Gingrich Is Ranting About EMPs Again

I don't understand what makes Newt Gingrich tick, but he's at it again - telling us all that the EMP threat is going to drive America back into the pre-Colonial days.

GINGRICH: [W]hat we are faced with is not simply a problem, it is potentially catastrophic. … [The] electro-magnetic pulse, from my co-author and good friend Bill Forstchen, has written a remarkable novel called One Second After, in which he takes a town in North Carolina and shows you what would happen with a successful electro-magnetic pulse attack. Electro-magnetic pulse is essentially a peculiarly-sized nuclear device that becomes a giant lightning strike. [...]

[E]xperts in nuclear weaponry, and they came back and said unanimously, “This is a catastrophic threat waiting to happen and North Korea, China and Russia all understand it and are all working on it.” Which is why I adopted the position towards North Korea that I would literally not allow them to fire any intercontinental range missile that we had not inspected. I would just take it out on the site.

And the reason is simple; one weapon of this kind that went off over Omaha would eliminate most of the electrical production in the United States. And we are not today hardened against this. It is an enormous catastrophic threat.

You don't say. Well, I want to hear from a real nuclear weapons expert. Stephen Younger, former senior fellow at Los Alamos National Lab and director at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, released a book earlier this year titled "The Bomb." It's a good book that I refer to both laypersons and military analysts who aren't familiar with the history of nuclear weapons, current issues, and associated strategies. Here's what he has to say about the EMP threat:

Since an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is generated in the upper atmosphere and projected downward, the affected area is quite large, potentially encompassing an entire country. However, the consequences of such an attack are limited to electronics (people and structures are not affected), and there is considerable debate within the scientific community about the sensitivity of electronics to a given type of pulse. Contrary to media reports, it is not true that an EMP attack from a typical strategic weapon would completely shut down the electronics within a country. First, the effect is statistical in nature - some systems will not notice the pulse at all while identical counterparts will be affected. Second, 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. (Upset can, however, have catastrophic consequences if the computer is the flight controller of an aircraft or another time-critical system.) Third, the EMP output from a typical device is degraded by several design issues so that few, if any, weapons currently deployed in military stockpiles will produce the maximum possible effect. Of all the nuclear effects, EMP seems the most prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

I'm sticking with Younger's point of view.

Comments

[Selil]

There is a lot more to the younger point of view and EMP is a real threat. There are non nuclear EMP bombs that would work quite handily and require only the level of experience IED's require. In fact with a few changes many IED's could be made to be localized EMP bombs too. A little bit of neat history on EMP testing of Aircraft http://www.ece.unm.edu/summa/notes/trestle.html

[J.]

No one is disputing that EMP exists or can be a threat to vulnerable systems. What we are saying is that there is a community who is deliberately exaggerating the threat way beyond its ability to encourage a particular agenda (national missile defense). It remains true that to cause what Newt is suggesting, you'd need to launch a megaton nuke over Kansas to achieve a significant and catastrophic effect to the nation. And if someone - anyone - launches a nuclear-tipped missile against the United States, don't you think that 1) there will be a significant military response from hardened command posts and missile silos and submarines, and 2) we'll have a lot more to worry about than some fried computers.

Oh and about the linked article - great, a guy who was in charge of an EMP test range wants to stress the point that EMPs are a national threat. I still doubt it. But even if it were true, I would suggest that the solution is hardening, redundancy, and resiliency, not missile defense. Lots cheaper, lots more useful.

[Cheryl Rofer]

Selil's link doesn't work. [J. - fixed it.]

And the IED idea is even more preposterous than nuclear EMP.

I think that Gingrich says these kinds of things 1) because he's a Republican and feels it is his duty to instill fear in the population; 2) because he likes to maintain a sort of wonky reputation and hopes that most of the voters don't know enough to see that he's just being dumb; 3) because he likes the attention.

[Tim L.]

Probably an even greater EMP threat is the sun. The last big cycle of solar flares happened before we had this dependence on an electronic infrastructure. If that same level hit us now, it would probably be worse, chances are the entire electric grid would be completely disabled at the very least. This is a good reason to work on our infrastructure to harden against this then we won't have to worry about that issue.

