Electric power drives virtually all infrastructures in the United States. Backup is provided by generators whose life typically is 72 hours or less, along with batteries with a life of a few hours at most. Even a short blackout can cause losses of between 18 and 60 percent of production in the affected area.
Note that in the past 20 years the margin of redundant capacity for emergency needs has halved, from 20 to 10 percent. Increasing use of wind power, a mode that relies on the vagaries of fickle weather, can place unpredictable demands upon the system, increasing reliability problems. Overseas factories often produce (and customize) high-power transformers that step up and down voltage levels as electric current travels between power generation and customer distribution. But these transformers are not an immediate-term solution; the lead-time to order one is about a year, and there are 2,000 transformers in the U.S. electric grid.
As with computers, digitally controlled power systems can suffer extensive damage if shut down without the proper procedures. Thus the electric grid transmission system that links generators and consumers is, the panel said, “highly vulnerable” to EMP.
Telecommunications networks are another major potential weak spot. Backup power typically lasts 4 to 72 hours. (One significant exception: EMP can’t hurt fiber optics, which lie outside the frequency range EMP effects occupy; but computers, telephones, etc. are electrical, and thus the end points of fiber networks are susceptible.)
Banking and finance networks are highly automated electronic digital systems. These networks are impossible to operate without communications connectivity. In the past three decades, the transaction volumes that these networks carry have jumped by several orders of magnitude. A generation ago, a 10 million–share trading day on the New York Stock Exchange was huge, whereas today trading volume averages several billion shares per day. The public securities markets trade trillions of dollars of securities annually; other specialized financial networks also trade trillions of dollars in value. In all, financial communications networks daily carry several times the amount of data held in the entire print collection of the Library of Congress.
The financial industry is well protected against localized outages, with significant backup redundancy. But the industry’s assets are not hardened against EMP, and likely are highly vulnerable. The industry is so automated that reversion to a cash economy may not be feasible in event of a protracted outage; the United States might have to revert to a barter economy. A major disruption for even one day, let alone weeks or months, could be devastating. The Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission agree that even a single day without power could cause wide-scale disruption and risk to critical markets. In a situation where an EMP crippled electronic systems needed to recover lost data, the panel warned that an “irrecoverable loss of critical operating data and essential records on a large scale would likely result in catastrophic and irreversible damage to U.S. society.”
Petroleum and natural gas flow through an extensive physical infrastructure in America. Backup systems can run this energy infrastructure for a few days, but energy transport systems, run by easily fried specialized digital control systems known as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), are vulnerable. (It is SCADA systems that were damaged by the Stuxnet cyberwar software. When the SCADA systems went haywire, they caused Iran’s delicate centrifuge equipment to operate erratically, ultimately rendering nearly 1,000 inoperable.)
Transportation is another source of vulnerability. Coal supplies currently on site at some power plants could last up to a month; other plants have only days’ worth of coal on site. Repair and recovery of railroads would take days to weeks, with manual control able to operate at only 10 to 20 percent of normal capacity.
Modern vehicles have up to 100 microprocessors controlling operations, so an EMP attack could disable most of the nation’s over 200 million vehicles, including the ones that carry about 80 percent of manufactured goods between manufacturer and consumer.
Some 100 deep-draft ports (capable of handling large ships) move 95 percent of overseas trade (75 percent by monetary value); typically, ports have 10 to 20 days’ fuel on the premises.
Aircraft have lots of redundancy. Modern airliners and regional jets carry hydraulic backup, driven by pressurized fluid power and unaffected by EMP or other electrical interference. EMP would zap electrical systems and radar, but planes could fly on hydraulic power and land under visual flight rules, weather permitting. Spacing of landing aircraft would be a problem; air traffic control radars have limited redundancy. Once on the ground, though, planes would stay there until power is restored, save for emergency missions. As food and water ran low and communications closed down, a major EMP strike could bring most air travel to a standstill.
Agriculture requires immense water table and electric grid support. The grid is also essential for food processing, primarily for refrigeration.
Supermarkets are the weakest link—the current reliance on justin-time delivery (using electronic databases) means that supermarkets have one to three days’ supply of food. In 1900, almost a third of Americans were farmers. Today the figure is 2 percent, meaning that there is a shortage of skilled farm personnel to help in a crisis. (Farm productivity, meanwhile, is up fiftyfold.) There are not enough workers to process food in the low-tech ways of earlier times. Gas ranges would work, but most gas-powered ovens built since the mid-1980s would not, as they are made with components more vulnerable to EMP disruption. And these newer models cannot be ignited with a match.
Starvation, in the event that the food infrastructure collapses, would impair mobility and strength within a few days. After four or five days judgment would be impaired. After a fortnight people would be incapacitated. Death would result in one to two months.
The water infrastructure includes over 75,000 dams and reservoirs; thousands of miles of pipes, aqueducts, and distribution and sewer lines connect buildings with many thousands of water treatment facilities. Filtration and disinfectant systems require electric power. So do the pumps that raise water against the pull of gravity (as in skyscrapers). Irrigation and cooling are 80 percent of water consumption. As for drinking water, stores typically carry one to three days’ supply. Overall, because it relies heavily on electricity and digital control systems, the water infrastructure is highly EMP vulnerable.
