The attack would probably come without warning of any kind.
You could be in your car driving to work one morning when, in a blink of an eye, American civilization would be destroyed. The first inkling you would have that something was amiss is when your car suddenly died. You turn the key to start it again and…nothing. The engine doesn’t even turn over. The next thing you would notice is that the exact same thing has happened to everyone else on the road. You reach into your pocket and grab your phone to call your boss to tell her you’ll be late and find to your horror that the phone is completely dead – not only no signal but the phone itself is gone.
If you’re driving in a city you would see that all the stoplights are out as well. The fountain in front of the building across the street has stopped pumping water. You see a child is crying because his battery operated toy has stopped working. You try to access your laptop to see if you can catch some news and can’t even turn it on.
Perhaps you run into the bank to try and get some cash. The bank employees are frantic. The back-up generators that were supposed to supply electricity in the case of a power outage aren’t working. Later, you find out that your account records have been wiped along with trillions of gigabytes of data stored in millions of other computers around the country.
This is just the beginning. When you finally make it home you realize that you have no electricity, no water, no refrigeration – nothing. Your battery operated radio doesn’t work. In short, you have been propelled back more than 100 years in time and, for the foreseeable future, must live as your great grandparents lived.
Except you can’t live that way. Our entire industrialized civilization has become dependent on electricity and micro-electronics. The interconnectedness of systems – all of which have failed – have made our society possible. Without them, we can’t get food to grocery stores or water to faucets or electricity or natural gas or heating oil or any of the other absolutely vital services and materials that life itself depends on.
And to top it off, everyone else in the United States is in the same boat as you are. Dozens of commercial aircraft have dropped out of the sky killing thousands. Trains carrying freight and people have run off the rails killing many more as well as causing toxic spills in dozens of communities across the country. Communications, transportation, and most economic activity suddenly and completely ceases.
This nightmare is the result of a relatively small (10 kiloton) nuclear device exploded approximately 300 miles above Kansas. The 2 million degree heat generated by the nuclear chain reaction lasts for only a millionth of a second or so. But then as it cools, that thermal radiation becomes gamma rays which interact with the atmosphere and the earth’s magnetic field and generates an electrical field a million times more powerful than anything on earth.
Called Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP, this kind of an attack is more than a possibility. The military has known since the 1960’s about EMP and what could happen to electronics in the event of a nuclear attack. At that time, since any nuclear device that went off on American soil would be relatively close to the earth – probably not more than 10,000 feet above the target – the EMP effects would be highly localized. This is because EMP effect is line of sight or horizon to horizon. The higher the blast, the wider the effect so that when detonated at approximately 300 miles above the center of the country, the effect is total.
There was a half-hearted effort back in the 1980’s to “harden” both military and commercial systems that would be vulnerable to the EMP effect. The military did a pretty good job of hardening much of their equipment although of late they have come to depend on commercial systems here at home for communications. But the private sector did precious little. In the event of such an attack, banking, insurance, and many other kinds of corporate records would be irretrievably lost. Some of the larger banks have made an effort to back-up data and store it below ground in vaults. Larger insurance companies have done the same. And the regional Federal Reserve Banking centers has also taken some steps to protect their records. But it is doubtful whether your local First National has gone to the trouble of building a Farraday Cage to protect your account.
A recent study of the threat posed by an EMP attack was published last summer. The fact that it came out the same day as the 9/11 report guaranteed its anonymity. Called the “Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack”, it was chaired by the esteemed scientist Dr. William R. Graham and included a short but highly impressive list of top American scientists, engineers, and military specialists. What they discovered should chill your blood:
The alarming answer is that delivery of an EMP weapon requires less than state-of-the-art technology. A rocket simply has to carry a nuclear payload to altitude and detonate it. Aiming can be very general, unlike targeting an installation or even a city. Alarmingly, such missiles exist, engineered by North Korea and sold to countries like Iran, Syria, and – we fear – soon to Venezuela.The missiles do not have to be launched from land. They could, with rather conventional engineering modifications, be launched from the deck of a freighter off-shore from the American coastline. Terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda already possess a modest fleet of merchant ships. Both Iran and North Korea are furiously working to develop deliverable nuclear weapons. In the opinion of many, it is not a matter of if we are attacked by EMP but when. America has a surfeit of capable enemies – communists, dictators, and terrorists – and they form a deadly connection committed to our demise.
