[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 83 (Tuesday, June 21, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H4888-H4894]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, what I want to spend a few moments talking 
about this evening is something that will be new to most Americans. 
They will not have heard about this subject. Indeed, nobody knew about 
this until 1962; that is, no one in this country knew about it.
  There was an experiment over Johnston Island out in the Pacific Ocean 
that was called Operation Starfish. It was part of a series of nuclear 
tests that were called the Fishbowl Series. This was a unique one. The 
others had all been at ground level or some little distance above the 
ground. This one was an extra-atmospheric, a detonation above the 
atmosphere.
  Nobody knew what was going to happen. It was the first time we had 
detonated a nuclear weapon in a test series above the atmosphere, and 
there were a number of ships and airplanes and radar, theater-like, 
that were tracking the missile that launched this nuclear bomb and 
noted its explosion. The explosion occurred about 400 kilometers

[[Page H4889]]

above Johnston Island. That is well above the atmosphere.
  Now, the Soviets have had very extensive experience with this kind of 
testing. This was our first and, indeed, our only experience with this. 
So our knowledge about this phenomenon comes from this single test, 
what we have learned from the Soviets and now the Russians and the 
number of simulations that we have done since that time.
  There were no diagnostics to test the effects on Hawaii, which was 
about 800 miles away, because nobody expected there to be any effect 
there. Many of the instruments we were using for testing around 
Johnston Island were pegged; that is, they did not have enough capacity 
to register the effects that were produced by this extra-atmospheric 
explosion.
  What happened in Hawaii may be open to some controversy, but there 
were some lights that went out. This was largely electrical. In those 
days it was not all of the electronics that we have today. A number of 
lights went out, and in the last couple of years, some of the evidence 
of what happened to that equipment was shown to a commission that I 
will talk about in a little bit that was set up in 2001 to investigate 
this phenomenon, and they submitted their report in 2004.
  This phenomenon that we observed there that exceeded the capacity of 
the instruments at the test site, that went all the way, 800 miles 
away, to Hawaii, have been called electromagnetic pulse, EMP. We have 
learned since then that every extra-atmospheric explosion produces an 
EMP. You can develop a nuclear weapon, as we designed but as I 
understand never built and the Soviets both designed and have built, 
enhanced EMP weapons that limit the explosion but increased the 
electromagnetic effects.
  What are the implications of EMP and why are we talking about it 
tonight? EMP could be probably the most asymmetric weapon that any 
adversary could use against us. By asymmetric, we mean a weapon that 
has a relatively small impact in terms of its local effect but could 
have an enormous impact on our military or our society because of its 
effect.
  There are a number of asymmetric weapons. Terrorism is an asymmetric 
weapon. It does not cost them much money or take very big explosives, 
but it has a big effect on us. 9/11, of course, was a major asymmetric 
attack on us because those few people in those four airplanes have cost 
us billions and billions of dollars and totally changed our society. 
This is an example of an asymmetric attack.
  Most Americans will not know about electromagnetic pulse and what it 
could do to our military, to our society, but I will guarantee my 
colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that all of our potential enemies know 
everything about EMP. In a little bit, I will show you some quotes from 
countries that could be our enemy that will indicate that they know all 
about EMP.
  In 1999, I was sitting in a hotel room in Vienna, Austria. We were 
there near the end of the Kosovo conflict. There were eleven Members of 
Congress there, several staff members, three members of the Russian 
Duma and a personal representative, Slobodan Milosevic. We developed a 
framework agreement for ending the Kosovo conflict that was adopted 8 
days later by the G-8.
  One of the Russians who was there was a very senior Russian. His name 
is Vladimir Lukin. He was the ambassador to this country at the end of 
Bush I and the beginning of Clinton. At that time he was chair of their 
equivalent of our Committee on International Relations, a very senior 
and very respected Russian. He is a little short fellow with short arms 
and stocky build.
