in a metal box or wrapping them in aluminium foil. Another option is to select more robust components: The air traffic control system in the United States happens to use a fuse which is extremely vulnerable to any kind of electronic spike. But there are alternative and perfectly compatible fuses which have been tested and are much less sensitive.
You can look up the EMP Commission’s reports online; one was published in 2005 [http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_cr/h060905.html] and the other last year [http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32544.pdf]. What the Commission concluded was that the issue is not that this is a new threat, because it is not in and of itself. However, what is new is that we can no longer be confident that we can deter our enemies to stop them from using it.