Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Dr. Lowell L. Wood, Jr.,
Senior Staff Scientist,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
and Commissioner, Commission to Assess
the Threat to the United States
from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack

Introduction By: Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.

Dr. Lowell L. Wood, Jr.: Thank you very much, Dr. Pfaltzgraff, for the very kind introduction and for the invitation to speak here this morning.

I’ll be talking from the vantage point of a member of the EMP Commission, as Bob just mentioned. This is a commission created by the Congress several years ago as part of public law in the last months of the Clinton Administration. The Commission was signed into existence by President Clinton, and its membership was appointed by the officers of the Bush Administration.

The charter given by statute is sketched here to assess the electromagnetic pulse threat to the US, and to recommend protective steps that the US government should take. The specifics when the Commission looked at things were to look only at those threats which came from high altitude nuclear explosions and to comply explicitly with the Congressional charter to look forward 15 years, a decade-and-a-half, as to how these threats would evolve.

So what I’ll be talking to you about this morning is the intersection of what you've heard from the first two speakers, a nuclear threat and specifically one directed to the infrastructure of the United States. The reason why this particular threat was engaged and, indeed, continues to seize the Congressional attention, it’s a very peculiar one, which is the attack would potentially kill no Americans directly and immediately, but would merely gravely wound or potentially kill American civilization.

The statute specified nine commissioners, seven appointed by the Secretary of Defense, two by the Director of FEMA, and those responsibilities now subsumed, of course, by the Secretary of Homeland Security. That very distinguished set of colleagues are Chairman Bill Graham, has had a very distinguished career, both in government service and in the private sector.

The Commission labored, as commissions do, generated a set of products that are available at the Commission website, http://empcreport.ida.org/, and thus far the executive summary is there along with Congressional presentations as we complete our mandate by reporting to the various committees of Congress that are concerned with these matters. There are other volumes, which are available at various levels of classification. The Congressional testimony is also available at different levels of classification.

The Commission sponsored a variety of work in discharge of its statutory mandate and in particular sponsored a substantial amount of research to assess actually EMP vulnerability of both civilian and military infrastructures of the United States, sponsored workshops, and also solicited foreign perspectives on EMP. And these are also available in various forms, most particularly to officers and officials of the US government.

The EMP threat has been recognized for several decades. It was prominently highlighted over four decades ago by the Starfish nuclear test, which was one of the first high altitude tests that the United States had conducted. Although it was at a very great distance, nearly 1,500 kilometers from Honolulu, and just above the Honolulu horizon, actually it induced a substantial number of negative impacts in the Hawaiian islands, ranging from failures of motor vehicles to failures of power grids, communication systems and so forth. A collateral effect was that commercial satellites in space all died relatively quickly.

The Russians explored high altitude phenomenology much more extensively than did the United States, and in particular they did extensive high altitude testing over their own territory. This is a new graph that was presented several years ago at an international workshop on EMP by a cognizant general officer of the once-Soviet Union and more recently the Russian Federation, and sketches the wide variety of electromagnetic pulse effects that the Russians observed over their own territory in the course of their atmospheric test series in the early ‘60s. Apparently, this particular set of revelations was a little bit too extensive because the general officer who gave it got himself a number of years of confinement in his home as a consequence, even though the Soviet Union was now long since gone.

Neither the US nor the Soviet Union much discussed EMP during the Cold War, because it was understood that EMP was merely one of the side effects of a massive nuclear exchange, and that other consequences would be more immediate and potentially more severe. Now that the Cold War is over, the issue set is somewhat more distinct.

The perspective that the Electromagnetic Pulse Commission took was to do a capability-based analysis of the EMP threat, to not look to see, or to try and guess what the likelihoods of various modes in which this threat would appear might be, because this is speculation against an uncertain and largely unknowable future and, rather, to look to see what the nature of the impacts would be on the United States between now and the end of next decade, and to specifically acknowledge that the means of imposing electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States is very highly mobile; it's almost fungible these days.

It’s crucial to understand two things that the Commission pointed out in its report. The first is that the ability to place nuclear weapons in the near space of the United States is the essence of the ability to threaten the United States with EMP attack. Nuclear weapons not only, as you have heard from other speakers this morning, are ever more present throughout the world, but the means of emplacing them in the near space of the United States are also; that is to say, even short-range ballistic missiles are sufficient to impose such a threat, and these missiles are so prevalent these days, the world is literally awash in them. And particularly in the last decade, two private citizens of the United States have each taken delivery of fully operational Scud missiles inside the territory of the United States, purchased for their own means, nominally for collection purposes.

