A CONTINENT-WIDE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE DESTROYS ALL ELECTRONICS
LESS THAN A MILLISECOND
GERMAN FILM DIRECTOR WIM WENDERS IS KNOWN FOR HIS “ROAD” movies, in which characters wander through desolate landscapes grappling with various sorts of existential angst. His 1991 film Until the End of the World is set at the turn of the millennium and involves an out-of-control nuclear-powered satellite that’s about to reenter the atmosphere at some unknown location and contaminate a large area of the planet. People in different possible impact locations start panicking and flee in large numbers. Amid a lot of running around in the desert by the film’s heroine, a woman named Claire, there’s a collection of mad scientists, shadowy characters from covert government agencies, hitchhikers, bounty hunters, and other assorted riffraff looking to recover the prototype of a device for recording and translating brain impulses. During the course of this manic chase, the nuclear satellite is shot down, causing a huge burst of energy—an electromagnetic pulse (EMP)—that wipes out all unshielded electronic equipment throughout the world. As a result, the characters are transported from the late twentieth century back to a kind of caveman style of existence, as all devices worldwide that rely on microcircuits, such as computers, cars, radios, and the like are burned out in the span of a few milliseconds.
Is this something that could really happen? Could all the electronics we take for granted in everyday life suddenly be shorted out? Or is an EMP, Wenders-style, just another wild Hollywood extrapolation of something that’s theoretically possible to something we should all be concerned about? A bit of history will quickly sort out the matter.
On July 16, 1997, Representative Curt Weldon, chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, convened a session on “The Threat Posed by Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) to U.S. Military Systems and Civil Infrastructure.” Among the experts called upon for testimony were Dr. Lowell Wood of the Livermore National Laboratory in California; Gilbert Clinger, acting deputy undersecretary of defense for space; and Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Others testifying included several members from the US intelligence community. The conclusion of the hearing can be captured by a statement from Dr. Wood near the end of the session:
It is a reasonable projection that most, if not all, modern computer systems exposed to EMP field levels…would wilt. By wilting, they would at least cease to function. In many cases they would be burned out…Not just computers in aircraft but computers everywhere, other than this type of very high integrity metallic enclosures that Dr. Ullrich sketched in his opening statement. Computers in any other enclosure than that type would be compromised, if not destroyed outright.
Later, Congress charged a blue-ribbon committee with undertaking a deeper investigation of the entire EMP phenomenon, which was published in 2004 as Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack.
In view of these detailed studies, we can safely conclude that not only is the EMP a viable threat to a modern, high-tech way of life, it is only going to become more threatening as we become ever more dependent on increasingly delicate electronics to navigate through our daily lives.
WHAT IS AN EMP, ANYWAY?
TO PUT IT VERY COMPACTLY, AN EMP IS AN ELECTROMAGNETIC SHOCK wave produced by a very high-energy explosion in the atmosphere. This wave creates a momentary surge of electrical current in the circuitry of any device like a cell phone, computer, television set, or automobile that is not shielded for protection. This pulse of current burns out the electronics in just the same manner as a surge of current in your home burns out a fuse instead of your oven or stereo. The difference is that the EMP attacks all electronics via a wave propagated in the atmosphere, unlike the surge of electricity in your home that goes through the wiring in the wall. You can easily protect against the home-brew pulse by simply installing a fuse box. But there is no fuse box possible when the entire circuit is under attack in all places at once. You have to shield the entire device that’s to be protected, as noted in the statement above by Dr. Wood.
Certainly the most well-chronicled EMP in history came from an atmospheric nuclear blast over Johnston Island in the South Pacific in 1962 that was part of Project Starfish Prime. This 1.4-megaton explosion was set off at an altitude of about 250 miles over a remote area. But the resulting pulse of electromagnetic energy was felt in Honolulu, nearly seven hundred miles from the epicenter of the blast. Even though the energy in the pulse was considerably attenuated by the time it reached Hawaii, it still had enough “juice” to blow out streetlights in Honolulu, set off burglar alarms, and damage a communication relay station.
One should bear in mind that Project Starfish Prime was in 1962, nearly fifty years ago, when much of the world’s electronics was still reliant upon vacuum-tube technology. In today’s world of supersensitive microelectronics, all computers and cell phones; all cars, boats, planes, and trains; all critical infrastructures for supplying energy, food, water, and communication; and all electronic control and security systems are vulnerable. With this constellation of nice properties, an “EMP bomb” is truly a terrorist’s best friend. But how easy is it to actually create such a pulse and deliver it over a wide geographic area?