Emergency services are provided in the United States by some 2 million firefighters, police, and emergency medical personnel. Emergency communications have enhanced backup, but they depend upon other infrastructures functioning. (A minor east coast earthquake in 2011 generated such a huge surge in cellphone traffic that congestion prevented most callers from getting through. An EMP strike would be far worse.)
Space systems orbiting at low altitudes are vulnerable to EMP (as well as to other radioactive elements dispersed by a nuclear explosion, should their orbit take them through an affected zone). However, many vital satellites—such as communications and broadcasting satellites in their geosynchronous orbits, 22,300 miles above earth in deep space—are EMP safe.
Government depends upon all the above services, and is thus vulnerable. It would need to handle public dissemination of information following an attack. People may panic in the face of remote but unexplained dangers: after the 2001 anthrax attacks people took precautions against the disease, despite the astronomical odds of their becoming victims. After an attack, people would want to know about their family, understand what had transpired, and be assured that the authorities were managing the situation. Otherwise panic, or even posttraumatic stress, could result. After Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami megadisaster caused several partial nuclear plant meltdowns and released locally lethal radiation, Americans on the West coast bought iodine tablets, fearing that they otherwise would get thyroid cancer. Many people ignored statements from public health authorities that such precautions were unnecessary (because by the time the iodine crossed the Pacific its toxicity would have been drasticall
y reduced).
Reducing EMP Risk
THE COMMISSION concludes that while an EMP attack on civilian infrastructure is “a serious problem,” it can be managed by public and private cooperation. This may prove optimistic. America may well need other countries to serve as “edge communities” and come to our aid.
A modest investment along the lines indicated in the commission’s report—hardening of key facilities and stockpiling of critical infrastructure components—would surely represent a small fraction of potential exposure and could add a lot to America’s security. The panel listed a set of remedial measures that appear to cost in aggregate perhaps $5 billion. At many times that amount the investment is a bargain.
Hardening vital infrastructures would also protect our lives and trillions in economic value from one phenomenon against which a deal with Moscow will not help: geomagnetic storms from the sun, which interact with the Earth’s magnetic field as does EMP. In 1859 a powerful geomagnetic storm inflicted major damage worldwide. With today’s vast infrastructures global catastrophe could result if another such storm occurred.
Missile defense—intercepting missiles before they reach detonation altitude—could amplify this protection. The threat is hardly theoretical; as indicated above, Iran has successfully tested a missile in EMP mode. A big and unanswered question is when Iran will have an ICBM ready, to cover the 6,350-mile distance between Tehran and Washington, D.C. One report has Iran already having purchased a pair of Chinese DF-31 ICBMs, whose range is 5,000 miles. These have sufficient range to cover all of Europe.
Iran has already launched small satellites into space. Doing so requires accelerating a rocket to an orbital velocity of five miles per second, faster than the four-mile-per-second velocity achieved by ICBMs that traverse space en route to their targets. Iran’s ICBM quest awaits two milestones: when it miniaturizes nuclear warheads, so they are small and light enough to be carried by Iran’s ballistic missiles; and when it achieves sufficient accuracy to put those missiles close to intended targets. Because Iran’s likely targets will be cities, the ICBMs they deploy need not have the pinpoint accuracy, within the radius of several football fields, achieved by U.S. ICBMs.
Currently Iran has the intermediate-range Shahab-3, with a 1,200-mile reach. To reach the continental United States, a Shahab-3 would have to be launched from a base inside the Western Hemisphere. And as it happens, Iran has found just such a base in Venezuela, courtesy of Venezuela’s anti-American president Hugo Chavez. From Caracas to Miami is 1,000 miles, well within the range of the Shahab-3. But being smaller than an ICBM, Shahab missiles will require warheads of greater miniaturization than those for an ICBM. Chavez may succumb to cancer before 2012 ends, but if his followers seize power, then Iran’s basing option will remain open. Meanwhile, six Persian Gulf states have indicated interest in deploying a missile defense shield backed by the U.S., to counter the growing Iranian threat.
Currently deployed missile defense systems can shoot down intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), which travel at about two miles per second. At twice that speed ICBMs are far too fast for existing defense systems to reliably track and destroy. America’s current deployment is minimal, and not effective against an EMP launch.
Such launches pose an additional as yet unmet challenge: they follow a steep trajectory that today’s missile defense systems are not designed to intercept. Existing systems intercept warheads as they descend. But an EMP warhead is detonated at maximum altitude, and will have done its work before today’s systems can perform their defensive mission.
What is ultimately needed is a system like the recently cancelled Airborne Laser, which was carried on a Boeing 747 aircraft and aimed at missiles as they rose off the launch pad or in early stages of flight. The ABL was ended because its technology was considered not good enough. We must put American ingenuity to work anew on this vital task. New directed energy systems—especially those based on ships, which would draw from the vast electric power produced aboard ships (far greater than that generated in any aircraft)—offer promise for improved missile defense in the medium and longer term.
