Where were Bush and Obama?

In National Review, William Graham, James Woolsey, and Peter Vincent Fry warn us about EMP and thank President Trump for issuing an Executive Order requiring the bureaucracies to deal with the threat.

...EMP, like a super-energetic radio wave that can destroy all kinds of electronics across a region as vast as North America with a single weapon, could in the long run kill far more Americans through its indirect effects than nuclear bombing of a city. Fatalities estimated from a protracted nationwide blackout lasting one year range from 67 to 90 percent of the U.S. population, due to starvation, disease, and societal collapse.

Nuclear deterrence may not prevent an EMP attack, which can be executed anonymously using a balloon or a private jet or by doing a zoom-climb, with a short-range missile launched off a freighter (as practiced by Iran), or by satellite (as practiced by North Korea). Retaliatory threats are credible only if you know who attacked.

...EMP also blinds, at the speed of light, satellites, radars, and other National Technical Means used for threat assessment and identifying attackers. Super-EMP weapons now possessed by Russia, China, and probably North Korea could generate 100,000 volts/meter or more, greatly exceeding the U.S. military hardening standard (50,000 volts/meter) and potentially paralyzing U.S. nuclear and conventional retaliatory capabilities.

Terrible as the consequences of a nuclear EMP attack on the United States would be, a natural EMP from a solar superstorm, such as a recurrence of the 1859 Carrington Event, could be even worse, potentially collapsing life-sustaining critical infrastructures — electric grids, communication, transportation, business and finance, food and water — worldwide:

The great news is that President Trump has issued his “Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses” (March 26, 2019), which implements core recommendations of the EMP Commission, requiring that: “The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation’s resilience to the effects of EMPs.”

The EMP Executive Order describes a program for protecting electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures that shall be, as recommended by the EMP Commission, run from the White House.

One of the biggest obstacles to achieving national EMP preparedness is buck-passing by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy (DOE), and utilities. No one wants to take the lead on protecting critical infrastructures from EMP, and everyone has plausible arguments why responsibility belongs to someone else. Now the EMP Executive Order requires DHS, DOD, DOE, and the utilities to work together on national EMP preparedness — under White House supervision.

The recent foot-dragging and erroneous DHS “National EMP Strategy” (October 9, 2018) — reluctantly drafted by DHS only because Congress tried to compel them to do something about EMP in the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act — would have continued studying EMP until 2028. In contrast, President Trump’s EMP Executive Order moves like lightning.

...President Trump’s EMP executive order is an opportunity for the U.S. government and private sector to achieve national EMP preparedness quickly, within two to three years. But “the swamp” may yet win. Obama holdovers and career bureaucrats, the electric-power lobby, and ignorant media “instant EMP experts” will do everything in their power to derail Trump’s plan to make America safe from EMP.

Shortly after issuance of the EMP executive order, a spate of articles appeared claiming that EMP is not a real threat, or the threat is overblown.

Finally we have leaders who are taking seriously the threat of EMPs!

In the Hill, Peter Pry reports,

...The Executive Order on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Threats, signed on March 26 by President Trump, is an excellent first step toward achieving national preparedness. It seeks to implement core recommendations of the Congressional EMP Commission on an accelerated basis.

Among the best and strongest features of the EMP Executive Order is putting the White House in charge of national EMP preparedness, rather than relying on the Department of Energy (DOE) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead.

The order states that the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), working with the National Security Council and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “shall coordinate the development and implementation of executive branch actions to assess, prioritize, and manage the risks of EMPs.”

White House leadership on EMP preparedness is imperative. Both Energy and Homeland Security have a long history of underestimating and under-prioritizing the EMP threat.

Among its many strong features, President Trump’s executive order combines EMP and cybersecurity. It directs DHS’s secretary to coordinate with the Energy and Defense secretaries, other agencies and the private sector to “develop a plan to mitigate the effects of EMPs on the vulnerable priority-critical infrastructures.”

The president’s order recognizes that an EMP attack, in adversary military doctrine and planning, is a dimension of cyber warfare. Worst-case cyber attack scenarios that could kill millions of Americans — by, for example, causing a protracted blackout of electric grids through cyber-induced over-voltages, or by manipulating controls to destroy transformers — can be addressed by many of the protective measures long recommended by the Congressional EMP Commission.

One of the most welcome and needed features of the EMP Executive Order is the requirement that the vulnerability of vital critical-infrastructure equipment be established through empirical testing in EMP simulators.

Read more here.

Why are we permitting two North Korean satellites to orbit across America each day?