North Korea has not only sold Taep’o-dong-1 missiles to Syria but has apparently sold the plans for the more advanced Taep’o-dong-2 to Iran. That version, many experts believe, is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. And Iran is already testing an even more advanced missile, the Shahab 3 which some analysts think they have deliberately detonated in the atmosphere it test its capability as an EMP weapon:
The radical Shiite regime has conducted successful tests to determine if its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can be detonated by a remote-control device while still in high-altitude flight.Scientists, including President Reagan’s top science adviser, William R. Graham, say there is no other explanation for such tests than preparation for the deployment of electromagnetic pulse weapons – even one of which could knock out America’s critical electrical and technological infrastructure, effectively sending the continental U.S. back to the 19th century with a recovery time of months or years.
And the truly frightening thing about the threat is that there is nothing we can do about it at the present time.
One thing we do have is a little time. One doesn’t just plop a nuclear warhead on top of a rocket and send it on its way. The technical complexities involved in designing a nuclear warhead are quite daunting. So even if Iran will soon have a nuclear device (and even if North Korea already has one) many analysts believe they are a few years away from being able to place them on top of rockets.
Needless to say, this should give a little more urgency in our efforts to disarm the mad mullahs in Iran. One way or another, the Iranians must not be allowed to construct a nuclear device. If they do, the possibility that the weapon would end up in the hands of a group that could destroy our civilization while keeping Iranian hands clean so as to preclude a retaliatory response is just too great.
UPDATE: 12/8
A couple of things.
First, Doc in the comments gives a scientific basis for why the kind of EMP attack I’ve outlined above is impossible. This is extremely puzzling to me because the link I provide in the article details the findings of a commission to study this threat that has concluded not only is it possible, but likely.
Here’s a story (via Drudge) that also outlines the threat.
Frankly, I am at a loss as to how to to reconcile the science that Doc bases his conclusions on with the arguments made by the Commission.
Secondly, there seems to be a general feeling that al Qaeda would be unable to carry out such an attack. I agree. And I hope that I made clear in the article that Iran and North Korea are years away from having the capability of doing so. That said, because of the devastating nature of the threat, it would seem prudent to continue our efforts to prevent both Iran and the NoKo’s from getting their hands on the bomb as well as preventing them from buying technology that would assist them in their development of ICBMs.
It would seem to be the least we can do.
12:46 pm
As I recall from some studies twenty years ago at Bell Labs, the folks in kansas, directly beneath the blast, will be largely unaffected by the EMP effects. There is a pattern that sort of looks like a smile, with the ends of the smile curving up to the north. I think the effect was lessened when the pulse was parpendicular to the earth’s magnetic field.
Also, does this effect really have anything to do with gamma rays? I thought the pulse was an electromanetic effect independent of the gamma rays. The gamma rays are what turn fiber optic lines dark, though.
12:58 pm
The heat pulse at 300 miles above the atmosphere wouldn’t affect the ground because there’s no air to carry it. But according to Richard Rhodes in “The Making of an Atomic Bomb” within a few thousandths of a second, the blast wave cools to only a couple of hundred thousand degrees. The rest of the energy turns into high energy gamma rays and x-rays. It’s the gamma rays that interact with the air as well as the magnetic field to produce the effect.
Here’s a quote from this fascinating website:
http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm
An electromagnetic pulse starts with a short, intense burst of gamma rays produced from nuclear detonation. The gamma rays interact with the atoms in air molecules through a process called the Compton effect, wherein electrons are scattered at high energies, thus ionizing the atmosphere and generating a powerful electrical field.
Also somewhere on that site I read that the shape of the EMP is umbrella like as it follows the magnetic field of the earth. I don’t think the folks in Kansas would be spared.
