RSSElectromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Threat Assessment
Semper Fi Parents | November 26, 2010
A great analysis of a threat that few of us think about, perhaps to our regret someday,
Over the past decade there has been an ongoing debate over the threat posed by electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to modern civilization.
This debate has been the most heated perhaps in the United States, where the commission appointed by Congress to assess the threat to the United States warned of the dangers posed by EMP in reports released in 2004 and 2008.
The commission also called for a national commitment to address the EMP threat by hardening the national infrastructure.
There is little doubt that efforts by the United States to harden infrastructure against EMP — and its ability to manage critical infrastructure manually in the event of an EMP attack — have been eroded in recent decades as the Cold War ended and the threat of nuclear conflict with Russia lessened.
This is also true of the U.S. military, which has spent little time contemplating such scenarios in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The cost of remedying the situation, especially retrofitting older systems rather than simply regulating that new systems be better hardened, is immense.
And as with any issue involving massive amounts of money, the debate over guarding against EMP has become quite politicized in recent years.
We have long avoided writing on this topic for precisely that reason. However, as the debate over the EMP threat has continued, a great deal of discussion about the threat has appeared in the media. Many STRATFOR readers have asked for our take on the threat, and we thought it might be helpful to dispassionately discuss the tactical elements involved in such an attack and the various actors that could conduct one. The following is our assessment of the likelihood of an EMP attack against the United States.
Defining Electromagnetic Pulse
EMP can be generated from natural sources such as lightning or solar storms interacting with the earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetic field. It can also be artificially created using a nuclear weapon or a variety of non-nuclear devices. It has long been proven that EMP can disable electronics. Its ability to do so has been demonstrated by solar storms, lightning strikes and atmospheric nuclear explosions before the ban on such tests. The effect has also been recreated by EMP simulators designed to reproduce the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear device and study how the phenomenon impacts various kinds of electrical and electronic devices such as power grids, telecommunications and computer systems, both civilian and military.
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