  He sat in that hotel room in Vienna for 2 days with his arms folded 
across his chest, looking at the ceiling. He was very angry. He said at 
one point, You spit on us; now why should we help you?
  What he meant by that was that the United States, the Clinton 
administration at that time, had indicated to the Russians that they 
really were not needed to help resolve this conflict, that we were big 
boys and we would handle this on our own. It soon became obvious to the 
Clinton administration that the only country in the world that had the 
real confidence of the Serbs was Russia, and they were added to the G-7 
to make the G-8, which 5 days after we came back resolved the Kosovo 
conflict with the framework agreement that we had developed there.
  The statement that Vladimir Lukin made was a startling statement. The 
chairman of our delegation was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Weldon) who had been to Russia thirty-some times and he speaks some 
Russian and understands more. When Vladimir Lukin was speaking, he 
turned to me and said, Did you hear what he said? Yes, I heard what he 
said, but of course, I did not understand it; I just heard Russian 
words.
  When it was translated, this was what he said, and by the way, he did 
not need a translator. Vladimir Lukin speaks very good English, but 
when you are talking with these folks, they frequently will speak in 
their native tongue so it has to be translated and then translated back 
to them when we speak so that gives them twice as long to formulate 
their answer. So if you do not know both languages, you are at somewhat 
of a disadvantage in dialoguing with them because they have twice as 
long to formulate an answer.
  This was what surprised the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), 
and this is what he said: If we really wanted to hurt you, with no fear 
of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM. That's a submarine-launched 
ballistic missile. We would launch an SLBM. We would detonate a nuclear 
weapon high above your country, and we would shut down your power grid 
for 6 months or so.
  Now, he made the observation that without fear of retaliation, 
because you would not know for certain where it came from, particularly 
today. Factor in the Cold War with only two superpowers, we absolutely 
would have known where it came from, but today, how would you know? 
There are many countries out there who can get a tramp steamer and a 
Scud launcher and a crude nuclear weapon and that is all it would take 
to produce an EMP attack because a Scud launcher goes about 180 miles 
apogee, and that is plenty high. It would not cover all of the United 
States, of course.
  The third ranking Communist was there, a handsome, tall, blond fellow 
by the name of Alexander Shurbanov, and he smiled and said, if one 
weapon would not do it, we have some spares. I think at that time it 
was something like 7,000 spares that they had.
  This was a very startling remark, and what it said was that the 
detonation of a single, large, appropriately designed nuclear weapon 
above our country could shut down our power grid and shut down our 
communications, he said, for 6 months or so. If that were true, and 
there is increasing evidence, as I will indicate, from the report that 
this commission gave us that it is true, that would mean that you would 
be in a world, Mr. Speaker, where the only person you could talk to was 
the person next to you unless you happened to have a vacuum tube 
handset, then you could talk because they are about a million times 
less susceptible to EMP than our current microelectronic systems, and 
the only way you could go anywhere was to walk.
  Several years ago, we had a field hearing at Johns Hopkins University 
applied physics lab, and a Dr. Lowell Wood was there. I met Dr. Lowell 
Wood through Tom Clancy who lives on the eastern shore of Maryland and 
I know him. He has come to do several political events for me. I knew 
that he had done a book where EMP was a part of the scenario, and I 
knew he did very good research and he could tell me something about 
EMP. This was several years ago.
  I called Tom Clancy and I asked him, and he said, gee, if you read my 
book you know all about EMP that I know, but he said let me refer you 
to the smartest man hired by the U.S. government. He referred me to a 
Dr. Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. We 
got his pager number. In those days it was pagers rather than cell 
phones that are so ubiquitous today, and I paged him, believing that he 
was in California. The pager signal went up to a satellite and back 
down, and he was in Washington, and within an hour, he was sitting in 
my office.
  Dr. Lowell Wood at this field hearing out at the applied physics lab 
out in

