Failure to Protect U.S. Against Electromagnetic Pulse Threat Could Make 9/11 Look Trivial Someday
Peter Kelly-Detwiler
Contributor
I cover the energy industry. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Exploding A Nuclear Bomb In The Sky Creates An Interesting Phenomenon In 1962, during the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear weapon high above an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed Operation Starfish, this exercise was part of a larger project to evaluate the impacts of nuclear explosions in space. The missile, launched from Johnson Island, 900 miles from Hawaii, was armed with a 1.4 megaton warhead, programmed to explode at 240 miles above the earth. It detonated as expected. What was not entirely expected was the magnitude of the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The EMP was powerful enough to affect the electric grid in Hawaii, blowing out streetlights, and resulting in telephone outages and radio blackouts. Dr. William Graham was active in the follow-up to the project, working out of the Air Force weapons lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After the blast, it was his job to understand the data collected, find out just what had happened in Hawaii, and what the defense implications were of this phenomenon. In a recent interview, Graham commented,
Graham then went on to become one of the nation’s leading experts on the topic, helping advise on both defensive and offensive capabilities.
In the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, Dr. Graham continued to lend his expertise, and became a member of the President’s Arms Control Experts Group and Science Advisor to the President. More recently, he has shifted his focus to protecting against what he now sees as the potentially greatest existential threat to the United States: an EMP attack against our civilian infrastructure – particularly the electric power grid. He is concerned that in the last half century since we first became aware of this issue, our increasing reliance on electronics, and hence our vulnerability, has increased tremendously. To that end, Graham has served as Chair to both the 2001-4 and 2006-8 Commissions to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, and was a member of the Department of Defense’s Science Board and the National Academies Board on Army Science and Technology. The Potential Consequences Are Almost Unimaginable Graham knows what he is talking about, and his comments are not to be taken lightly.
Graham expressed concern that Iran also has this offensive capability within their arsenal, and perhaps within their current military doctrine as well.
Why is this so important? Because a single missile with a warhead that actually doesn’t have to be all that large, has the potential to take out the U.S. power grid, destroy our electronics networks, and create an existential crisis like nothing the world has ever witnessed. Here’s an excerpted summary from the 2008 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack that would make great science fiction. Unfortunately, it’s not:
The summary continues:
It goes on to note that we have become so efficient, technology-dependent, and highly leveraged that utilities would lack sufficient trained service personnel to address a disaster on this scale. The Effects and Components of Electromagnetic Pulses The International Electrotechnical Commission defines three components associated with a nuclear electromagnetic pulse: E1, E2, and E3. The E1 pulse is brief, intense, and very quick (traveling at over 90% of the speed of light), and can take out computers and telecommunications equipment owing to its ability to exceed voltage limitations. The E2 element is intermediate in duration, lasting from a microsecond to a second after the initiation of the EMP, and is similar in its effects to lightning. As such, the grid is generally shielded against E2. By contrast, the E3 pulse is much slower, a result of the nuclear explosion affecting the earth’s magnetic field, and is very similar to the effects of an intense solar storm. The E3 effect of a nuclear blast or severe solar storm would be to create massive currents on power lines, which could then destroy electrical transformers and potentially impact power plants as well. One curious facet of an EMP event is that we wouldn’t even feel it pass through our bodies. The EMP would pass unnoticed through us, even as it fried the iPhones and Galaxies in our pockets, knocked out our telecommunications system, rendered our cars and computers without the ability to function, and took out our power grid. We would have little idea of the dread potentially awaiting us, because there would be no communications. No mobility. Nothing that our highly evolved, sophisticated, and electronic society relies on. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we know how to protect against this type of event. The military had been working on hardening its capabilities since the Cold War in the 1960s (as have the Russians, Chinese, and other nations). The bad news (again) is that the civilian infrastructure is about as soft as it gets, there is nobody in charge of coordinating a hardening of this infrastructure, and government response to date has been tepid or watered down to the point that it is relatively meaningless. In fact, no less than two Congressional Commissions (2004 and 2008), a National Academy of Sciences report and other U.S. Government-sponsored studies have raised heightened concerns about this issue. All found that the EMP threat poses a significant and existential threat to the United States. Ultimately, such a threat extends to the rest of the world; a failure of the U.S. banking, economic, and national security systems would quickly have enormous ramifications across the rest of the planet. And yet, legislation to address the issue never makes it out of committee, regulators come up with weak standards, and nothing really happens. It is only after a significant harmful event has occurred that we, as a society, raise questions as to why didn’t we do more to guard against the potential effects. It seems it has always been that way. After 9/11, the Commission pointed out the weaknesses and failures that helped allow that event to take place, and pointed to ‘a failure of imagination.’ After Hurricane Sandy, it seems the nation (the East Coast, anyway) woke up to the potential damage a major storm could do, and set about working to harden the coastline and our infrastructure. And yet, that hurricane had to hit New York before the city seriously addressed the threat – we could not extrapolate from Katrina and connect the dots. It was as if Hurricane Katrina had never occurred. Just because a storm hit New Orleans and caused tremendous damage, why should New York worry? Unfortunately, that failure of imagination appears to be front and center with respect to protection against EMPs – whether created by the sun or human antagonists. Surprisingly, there is only a relatively small group of people who are highly focused on this issue. Like Dr. Graham, they also happen to be the ones who were most involved in developing our own EMP weaponry capabilities or countermeasures during the Cold War, so they know better than most how devastating these weapons can be. And they are extremely frustrated with the utter lack of meaningful action in Washington to address this issue. The nature of this threat was brought to my attention by Dr. Peter Pry, who has written extensively on the topic, most recently publishing the book ELECTRIC ARMAGEDDON: CIVIL-MILITARY PREPAREDNESS FOR AN ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE CATASTROPHE as head of the Task Force on National And Homeland Security. A former CIA Intelligence Officer, Dr. Pry is an expert in the space, has served on numerous congressional advisory groups concerning national security issues. He also connected me with some of the other major thinkers who have been advocating for a more proactive U.S response. Over the past few weeks, I have interviewed Graham, Pry, and a number of other experts, to better understand the issue as well, as the lack of any meaningful or concerted response – from either the national government, the electric industry, and its regulators. When Regulators Rely On Adam Smith, Don’t Be Surprised If The Dingo Comes Over To Babysit Pry comments that the main entity responsible for electric reliability, the North American Electric AEP +0.02% Reliability Corporation, and its member utilities, don’t want to spend the money. NERC “lowballs the threat from natural EMP from the sun. They claim they can handle it, but that’s untrue.” They don’t even focus on the obvious physical threat to substations.
Meanwhile, there is nobody specifically in charge of protecting the nation’s electric grid from a national security perspective. The Department of Defense has no jurisdiction for protecting the domestic civilian infrastructure, despite its national security implications. NERC is relatively toothless, made up of its member utilities – whose chief responsibilities are to their shareholders and ratepayers, not to safeguard national security. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) lacks any real mandate. We saw just how weak this collaboration was with the recommendations coming out last month from the NERC relating to protection of the power grid against both physical attacks and solar storms. In both cases, the standards approved by NERC are far below what is necessary, and don’t even include power plants. There is simply no holistic view being applied, and no serious response to the potential severity of the threat. It’s not like nobody is trying. In 2011, Representative Trent Franks (a Republican from Arizona) attempted to address this situation, sponsoring H.R. 668, the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage (SHIELD) Act. This legislation would have directed the FERC to enable emergency measures to protect the power grid via directive of the President. Importantly, it also laid out the cost recovery methodologies (the private sector needs to get paid for the measures it implements). The Act also would have ordered the FERC to develop and submit reliability standards for the electric grid with respect to geomagnetic storms or EMPs. Finally, it would have directed the DoE to create a program to develop expertise in safeguarding the bulk power system and to share this expertise with the owners, operators and users. In June of last year this was referred to the Subcommittee on Energy and Power. Pry commented that NERC has lobbied against the bill, claiming that it represents over-regulation. He notes that in his view, the Edison Electric Institute is no better, characterizing this effort as ‘Obamacare for the electric grid’ and stating that the industry should be left to address this issue. This tepid approach leaves him rather mystified.