To address this key question, we first must understand how the pulse is generated. An EMP begins with a short, intense burst of gamma rays of the sort produced by a nuclear explosion. It should be emphasized here that you do not need a nuclear blast to generate an EMP. But as the strength of the EMP goes up dramatically with the strength of the blast itself, you get a bigger “pulse for your buck” with a nuclear blast than with any other known type of explosive. I’ll come back to this point later.
The gamma rays from the blast interact with air molecules in the atmosphere and scatter electrons at high energy in a process called the Compton effect. These high-energy electrons ionize the atmosphere, thus generating a very strong electric field. How strong depends on the magnitude of the blast, as well as on its altitude. The strongest EMP comes when the altitude is above twenty miles, but it’s also very strong even with surface or low-altitude bursts. The weakest effect is when the burst is at an altitude somewhere in between.
To return briefly to a point raised earlier, it is not necessary to set off a nuclear blast to create an EMP. It can be done via conventional explosives and ordinary nineteenth-century physics by a device called a flux compression generator (FCG) or by a magneto-hydrodynamic device (MHD). The FCG is just jargon terminology for a device that uses a quick-acting explosive to compress a magnetic field, transferring most of the energy in the explosive to the field.
An FCG consists of a tube packed with quick-reacting explosives. The tube is placed inside a slightly larger copper coil. Just prior to detonation, the coil is energized by a bank of capacitors in order to create a magnetic field. The detonation is then set off from the rear of the tube. As the electromagnetic wave expands outward from the force of the blast, the tube touches the coil creating a short circuit. The short moves forward as the tube flares outward, thereby compressing the magnetic field. According to Australian defense expert Carlo Kopp, “The result is that the FCG produces a ramping current pulse, which breaks before the device disintegrates from the explosion.” This pulse has the strength of a million lightning strikes and is what burns out all electronics in the path of the electrical shock wave propagated outward from the FCG.
An MHD device operates on the slightly different principle of a conductor moving through a magnetic field, which then produces an electrical current perpendicular to the direction of the field and conductor motion. Frighteningly, either the FCG or MHD devices can be rigged up rather easily to serve as a very effective, compact, and cheap EMP bomb.
Regardless of how you create the EMP, the effects line up with the fictional works I discussed earlier. An instant after the bomb—nuclear, FCG, or MHD—is detonated, an invisible radio frequency wave is created. This “pulse” is more than a million times as powerful as the strongest radio signal from earthly radar, television, or radio sources. The wave is strong enough that it will reach every location in line of sight of the explosion. This is one of the principal reasons why a high-altitude burst can do so much damage. For instance, a single blast three hundred miles above Kansas will affect the entire United States, along with parts of Canada and Mexico!
When the electrical wave strikes the surface of the earth, it generates high-speed electromagnetic shock waves that threaten every part of our modern technological infrastructure, such as
So not only do all the electronics die, so does all the electrical power—perhaps permanently—since power transmission lines conduct the pulse to the transformers, which are then shorted out by voltages greater than what’s seen in a typical lightning bolt.
What would you experience if you were unfortunate enough to be in range of an EMP attack? The first thing you’d notice is that lights, motors, elevators, and all other electrically powered devices stop dead in their tracks. Except for the immediate stoppage of moving vehicles like cars, trains, and planes, this would not be much different from the type of power failures many regions of the world have experienced numerous times before. Transportation systems wouldn’t work, water wouldn’t flow (since it requires electrical pumps to get the water to your faucet), and fluorescent lights and television sets would show a strange, otherworldly glow, even if they’re turned off, due to the electron flux streaming through their noble gases or phosphors. Your smartphone would feel warm to the touch, its battery stretched well beyond its voltage limits. And, of course, your computer would be fried.
At first, you might think this was just another power failure—until you tried to access emergency communication channels to get the lowdown on what’s happening. Those channels would be as dead as the rest of the communication systems we take for granted. Even if they’re not, your battery-powered radio or cell phone will be. You’d be cut off from communication of all sorts other than direct verbal communication with those in your immediate vicinity. The vast majority of people would probably just break out the candles, fire up the backyard grill, and expect things to be back to “normal” in a few hours, or at most a day or two. But it ain’t going to happen that way! If it’s an EMP attack, the recovery time can be measured in many months, if not years. And by the end of the first week, panic would set in. Looters and hoarders would be out in force, law enforcement officials and the military would be deserting in droves to protect their own families, fires would burn unattended, and, in general, society would quickly revert to a lifestyle akin to the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust rather like that depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling book and associated film The Road.
But unlike a nuclear attack, the EMP itself is totally harmless to humans. Unless you’re dependent on technological helpers like dialysis machines, heart pacemakers, or other such electronic health-care devices, you’ll survive the experience—at least for a while. This all sounds like the kind of weapon a mad scientist or equally deranged terrorist would salivate over. And maybe it is. Let’s look a bit deeper at just how good a doomsday device an EMP bomb could really be.