If you can get a Scud delivered to your doorstep, as a gentleman did in southern California, and the government finds out about it when the neighbors complain of zoning violations -- namely, he had it parked on the street like an illicit camper -- the government found out that here was private ownership of a ballistic missile in Oxnard, southern California, that’s something else again.

So the fact of the matter is, the means of delivering small nuclear explosives into the near space of the United States are all too prevalent these days.

Another key finding of the Commission was it is not necessarily to have a hydrogen bomb of a megaton or ten megatons, or whatever scale, to pose very severe threats to the United States, that various low-yield weaponry suffices for this purpose if it’s tailored for EMP purposes. And in particular weaponry small in yield compared to those used in World War II could easily pose very serious threats, threats which could, as I said, gravely wound or destroy American civilization.

So these are points that need to be understood and retained essentially indefinitely -- very small nuclear weapons, very small quantities of nuclear weapons, potentially only one of them, and potentially very readily available delivery means.

The number of points of adversaries that could potentially mount these attacks is very large, and the knowledge with respect to the impacts of these attacks on the United States is quite prevalent. So just as was pointed out in the previous talk, this type of threat is by no means adequately addressed at the present time, and the near-term prospects for it being satisfactorily addressed are very somber indeed.

An EMP attack is an attack not against the forces of the United States, not against the people of the United States, but against the infrastructures, and indeed the critical infrastructures of the United States, the most vulnerable and most serious infrastructural vulnerability being that of the electrical power industry. EMP potentially turns off electric power on very large scales, potentially nationwide scales, in a fashion in which it literally cannot be turned back on. It’s not a blackout, it is a stayout. The power goes down and it stays down. This is because not only equipment is disrupted in its functioning, but a critical fraction of the equipment is destroyed.

One of the things that the Commission found, a very parlous sort of result, is that this equipment is not spared and cannot be replaced. Much of the key equipment of the US civilian electrical infrastructure is not manufactured in the United States any longer; it’s imported. And the importation time scales are of the order of a few years.

The Commission supported extensive evaluation of the vulnerability of various types of civilian and military infrastructure. This had never been done previously, and the results are reported, and I obviously don’t have time to summarize them, but the levels of vulnerability are very sobering.

At least as sobering is the provisioning finding of the Commission, that the critical infrastructures are very tightly intermixed; that is to say, the coupling between them is not only extremely extensive, but it is critical. If you don’t have electric power, an awful lot of other things don’t function. If you don’t have communications, many other things don’t function. If you don’t have the ability to clear financial transactions on a daily basis, the rest of the country comes tumbling down, even if the infrastructure is nominally sound. So the cross-couplings are many and they're critical. If you break one of the key infrastructures, the rest come tumbling down very soon thereafter.

Because of the background of the Commissioners and the charter given to the Commission, a lot of attention was given to the vulnerability of military systems and the remediation of these vulnerabilities. The basic finding was that military systems are at very high risk, and that risk continues to escalate. It escalates both because of the increasing dependence of the military on electrical and electronic systems and because of the increasing realization of potential adversaries that this is not the Achilles heel, but one of several Achilles heels of such systems.

The strategic force hardness against EMP which was moderately good during the latter part of the Cold War has been attenuated very substantially since the end of the Cold War, and its current situation is unsatisfactory and continuing to deteriorate.

The situation with respect to the vulnerability of general purpose forces, our national force projection capability is even more somber. There was never a significant attempt made to EMP harden that, so it’s soft and getting softer, in relative terms, and the prospect of an electromagnetic Dunkirk looms in the near future. That is to say, not only the inability of a small, technologically enabled force suddenly degenerating into a small, vulnerable force, but potentially the inability to even retreat gracefully may be compromised, compromised fatally.

The Commission found that EMP attack threats could be mitigated. There are rational things that could be done that are quite effective, that are known effective from Cold War practices and strategic situations, and very substantial reductions in vulnerability can be made at very affordable cost, both economic and utter cost. Unfortunately, the drive towards efficiencies, which the previous speaker referred to, takes national capabilities in exactly the opposite direction; that is to say, to ever greater vulnerability because efficiency demands, economic and operational efficiency demands run often too closely to opposite the requirements of safety and robustness.

The basic approach to coping with these problems is to limit vulnerability by two basic approaches -- to prevention of EMP attacks and to limiting damage in the case of such attacks. There are roles for both the Homeland Security Department and the Defense Department, because I'm more concerned at the present with domestic infrastructure. I’ll just emphasize that there are many things that the Homeland Security Department can do, needs to do, is not doing at the present time, and that is not a deficiency on the part of DHS, but it is a commonly owned problem between the Congress, the President and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Everybody needs to engage in a much more serious fashion than has been done to the present time.