Ambassador Hank Cooper served with Graham at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in the 1960s and later oversaw the Department of Defense programs to harden the Air Force strategic systems, including the command, control and communications systems to assure they could operate through, and the President could use them after, a Soviet nuclear EMP attack. He was President Reagan’s Chief Negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with Soviets and Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) during George H.W. Bush era—where he worked to assure our ballistic missile defense systems were hardened to EMP effects. He reiterates that:
Cooper believes that one reason for inaction to date has been because key information on the EMP threat and how to counter it was highly classified during the Cold War—indeed until the EMP Commission was able to get it made public in 2008. So the public and even many government officials have been unaware of the issues—and most with government clearances haven’t yet proactively addressed the broader concerns about the viability of our civil critical infrastructure after an EMP attack. They certainly have had little effect on an electric industry that is unwilling to submit itself to additional oversight. In this, Cooper closely echoes Pry.
Cooper notes that Congress has provided a dysfunctional regulatory arrangement that mirrors what it would be like if you could only buy medicine from completely unregulated pharmaceutical companies selling their wares—like buying “miracle drugs” from a traveling salesman in the “Old West.” There is a well-defined purpose for the Federal Drug Administration—no matter what its performance may be. He suggests we need an analogous authority with teeth to assure a viable electric power grid. Connecting the dots requires only limited imagination, so it clearly stands to reason that the U.S. government should be aware of – and addressing the problem – with a high degree of urgency. Yet it seems as if nothing could be further from the truth. From the government perspective, it is as if an event such as 9/11 never happened, or never could happen to the nation’s power grid. The FERC has directed the NERC to develop plans against an electromagnetic storm, and even in this area, the result has been astonishingly lackluster. As Graham comments,
In June of 2013, Graham, Cooper, and other experts concerned with the EMP threat wrote a highly detailed letter outlining the EMP threat and ways to protect against it. This letter – from the Foundation For Resilient Societies – was addressed to the White House as well as to the Secretaries of Defense, State, Energy, and Homeland Security, as well as a host of other federal agencies. A year later, the Foundation has yet to receive a response. Pining For The Days Of Cold War Mutual Assured Destruction: The Rogue Threat Is Real Dr. Pry has been focused on the EMP issue for decades. At the CIA, his specific task was to evaluate the Russian nuclear strategy. At that time, the U.S. intelligence community was keenly aware that an EMP attack could existentially threaten the U.S.
The Russians thought about EMP both offensively and defensively. One of the Soviet Union’s greatest fears was that we had an EMP attack in our military doctrine, and they prepared for it. Dr. Pry noted that this preparation and mindset almost proved our undoing, because the Russians took this threat very seriously, even after the Cold War was over.
The Russian military went on high alert and actually brought the nuclear briefcase to then President Boris Yeltsin, while their intercontinental ballistic missiles were placed on high alert to prepare for a nuclear strike.
Today, that danger from Russia still exists, but it is not what keeps Pry, Graham, or the EMP threat experts up at night. Today, the danger is less likely to emanate from an organized state within the community of nations, and more likely to come from a marginalized nation or a stateless entity – somebody who has less to lose, and against whom it would be harder to strike back. In the previous decade, the U.S. government recognized that the need to better understand this danger, and commissioned a study in 2001 followed by a second review four years later. In 2004, only the executive summary was released. In 2008, the contents of the updated report on critical national infrastructures was released as a result of a deliberate decision to inform the public and declassify enough to raise awareness that there was a threat to the unhardened infrastructure. Pry observes,
Concerns related to nuclear EMPs have heightened in recent years as a result of the continued activities of states such as Iran and North Korea, as well as various non-state actors such as Al Qaeda. Pry indicates that North Korea sits at the top of the list of worries.
Any casual observer of North Korea will note that the country routinely tests missiles (as they did this month) – often during periods of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula. The payload capabilities of the rockets they launch are not very large. But they don’t have to be to launch an EMP. Pry notes that the Western press has characterized North Korea’s nuclear tests as relative failures,
Ambassador Cooper observes that the enemy has shifted, and we have not changed our doctrine in response.
Mutual Assured Destruction works fine, if both parties understand and play by the same rules. And if neither party is willing to commit suicide.