[[Page H4890]]

Howard County made the observation that an EMP lay down would be the 
equivalent of a giant continental time machine that would move us back 
a century in technology. What this would mean, of course, is that we 
would have no more capability for moving around, for communicating to 
each other, for plowing our fields, for moving our equipment and our 
food around than we had 100 years ago.
  I said that, Dr. Wood, the population we have today, 285 million 
people and its distribution, largely in large cities and suburbia, 
could not be supported by the technology of a century ago. His 
unemotional response was, Yes, I know.

                              {time}  2130

  The population will shrink until it can be supported by the 
technology. The point I am trying to make is this could be a 
devastating asymmetric weapon. It may not be known to most Americans. I 
suspect not one in 100 have heard of nuclear electromagnetic pulse, but 
I can assure Members that all of our potential enemies know a great 
deal about EMP.
  The first chart shows the effects of a single nuclear weapon. This 
one is detonated in the northwest corner of Iowa, and it blankets all 
of the United States.
  The colors here indicate the intensity of the pulse you get from 
that. The purple as you can see from the scale is 50 percent. So what 
this says is whatever the intensity was at ground zero, and we are 
several hundred miles above that, but the intensity at that level which 
is the red here in the center, will be half that out at the margins of 
our country.
  This little smile here and the distortion here is due to the magnetic 
field of the Earth that bends the electrons that I will describe in 
just a moment.
  What is this electromagnetic pulse? It is produced from strong gamma 
rays from the nuclear explosion which produce electrons that move at 
the speed of light. They move now to everything within line of sight. 
If you are about 3 or 400 miles high over the center of the country, 
Iowa or Nebraska, that will blanket all of the United States.
  If the voltage is high enough, it will disrupt or fry these 
microelectronics.
  Mr. Speaker, if you want to work on the inside of your computer, you 
need to be very careful that the static electricity that you produce 
just by rubbing your clothes together will not damage it. You need to 
put a little wrist band on and ground yourself. At factories where most 
of these computers are made, and it is almost all women that I have 
seen there, this is one area where women do it better than men, and 
they are grounded to the floor. They have a metal anklet on, and they 
are grounded to the floor because static from just their movement could 
damage these very sensitive, very tiny microelectronics.
  A little later I will show a chart that says the interview with some 
Russian generals have indicated that they have weapons that can produce 
200 kilovolts per meter. They told us, and I cannot tell Members the 
exact voltage to which we have harkened, but I can say that the Russian 
generals told us they believe that this signal was several times higher 
than the voltage to which we had hardened. And even out at the 
periphery with 50 percent degradation, it was higher than we had 
hardened. By ``hardening'' I mean we have put some buffers in there 
that would intercept this pulse, like the surge protectors that we have 
for our computers which we have for lightning which will do no good for 
EMP because this pulse has such a rapid rise time measured in 
nanoseconds.
  This pulse will be through the surge protector before the protector 
sees it. If you are 200 kilovolts at ground zero, it is 100 out at the 
periphery, and that is probably enough to weld, to fry all of our 
microelectronics, which is why Vladimir Lukin said they would detonate 
a nuclear weapon high above our country, shut down our power grid and 
our communications for 6 months or so.
  From chart 2, I want to give some quotes from potential enemies to 
indicate that I am not letting the genie out of the bottle this 
evening. They know all about it. Not one in 50 Americans may know about 
EMP, but I want to assure Members our potential enemies know all about 
EMP.
  This first quote is the quote that I heard myself sitting in that 
hotel room in Vienna, Austria when Vladimir Lukin said they could shut 
down our power grid and our communications. That was May 2, 1999. There 
were 10 other Congressmen there and several staff members.
  Chinese military writings describe EMP as the key to victory and 
describe scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in 
a conflict over Taiwan. It is not like our potential enemies not only 
know about it. And they know that we know about it, so they feel free 
to put it in their public writings.
  A survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by 
the EMP commission was set up, and they functioned for 2 years. They 
submitted a report and they are now continuously briefing additional 
entities, different organizations and people. They found widespread 
knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility, including in 
Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. Iran has 
tested launching a scud missile from a surface vessel, a launch mode 
that could support a national or transnational terrorist EMP attack 
against the United States.
  By the way, we thought that launch was a failure because the device 
was detonated before it reached land. Now, that is exactly what you 
would do if you were rehearsing an EMP attack. By the way, there is no 
way that a nuclear weapon could do anywhere near as much damage against 
a sophisticated country like ours by dropping it on one of our cities 
as you could do to our country by detonating it at altitude. And you 
would not know it happened unless you were looking at it.
  We are totally immune to EMP. It will not hurt us or damage 
buildings. All it does is to knock out all of our microelectronics, 
which means all of our computers. For instance, your car has several 
computers. Indeed, if you have a new car, they cannot even work on it 
in a shop without hooking it up to a computer to tell what is wrong 
with the vehicle. So an EMP with a high enough pulse would fry the 
computers in the car. They would not run. If you happen to have an old 
car with a coil and a distributor, that is probably going to work. That 
is probably less susceptible to EMP.
  This chart shows additional quotes: ``If the world's industrial 
countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against 
dangerous electronic assaults, they will disintegrate within a few 
years. 150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. If the enemy forces 
succeed in infiltrating the information network of the U.S. Army, then 
the whole organization would collapse. The American soldiers could not 
find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.'' This 
is from Iranian Journal, December 1998.