The bottom line, and the summary of my whole presentation, is that EMP is one of the few ways in which the United States can die as a nation, and die in a single event, that can be readily mounted with means that are well within the purchasing capability of even a moderately wealthy individual, let alone a transnational terrorist organization. The EMP threat can be reduced to levels in which the United States can survive and recover, and a balanced approach of multilayered defense featuring prevention of attack, preparation for dealing with it, protection of key portions of the infrastructure and the ability to recover essential aspects of the infrastructure before tens of millions of Americans die from the lack of infrastructure are the keys to success.

Critical military vulnerabilities have been exposed and are exposed ever more drastically with the distance from the end of the Cold War and remediating these is crucial to the retention of a viable US force projection capability, both strategic and conventional.

Thank you very much. [Applause]

Questions and Answers

__: This question is for Dr. Flynn. On the issue of port security grant funding that’s come up a couple times, you talk about LA/LB, I think to be fair to the case that they have received over $50 million since the grant program began, the 200 million this time around is correct, but I think it points to a larger issue about the need to share cost with private sector, state/local; I'm curious of your opinion on that, sir, and how you think that should play out, since the private sector does get some benefit from the security enhancements provided. Thank you.

__: Thanks again, gentlemen, for your time and your insights. One of the things you brought up was this problem, Dr. Zelikow, of horizontal planning. A lot of the focus and emphasis has been on federal agencies, government responses and what the government is and is not doing. But a lot of the problems you mention cut across from the government sector to the private sector, and the solutions will have to involve that private sector in what we do. What are your suggestions for getting them into some of this horizontal planning interoperability and finding a cohesive solution as opposed to a federal idea that gets promulgated?

DR. PFALTZGRAFF: Next, Lowell Wood, and Lowell, if I could just add to this, much of the infrastructure that you discussed, perhaps all of it, is in some respect in the private sector that is vulnerable to EMP. How do you look at the problem of integrating the private sector into the EMP problem?

DR. WOOD: The EMP Commission looked at this quite extensively in the process of engaging the various folks who own and operate and build and design and maintain the critical infrastructures of the United States. One thing that became very clear to us, even though most of us are extensively backgrounded and experienced in the public sector, is that unfunded mandates simply don’t work. It’s the Soviet model, and it’s one of the reasons they crashed. Government just can’t get things for free by demanding it. It just doesn’t happen. People drag their feet, and they pretend to implement, and they partially implement, they implement the cheap stuff rather than the important stuff, and so forth.

So the Commission took a very strong stance against unfunded mandates to fix the vulnerabilities of the critical infrastructures of the United States. They said that national security is a responsibility of the national government; the national government has a very large claim on the assets of the country to provide for the common defense; and that it should just resign itself to paying for it, paying for it up front, cheerfully and fully.

So the position that the Commission recommended to the Congress and the Executive was that the government should partner with the critical infrastructure, owner, operators, builders, designers, maintainers of this country to have the government define what the needs and requirements were, that the private sector would respond and say, “Here’s what it costs to meet this various requirements”; after a good deal of design and analysis has been done, “Here’s what a prioritized program might rationally look like,” and so forth. Then the government’s job is to pick and choose among those in a prioritizing sense, and to fund them, and then to oversee that it gets good value for the funding.

Basically, the infrastructures of this country represent a present value capital plant of something in the order of $10 ten trillion. The EMP hardening of this plant, if it was done fresh, if it was done when the plant was built, is something like 1% of that cost. A very small fraction suffices to not only give EMP robustness, but robustness against a number of other hazards that have features in common, technical, physical features in common with the EMP, such as lightning and floods and geomagnetic storms, and other large-scale stresses.

So that 1% cost that you pay, which is not negligible, it’s a tenth of a trillion dollars, buys a lot of steady state protection and robustness. It has nothing to do with robustness against EMP attack. A single blackout like occurred 14 months ago in the Midwest cost $15 billion in spite of the fact there was no physical damage done to anything.

So we’re talking about large cost scales here, but we’re also talking about large benefits that occur in steady state. And so the recommendation with respect to hardening of critical infrastructures that came from the EMP Commission, in the EMP context, I think, applies more generally to a lot of the problems that we’ve been discussing here. There are general societal benefits; the problem is a long-term one that has to be engaged for a decade or two or three in order to effectively fix; the costs are not huge on a steady basis, but they are of the order of 10 billion per year.