The Biggest Unaddressed Threat to Our Security

Although few people are aware of it, the U.S. is not prepared to withstand an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event. There are two types of EMPs, but they are both equal in the devastation they could cause to the nation’s electric grid, and by extension its systems for communications, transportation, food services, water, emergency services, and banking.

• The first type can occur naturally, as the result of a solar storm.
• The second type can be launched by another country or a terrorist organization in the form of a nuclear weapon exploded in the atmosphere over the U.S.

The first type of electromagnetic pulse event, which originates from the sun, tends to occur about once every 100 years. As Richard Lovett of National Geographic News reported, there are three phases to a solar storm, and not all of them occur in every storm.¹

The first phase consists of x-rays and ultraviolet light. The second phase is a radiation storm. The third phase is a coronal mass ejection, an eruption of plasma from the sun that projects a torrent of charged particles that interact with Earth’s magnetic field to produce powerful electromagnetic fluctuations.

The last time a severe solar storm collided with the Earth happened in 1859, in what became known as the Carrington event, because British astronomer Richard Carrington was the first scientist to identify it.

At that time, the U.S. economy was largely based on agriculture, and the electronic and digital technologies that we now depend on were not yet invented. All that existed was the telegraph system. As Douglas Main reported recently in LiveScience, when the electromagnetic surge hit the telegraph wires, the current zapped machines throughout the system and paper telegrams burst into flames.²

Today, of course, our economy is wholly dependent on electricity, satellites, and global positioning systems. If another Carrington event happened tomorrow, all of these technologies would fail, the result would be catastrophic—and there is nothing to prevent such a disaster from occurring. In fact, the nation narrowly averted one less than four years ago only because of fortunate timing.

As a team led by University of Colorado physicist Daniel Baker recently reported, a coronal mass ejection occurred in July 2012 when an eruption on the sun sent 80 billion pounds of energized particles hurtling toward Earth at millions of miles per hour. The planet’s orbit took us out of harm’s way, but Baker calculates that if the ejection had happened just one week sooner, it would have made a direct hit.³

If not for that stroke of luck, our society would have been plunged back into the pre-Internet, pre-Industrial era.

Unlike the first type, the second type of electromagnetic pulse event—a deliberate EMP attack—hasn’t happened yet. However, Russia, China, and North Korea have all reportedly included an EMP attack in their military planning, and the U.S. has done little to prepare for this threat.

If an enemy detonated a nuclear bomb in the sky over the middle of the United States, at an altitude of 25 miles to 500 miles, the result would be three quick electromagnetic pulses that would create powerful currents that would overload transformers and take out much of the U.S. electric grid.

That assessment comes from testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in July 2008 by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.

Once an EMP attack occurs, it would be no easy matter to repair the damage to the grid. According to national security experts James Jay Carafano, Ph.D. and Richard Weitz, Ph.D., the equipment that is used in the grid is produced overseas and typically takes two years to be manufactured and delivered.

In a Heritage Foundation report, Carafano and Weitz explain the dire implications of a successful EMP attack: “Overnight, daily life as Americans know it will be a thing of the past. . . . While the banking infrastructure was designed to withstand a wide range of threats, it was not designed to withstand a complete communications shutdown. An EMP attack would heavily damage the U.S. transportation sector, which would significantly impair recovery efforts in the wake of an attack. . . .⁴

“Airplanes would literally fall from the sky, cars and trucks would stop working, and water, sewer, and electrical networks would fail. Food would rot, medical services would collapse, and transportation would become almost non-existent.

“Not even a global humanitarian effort would be enough to keep hundreds of millions of Americans from death by starvation, exposure, or lack of medicine. . . . Without the American economic engine, the world economy would quickly collapse. . . . Earth would most likely recede into the ‘new’ Dark Ages. All past calamities of the modern era would pale in comparison to the catastrophe caused by a successful high-altitude EMP strike.”

Carafano and Weitz point to recent disasters to provide insight into what to expect. The New York City blackout on July 13, 1977 was caused by lightning strikes that led to the failure of the electrical grid. While the blackout ended after 26 hours, it led to what Time magazine called the “Night of Terror,” in which an outnumbered police force arrested 3,000 people but was still powerless to stop widespread looting and other crimes.⁵ The cost of the one-day blackout approached $350 million.

Similarly, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans on August 29, 2005, wiping out the transportation and electrical systems for weeks. Food spoiled, hospitals lost power, relief supplies could not be delivered, and businesses were looted. The disaster led to about 1,500 deaths and caused $81 billion in damages.

Considering that cities affected by an EMP attack would lose electricity for months or years, it’s likely that the social order would crumble.

