by Bobby Akart
SUGGESTIONS TO U.S. POLICYMAKERS
At Heritage.org, Senior Policy Analyst, Michaela Dodge and Policy Analyst, Jessica Zuckerman provided this list of what Congress and the Administration should do:
· Mandate additional research into mitigating EMP threats. Similar to what Maine is doing, the U.S. should undertake additional research into how an EMP would affect electronics and electrical systems and how these vulnerabilities can be removed or lessened.
· Determine which countries could undertake EMP attacks. The U.S. should understand where potential EMP attacks could come from and produce intelligence estimates on nations that are pursuing or already have weapons capable of producing an EMP. This information can then be used to better inform policymakers on how best to respond to potential threats and prevent EMP attacks from occurring.
· Improve and fully fund U.S. missile defense. Ballistic missiles are one of the most effective means of delivering an EMP. U.S. missile defense should be advanced to address the threat, especially as the East Coast remains less protected than the West Coast. Improved command-and-control features and interceptors tied to forward-deployed radar would give the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptor the ability to counter long-range ballistic missiles in the late midcourse stage of flight. The government should improve the SM-3’s ability to intercept short-range ballistic missiles in the ascent phase of flight. Ultimately, the U.S. should develop and deploy space-based missile defense, the best way to protect the U.S. and its allies from ballistic missiles.
· Develop a National Recovery Plan and National Planning Scenario for EMP. The catastrophic cost of an EMP event means that it deserves careful preparation and planning. Such plans should take the advice of the EMP commission and employ a risk-based approach that recognizes that certain infrastructure—particularly electrical and telecommunication systems upon which all other sectors depend—is most important in preparing for and recovering from an EMP event. Additionally, DHS should have a National Planning Scenario dedicated to EMP so that local, state, and federal authorities understand what would happen in an EMP event and what their respective responsibilities are in terms of both response and recovery.
· Prepare and protect critical cyber infrastructure. Cyber infrastructure is completely and uniquely dependent on the power grid, which makes it particularly vulnerable to an EMP. The U.S. should explore ways to protect and shield the circuit boards of critical networks. Additionally, the U.S. should consider the interdependency between the nation’s cyber infrastructure and the other critical infrastructures and take actions to prevent cascading failures.
Chapter Fourteen
U. S. Department of Defense Preparations
Military moves NORAD to Cheyenne Mountain
New concerns are being raised that the nation's electrical grid and critical infrastructure are increasingly vulnerable to a catastrophic foreign attack -- amid speculation over whether officials are eyeing a former Cold War bunker, inside a Colorado mountain, as a shield against such a strike.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command is looking for ways to protect itself in the event of a massive EMP. A $700 million contract with Raytheon to upgrade electronics inside Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain facility may provide a clue about just how worried the military is about the threat.
The Cheyenne Mountain bunker is a half-acre cavern carved into a mountain in the 1960s that was designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. From inside the massive complex, airmen were poised to send warnings that could trigger the launch of nuclear missiles.
The Air Force moved out of Cheyenne Mountain, which was built to survive a nuclear attack, in 2006, establishing its NORAD headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. But that facility, inside the mountain, could offer protection against a so-called EMP attack.
The head of NORAD recently suggested, at an April 2015 Pentagon press conference, that Cheyenne may still be needed. "My primary concern was, are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody who wants to move in there?" Admiral William Gortney told reporters, "I'm not at liberty to discuss who's moving in there, but we do have that capability to be there. And so, there's a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there.”
NORAD spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis, told Fox News, "The mountain's ability to provide a shield against an EMP is certainly a valuable feature, and that is one reason we maintain the ability to return there quickly, if needed."
Now, officials say that the Pentagon is looking at shifting communications gear to the Cheyenne bunker.
"A lot of the back office communications is being moved there," said one defense official.
Officials agree that the military's dependence on computer networks and digital communications makes it much more vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse, which can occur naturally or result from a high-altitude nuclear explosion.
Under the 10-year contract, Raytheon is supposed to deliver "sustainment" services to help the military perform "accurate, timely, and unambiguous warning and attack assessment of air, missile, and space threats" at the Cheyenne and Peterson bases.