  ``Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology 
directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse.'' This is from 
Iranian Journal of March 2000.
  Terrorists have attempted to acquire non-nuclear radio frequency 
weapons. These are the weapons that would produce the directed energy 
effect. These produce a similar kind of pulse to EMP but does not have 
the broad spectrum. It only has part of the frequency involved. But if 
intense enough, if set up in this room, for instance, it could fry the 
computers in the cloak room which is not that far away. If it was set 
up in a van and went down Wall Street, if it were a really 
sophisticated device, it could take out all of the computers there, 
which would shut down our trading for quite a while if they were all 
taken down.
  Some people might think that things similar to a Pearl Harbor 
incident are unlikely to take place during the Information Age. And 
this is a writing from China. Yet it could be regarded as a Pearl 
Harbor incident of the 21st century, if a surprise attack is conducted 
against the enemy's crucial information systems of command, control, 
and communication by such means as EMP weapons. Even a superpower, 
China says, like the United States, which possesses nuclear missiles 
and powerful armed forces, cannot guarantee its immunity. In their 
words, an open society like the United States is extremely vulnerable 
to electronic attacks. This is May 14, 1996 from a Chinese journal.

[[Page H4891]]

  Iran has conducted tests with Shahab-3 missiles which have been 
described as failures. I mention that because they detonated it before 
it reached the ground. That is exactly what they would do if they were 
planning for an EMP attack. Iran Shahab-3 is a medium-range mobile 
missile that could be driven onto a freighter and transported to a 
point near the United States for an EMP attack.
  By the way, an EMP laydown is always an early event in Chinese and 
Russian war games because it is the most asymmetric attack that they 
could lodge against our country.
  Just a little bit of a time line here. Operation Starfish occurred in 
1962. In 1995, there was a very interesting event that nearly started 
World War III. It has been written up in several books now. Most people 
never knew about it, but the Norwegians launched an atmospheric test 
rocket. They are fairly close to Russia, and they told the Russians 
that they were launching this rocket; but in the bureaucracy of Russia, 
that did not get communicated to the right people and when they 
launched it, it was interpreted as a first salvo from the United 
States. You do not have very long to respond if your enemy is about a 
half hour away in terms of these ballistic missiles. The Russians came 
very near to launching a major salvo of missiles with nuclear warheads 
on them against our country. This was a very narrow brush with destiny 
that tells us how important it is that we understand the potential of 
these weapons and how they could be misunderstood by an enemy.
  In 1997, I sat in a hearing here on Capitol Hill and General Marsh 
was there. He was the general in charge of the President's Commission 
on Critical Infrastructure. He was looking at the critical 
infrastructure of our country and its vulnerability to enemy attack. I 
asked him if he had looked at EMP. He said, yes, he did. Well? Well, 
the commission thought there was not a high probability there would be 
an EMP attack, so they had not considered it any further.
  My observation to that was, Gee, if you have not already, I am sure 
when you go home tonight you are going to cancel the fire insurance on 
your home because there is not a very high probability that your home 
will burn.
  When you have an event like a potential fire in your home or an EMP 
attack, which is a very high-impact, but low-probability, event, that 
is just the kind of an event that you purchase insurance to protect you 
from. It is unlikely to happen; but if it happened, it would be so 
devastating you would need insurance to cover that.
  Mr. Speaker, what we need is the equivalent in our country of the 
insurance policy that you bought on your home. We need to make an 
investment in the equivalent of an insurance policy so we will be able 
to anticipate if we can survive an EMP attack.