3:23 pm
We should also keep our eyes on China, which has sophisticated nuclear weapons and an emerging space flight capability. In addition, the Chinese military has publicly threatened to use nukes against the U.S. if it interferes with Chinese efforts to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, a nuclear explosion in space would probably take out most of China’s space-based assets.
In June 2004, Scientific American had a long article on this subject titled “Nuclear Explosions in Orbit.” The article raised the issue of how we would respond to a high-altitude nuclear explosion over our territory. It’s likely that we would not respond with a conventional nuclear attack. Required reading for all.
4:12 pm
Jonathan makes a good point. It would be unlikely that we would be willing to level Tehran or North Korea with a nuclear response. If we were to respond in kind with an EMP attack of our own, would North Korea even notice? The North Koreans are not too far from being able to accomplish this, and they are insane.
7:04 pm
Oh come on people, do the maths. What the is describing is impossible for two reasons. 1) The propergation of energy from a source follows a cube law (as it propergates in s sphere), so the distance eats up power. The further away you are, the much, much smaller is the effect.
2) The earth itself is a sphere. To hit a large fraction of the US, then the bonb has to be in the upper atmosphere. The higher up it its, the less power gets to earth.
So that is the physics taken care of.
So, could a device take out all our electronics?
No, they are hardened and can handle anything unless it’s quite close. Now it might be a bit sad for you to realize in the time it takes between your eyeballs melting and the blastwave smashing you to pieces, that your TV is destroyed for good, but that is about as much as we have to fear from emp. It makes more sense to us a blast effect to kill everyone, rather than try to take out their electonics.
How do we know what I am saying is true? Well, not a single nuclear attack plan of the USSR or the USA (who had all the unpublished data from atomospheric testing), contained an emp component. Never did either side attempt to disrupt the electronic devices of the other side using emp. All bombs were designed to destroy targets, by heta and blast.
It is however a good idea to persuade the Iranians and the North Koreans that a 20KT blast at 30,000 feet above the USA will bring its civilization to a halt. That way they would announce that they have crossed the nuclear Rubicon by causing 30 seconds of interference on our TV and mobile phones. Then we could nuke them properly.
7:18 pm
Doc:
Normally, I would bow to superior knowledge but in this case, I think you’re talking through your hat.
This is an issue that people have been studying for 40 years. And yes, a device would have to be detonated 300 miles above Kansas – or didn’t you bother to read that?
As far as “hardened” electronics, I’m sorry but that is ludicrous. This is from a statement by Dr. Gary L. Smith, Director of Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins:
When EMP energy enters the interior of a potentially vulnerable system, it can cause a variety of adverse effects. These effects include transients, resettable or permanent upset of digital logic circuits, and performance degradation or burnout of electronic components. The collected EMP energy itself can cause malfunction or device failure directly, or it can trigger the system’s internal power sources in unintended ways, causing damage by the power sources within the system itself.
In summary, EMP introduces two collectively unique features to the overall picture of system susceptibility to nuclear effects. These features, taken together, distinguish EMP from all other forms, both natural and man-made, of electrical stress and response. First, stresses induced by EMP can significantly exceed those ordinarily encountered in system circuits and components and can thereby increase the probability of upset and burnout occurring in electrical and electronic systems. Second, EMP can cause this increase to occur nearly simultaneously over a large area, about one million square kilometers for a high-altitude burst.
There are so many interesting links on this site, take your pick.
http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm
If you could offer a some counter links that debunk the EMP effect described in the article, I would consider including them in an update.
4:47 am
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9:49 am
The things I do when I should be working.
If the table doesn’t come out, tough, write your own damn spreadsheet, the maths is easy.
Here is a quick overview of emp, which I did just now when is was suposed to be analysing crystal structures. Enjoy.
Conversion of units.
1KT of TNT is 4.2×109 joules.
http://www.ieer.org/clssroom/unitconv.html
and
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci499008,00.html
Overview of electrical storms in the upper atmosphere.