Don’t Forget About The Sun And then there is the possibility of a massive geomagnetic storm, far greater than the Hydro-Quebec solar storm of 1989, which was sufficient to cause the HQ grid to collapse within 92 seconds, took out a transformer at a nuclear plant in New Jersey. A geomagnetic storm occurs when a solar wind interacts with the planet’s magnetosphere and transfers energy to that magnetosphere. This results in increased electric current, which can be picked up by power lines essentially acting as antennae. The famous 1859 Carrington event reportedly created an aurora borealis bright enough so that people in the northeast could read a newspaper at night. The EMP impact was sufficient to cause telegraph machines to catch on fire and took out the newly laid transatlantic cable. In today’s world, it could have a significantly more devastating effect. The good news here is that with a solar event taking place 96 million miles away, we would have approximately 20 hours of lead time, and could potentially take the power grid offline to protect transformers and other infrastructure until an event passed by. That said, a proactive continental blackout could be quite damaging. However, no one knows if a voluntary blackout of the grid would, in fact save it from an EMP catastrophe. For certain, we lack the command and control arrangements or a plan in place to execute a coordinated nationwide shutdown of the grid by its 3,000 utilities, nor have we ever practiced such a contingency, or practiced turning the nation back “on”–performing what would technically be called a nationwide “black start.” This threat is more than theoretical. Just two years ago, a solar superstorm erupted that was likely similar to or greater in magnitude than the Carrington event. Fortunately, the earth was not in the line of fire, but it was close. Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado was quoted as saying that had the event occurred a week earlier, the earth would have been hit. Had that occurred “we would still be picking up the pieces.” Given that high level of uncertainty, what would it take to harden the grid against either a solar or military EMP event? That depends on what and who you are trying to protect against and what kind of post-event capabilities one is trying to achieve. Pry notes that,
While the Transmission Lines are Vulnerable, So Are Power Plants One individual who has done a good deal of work in evaluating the preventative technologies and associated costs – with many publications to his name – is John Kappenman. Kappenman is a consultant to the Department for Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the DoD concerning the risks and costs of solar storms to the electric grid. He has modeled the costs to protect against potential massive solar storms, as well as having invented some of the defensive technology. Kappenman observes that you have to apply systems thinking to a highly interconnected power grid. And while all of the attention (such as it is) has been paid to security of the power lines – which would indeed act to magnify the strength of the EMP, power plants are extremely vulnerable and cannot be ignored.
Kappenman comments that this is a result of the tremendous amount of energy these plants process each day. Take a coal-fired plant, for instance.
He notes that thousands of plants would experience the same thing at the same time, and the nukes would have radioactive energy as well.
Kappenman looks at this problem as one that has to be responded to immediately in a post-event scenario. The question – whether in a natural or man-made catastrophe – is what functional pieces are left, and how quickly you can stitch them back together to some functional level.
The problem is that even if the transformers are protected, there is still enormous risk to thermal power plants. Many of those would likely be out of commission for some time, including the nuclear and coal plants.
How Would One Protect The Nation’s Power Grid? So what would it take, then, to provide a meaningful level of protection to the system? Kappenman indicates that this depends significantly on how one approaches the issue and what is the target to be hardened. But to protect the electronics aspect, the approaches are simple and relatively low cost. The challenge has to do with the fact that our electronics are ubiquitous, making a complete retrofit effort time-consuming and costly. The best way to approach it would be piecemeal, focusing on the critical areas first and replacing other items as they age and require updating.
With the bigger hardware, such as transformers, it is not necessary to harden every one of them. The key is to apply systems thinking, look at the entire grid as a whole, and determine where you need redundancy and what critical assets must be protected. Kappenman comments,
Something Has to Change Yes, we could do all that. But we probably won’t. We don’t have the leadership in Washington. We have a serious mis-match between a for-profit industry and a national security issue. And we don’t have the political will to address this issue with the resources and gravity it deserves. We really honestly probably don’t even want to think about this problem. Which is shortsighted and really stupid. In the context of the other things we protect against every day, it makes no sense. To take the most recent example of the lax approach to just one part of this issue – solar storms – the approach proposed by NERC and approved by FERC requires the utilities to monitor space weather, and have written plans in place to protect against solar storms. FERC estimates an annual compliance burden of 20 hours per utility, costing approximately $1,200. No drills or other practice tests are required. Of the 2,000 utilities monitored by NERC, 90% do not even have to comply. Nor do nuclear power plants or other generating facilities need to comply. That should make us all feel safe at night. At the same time that we write $645 billion in annual life and health insurance premiums, and $460 billion in policies for property and casualty, we as a society are completely unwilling to protect against one of the potentially greatest natural and man-made threats to our existence. Whistling past the graveyard indeed…
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