Gaffney Describes How to Win the War on Terror |
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Now, after the end of the Cold War, what if there is a different kind of attack on the U.S.? What if a country which has only one or two nuclear weapons chooses to put it on a missile, a Scud, which are a dime a dozen on the world market, and shoots them from a ship over the U.S. According to Graham, “You just have to get the nuclear warhead above the atmosphere and within line-ofsight of the region you want to disrupt.” Graham explained that the Commission sought out two Russian experts who admitted that both Russian engineers and Chinese engineers worked in North Korea helping them to design various military capabilities. “I think it would be reasonable to assume those included some nuclear capabilities,” said Graham. The Russians told them that while they could not officially sanction it, if the U.S. was to attack North Korean nuclear facilities, they would certainly understand why we had done it. “We were never able to solve the mystery of the peak field levels because the Commission members were unable to meet and talk with Russian technologists, but if the commission is ever reestablished that must be done,” he said. Today our very advanced and efficient infrastructure provides both our civilian population and our military with telecommunications, financial distribution systems (most money flows electronically today), traffic, health services, government, and power and energy including gas pipelines, oil pipelines, rail lines – all of these depend upon it and are high-reliability infrastructures. Under normal circumstances they have an n-1 survivability, meaning they tend to fail only one note at a time. In other words, even though everything can fail, it is usually a single failure not correlated failures or multiple failures across the system. But if you get multiple infrastructure failures, you don’t have infrastructure one to draw on to help repair infrastructure two or three. Hurricane Katrina was a classic example because you had “a massive infrastructure attack and failure where we lost power, communications, energy transport, transportation, financial management, organizational management, government functions, public safety – all simultaneously,” Graham said. That is the problem of what a high-altitude EMP attack could cause. All of our infrastructures draw on electronics for their control and management. Even microchips are used in cars today and just ordinary automobiles were found to be vulnerable to high-altitude EMP. In a test of EMP attack, 10 percent of them just stopped. “You can imagine what it would look like if 10 percent of the traffic suddenly stopped,” he explained, “It would take days to weeks to un-jam the roads and to unscramble the accidents and to try to get anything clear so you would have access again.”
“A nuclear burst at a 100 miles altitude over the East Coast could cover essentially the whole East Coast where something over a third of the population lives. Another one could do the West Coast. If you are into the ICBM class of threat, one over the middle of the country could get both of those. And the effect falls off very slowly with altitude. It is a saturation type of effect.” he explained. Responding to this threat, Graham recommended we work to dissuade countries from conducting this sort of attack on the U.S. and work up a plan of how we would respond to deal with those countries and terrorists elements that could not be dissuaded. He also advised that we protect our high-value items and assign a single office and point person responsible for the protection and reconstruction of the infrastructure. If an office like that had existed, it would have been a help in responding to Hurricane Katrina.
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Dr. Bill Graham, chairman of the Commission
to Assess the Threat to the United States
from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack,
addressed DFF’s Capitol Hill Forum to
expose what many believe to be one of the
most fatal threats facing the United States Dr. Bill Graham explained that because the population of the United States no longer lives on farms, which provided relative selfsufficiency in the past, an EMP attack would be devastating because we now depend heavily on critical infrastructures to provide food, water, safety, health, and protection. To lose those infrastructures would lead to tremendous loss of life. The phenomenon of EMP was first detected in 1962 when the U.S. conducted a series of tests. One involved a megaton burst at an altitude of approximately 400 kilometers over Johnston Island in the Pacific, a little above the horizon at Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. After this burst, a number of strange things happened in Oahu and elsewhere in the Hawaiian Islands. These results were completely unexpected because the calculations of the nuclear EMP by physicists had completely missed the basic phenomena that was involved. Graham said that among the
strange things that happened
were Oahu lost 36 chains of
streetlights around blocks and in
the city, burglar alarms started
going off, and microwave relay
was lost at the station on the
Island of Kauai. Graham then
spent the next three years working
on the nuclear effects, and particularly
the electromagnetic effects, in close
cooperation with scientists at Los Alamos. Los
Alamos scientist Conrad Longmire realized
what was really happening with the high-altitude
EMP when he determined that the peak
electric fields were in a very, very sharp, fast
pulse of electromagnetic energy — basically
radio frequency energy crunched up into a “So we have learned over time that you can have electromagnetic fields not only very fast and very intense, but some slower ones which look more like geomagnetic storms that also produce significant effects, but of a different type,” he said. “The geomagnetic storm-like effects tend to disrupt and damage and take down long-distance electric power transmission systems, for example the systems that take power from Hydro-Québec and bring it down into the United States.” In 1994, we started getting hints that the Soviets had thought that the peak EMP fields were not just at 100,000 volts per meter, but possibly as high as 200,000 volts per meter, Graham pointed out, and by 1998 we were sure that they had a different view. “To this day we don’t know why the Soviets get one value for the EMP which is twice the value we get,” Graham said. “This strikes me as a substantial lack of curiosity to say the least about the subject since it really can affect what the high-altitude nuclear explosions can do to surface systems, military systems, and civilian systems as well. So we have a big scientific mystery out there that we have had for a decade.”
During the Cold War, high-altitude EMP had a particular kind of concern to be used as a precursor attack: missiles launched by submarines could shut down our military’s capability to both perceive that we were under attack and to respond to it in a rapid manner. At the time, “we weren’t so worried about the effect of the high-altitude EMP on the civilian infrastructure because we assume with 20 minutes or so the civilian infrastructure was going to be destroyed anyway in an attack by the then Soviet Union,” Graham explained. |
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