Raytheon's contract also involves unspecified work at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Pentagon constructs $44 million EMP-proof bunker in Alaska
Fort Greely, Alaska is home to one of America’s two domestic missile defense bases. Now, it’s getting armored against high-altitude electromagnetic energy attacks—like the kind emitted from nuclear blasts. The Pentagon is spending millions on a bunker designed to protect against exactly that. According to contract documents from the Army Corps of Engineers, the military plans to spend $44 million on an “HEMP-protected” bunker housing the base’s missile launch control systems. The base at Fort Greely houses anti-ballistic missile interceptors stored in silos, and can also control and direct interceptors fired from a similar site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The sum allocated to the Fort Greely project is small in comparison to the $41 billion the Pentagon is spending on its ground-based defense program through FY2017. The plan calls for the installation of dozens of missile interceptors in Alaska and California. These interceptors will carry kinetic kill weapons, designed to impact and destroy ballistic missiles during their mid-course phase. Mid-course defense refers to the flight pattern of ballistic missiles as they travel through space—and before they reenter the atmosphere moving at extremely high speeds.
But a missile defense site wouldn’t count for much if it could be knocked out by an EMP. The Pentagon is concerned enough with that scenario to protect its missile defense site. “The EMP and blast-proof building design also will provide a blueprint for subsequent launch-control buildings at Fort Greely,” reported the trade journal, Military and Aerospace Electronics. Naturally, EMP-shielding also protects against lightning strikes, so it’s a good insurance policy to shield the base’s critical launch systems, in any case.
The contract points out that when the military first constructed the silos, the building housing the key launch components, “was not blast protected, HEMP shielded, and did not provide the utility redundancy to support a deployed weapons system.” By protecting the base from EMP blasts, the Pentagon means the ability, “to resist the effects of a surface blast due to the accidental explosion of a missile as it exits a silo.”
What are the United States government and the military preparing for? Why are they finally taking the threat seriously?
PART SIX
THE AFTERMATH
CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE – EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS
Chapter Fifteen
A Collapse Event
In any extreme situation, you cannot survive for more than 3 minutes without air – 3 hours without shelter – 3 days without water – 3 weeks without food.
A collapse of the power grid may occur due to a cyber attack or an electromagnetic pulse. An EMP would destroy critical electric
al infrastructure and potentially shut down a large portion of the nation’s electrical grid. The widespread, functional collapse of the electric power system in the area affected by EMP would be likely.
But even if the U.S. is never attacked by an EMP weapon, scientists tell us that it is inevitable that a massive solar storm will fry our electrical grid someday. If an event similar to the solar storm of 1859—the Carrington Event—happened today, it would be catastrophic. That massive solar storm fried telegraph machines all over Europe and North America. At some point, we will experience another solar storm, and some scientists believe that we are already 50 years overdue for another one. In fact, the earth barely dodged a signficant CME in the summer of 2012.
Within 24 – 48 hours after the collapse of the power grid, lack of information will lead to confusion among the general population as traditional news acquisition sources like television, radio, and cell phone networks will be non-functional. Once people realize the power might not be coming back on, and grocery store shelves start emptying, the entire system will begin to delve into chaos. Within thirty days, mass casualties would begin as food supplies dwindled, looters and gangs turned to violent extremes, medicine couldn’t be restocked and water pump stations failed.
What about long-term?
According to the EMP Commission that investigated this issue, approximately two-thirds of the U.S. population could potentially die from starvation, disease and societal chaos within one year. It would be a disaster, unlike anything that we have ever seen before in U.S. history.
Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, is even more pessimistic. He believes that a single EMP blast could potentially end up killing almost the entire population of the United States.
“Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity,” Gaffney states.
As a society, we are simply not equipped to function without electricity. Dr. William Graham was the chairman of the government commission, which I mentioned above, and he believes that a Super-EMP blast could knock the United States back into “the late 1800s” in just a single moment.
Life after an EMP attack, “would probably be something that you might imagine life to be like around the late 1800s but with several times the population we had in those days, and without the ability of the country to support and sustain all those people,” Graham says. “They wouldn’t have power. Food supplies would be greatly taken out by the lack of transportation, telecommunication, power for refrigeration and so on.”
If a direct solar flare hits the earth, some of which can be 14 times the size of our planet, scientists from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences say it would cost the nation up to $2 trillion in the first year. It could take four to ten years to recover and would affect ninety percent of the U.S. population, meaning widespread starvation and death.
Chapter Sixteen
Critical Infrastructure
EMP: A Threat from Above to America's Soft Underbelly Below
How will America survive a complete collapse of our critical infrastructure following an EMP attack?
The clock is ticking. One Second After. One Year After. Even if there is never a major EMP attack against the United States, scientists tell us that it is only a matter of time before a massive solar storm fries the electrical grid.