NIGHTMARE WEAPON—OR JUST A BAD DREAM?
IS AN EMP BOMB A POOR MAN’S NUCLEAR WEAPON? IT’S CERTAINLY tempting to think that a weapon that’s undetectable, untraceable, kills no people directly, totally devastates a modern society in a few milliseconds, and can be constructed with what amounts to 1940s technology is a great equalizer for a rogue state or a band of terrorists to flatten a nuclear power like the United States. And indeed, unverified reports suggest these features of the “E-bomb” have not been lost on the global terrorist community.
To illustrate, here is one possible terrorist scenario, based on actual facts, that would serve well for mounting an E-bomb attack:
Given that countries like Iran have already demonstrated the ability to launch a SCUD missile from a ship at sea, these steps are all that’s needed to get into the E-bomb business. The sea-based scenario sketched here would be especially attractive for a terrorist group since it may be very difficult to identify the attacker, given the vast quantity of SCUD missiles floating around the world today.
If you think this scenario is just the pipe dream of a slightly paranoid writer, think again. This is the very scenario presented in the report issued in 2004 by the congressional commission I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The commission reported that terrorists could totally disable the United States in one fell swoop by following precisely the steps of this scenario. A lone nuclear weapon launched from an offshore freighter is all it would take.
Of course, it’s not at all a trivial matter to get your hands on a nuclear weapon, despite the fact that lots of them are unaccounted for and presumably in unfriendly hands. But as we’ve already seen, you don’t need a nuclear weapon to create an EMP. A much simpler FCG or MHD device will serve nearly as well. But how likely is such an EMP scenario, nuclear or otherwise?
AS REPORTED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES IN 1983, AT THAT TIME STRATEGIC planners in both the United States and the Soviet Union regarded an EMP attack as the opening salvo in an all-out nuclear war. But it never happened, because the heart of nuclear defense in that era was the so-called MAD principle of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” which served as a very effective deterrent to an EMP attack. This Cold War doctrine has pretty much been eliminated from strategic thinking today, though, as the geopolitical landscape has reconfigured itself.
Nowadays, the rise of nonstate players like al-Qaeda, combined with the widespread availability of weapons of mass destruction and the ever-shifting power balance between major nations, has made the possibility of an EMP attack much more difficult to evaluate. What does seem clear though is that these changes in the worldwide power landscape make an E-bomb threat much more credible.
The world now has many more nuclear states, some controlled by very unstable political regimes with legions of shadowy alliances—but without the capability of launching a full-scale nuclear war. So an EMP attack may well look rather attractive to such a state, especially if it could be carried out by one or another of the nonstate clients of this type of regime. As an attack of this sort will not destroy any lives and will not be followed up by an all-out nuclear strike, the country under attack is unlikely to launch a full-scale retaliation. In fact, it may well be impossible to know who the attacker actually is.
It’s very difficult to prepare an “appropriate” response to an EMP attack. How do you respond to an explosion that takes place hundreds of miles up in the atmosphere without being seen or heard, yet destroys a whole national infrastructure in a moment? There are simply no legal precedents to give guidance in the formulation of a measured response to such an attack.
On balance, it would seem that an E-bomb attack has a very attractive cost-benefit ratio for the attacker. With one or two warheads you can devastate an entire country like the United States with minimal chance of retaliation. An EMP attack is also appealing as the opening salvo in a conventional war, since a state with a small number of warheads like North Korea or Iran may first want to take out the larger state’s technological advantage prior to engaging on the battlefield by conventional means.
Su Tzu-yun, one of China’s leading military analysts, stated the matter succinctly in 2001: “As soon as its computer networks come under attack and are destroyed, the country will slip into a state of paralysis and the lives of its people will grind to a halt.” Even more ominous are the words of Iranian defense analyst Nashriyeh-e Siasi Nezami in 1999:
…Today when you disable a country’s military high command through disruption of communications you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country…If the world’s industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years…American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.
It may seem strange to most people to read what’s stated here, since the natural question arises, “If an EMP is such a huge threat, why haven’t I heard about it?” In late 2000, the US Congress tried valiantly to alert a recalcitrant White House to the danger by forming an EMP Threat Commission to study and report on the true magnitude of the EMP as a threat to national security. This was a counter to a report in 1997 from the Commission on Critical Infrastructure, which told the Congress that they regarded a terrorist attack via EMP as an event so unlikely that it didn’t merit serious concern at that time.