“The global view of lightning activity offered by detectors in space has increased our appreciation of the importance of atmospheric electrical processes. There are between about 40 and 100 lightning discharges every second, each radiating electromagnetic pulses at up to 20 GW peak power and producing quasi-static electric fields up to 1 kV/m at 50–80 km altitude in the mesosphere. The electromagnetic energy couples with the plasma in the magnetosphere. Wave–particle interactions with radiation belt electrons (keV–MeV energies) result in scattering of some of the population out of the atmosphere. Intense lightning may also result in electrons being accelerated to relativistic energies in the upper atmosphere and injected into the magnetosphere. It is thought that thunderstorms provide a source of inner radiation belt electrons in this way. Electric processes within the troposphere then affect directly the atmospheric layers above, out to the near-Earth space environment.â€
From Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 43 Issue 6 Page 6.09 – December 2002
“ The electric Earth Cosmic influences on the atmosphere†Neil Arnold and Torsten Neubert.
So an average ‘discharge†of lighting in the upper atmosphere releases at 20 GW peak power which is equal to 20*10^9 joules in a second, which is equal to 4.7 KT of TNT. We have between 40 and 100 events like this, every second, about 5% of the discharges are in the 50 KT range, that is 2-5 per second.
The energy density of an explosion falls with distance, the further away you are the better, here is the falloff of a 20 KT device.
MilesMeterskmJoulesFractional of original Energy
0.01.00.0018.4E+101
0.010.00.0108.4E+081.E-02
0.1100.00.1008.4E+061.E-04
0.61000.01.0008.4E+041.E-06
3.15000.05.0003.4E+034.E-08
6.110000.010.0008.4E+021.E-08
30.650000.050.0003.4E+014.E-10
61.2100000.0100.0008.4E+001.E-10
306.2500000.0500.0003.4E-014.E-12
At 300 miles you get 1/4000000000000 of the energy output. This is only a real problem in electrical devices, if you have a long antenna, to collect a larger fraction of the energy in a long line. This can happen, as happened high-altitude nuclear testing in 1962 over Kazakhstan, (probably 300 KT and at 175 miles above the earth (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/tests/USSR-ntests1.html)) several system effects were noted due to the high altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP). In particular a 500-km long aerial communications line experienced a failure. This test was designed to see what happened if you used a 300 KT device, in emp mode. The question the Soviets wanted to know was, does a 300 KT device going off at 290 km above a city give me a better effect than if it goes off at 290 meters above a city. The answer is NO.
IEEE Transactions On Electromagnetic Compatibility, 40, 1998.
“Response of Long Lines to Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP)â€
Vasily N. Greetsai, Andrey H. Kozlovsky, Vadim M. Kuvshinnikov, Vladimir M. Loborev, Yuri V. Parfenov, Oleg A. Tarasov, and Leonid N. Zdoukhov.
They concluded that the main problem is with the type of porcelain insulators used.
“The HEMP hazard to a line has clearly been shown through full-scale (atmospheric tests) experiments and has been corroborated by the results of further years of experimental investigation.
Particularly, it was found that for power lines with 5-kV operating voltage and below, line-isolation spark over occurs under the action of surges with amplitudes on the order of 100 kV. Then, under operating voltage conditions, the transition from spark overs to arcs occurred and created two and three-phase short circuits, and the porcelain insulator’s glaze failed and fused. Experiments have indicated, however, that glass and polymeric insulators have not shown the same problems. Additional experimental investigations on substation equipment protective devices have also shown that due to their voltage-time characteristics, they will conduct high-amplitude HEMP surges.â€
So, don’t worry about emp.
4:17 pm
Doc:
Thanks for the information. I would like to ask that any reader who can decipher Doc’s comment to please email me or leave a comment yourself. I can only write about what others are saying about this issue.
The fact that the military has spent billions in hardening their electronics makes me think that either Doc is wrong or that we have been flummoxed into wasting a lot of money.
Andrew:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the Iranians adding a third stage to the Shahab 3? And wouldn’t that give it enough to achieve a suborbital heighth of about 185 miles?
I read that in some Congressional testimony on Iranian military capabilities last spring. Similarly, the NoKo’s are restaging the taep-o-dong 2 that would give it a range capable of hitting the northwest US.