                              {time}  2145

  In 2001, we had some very interesting tests at Aberdeen with a 
directed energy weapon that was put together. This was really 
interesting, because we asked these engineers to put together the kind 
of a weapon that terrorists might put together if they were buying 
equipment only from Radio Shack. So they went to places like Radio 
Shack and they bought the equipment and they put it together in this 
van that could go down the street and it was kind of camouflaged so it 
was not sure what it was and this directed energy weapon had the 
ability to take out microelectronic equipment at considerable distance 
from it.
  In 2001 because of my concerns about the potential for EMP, I had put 
in the authorization that year legislation that set up a commission to 
look at this eventuality. The next chart shows the commissioners that 
were on this. These are all very well known people. The first person 
that heads the list there is Dr. Johnny Foster who is the father of 
most of our modern nuclear weapons. He is the Edward Teller of today. 
Another one of our commission members, Dr. Lowell Wood that I have 
mentioned already, kind of inherited the mantle of Edward Teller. There 
were several other people. They had nine people altogether. Dr. Bill 
Graham who chaired it was the deputy chair of the emerging ballistic 
missile threat that was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld before he was the 
Secretary of Defense. Dr. Bill Graham has been the presidential science 
adviser. He has held a lot of very high posts. He is really very well 
known. Commissioner Richard Lawson was a USAF general, served on the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff and was Deputy Commander in Chief of the U.S.-
European Command. The last member listed here, Dr. Joan Woodard, I had 
a very interesting experience with her. I did not remember the names of 
all the commission members and they had just been set up a little while 
and I went out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to visit my son who works 
there in the laboratory. He brought home from the lab a little internal 
report that they were passing around that indicated to me that they 
might have some expertise at the lab there that would be useful in the 
work of the commission. And so I asked to have a briefing on it and, 
big surprise, Dr. Joan Woodard was one of the commissioners and she had 
been working for several months and had a number of her staff working 
with her and I had a 5-hour classified briefing on the potential 
effects of EMP not just on our military because they were spending most 
of their time on our national infrastructure. So we had this body of 
real experts that was working for 2 years. Ordinarily a commission 
works for 1 year. This one worked for 2 years and brought forth a big 
report. They are still writing, I think, the third volume of this 
report. They have now briefed the House, they have briefed the Senate, 
they are briefing a lot of key people. A lot more people are now 
knowing something about EMP and its potential effects.
  What I want to do now in the next four charts, and we will look at 
this next one now, I want to quote directly from the EMP commission 
report. This is the EMP commission report that was Public Law 106-398, 
title 14. This was the law that set up this commission and all of this 
is from their report.
  Over at the left of this chart, Mr. Speaker, you see the effects of 
an extra-atmospheric detonation above our country and the concentric 
circles there show the range that would be covered by detonations at 
different altitudes. You see you need to get up about 300 miles high, 
that is about 500 kilometers, before it covers all of the United 
States. These are direct quotes from the commission:
  EMP is one of a small number of threats--indeed, I do not know any 
other threat--EMP is one of a small number of threats that may, one, 
hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. We 
need to put that in everyday kitchen language, Mr. Speaker. What they 
are saying is that this would end life as we know it in the United 
States. Let me read it again in their carefully couched language: Hold 
at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. If, Mr. 
Speaker, this EMP attack really did what Vladimir Lukin said it would 
do and that is to shut down our power grid and our communications for 6 
months or so, if the only person you could talk to is the person next 
to you and the only way you could go anywhere was to walk, I think it 
is very obvious that that would end life as we know it in this country. 
Hold at risk, they say, the continued existence of today's U.S. civil 
society. Also, it has the power to disrupt our military forces and our 
ability to project military power. That is because, Mr. Speaker, for 
the last decade, more than the last decade, we have been waiving EMP 
hardening on almost all of our weapons systems. You see, when we had so 
little money to buy weapons, particularly during the Clinton years when 
they called it a build-down, I called it a teardown of the military, we 
could get a few more percent weapons systems that cost somewhere 
between 1 percent and 10 percent to harden, so you could get 1 percent 
to 10 percent more weapons systems if you did not harden, and so they 
just ran a calculated risk that we would not need the hardening. But, 
Mr. Speaker, the time when we are really going to need these weapons is 
when we are at war against a peer, and there will be a peer, a 
resurgent Russia or a China of the future and the first thing they are 
going to do, they say so in their writings, they say so in their war 
games, the first thing they are going to do is an EMP laydown which 
will then deny us the use of all of our military equipment which is not 
hardened. I am not sure why we are building it, we do

[[Page H4892]]