However, the threat of retaliation is likely to prevent a foreign power with nuclear capability from launching an EMP attack, according to Douglas Main of LiveScience. U.S. nuclear submarines constantly patrol the world’s oceans and would be spared from an attack on the U.S. mainland. The knowledge that those subs would launch their own nuclear missiles should be enough to deter any sane leader from authorizing an EMP strike.⁶

As for terrorist organizations, they would need not just access to a nuclear weapon, but also the ability to launch it at the middle of the U.S. without being detected by America’s missile defenses. While those challenges are surmountable, there are steps the U.S. can take to protect against such a threat, as we will discuss in the following forecasts.

First, no matter how it originates—as an explosion from the sun or as an attack from a terrorist or foreign government—an EMP event would be an economic disaster unlike any the U.S. has ever faced.

John Holdren, the former director of the Woods Hole Research Center and a former Harvard professor, is now the senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues. In 2011, he co-authored a New York Times article with John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, in which they estimated that the impact of an EMP event “could be big—on the order of $2 trillion during the first year in the United States alone, with a recovery period of 4 to 10 years.”⁷

Second, the U.S. can’t afford to wait until an EMP event occurs to figure out how to respond.

Congress will need to be proactive in determining how to prevent an EMP attack from happening, and in identifying how to respond to a natural or man-made EMP event. As Richard M. Harrison, the Director of Operations and Defense Technology Programs at the American Foreign Policy Council, recently admonished, “A number of nations (most notably Israel and Norway) have taken the EMP threat seriously, and are proactively upgrading their national infrastructures and putting procedures in place to deal with an EMP event. Because an EMP event on a devastating scale has not yet occurred, critics in the U.S. have discounted the threat as nothing more than science fiction. Accordingly, they have dismissed the need to prepare for one, and policymakers in Washington have followed suit. That represents a dangerous error. As a number of notable U.S. experts and officials have warned, the threat posed by EMP is very real and potentially devastating.”

Third, one proactive measure that Congress must authorize immediately is to secure the power grid against EMP threats.

According to the LiveScience report, physicist Daniel Baker identified steps to protect against an EMP attack or a coronal mass ejection. This approach entails coating electrical components; diverting electricity around the transformers that would be impacted; and adding more transmission lines and generators. All of this, Baker admits, would be costly. Fortunately, according to a report by Polar Star Consulting LLC, most of the U.S. grid provides sufficient diversity—in the form of multiple routes from one point to another—to mitigate risk. The exception is the mid-Atlantic area, from the middle of Virginia to the middle of New York State. For this reason, hardening of the grid in this region should be a priority. The good news is that hardening the entire network is not necessary. But even if that were necessary, according to Harrison, the EMP Commission identified transformers as the “backbone” of the electrical grid and recommended hardening this part of the system because it would deliver the most protection at the lowest cost. Research indicates that the grid could be protected for $2 billion. Considering Holdren and Beddington’s estimate that an EMP event would cost $2 trillion in the first year, spending $2 billion would be a wise investment.

Fourth, Congress will need to authorize more funding for research to understand solar storms.

According to National Geographic News, “Scientists using the new Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft are hoping to get a better understanding of how the sun behaves as it moves deeper into its next maximum and begins generating bigger storms. These studies may help scientists predict when and where solar flares might appear and whether a given storm is pointed at Earth. ‘Improved predictions will provide more accurate forecasts, so [officials] can take mitigating actions,’ said Rodney Viereck, a physicist at the Space Weather Prediction Center.” Currently, satellites that monitor the sun can detect eruptions 20 hours before they reach the Earth, which enables power companies to shut down transformers before they would be destroyed. A better grasp of the sun’s activity would expand that window considerably.⁸

Fifth, the U.S. will become increasingly aggressive, using both its military strength and the crippling impact of economic sanctions, against hostile countries that are attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

As Carafano and Weitz of the Heritage Foundation suggest, “Washington must pursue an aggressive protect-and-defend strategy, including comprehensive missile defense; modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent; and adopting proactive non-proliferation and counter-proliferation measures, both unilaterally and in partnership with allies.”⁹

Sixth, to prevent against an EMP attack by terrorists, Congress will authorize the U.S. Navy to develop weapons to intercept missiles before they reach the mainland.

According to Baker Spring, a Heritage Foundation research fellow in national security policy, terrorists could easily launch a ballistic missile with an EMP warhead from a cargo ship off the U.S. coast. Spring recommends that Congress give the Navy the funding it needs and a mandate to create upgrades to the SM-3 sea-based ballistic missile defense interceptor in order to destroy an enemy missile while it is still rising, before it can reach the altitude to create an EMP event.¹⁰