The original article was posted here:
The Threat of EMP Attack is Very Real
As we commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Japanese
surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, which heralded
America’s formal entry into the Second World War, we must remember that the
threat of a far more devastating surprise attack upon the U.S. homeland remains
very real. The Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP
Attack, also known as the Congressional EMP Commission, comprising the foremost
experts in the Free World, warned in 2004 that “Several potential adversaries
have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a
high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A
determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high
level of sophistication…It has the capability to produce significant damage to
critical infrastructure and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society, as well as
to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence
and military power.” This author previously warned about this catastrophic
threat to the U.S. in an article entitled “America’s Achilles’ Heel: An EMP Attack” published in the
National Interest back in June 2018.
Over the past decade, support for protecting America against
the existential threat of EMP attack has been overwhelmingly bipartisan. For
example, in 2010, the Democrat controlled House of Representatives passed the
GRID Act by a unanimous vote, which, had it been approved by the U.S. Senate,
would have provided $2 billion to harden our nation’s electrical power grid
against the twin threats of EMP attack and super solar-storms. The subsequent
Critical Infrastructure Protection Act also passed in 2017 with strong
bipartisan support.
Disregarding
this overwhelming bipartisan consensus regarding the threat of an EMP attack,
freelance reporter Matthew Gault argues in a 2016 editorial that
the threat of EMP is not real. He further claims that EMP weapons have never
been tested before, so no one knows whether or not they would have the
disastrous effects national security experts say they would. However, these
dubious assertions are contested by virtually all of America’s top national
defense and intelligence experts, as well as the bipartisan Congressional EMP
Commission. This is noted in another National Interest article entitled “Millions of Americans Could
Die: Are We Ready for an EMP Attack?”, where they state that a
comprehensive EMP attack could very well constitute a nation-ending event.
In another article entitled, “Defense
Adviser Gets It Wrong on EMP,” Dr. Peter Pry, the former Chief of Staff
of the Congressional EMP Commission and one of the top nuclear/EMP experts in
the nation, identifies a number of faulty assumptions in Mr. Gault’s article.
Pry states that the author and Dr. Peter Singer, who is cited in the article,
“do not appear to understand a high-altitude EMP attack would happen
exo-atmospherically, in outer space, so there would be no blast, thermal, or
fallout effects on the ground, only the EMP. So their arguments that blast and
other nuclear effects would be worse than EMP are nonsensical.”
Dr. Pry also points out that “they wrongly
assert a high-yield thermonuclear weapon is necessary for EMP attack. The EMP
Commission found any nuclear weapon, even a primitive weapon that terrorists
might build, is a potential EMP threat. Indeed, the greatest EMP threat is from
super-EMP nuclear weapons, that are very low-yield, designed to produce gamma
rays that generate the EMP effect, not make a big explosion.” According
to Dr. Pry, “The yield of a Super-EMP weapon can be very low—10 KT (kilotons,
or TNT equivalent explosive power) or much less, but it could generate much
higher EMP fields (100–200 KV/meter) than a 25 MT (Megaton) weapon (50
KV/meter) of conventional design.”
Perhaps
the most erroneous claim made in Mr. Gault’s article is that “North Korea does
not yet...possess a missile that can carry a nuclear weapon...to the United
States.” As Dr. Pry points out in his article, “the Defense Department 2015
report Military and Security Developments Involving the Democratic People's Republic
of North Korea warns that North Korea now has nuclear-armed mobile ICBMs, the
KN-08 and KN-14, that can strike the United States.” Pry adds that “the
EMP Commission, South Korean military intelligence, and China have warned that
North Korea probably has super-EMP weapons.”
He notes that on October 12, 2017 in “North
Korea Nuclear EMP Attack: An Existential Threat,” EMP
Commission Chairman Dr. William Graham warned Congress: “An EMP
attack might be made by a North Korean satellite, right now. A Super-EMP weapon
could be relatively small and lightweight, and could fit inside North Korea’s
Kwangmyongsong-3 (KMS-3) and Kwangmyongsong-4 (KMS-4) satellites. These two
satellites presently orbit over the United States…The south polar trajectory of
KMS-3 and KMS-4 evades U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning Radars and National
Missile Defenses.” Dr. Pry states that North Korea could detonate their
super-EMP satellites remotely via an encoded signal. Such an attack would
likely be impossible to trace, and thus U.S. leaders would likely have no idea
who attacked us or which country to retaliate against. Russia and the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) are believed to have such weapons in orbit over the
United States as well.
Pry
continues in his remarks that, contrary to their assertions that EMP effects
can only occur at some unknown spot in the atmosphere, “any nuclear detonation
at an altitude of thirty kilometers or higher will generate EMP.” In rebuttal
to their claim that, “EMP effects are unreliable and have never been tested,”
Dr. Pry states that “EMP and its effects have been tested for over fifty years
and are better understood than the efficacy of cyber warfare.” While Dr. Singer
claims that a sophisticated ICBM is necessary to conduct an EMP attack, the EMP
Commission has stated that they can be delivered through a variety of means
including satellites, long- or medium-range missile; short-range missiles
launched from a freighter; from some cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles;
from jets or a commercial jetliner; or a meteorological balloon. Furthermore, a
ballistic missile equipped with a super-EMP payload would not need to be
accurate and would not require a re-entry vehicle, heat shield or shock
absorbers.