not need it, to defeat countries like Iraq. We will really need it to 
defeat a peer and if it is not hardened, then it will not be available 
to us.
  The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than 
during the Cold War. Yes, that is true. There was one then, the Soviet 
Union. Now there are a whole bunch. Let us try Iran if it gets a 
weapon, North Korea, India, Pakistan, a number of countries that are 
today our friends, England and France and Israel and the list goes on.
  Quotes again from the commission, not my quotes. Potential 
adversaries are aware of the EMP's strategic attack option, obviously 
from what Vladimir Lukin said and you can glean that from their 
writings. The threat is not adequately addressed in U.S. national and 
homeland security programs, and that is a gross understatement. It is 
not only not adequately addressed, it is hardly addressed at all.
  The second chart is again quotes from the EMP commission and we have 
redacted some names here. I am not sure the Russian generals would want 
the world to know who they were, but these are the two Russian generals 
that I mentioned. They claim that Russia has designed a super EMP 
nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. I cannot 
tell you what we hardened to, but I can tell you that the Russian 
generals believe that this is several times the level to which we have 
hardened. Chinese, Russian, Pakistani scientists are working in North 
Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the 
near future. This is not my statement, Mr. Speaker. This is a direct 
quote from the EMP commission.
  The next chart shows additional quotes from the EMP commission. 
States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for 
EMP attack offers the greatest utility. Indeed, if they had a single 
weapon, taking out Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, 
Washington would have nowhere near the effect on our society as simply 
taking out all of our computers.

  EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against U.S. military forces in 
a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland. Again, 
these are not my words. These are quotes from the EMP commission.
  This is a really interesting one. EMP may be less provocative of U.S. 
massive retaliation compared to a nuclear attack on a U.S. city that 
inflicts many prompt casualties. Even, Mr. Speaker, if we knew where it 
came from, if all they have done is take out our computers, are we 
justified in incinerating their grandmothers and their babies? Maybe we 
should respond in kind and take out all the computers in North Korea. I 
doubt that very few people in North Korea would care that we took out 
all their computers. This, Mr. Speaker, is really a very asymmetric 
attack because if we responded in kind, there are none of our enemies 
that are anywhere near as vulnerable as we are and some of them could 
hardly care less if we took out their computers and the few that the 
military has could easily be hardened if they were anticipating that 
they might need them hardened.
  Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire 
regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military 
strength and societal survival, challenge the integrity of allied 
regional coalitions, and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to 
the high-tech West than to rogue states. Indeed, if we responded in 
kind, it would really be an asymmetric attack, because they would be 
little affected by taking out their computers since they little depend 
on their computers.
  Technically and operationally, EMP attacks can compensate for 
deficiencies in missile accuracy, fusing, range, reentry. Suppose they 
are really lousy in the kind of missiles they have, their aim is very 
poor. If they missed the target by 100 miles, Mr. Speaker, it really 
does not matter. One hundred miles is as pretty much as good as a dead 
hit because 100 miles away really will not make that much difference in 
the very large areas that are covered by this EMP attack.
  Terrorists could steal, purchase or be provided a nuclear weapon for 
an EMP attack against the United States simply by launching a primitive 
Scud missile off a freighter near our shores. We would have, Mr. 
Speaker, 3 or 4 minutes' notice. Scud missiles can be purchased on the 
world market today for less than $100,000. Al Qaeda is estimated to own 
about 80 freighters. So what they need is $100,000 to buy a Scud 
missile and a crude nuclear weapon that who knows where they might get 
that. Maybe some Russian scientist who has not been paid for 4 or 5 
years.
  Certain types of low-yield weapons can generate potentially 
catastrophic EMP effects. These are the enhanced EMP weapons that the 
Soviets, the Russians, have developed. Mr. Speaker, we have every 
reason to believe that these secrets are now held by China. There is no 
reason to entertain the thought that they do not have these secrets. 
And if China has them, who else has them? I think the safest thing to 
assume is that any potential enemy has them.
  The last chart from the commission shows a very interesting little 
schematic on the right which shows the interrelationships of our very 
complex infrastructure. This was commented on a number of years ago by 
a scientist at Cal Tech who held a series of seminars called The Next 
100 Years. He was theorizing, could we indeed recover from something, 
he did not know about EMP, so he was talking about a nuclear war, 
because he noted that we had developed a very interconnected, 
complicated infrastructure where one part depended on another part and 
we developed that from a base of high quality, readily available raw 
materials, oil that almost oozed out of the ground at Oil City, 
Pennsylvania, coal that was exposed by a heavy rain when the dirt was 
washed off, iron ore in the central part of our country that was such 
high quality that you could almost smelt it in a backyard smelter. 
Indeed, there is one of those, you can drive up and see it just south 
of Thurmont on Route 15. It is called Catoctin Furnace and they denuded 
the hills up there to produce coke to make iron there. You see here a 
very interrelated infrastructure. The point they are making is that if 
one part of that comes down, suppose you do not have electric power, 
they have not drawn all the arrows they should have drawn because you 
are not going to have oil or gas, you are not going to have 
communications, you are not going to have water, you are not going to 
have banking or finance, you are not going to have government services, 
you are not going to have emergency services, you are not going to have 
transportation without electricity. So if you take down just that one 
thing, everything comes down. Of course, if you do not have any banking 
services, pretty soon everything will grind to a halt because they will 
not have the finances to keep the thing going.
  One or a few high altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMPs 
simultaneously over wide geographic areas. Again, I am quoting from the 
commission. Unprecedented catastrophic failure of our electronics-
dependent infrastructure could result. I think that you should almost 
put the verb in there, Mr. Speaker, would result. You may have noted in 
the paper just today, I think, or yesterday, there was an account that 
we almost had another big blackout, just almost tripped that big 
blackout and there is no catastrophic insult like an EMP laydown to 
cause that. Power, energy, transport, telecom and financial systems are 
particularly vulnerable and interdependent. We just talked about that, 
very vulnerable, lots of computers, very interdependent. One goes down 
and they all come down. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause 
large scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the Nation's 
life.

