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Plausibility of EMP Threat Classified, Expert Says By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — Questions about the plausibility of an alleged special electromagnetic pulse nuclear weapon that could to someday wipe out modern U.S. society by damaging or destroy its electrical system cannot be publicly addressed because the answers are classified, a U.S. expert said Wednesday (see GSN, July 23). Lowell Wood, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, served on a national commission created by Congress that in July reported the potential for an EMP threat and recommended broad, potentially multibillion dollar measures for the nation to minimize its consequences. The National Commission to Assess the Electromagnetic Pulse Threat to the United States, presenting the executive summary of its report, told Congress that certain nuclear weapons detonated in the upper atmosphere above the United States have “the potential to hold our society seriously at risk and might result in defeat of our military forces.” It says further that “terrorists or state actors that possess relatively unsophisticated missiles armed with nuclear weapons” could threaten the United States with such weapons within the next 15 years. The United States is particularly vulnerable, it says, because of its dependence on modern electronics for transportation, communications, warm shelter and national security. Speaking at an event Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Wood said the technology exists to greatly reduce the consequences of such an attack. He urged the federal government and Congress to aggressively address the issue and said it could cost about $10 billion a year over two or more decades to gradually fix weaknesses in critical U.S. infrastructures, such as by configuring major components of the electrical power and telecommunication systems so they would not be damaged from an attack. He also advocated creating high-level positions in the Defense and Homeland Security departments responsible for dealing with the threat, and a space-based defense against such an attack. Wood refused, however, to respond to questions about whether weapons capable of doing such damage are technologically possible and within reach of so-called “rogue” states and terrorists he said might pose a threat. “You seriously don’t expect answers in an unclassified [setting] to those sorts of questions?” he said. Doubts Voiced Philip Coyle, who was the assistant secretary of defense and Pentagon director of operational test and evaluation during the Clinton administration, however, questioned the certainty of the report’s conclusion that smaller, kiloton-scale nuclear weapons could be developed to produce the catastrophic consequences described by the report. “The U.S. military does not know how to do this today, and has no way of demonstrating the capability in the future without returning to nuclear testing,” he said by e-mail. “The fact is that a rogue nation or terrorists that tried this would be very unsure of the results, and would risk massive retaliation from the United States for having achieved nothing,” he wrote. Coyle, who also worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for more than 30 years, also said it is uncertain that even a massive nuclear weapon would cause the scale of destruction the commission predicted. “Granted, both Russia and China have high-yield nuclear weapons and rockets that can launch such weapons into space. If Russia or China wants to create EMP, they certainly can — although again they could not be sure they would achieve the devastating results postulated by the commission,” he wrote. Coyle noted that the United States has conducted a test that produced the EMP phenomenon, the 1.4 megaton-yield 1962 Starfish nuclear test, which reportedly knocked out some street lights and a telecommunications relay facility in Honolulu. The commission also had only partial data from a series of Soviet tests in the early 1960s and the damage caused by those tests was quickly repaired. The effects of the Starfish test were “nothing like the effects postulated in this report,” he wrote. “In both cases, the power outages were brief and quickly repaired. You might notice that in the picture of the Starfish test, the lights in Honolulu are ON.” A New Thing The Starfish test did not knock all of the power out in Honolulu, Wood said, because of its distance from the islands, some 800 nautical miles away. Furthermore, in his presentation arranged by the nonprofit The George C. Marshall Institute, he argued that more effective, lower-yield nuclear EMP threats are newly understood to be possible. “One of the things that is important to be realized, and that is new, in that it hasn’t been discussed publicly before the EMP commission’s report, is that the magnitude of the EMP is not dependent on yield,” he told the audience. “One of the standard myths about EMP” is that an effective high-altitude EMP attack requires megaton-class explosives, he said. EMP effects could be produced by “quite small nuclear explosions, in some cases even more so than from very big ones,” according to a slide in his presentation. A “tailored” 10-kiloton weapon “may be more EMP threatening” than a standard megaton-class one, it added. Designs for such tailored EMP weapons “can be found on the Internet,” Wood said. Wood said his comments were “my own take on the situation,” and not intended to represent those of the commission. The commission’s report, however, appeared to endorse his view. “Certain types of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons can be employed to generate potentially catastrophic EMP effects over wide geographic areas, and designs for variants of such weapons have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter century,” it says. It’s Classified When asked following his presentation whether U.S. scientists have developed and tested a kilotons-scale weapon to demonstrate its EMP capability, Wood said he could not comment. The commission conducted assessments of what the United States and others know about such weapons and questions about such matters were addressed in a classified session with members of Congress following a public presentation of the commission’s report, he said. “We presented in open session, then we went up and spent another few more hours and presented in closed session, where they asked and were given answers” to such questions, he said. “But they are members and it was a tightly closed environment, a doom room,” he said. “I’d be willing to take the chance to inform the American people about what the situation is, but I’m forbidden by law to do so.” The commission’s five volumes on the subject were: an unclassified executive summary released in July; a classified threat assessment; an unclassified critical infrastructure assessment; a volume on military topics; and an assessment of potential threats. Wood also refused to comment on whether the U.S. should pursue such technology to see if it worked. “Those are things that the president and the Congress should decide … the chairmen of the Armed Services [Committees], the secretary of Defense,” he said. Coyle, in a commentary published in July, said the commission’s report appeared to “extrapolate calculations of extreme weapons effects as if they were a proven fact, and further to puff up rogue nations and terrorists with the capabilities of giants.” He advocated an independent scientific peer review off the technical basis underlying the commission’s projections of a new EMP threat. “The Congress has done this in the past to address controversial nuclear weapons issues. Before this commission’s findings become the basis for significant policy and budgetary decisions, we need such an independent scientific review,” he wrote.
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