Finally, in an attempt to mistakenly
project Western thinking onto our enemies, Mr. Gault mistakenly asserts that no
nation would ever perform an EMP attack because it would result in a nuclear
war. However, as Dr. Pry points out, a study of Russian, Chinese, North Korean
and Iranian military doctrines all make clear that they do not view a low-yield
super-EMP weapon as a nuclear attack but rather they view it as part of a
cyberwar operation that could achieve a decisive victory over the United States
and its allies at minimal cost to themselves. Thus their presumed threshold for
resorting to such weapons would be much lower than ours if the United States.
processed them.
National
security correspondent Bill Gertz published an article in the Washington Free
Beacon back in January entitled “China,
Russia Building Super-EMP Bombs for ‘Blackout Warfare.” In it, he
reports that “Several nations, including China and Russia, are building
powerful nuclear bombs designed to produce super-electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
waves capable of devastating all electronics—from computers to electric
grids—for hundreds of miles, according to a newly-released congressional
study.” This study, entitled “Nuclear EMP
Attack Scenarios and Combined-Arms Cyber Warfare,” was written by
the EMP Commission. “Nuclear EMP attack is part of the military doctrines,
plans, and exercises of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran for a
revolutionary new way of warfare against military forces and civilian critical
infrastructures by cyber, sabotage, and EMP,” the study states. Gertz further
reports that Russia has adopted a new nuclear strategy called “escalate to
de-escalate” a conflict with nuclear arms that the report suggests is tailored
to space-based EMP attacks. The attacks are regarded by enemy military planners
as a relatively easy, potentially unattributable means of inflicting mass
destruction and forcing opponents to capitulate.
Gertz writes that “In a major conflict with
either China or Russia, the first shot in the war could be a space burst of a
super EMP weapon designed to knock out U.S. nuclear command and control and
weapons.” Citing the study, he adds, “A super-EMP warhead, in the possession of
Russia or North Korea, could put at risk the best protected U.S. assets, even
threatening the survival of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.” Gertz cites this
recently-declassified EMP Commission study as stating that one or more Russian
nuclear missile submarines could utilize a relatively small number of super-EMP
weapons in a surprise attack to paralyze U.S. strategic and conventional forces
and blackout the national grid, knocking out US national missile defenses, the
Pentagon command center, NORAD, U.S. nuclear bombers, and U.S. nuclear
submarine bases. Such a comprehensive super-EMP attack could be executed with
very little warning in as little as several minutes from launch. Super-EMP
warheads detonated in outer space would leave no bomb debris for forensic
analysis and thus could destroy U.S. critical infrastructures and kill tens of
millions of Americans anonymously. The study also states that such attacks
could also be used by the Russians to defeat NATO and occupy much of Europe or
by the PRC to knock out Taiwanese defenses and U.S. aircraft carrier groups to
ensure the success of a hypothetical Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
The EMP Commission has published a number of reports
concluding that, in the event of a comprehensive EMP attack on the U.S.
homeland, up to 90 percent of the U.S. population would die within a year due
to a widespread breakdown of the food distribution system resulting in mass
starvation and an epidemic of starvation-related diseases and related adverse
effects. In his article, Mr. Gault ridicules this estimate as vastly
millions of Americans to die cannot be said to “exist only in
our minds” as Mr. Gault would like us to believe.
No one wants world peace more than this author, having
recently published a global peace proposal earlier this year and a subsequent more comprehensive version here which would
entail the U.S. making substantial concessions to Russia and/or the PRC while
rebuilding America’s defenses in order to help ensure a just and lasting great
power peace and successfully avert a Third World War. However, just as it was
folly for past U.S. leaders to believe that America’s enemies would not or could
not attack us before Pearl Harbor, it would be the height of folly for us to
stick our heads in the sand and pretend existential threats like EMP and
nuclear missile attack do not exist, which is why EMP threat deniers such as
Mr. Gault and Dr. Singer must not be heeded. This is particularly the case when
America’s enemies, beginning with Russia, have been successful in developing
super-EMP weapons for the purpose of winning a hypothetical war against the
U.S. in the belief that they could succeed in crippling America’s ability to
retaliate with its nuclear deterrent and thus deliver a knock-out blow at
low-risk to themselves.
Of
all the potential existential threats facing the United States attack including
a full-scale nuclear war or the overhyped unproven threat of man-made climate
change, allegedly requiring a New Green Deal estimated to cost $95 trillion,
EMP attack is undoubtedly the most affordable to defend against with the cost
of hardening the U.S. electrical power grid estimated at only $2 billion. It is
imperative that U.S. leaders act quickly to rebuild America’s shrinking nuclear
arsenal, deploy a comprehensive national missile defense system and harden our
electrical power grid against EMP attack to defend our great nation from
nuclear missile/EMP attack and deter our enemies from ever attempting such
nuclear aggression. It is also important that the U.S. develop its own
super-EMP weapons to provide a more flexible response which could more credibly
deter their use against us.
David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army
combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with a M.A. in National Security Studies
from Georgetown University. He previously served as National Security Policy
Director to U.S. Senator Mike Lee and currently serves as Utah Director of the
EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. He can be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.