Daniel John Sobieski reports in The American Thinker,

The nightmare scenario of an America sent back centuries in time before electricity, refrigeration, and smartphones has grown unnervingly closer with the presence of two North Korean satellites with orbits over a blissfully unaware American populace and an Obama administration that was indifferent to the apocalyptic threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

On Feb. 7, 2016, North Korea launched a second satellite, the KMS-4, to join their KMS-3 satellite launched in December of 2012. In an article in the Washington Times on April 24, 2016, R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Peter Vincent Fry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security as well as director of the Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, warned of the dangers of an apocalyptic EMP attack that these and similar satellites pose:

Both satellites now are in south polar orbits, evading many U.S. missile defense radars and flying over the United States from the south, where our defenses are limited. Both satellites -- if nuclear armed -- could make an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could blackout the U.S. electric grid for months or years, thereby killing millions.

Technologically, such an EMP attack is easy -- since the weapon detonates at high-altitude, in space, no shock absorbers, heat shield, or vehicle for atmospheric re-entry is necessary. Since the radius of the EMP is enormous, thousands of kilometers, accuracy matters little. Almost any nuclear weapon will do.

Moreover, North Korea probably has nuclear weapons specially designed, not to make a big explosion, but to emit lots of gamma rays to generate high-frequency EMP. Senior Russian generals warned EMP Commissioners in 2004 that their EMP nuclear warhead design leaked “accidentally” to North Korea, and unemployed Russian scientists found work in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Read more here.

Could North Korea launch an EMP attack?

John R. Moore writes at PJ Media about the terrifying prospect of an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack.

North Korea can launch an EMP attack before it has developed nuclear missile technology, and EMP may be far more deadly.

...An EMP disaster from a high-altitude blast seems like science fiction: There is a silent flash high in the sky, and everything using electricity just … stops. Cars stop, power goes out, the Internet dies, satellites quit working, landline and mobile phone systems go out, and computers are destroyed. In a moment, we are back to 1850, as was dramatized in William Forstchen's 2009 novel One Second After.

...As former CIA chief James Woolsey recently said:

"If you look at the electric grid and what it's susceptible to, we would be moving into a world with no food delivery, no water purification, no banking, no telecommunications, no medicine. All of these things depend on electricity in one way or another."

...To nuke one of our cities, the North needs to master ICBM construction, nuclear weapons miniaturization, precision long-range guidance technology, atmospheric re-entry vehicles, and fusing to trigger detonation at the right time after the hazardous re-entry. In contrast, an EMP attack requires only a small, light nuclear weapon and the ability to launch it as a satellite. Once over the U.S., it is detonated.

Already, two satellites launched by North Korea cross the U.S. every day.

Read more here.

EMP is no science fiction

Bill Straub reports at PJ Media,

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director R. James Woolsey warned lawmakers that natural and manmade electromagnetic pulses present an “existential threat to the American people” and accused congressional and White House officials of ignoring a potential catastrophe.

Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee, Woolsey, who served two years under President Bill Clinton, warned that EMP is “a clear and present danger and that something must be done to protect the electric grid and other life sustaining critical infrastructures — immediately.”

But Woolsey noted that official Washington is ignoring the looming threat despite a report issued by a blue-ribbon congressional commission in 2004 that offered what he termed cost-effective solutions.

Experts maintain an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) resulting from a high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon high above the jet stream — perhaps by a rogue state — or a geomagnetic “super storm” caused by the sun, could conceivably lead to an electrical blackout lasting months or even years. A 2008 report by the congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse found that up to nine out of 10 Americans could die from a long-term blackout as a result of starvation and societal collapse.

Reportedly, according to the Wall Street Journal, a study by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission warned that a terrorist attack that destroys just nine key transformer substations could cause a nationwide blackout lasting 18 months.

...Woolsey told Johnson – the lone lawmaker sitting through the hearing for the first hour and a half – that EMP “is not science fiction.”

“One prominent myth is that a sophisticated, high-yield, thermonuclear weapon is needed to make a nuclear EMP attack,” Woolsey said. “In fact, the Congressional EMP Commission found that virtually any nuclear weapon — even a primitive, low-yield atomic bomb such as terrorists might build — would suffice. The U.S. electric grid and other civilian critical infrastructures — for example, communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water — have never been hardened to survive EMP.”

...The Congressional EMP Commission recommended a plan to protect the national electric grid from nuclear EMP attack that would also mitigate all lesser threats — including natural EMP, RFWs, cyber bugs and hacking, physical sabotage and severe weather — for about $2 billion. About $10-20 billion would protect all the critical infrastructures from nuclear EMP attack and other threats.

“Unfortunately, none of these plans has been implemented,” Woolsey said. “The U.S. electric grid and other civilian critical infrastructures remain utterly vulnerable to EMP because of lobbying by the electric power industry and their North American Electric Reliability Corporation has, so far, thwarted every bill by the U.S. Congress to protect the grid from EMP.

Read more here.