Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

December 01, 2011

I have to confess that I didn't watch CNN's recent presidential candidates' debate in Washington, since it conflicted with one of my favorite shows, Punkin Chunkin 2011, and my fascination with ingenious DIY technology for propelling members of the genus Cucurbita to new lengths easily trumps the spectacle of politicians firing off carefully rehearsed verbal zingers at one another like teenagers at a laser-tag emporium. But when I checked out the transcript of the debate, I have to concede that I was intrigued by candidate Newt Gingrich's answer to the question, "What national security issue do you worry about that nobody is asking about, either here or in any of the debates so far?"

A National Security Issue

Gingrich, with the zeal of a student angling for extra credit, responded with not one but three potential threats. Granted, two of them -- terrorists exploding a nuclear device in a major U.S. city and a cyber attack on U.S. computer infrastructure -- have been trumpeted in the media in recent years almost as extensively as Snooki being punched in an episode of Jersey Shore. But Gingrich's third item definitely qualified as one that most of the viewers, and perhaps most of the other candidates as well, probably have not been thinking about much:

"An electromagnetic pulse attack, which would literally destroy the country's capacity to function."

Gingrich added, ominously, that like a nuclear strike on a city or cyber warfare, an electromagnetic pulse attack was "outside the current capacity of our system to deal with."

Now, if you're a fan of the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix, in whichthehuman rebels used an electromagnetic pulse weapon to attack the machines, you're probably thinking, wow, cool. (A friend of mine who watched the spy show 24 informs me that an electromagnetic attack on Los Angeles figured in the series' final season plot line.) The rest of you, however, may be wondering: What the heck is an electromagnetic pulse attack? And if we are as vulnerable to it as Gingrich says, should I be cowering under my couch right now in terror? And if so, why isn't the government doing something about it?

Of course, this isn't the first time that a politician has evoked the specter of some cataclysmic threat. Back in 1960, presidential hopeful Sen. John F. Kennedy, D- Mass., gave a speech at the American Legion convention, in which he spoke ominously of a "missile gap" that might allow the Soviet Union to overwhelm the U.S. in a nuclear confrontation. While JFK made it sound real, as this declassified National Security Agency document details, available intelligence on the size of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal was sketchy, at best. We know today that the Soviets possessed just two ICBMs at the time and were the ones badly outgunned by the U.S. missile arsenal. (They later managed to catch up.)

High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse

What Gingrich is talking about, apparently, is something called a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or HEMP, which is not to be confused with the crop that George Washington once cultivated. The idea of HEMP has been around probably since the 1950s, when scientists noticed that nuclear bomb blasts gave off intense bursts of gamma rays into the atmosphere. The latter collide with atoms in the atmosphere, knocking loose a whole lot of electrons, an effect known as Compton scattering. When they reach the upper atmosphere, the electrons don't have anything to hit, so they spiral around the Earth's magnetic field lines. The result is a very brief -- about 10 nanoseconds -- pulse of extremely high-voltage electromagnetic energy that's capable of damaging computers, landline telephone systems, power grids, radio transmitters and anything else on the ground that contains circuitry. The Pentagon was sufficiently intrigued by this effect that it conducted a 1962 test called Starfish Prime, in which the military set off a 1.4- megaton nuclear device at an altitude of 250 miles over Johnston Island in the north-central Pacific. The idea was to see if a high-altitude nuclear bomb blast could destroy Soviet or Chinese anti-missile radar systems, rendering those enemies sitting ducks for a punishing U.S. strike.

However, according to this declassified 1962 U.S. government report on Starfish Prime, the blast didn't produce quite the paralyzing effect that the Pentagon had hoped for. "Detonation degradation of communications and radar surveillance capabilities was found to be appreciably less than expected," the report notes. A few networks of streetlights on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, about 800 miles from the blast, did briefly go out, which according to this 1989 analysis by a scientist from Sandia National Laboratories was probably caused by the Starfish Prime's HEMP. But even so, the pulse caused relatively minor damage.