Whether that will fill the bill of an EMP weapon is beside the point. The NoKo’s especially are interested in building full blown ICBM’s capable of hitting anyone, anywhere. I’ve seen estimates that they could be as close of 5 years from achieving that goal.
One more thing to worry about…
4:59 pm
“The fact that the military has spent billions in hardening their electronics makes me think that either Doc is wrong or that we have been flummoxed into wasting a lot of money.”
No they spent it to make sure that they survive near by explosions. The internet was developed so that a network of computers to route a message from A to B, but a very large number of route. All our electonics are hardened to survive , or be easily repairable, after Solar and atmospheric storms. These happen all the time, and were known about since the 60’s by the militaries in the US and USSR, but not by most civilian scientist. Given the large electical potentials generated in the upper atmosphere have little effect on our electical devices, models which postulate large consequences for similar, man made, potentials, should be taken with a grain of salt.
You probably know as much about milking a Yak, as do scientist know about the electical properties of the upper atmosphere. The physics and chemistry is funny there. Hard to get to and impossible to replicate in the lab. This is one of the reasons the US played with helium ballons so much in the 60’s and 70’s.
5:52 pm
Rick,
Yes, there are a lot of reports of Iranians and North Korea improving their designs. North Korea hasn’t done much with it’s missiles lately because they are edging closer to national collapse. It’s doubtful they’ll get the technology to make a viable ICBM anytime soon. Iran is definitely interested in MRBM technology, but they still have a long way to go for ICBM’s. Both programs are still pretty much in the prototype stage, which means they have a lot of problems, require a lot of maintenance, and aren’t very reliable. That will slowly change though, especially for the Iranians.
The problem with missiles, of course, is that they leave a calling card, and we are working toward missile defense to address the Korean threat. We have a joint project with the Israeli’s for missile defense technology, and the Israeli’s have an operational system now. Considering that, it’s much more likely they’d put a nuke on ship, blow it in a port city, or bring it across from Mexico. That way they’d be assured of destruction and mayhem while still have some plausible deniability.
12:20 am
Rick—
It sounds like there are scare holes everywhere…in space, science, the infrastructure, etc.
Are we returning to the “hide-under-desk-unitl-the-blast-passes” exercises kids did in school back in the ‘50’s?
I don’t think there is enough scientific intelligence among the Evil Ones to carry out the missions which would create your scenario. Local strikes on gas/electic/utility structures seem more likely. Local mayhem.
The more I read about these people, the less likely the Doomsday scenario seems. There are thousands of Americans-turned-Islamists living in sleeper cells all over this country. They live off the fat of gummit entitlement and do their guerilla training and wait for orders from Pakistan. Are they a threat? Some. But nothing that could be nation-wide.
The irony? We produce our own enemies from within: they are recruited from prisons and find some spiritual meaningfulness in their channeled hatred of our evil ways.
Where will it lead? Who knows? Can we halt the cultural sink that produces these people who end up in prison? Maybe.
That’s one thing that is leading me to believe a way out is to declare the “War” on Drugs the Peace Settlement. Let’s legalize drugs and open up the prisons to free the non-violent drug offenders. It can’t be any worse than what we already have going. The bad thing, of course, is that people holding equity in private prison building will see their net worth fall…c’est la vie…
But that’s only one small change. Don’t want to take up your space with others…
7:13 am
Good job Rick. The potential for terrorists today to do this is low due to the need for the proper kind of ICBM. But that means so little if you look out ten, twenty years.
The military hardened their equipment because they were going to go into a possible nuclear ground war in Europe. There are many small yield devices that could take out areas of communication and weapons if not hardened. Everything they do has to operate in a high dose environment, but it was thought to be a short time.
Surprisingly, spacecraft need to be hardened as well in certain orbits because radiation doses upset their circuits as well. We fly through these glitches everyday.
I do not believe batteries are succeptable. If I recall correctly anything turned off is fine after the
pulse.
With all that, the scenario you painted is very possible and people need to wake up to the fact ICBMs make WMDs reach out and touch us.
5:12 am
The Council Has Spoken!
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