An EMP event could knock out the U.S. electrical grid system and the critical infrastructures that rely on it. Along with the national electrical grid, other critical infrastructures include telecommunications, banking and financial transactions, oil and natural gas pipelines, transportation, food and water delivery, emergency services and space systems.
And without a doubt, our electrical grid represents the “soft underbelly” of the U.S. infrastructure.
Critical infrastructure is the backbone of every nations’ economy, security, and health. It is the power we use in our homes, the water we drink, the transportation that moves us, and the communication systems that we rely on to stay in touch with friends and family. Critical infrastructure includes the assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, so vital to a country that its incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.
The following lists twelve examples of critical infrastructure that are highly sensitive and vulnerable to EMP attacks:
· Electricity generation/production, transmission and distribution, Electrical Grids and Smart Grid Systems
· Gasoline production, transport, and distribution
· Heating (gas, fuel oil, steam, etc.)
· Satellite and land-based telecommunication; network, transmission and control centers
· Mobile communications network, base stations and centers
· Data centers; data equipment, control centers, power supply, cooling, etc.
· Transportation systems (fuel supply for vehicles, railway network, airports, harbors, inland shipping)
· Financial services (stock exchange, banking, ATMs, etc.)
· Agriculture food production and distribution
· Water supply (drinking water, waste water/sewage, stemming of surface water)
· Public health (hospitals, ambulances, mental health facilities)
· Security services (FEMA, police, military, prison system)
Most infrastructures have data/telecom systems highly dependent on critical electronic systems and equipment including power systems, cooling, vents. etc. Telecommunications systems, modern vehicles, and more, have vulnerable electronic devices and processors that are highly sensitive to an EMP. All unprotected electronic systems and equipment have a high possibility for a temporary or permanent failure after an EMP event.
The effect of an EMP attack is not limited to electronics on Earth. Satellite systems can be hit by an EMP, (Solar storms, HEMP explosion, etc.) and indirectly cause massive problems for various transportation and telecom systems like airline and ship traffic, on‐land transportation, and mobile phone networks.
Experts call the North American power grid the largest machine in the world. Its massive scale and reach make it impossible to protect fully. However, this vulnerability doesn't leave us defenseless. It does just the opposite. Due to its distributed nature and extensive network, the grid is phenomenally resilient, with the ability to shift power distribution at any time of day, and seal off potential areas of concern or damage. Likewise, working in the power industry, grid owners and operators have agreements in place to immediately deploy needed personnel and resources, identify and deliver spare equipment, including large transformers, and initiate recovery efforts to restore power quickly.
But what if the power grid comes under a sustained, coordinated attack? The concept of rolling blackouts concerns FERC and utility companies nationwide. It has already happened in America on several occasions. The extensive network was unable to pick up the slack as envisioned.
To their credit, power utilities are always reviewing ways to strengthen the nation's critical infrastructure. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation and FERC are working together to enhance reliability as it relates to geomagnetic disturbances as well. Naturally occurring solar storms could also impact the electric grid. NERC and FERC have developed standards requiring emergency procedures and preparedness strategies that would mitigate the effects of a significant geomagnetic storm event. Regulators and scientists at NERC recognize that these two events, EMPs and geomagnetic storms, are often incorrectly equated with one another. An EMP produces destructive energy pulses significantly more damaging than those created by a solar event, but mitigation measures applied for an EMP event can enhance protection.
America’s critical infrastructure can never be completely secured from all potential dangers, including terrorist attacks and cyber intrusions, but the power industry is man
aging the EMP threat in tangible and consistent ways. With every incident, including significant geomagnetic storms, the industry is learning — and the grid is getting better-equipped to handle evolving threats. This knowledge creates a compounding effect of lessons learned, that ultimately helps the sector meet challenges presented by many threats, including EMPs.
Targeted attacks on the electrical grid happen all the time, but most of them are not reported by the mainstream media. The following report of an attack is from 2013:
More than 10,000 people in Arkansas were dumped into a blackout in 2013 following an attack on that state’s electric grid, The FBI announced that in August of 2013, a major transmission line in the region, around Cabot, Arkansas, was deliberately cut. Also, they said that two power poles had been intentionally cut in Lonoke County, resulting in an outage.
The following is how the FBI described the attack:
In the early morning hours of September 29, 2013, officials with Entergy Arkansas reported a fire at its Keo substation located on Arkansas Highway 165 between Scott and England, in Lonoke County. Fortunately, there were no injuries and no reported power outages. The investigation has determined that the fire, which consumed the control house at the substation, was intentionally set. The person or persons responsible for this incident inscribed a message on a metal control panel outside the substation which reads, “YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED US.”
