Checking the Pulse of EMP

The Washington Time's Bill Gertz's account of the threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack in his piece “U.S. seen vulnerable to space 'pulse' attack” relies on hype and distortion. Though EMP is a real effect of nuclear detonations and can wreak havoc on electrical systems and electronics, it would be difficult for terrorists to pull off. And nation-states that would attempt such an attack would face nuclear retaliation from the United States which, during the Cold War, shielded its nuclear command and control systems from the possibility of EMP effects from an exchange with the Soviet Union.

There is a significant factual error in the Gertz piece. Gertz notes that "North Korea sells its own version of the Scud for around $100,000." As Steven Zaloga, a missile expert at the Teal Group Corporation and author of the book "The Scud," told POGO's Nick Schwellenbach for an article he wrote in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists this fall (paid subscription req'd), "A price of $100,000 for a Scud might refer to a non-working training model, but not a functional weapon." Zaloga is unsure what the going rate for a North Korean extended-range Scud would be, but a baseline Russian-made Scud (which are no longer made) would cost between $1 million and $2 million alone. The cost of the launch system would cost significantly more.

If terrorists did manage to build a nuclear weapon it is highly improbable that they could produce an efficient EMP-producing nuclear weapon, according to nuclear physicist Richard Garwin, who also published one of the first theoretical papers on EMP. Philip Coyle, former Pentagon director of operational test and evaluation, emailed Global Security Newswire that even "the U.S. military does not know how to [create thermonuclear-scale EMP from a Hiroshima-sized weapon] today, and has no way of demonstrating the capability in the future without returning to nuclear testing." When the United States does not have this ability, needless to say, it's unlikely that terrorist or "rogue" states could easily accomplish such a technological feat. It is much more likely that terrorists would build a relatively low-yield improvised nuclear device (smaller in magnitude than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, yet still devastating if detonated in a city).

States could assist terrorist groups in achieving an EMP attack, but this scenario still runs into the technological hurdles of producing a nuclear weapon that could produce significant amounts of EMP. Without such a Super-EMP weapon a terrorist group could not hope to impact a vast swath of the continental US with one weapon detonated at high altitude.

EMP is definitely a factor to consider in conflict scenarios of a war with China over Taiwan since China has thermonuclear weapons and Taiwan covers a much smaller geographic area than the US (this is the scenario noted in “The Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2005” (pdf) that Gertz cites as the “recent Pentagon report”). But more scrutiny should be given to scenarios of an EMP attack on the United States by terrorists before we spend the $20-200 billion dollars the EMP Commission estimates the US spend to harden its critical infrastructure from such an attack.

Comments

[Paddy Wagon]

You never know what you are going to get when you follow Moon's intel network. It's extensive, very extensive and the fact that Moon brags he took Gertz, his loyal follower, and made him what he is, even though he only went to high school, says a lot. Moon and his followers only have one goal, have the world follow Moon's lead.

Moon recently told a group this:

I am the founder of [the] Washington Times. I can get all the secrets and details of your life if I want.

Don't know if the audio has been scrubbed but I heard it also, you can find the rundown on that quote here:
http://www.blogesque.com/index.php?p=97

Go Here: http://tinyurl.com/87ldk
and you will find the top USA Moon "preacher", Michael Jenkins, saying this at about 8:30:

Thank God for Bill Gertz. We don't know where we would stand as a nation without him. But he also knows that didn't just come from his hard work. It came from True Parents.
___

Read some of how Moon brags about using the Washington Times to "influence" our nation here.
http://www.cellwhitman.blogspot.com/

The bottom post has just a little on who was in charge of the tipping point in our nation's decision to fund Star Wars years ago.

Bombs, subs, wars, nukes, treason, lies, NMD, terrorism...We have a huge national security problem in this nation/world, but none of those are it.

http://www.cellwhitman.blogspot.com/