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Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2017 10:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Angst over a <\/span>potential electromagnetic pulse attack bubbles up every few months, and it\u2019s easy to understand why. The EMP impact envisioned by people who have studied it closely would be downright apocalyptic: a decimated US power grid, and up to 90 percent of Americans dead within a year. It doesn\u2019t help, either, that North Korea<\/a> recently invoked the specter of an EMP attack, and seems increasingly like it would have the wherewithal to pull one off.<\/p>\n In broad strokes, if you explode a nuclear weapon at high altitude, it generates an electromagnetic pulse, which in turn can disrupt electronics ranging from cars, to street lights, to the US power grid itself. By what degree depends on whom you ask.<\/p>\n Scary stuff, especially that 90 percent number, which was first offered by representative Roscoe Bartlett in a 2008 Congressional hearing<\/a>, and backed by a physicist\u2014and leading voice in the EMP issue\u2014named William Graham. But Bartlett himself sourced the figure from a work of science fiction, William R. Fostchen\u2019s One Second After<\/em>. And while an EMP surge, be it from a hydrogen bomb detonated high above North America or powerful solar storm, would surely impact daily life, the extent of the possible repercussions remains uncertain. At least where North Korea is concerned, that lack of an assured outcome should help ease\u2014if not totally erase\u2014EMP concerns.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to note early that the EMP threat has become an unlikely live wire. Its most extreme proponents genuinely fear near-total annihilation; its vocal detractors dismiss the threat as science fiction.<\/p>\n In between, though, lie some important subtleties. Crucially, you won\u2019t find much disagreement on the very basic science. In fact, both the US and Russia have proven this out in practice. In 1962, the US conducted a nuclear test known as Starfish Prime, in which it detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead 240 miles above the Pacific. The resulting EMP knocked out hundreds of street lights, and some telephone communications, 900 miles away in Hawaii. Russian tests at around the same time, over Kazakhstan, reportedly resulted in an EMP that took out a 300-mile communication line, among other assorted impacts. Evidence persists beyond those specific corollaries as well.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t need to do high-altitude nuclear tests to know the EMP threat is real,\u201d says Dr. Peter Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Commission and has published several books about its potential impacts. Pry points to data gleaned from underground nuclear tests and EMP simulators, all of which, he says, indicate the strong potential for devastation.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sure you\u2019ve had the experience of driving a car down the road, listening to the radio, and then you\u2019ve driven under a high power line, and suddenly your radio doesn\u2019t work. You come out the other side and it works again. What\u2019s happened is you\u2019ve passed through an electromagnetic field that upset your radio,\u201d says Pry. \u201cI don\u2019t think you have to be Albert Einstein to realize that if that electromagnetic field were, say, a billion times more powerful, that your radio would not just be upset but it would be destroyed, the electronics in your car destroyed. Imagine that now not being a localized phenomenon, but extended to the whole North American continent.\u201d<\/p>\n 'I don\u2019t know how the proponents of EMP get such huge results. I just don\u2019t follow their logic.'<\/p>\n Philip Coyle, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation<\/p>\n The commission Pry served on\u2014tasked with investigating the threat\u2014laid out that case in a 200-plus page 2008 report, and Pry himself speaks passionately on the topic. But EMP skeptics still abound, particularly in the North Korean context. And the EMP Commission shut down on September 30, after the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security didn't seek funds from Congress to continue its operation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that North Korea has tested a larger yield nuclear weapon than before is of concern because of the yield of the nuclear weapon, not because of EMP,\u201d says Philip Coyle, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense and Director of Operational Test and Evaluation at the Pentagon, and spent decades studying nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.<\/p>\n Coyle acknowledges that EMPs can be a problem\u2014the electromagnetic pulse from an 1859 solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, would have devastating consequences if repeated today\u2014but he and others remain skeptical as to the true impact of the type of nuclear-based attack outlined by the EMP Commission.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know how the proponents of EMP get such huge results. I just don\u2019t follow their logic,\u201d says Coyle. \u201cThere just isn\u2019t a scientific basis to get these huge results, these huge numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s still not proof that it would destroy a wide area of electrical equipment today," says Sarah Burke, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy in the Obama administration and is currently a senior adviser at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank. "There\u2019s no actual proof that this would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Pry dismisses those who regard EMP as science fiction as \u201cidiot naysayers.\u201d But Coyle, Burke, and others who have raised doubts don\u2019t deny the underlying scientific principals. \u201cNuclear weapons do put out electromagnetic pulses of different varieties, and some of them are quite dangerous,\u201d Burke says. \u201cYou\u2019ll find that a lot of US military equipment, at least from the Cold War, was shielded against those kinds of EMPs.\u201d<\/p>\n For EMP threat skeptics, though, decades-old tests and modern simulations don\u2019t equal a guaranteed result today. Which means the right question to ask isn\u2019t if North Korea could explode a nuclear weapon high over the United States. It\u2019s whether Kim Jong Un would take that risk, uncertain of the ultimate effect, but knowing that his country would receive the full weight of American military response in return.<\/p>\n Or, as Burke puts it: \u201cIf you\u2019re a country that wants to go to war with the United States, and you want to cause maximum damage, you want to be pretty sure it\u2019s going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n North Korea attacking the US with an EMP would be a fantastically high-risk maneuver, with uncertain gains. And even if it did incapacitate much of the US power grid, it wouldn\u2019t prevent a counterstrike. US military equipment is hardened, and its response could come from plenty of places other than North America.<\/p>\n In fact, even testing the effects of an EMP attack could provoke US military engagement, says Bruce Bennett, who specializes in asymmetric threats at the Rand Corporation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe North Korean foreign minister recently threatened to detonate a nuclear weapon over the Pacific to demonstrate their missile capabilities. I think if he even does that, not as EMP, there is a fairly significant chance that the US would respond,\u201d says Bennett.<\/p>\n That sort of provocation would be out of character for Kim Jong Un, who despite the public bluster has historically known where the boundaries are, and managed not to cross them. His main objective is the survival of his regime; exploding a nuclear weapon above the United States would almost certainly assure its destruction.<\/p>\n 'If you\u2019re a country that wants to go to war with the United States, and you want to cause maximum damage, you want to be pretty sure it\u2019s going to work.'<\/p>\n Sharon Burke, New America<\/p>\n Given all the uncertainty, the takeaways about the EMP threat are also unclear. Long-term investment in hardening US grid infrastructure makes some sense, but headlines blaring that North Korea could kill 90 percent of the US population with one EMP strike seem counterproductive.<\/p>\n \u201cThe threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war with North Korea is a plenty big enough threat as far as I\u2019m concerned,\u201d says Coyle. \u201cTalking about EMP, I think it\u2019s just a distraction. I don\u2019t know why it keeps coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n As often happens, the best course to chart might be somewhere down the middle.<\/p>\n \u201cThe threat is perhaps best characterized as low \u200bprobability but \u200bpotentially \u200bvery high consequence\u200b,\u201d says Frank Cilluffo, director of George Washington University\u2019s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. \u201cFor this reason, the prudent course is to prepare in advance,\u201d through international cooperation to try and contain North Korea, and an increased focus on preventative measures at home and in space.<\/p>\n Pry disagrees. In recent Congressional testimony, he offered perhaps the cleanest distillation of the EMP argument, in that it\u2019s equal parts irrefutable and unprovable.<\/p>\n \u201cI suspect people will continue to describe an EMP threat as unlikely,\u201d said<\/a> Pry, \u201cright up until the day before North Korea actually attacks us.\u201d<\/p>\n