[Ray]

"you'd need to launch a megaton nuke over Kansas to achieve a significant and catastrophic effect to the nation. And if someone - anyone - launches a nuclear-tipped missile against the United States, don't you think that 1) there will be a significant military response from hardened command posts and missile silos and submarines, and 2) we'll have a lot more to worry about than some fried computers."

Right on, J.

Mr Gingrich's lecture is food for thought, but it falls flat on the point you made.

[Jason]

hey man...Newt didn't say he would use anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down the missile being fired. He said he would not allow it to be launched at all. He means that he would destroy it on the ground. There is more about EMP to be concerned about...the threat may not come from our,humanity's, nukes but, from that great nuclear reaction in the sky...our own star. If for no other reason we should be preparing...like you said by hardening our equipment and storing replacements. Think before you rant.

[Ray]

Interesting: suppose smaller weapons might be developed to use EMP against military targets; communications, ships and so on.

[Robert H. Tyrka Sr.]

What is notably missing from both the article and the comments is any reference to the conclusions of the Congressional Commission regarding EMP attacks, their feasibility and likelihood.
http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf
and http://downloads.tpass.org/file.php?id=63

To me, these deliberations and their conclusions carry far more weight than the opinion of the one purported expert, Stephen Younger.

Younger is replete with assertions with no facts to back them up: "First, the effect is statistical in nature - some systems will not notice the pulse at all while identical counterparts will be affected. Second, 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. (Upset can, however, have catastrophic consequences if the computer is the flight controller of an aircraft or another time-critical system.) Third, the EMP output from a typical device is degraded by several design issues so that few, if any, weapons currently deployed in military stockpiles will produce the maximum possible effect."

Insofar as the military has been aware of, and has been implementing both hardening and counter-measures where feasible, the threat to US forces since 1962, it behooves the armchair generals to get some facts instead of mushing around in meaningless generalizations and ad hominem attacks on those whose political opinions they does not share.

Younger avers that "the EMP output from a typical device is degraded by several design issues so that few, if any, weapons currently deployed in military stockpiles will produce the maximum possible effect." How can he possibly know that? He is no longer active in the field and I daresay hardly privy to the capabilities of current or future military stockpiles, especially of those enemies like North Korea or Iran and its surrogates that may be used to destroy us not, in Handel's words in Messiah, "in the twinkling of an eye", but over an agonizing year or so when the population starves or goes berserk looking to their neighbors for food for their children, or develops cholera because a broken down and polluted water supply.

An effective missile defense, and we are well on our way to one unless the current administration succeeds in reducing, once again, the efforts to make it operational, might, just might be able to take down a fission weapon (no, it doesn't require a megaton fusion weapon as someone ignorantly asserted)launched from a submarine (North Korea has the third largest submarine fleet in the world), a barge or an old freighter that could escape or be scuttled so that we would never know who destroyed American civilization.

Please, more informed facts and analysis rather than wishful thinking.

[George Smith]

Emerging Threats congressional committee meaning discussed by me here.

It was warned we could go back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with nothing to make us whole. The electrical reliability folks wanted to discuss cybersecurity but had to endure the EMP menace show. Bravely they weathered it.

[joe st sauver]

Very interesting article.

If you're interested in the EMP issue, you may want to check out the EMP talk I was invited to give for Infragard this past April:

Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)
http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/infragard-2009/infragard-eugene-2009.pdf

It directly addresses some of the points that were raised in the original article, including the upset vs. destruction issue... Comments/feedback welcomed.

Regards,

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.

Disclaimer: all opinions strictly my own.

[Sven Ortmann]

I've got a cold war book on arms science stuff and it stressed the fact that the angle of exposure of the electronics is important and would protect many electronics from a pulse.
The authors sketched an attack with 4-5 1 Mt bombs 500 km over the U.S. for a good effect.

I believe that only the U.S., UK, France, Russia and with some improvisation China could pull that off.

[Ray]

"Several potential adversaries, such as China, are capable of launching a crippling EMP strike against the US with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, and others, such as North Korea or even terrorist groups, could have the capability by 2015, the panel said in its findings that it unveiled to US legislators at a hearing on 22 July
2004".
This from Jane's Intel. 26th July, 2004; but journalistic rather than providing any indication or hint of hard data.

[Ray]

See also Missilethreat.com. July 24th 2009.