Well, times change. And just seven years later in 2004 the EMP Threat Commission issued their report in which they stated that such a devastating attack was neither unlikely nor difficult to achieve. A member of that commission was the forementioned Dr. Lowell Wood, who testified that an EMP attack could send the United States back to a preindustrial age way of life in terms of society’s ability to supply the population with food and water, not to mention cell phones, washing machines, pro football, and TV.
Before leaving the E-bomb weapon scenarios, it’s worth pointing out that some respected scientists think the effect has been overrated. The EMP phenomenon has never been fully tested since the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which came into effect very shortly after the Starfish Prime experiment, prevents nuclear tests in the atmosphere or in outer space. Consequently, the effects we have described here could end up being minor. The pulse may quickly dissipate due to distance, or there may be other factors that we don’t know about like shielding from the effect by a mountain range that reduces its effect to more of a nuisance than a continent-wide catastrophe. These are the same sorts of unknowns that surrounded atomic weapons at the time of the Manhattan Project. The theory was there, but the application was lacking. From the blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now we know. One can hope we don’t find out about an EMP in the same way.
I now rest the case for an E-bomb as a credible weapon of warfare and turn to the matter of the proverbial ounce of prevention instead of the kilos of cure. Supposing the EMP effect is truly real, not illusory, how might we protect ourselves from its devastation?
BEHIND THE WALL
AN EMP PULSE IS BOTH AN ELECTRIC AND A MAGNETIC FIELD, BUT it’s the electric field that does the damage. While the pulse may last only a hundredth of a second, the field strength is so great that all exposed electrical equipment is likely to be destroyed. And not just electrical equipment. The EMP effect also disrupts the ionosphere, which affects the propagation of radio waves in many communication bands for up to a full day. Luckily, though, the amateur radio bands (“ham radio”) would not be affected and could carry emergency communication without disruption.
The forms of damage that need protecting against come in two flavors:
Protection against Type I damage involves isolating the equipment from the pulse by placing it inside a metal-covered, grounded box (what’s called a “Faraday cage”). A possible Achilles’ heel to this form of protection is the requirement that the equipment be totally isolated from the pulse. But since most electrical equipment has cables that connect it to things like power sockets or a communication link like a modem, just enclosing the equipment itself is no good. You must also insert surge protectors, spark gaps, or other forms of filters at the point of entry of the cable into the equipment to stop the power surge from reaching inside the protective box.
Preventing Type II damage in power lines calls for isolation of equipment and very detailed grounding, so that the electrical pulse has an easier time getting to the earth through the ground than through the equipment.
Unfortunately, hardening systems is difficult and expensive. Not only must equipment be encased in Faraday cages, windows must be coated with wire mesh and doors have to be sealed with conductive gaskets. Fortunately, fiber-optic cables are not susceptible to the EMP effect, so the move to replace copper cables with fiber optics will certainly contribute to reducing overall EMP vulnerability.
Of course, there are also indirect ways of protecting against an EMP by such means as maintaining backup units in shielded cages and keeping equipment out of the range of the pulse to begin with.
ADDING IT ALL UP
SINCE ALL EVIDENCE POINTS TO AN EMP AS BEING A CREDIBLE PHYSICAL phenomenon, let’s assume for the sake of exposition that the threat of an EMP attack is indeed real as described in the foregoing pages. What about the timescale and likelihood of such an event actually coming to pass?
First of all, we can dispense with the notion of a naturally occurring EMP. To the best of current knowledge, the only way to create such a pulse is by human “ingenuity.” It needs to be designed. Unlike many of the other X-events discussed in this book, nature is not in the business of throwing us an EMP or two just to keep things lively.
Given the ease of creating at least a low-level EMP device and the well-understood facts surrounding the havoc that such a device can wreak, we should consider ourselves lucky that no known EMP attacks have taken place to date. After all, there are a lot of disaffected groups scattered around the world, many with access to the type of technical skills and equipment needed to build at least an FCG or MHD device, if not a full-scale nuclear EMP generator. Perhaps the reason is similar to the arguments against using biological weapons: the impact is totally nondiscriminatory. The effect of the weapon destroys or contaminates the very region the attacker might want to control and make use of. A full-scale E-bomb can knock out the infrastructure of an entire society. No question about that. But destroying its infrastructure then makes the resources of that society largely unavailable to the attacker, as well.
Of course, not all attackers are created equal. And there’s plenty of evidence of irrationality in the terrorist business to make the case that many potential attackers have no interest in taking over a society. Rather, they simply want to destroy it. For these sorts of attackers, an E-bomb would seem about as good a tool as one can find. Certainly, it would be a lot better than just blowing up a few buildings or nightclubs. Easy to build, dramatic in its effect, ensured anonymity of the attacker, relatively cheap to deliver—it’s not difficult to imagine an EMP attack in today’s highly charged, turbulent geopolitical climate.