Missile defense needs were examined in the Rumsfeld Commission report, which presented four unanimous broad conclusions:
1. Nuclear missile threats posed by hostile nations to America and its allies are growing.
2. Emerging offensive missile capabilities are “broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly” than realized in the intelligence community.
3. The ability of our intelligence to provide “timely and accurate” estimates of these threats is eroding.
4. Warning times are shrinking and may in some cases be minimal.
Given emerging perils, it is essential that missile defense technology be unleashed, not retarded, by existing arms accords, including New START, and that development on multiple types rapidly proceed. The need for this technology is urgent.
Which makes all the more worrisome President Obama’s identification of missile defense as of “particular” interest in accommodating Moscow’s desires after the November election.
The danger of EMP may seem remote. But failure to protect against it—by hardening essential infrastructure and strengthening missile defense—greatly increases the payoff for surprise attacks, and thus the chance they will be carried out and succeed. The potentially catastrophic consequences of EMP underscore the importance of nuclear-age history’s Eleventh Lesson: NEVER ALLOW SINGLE OR LOW-NUMBER POINTS OF CATASTROPHIC VULNERABILITY.
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54. Some countries claim a 200-mile limit to territorial waters, but such claims are not currently recognized under international law.
14.
THE PERILOUS PRESENT: BEYOND MYTHIC PASTS AND FANTASY FUTURES
How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and so Were able to Resume the Follies Which Had so Nearly Cost Them Their Life.
STATED THEME OF VOLUME 6 OF WINSTON CHURCHILL’S THE SECOND WORLD WAR
LESSONS DRAWN FROM THE NUCLEAR AGE DURING ITS FIRST TWO-THIRDS of a century cannot predict every crisis to come. History does not always repeat itself, but if we are to disregard what history teaches we should have good reason to do so—reason grounded in facts, and logical inferences drawn from those facts. We also should hold a keen appreciation of the intractability of human nature and how that nature affects global politics.
The civilized person recoils at the utter moral insanity and ultimate strategic futility of nuclear war. But defending and preserving civilization from its worst enemies, some of highly dubious stability, necessitates considering how to prevent the very real prospect that nuclear weapons will be used for the first time since 1945. The prospect of such a hideous, civilization-altering event seems to be growing as time passes. There is no time to waste in remedying unfortunate turns in nuclear policy and restoring more prudent policies so as to confront emerging nuclear dangers.
The select community of serious nuclear strategists, often satirized as enamored of matters at once esoteric and macabre, diligently and creatively pondered ways to avoid nuclear Armageddon. They got things right enough to help guide the civilized world through the era of super-power contest. Their collected wisdom coupled with history’s nuclear-age lessons offers the civilized world the best—and the last—chance to defeat the emerging, malignant nuclear actors of the twenty-first century before nuclear demons seize the world stage.
The bombs of 1945 generated a powerful current of opinion among leaders and the citizenry—the belief that those blinding atomic flashes had rendered traditional principles of geopolitics and war obsolete. The advent of the nuclear age coincided with the creation of the United Nations, which was to accomplish after World War II’s global carnage what the League of Nations had failed to do after the slaughter of World War I’s trenches. It is understandable that with tens of millions of lives already lost in what was to prove history’s bloodiest century, the prospect of destruction on a vastly greater scale—made possible by the
potentially unlimited thermonuclear power of the hydrogen bomb—would drive pacifist passions and utopian yearnings.
Events since 1945 have proven the dolorous refutation of such beliefs and hopes. The nuclear genie is not only still out of the bottle, it has multiplied. Malignant actors are now in possession of nuclear technology and could well have it within their power to fatally wound modern civilization in the not-too-distant future. The five members of the original nuclear club have been joined by four more, with only one of these, Israel, a truly stable democratic state that would not use nuclear weapons save if its literal survival required it. India is a democracy, fairly stable, but going through an economic and social transformation that will test that stability. Pakistan is rife with Islamist fervor and anti-American passions. A mysterious clique of xenophobic tyrants runs North Korea. Iran is approaching nuclear membership but is neither stable nor pacific in its strategic aspirations. Its revolutionary leaders desire to attain regional hegemony in the Mideast, driving American influence to the periphery, and then ultimately to destroy Western civilization.
Despite the clear lessons offered by this history, many have embraced mythic pasts. According to these myths, the threat of extinction posed by an all-out nuclear arms race is sufficient to create a fundamental commonality of interest in mutual survival. Thus patient diplomacy can bring about a nuclear-zero world in which we “end the nuclear nightmare” once and for all. The genie can, in this view, be put back into the bottle after all. There is no serious evidence to support this view. A companion myth is one of benevolent world government, though even a cursory look at the United Nations shows how chimerical such a vision is in real life.
For those who harbor such beliefs, arms control has become a doctrine that transcends geopolitics. Like all utopian beliefs, it is based upon revelatory rather than empirical truth and is thus beyond refutation by concrete evidence in the form of actual events. Arms treaties are inviolate, leading supporters to deny or minimize violations, lest they lead to abandonment of the treaty. Each treaty stands as a step towards nuclear zero. There can be no steps backward on this path. There are, in this view, no undetectable clandestine caches, nor implacable enemies.
Sleepwalking With the Bomb Page 23