Pretty soon after that, the Americans and the Soviets -- who achieved equally dismal results from their own HEMP tests, as detailed in this Space Review article -- signed a nuclear test-ban treaty, and so there weren't any more chances to see whether a HEMP attack would really work.

Nevertheless, fears about U.S. vulnerability to a HEMP attack have periodically resurfaced over the years. As reported in this 1972 New York Times article, the Nixon administration's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, asked Congress for funds to develop countermeasures, including a fleet of seven Boeing 747s that would stay permanently aloft. Here's a 1984 thesis from a Marine major at the military's Command and Staff College on the possibility of the Soviet Union mounting an electromagnetic pulse attack against U.S. forces in Europe. Over the past couple of decades, Congress also has repeatedly probed the subject, including holding this 1999 hearing on electromagnetic pulse threats to military and civilian infrastructure and commissioning this 2004 report warning that "EMP is capable of causing catastrophe for the nation." One leading HEMP alarmist is Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., who gave a speech on the House floor to tout a disaster novel, William R. Forstchen's One Second After, which envisions an apocalyptic electromagnetic attack on the U.S.:

At that same instant, the ceiling fan began to slowly wind down, the stereo in Jennifer's room shut off, and looking over to his alcove office he saw the computer screen saver disappear, the green light of the on button on the nineteen-inch monitor disappearing. There was a chirping beep, the signal that the home security and fire alarm system was off-line; then that went silent as well.

Scary, huh? Gingrich, it should be mentioned, wrote the novel's forward, and he's been beating the drum about the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States. As he said in a 2009 speech:

I've believed for a long time that EMP may be the greatest strategic threat we face, because without adequate preparation its impact could be so horrifying that we would, in fact, basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.

Sounds like it's time to stock up on Spam, get a shotgun and bury some gold bullion under the floorboards. On the other hand, the Pentagon has been preparing for a HEMP attack for nearly a half century now. In this 2009 article from Military Aerospace, once you get past all the doomsday scenarios, it turns out that there are already available technologies to enable critical computer networks and communications systems to survive a massive nuclear-induced surge, including mobile data centers powered by solar or wind electricity. Critical equipment can be protected with shielding made of densely woven copper wire or some other conductive material that would take the surge and prevent it from reaching the equipment within. (Electromagnetism pioneer Michael Faraday invented that particular countermeasure back in 1836.)

If you're worried about a HEMP frying your computer, ZDNet columnist Paul Murphy notes that electromagnetic pulses follow the law of inverse squares, which means that unless you're directly under the flash, the signal is likely to be weakened by the time it gets to you. If you're sufficiently far away, you may also have time to unplug your computer, separate the wires, and utilize a simple countermeasure--wrapping your hardware in aluminum foil. (If you're a conspiracy theorist or just a snark, you can also give it a little tinfoil hat.)

Just an Exaggeration?

Some experts question whether the impact of an electromagnetic pulse attack is being exaggerated. As Stephen M. Younger, former director of the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency, notes in his recent book, The Bomb: A New History:

It is not true that an EMP attack from a typical strategic weapon would completely shut down the electronics within a country ... the most likely effect from an EMP attack is "upset" rather than destruction, that is, a temporary scrambling of the memory of a computer or the frequency of a communication device, something that is easily corrected by rebooting or resetting the device.

Additionally, Younger points out, most of the nuclear bombs in most existing military stockpiles around the planet have design features that degrade the capability to produce a really potent electromagnetic surge, so an enemy probably would need to rig up something different to have any serious effect. That required degree of sophistication would make it tougher for a nuclear wannabe such as the Iranian regime or al-Qaida to use HEMP against us.

There's also another important point to consider. Assuming that al-Qaida had the ability to get a 1.4 -- megaton nuclear weapon into U.S. airspace, it strikes me that a HEMP attack is the least of our worries. Why would they simply settle for disabling our computers and phones and creating a temporary nuisance, when they could bomb a major city? (For that matter, since when do terrorists even need a nuclear weapon to kill a lot of people? Fertilizer, box cutters and firearms seem to do the trick quite effectively.)

So what do you think? Is HEMP worth worrying about, or is Gingrich stirring up needless anxieties? Express your opinion below.

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