                              {time}  2200

  Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these 
infrastructures. Without adequate protection, recovery could be 
prolonged months to years.
  What would happen if that was prolonged months to years?
  Increased dependence on advanced electronic systems results in the 
potential for an increased EMP vulnerability of our technologically 
advanced forces, making EMP probably the most attractive asymmetric 
weapon. EMP threatens the ability of the United States and Western 
nations to project influence and military power. We could be easily 
blackmailed by a country that has the

[[Page H4893]]

ability to produce an EMP laydown if we are not prepared to protect 
ourselves from it.
  Degradation of the infrastructures could have irreversible effects on 
the country's ability to support its population, and this one brief 
three-word sentence, ``millions could die.'' That is what Dr. Lowell 
Wood said when I asked him how could the technology of a century ago 
support our present population and its distribution. And his 
unemotional answer was, ``Yes, I know. The population will shrink until 
it can be supported by the technology.'' That shrink could easily, 
easily, Mr. Speaker, be in the millions or hundreds of millions of 
people.
  There are two other charts that I want to show the Members, and this 
is what other people are saying. This is from an op-ed piece by Senator 
John Kyl, and I am delighted that Senator Kyl is helping with spreading 
the word about this and the caution that we really need to be doing 
something. This was in The Washington Post, and he says: ``Last week 
the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology 
and Homeland Security, which I chair,'' this was John Kyl, ``held a 
hearing on a major threat to the United States not only from terrorists 
but from rogue nations like North Korea. An electromagnetic pulse, EMP, 
attack is one of only a few ways that America could be essentially 
defeated by our enemies, terrorists or otherwise. Few if any people 
would die right away, but the long-term loss of electricity would 
essentially bring our society to a halt. Few can conceive of the 
possibility that terrorists could bring American society to its knees 
by knocking out our power supply from several miles in the atmosphere, 
but this time we have been warned and we better be prepared.'' And this 
is his comment.
  Another comment here, and this is from the Washington Times and just 
a couple of brief paragraphs here. This is from Major Franz Gayl: ``The 
impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries. The less 
developed societies of North Korea, Iran, and other potential EMP 
attack perpetrators are less electronically dependent and less 
specialized while more capable of continued functionality in the 
absence of modern convenience.''
  That is an easy way to say they are not dependent upon computers like 
we are and we would suffer a whole lot more than them. And then in the 
next paragraph he pointed out that because of our enormous complexity, 
how technologically developed we are, that our great strength has 
become potentially our great weakness when we are talking about EMP.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, I would like to close with some observations. 
Again, from the commission's report, the EMP threat is one of a few 
potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. By taking 
action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels.
  I would like to say, Mr. Speaker, that the EMP Commission report is 
really a good-news story. One would not think it was good news pointing 
out how very vulnerable we are, but the good news is that we now know 
how vulnerable we are, and we know that this is fixable; and it is 
fixable for far, far less cost than the Iraq war. We just need, Mr. 
Speaker, to do it. It is not going to happen overnight. It is going to 
happen quicker in our military than in our private sector because we 
turn over our weapons programs quicker than we turn over our big 
transformers and our power grid and so forth. But we can little by 
little, year by year, fix our national infrastructure and fix our 
military so that we are not as vulnerable.
  Mr. Speaker, being vulnerable like this, and I pointed out comments 
from the writings of a number of our potential enemies, it is not that 
they do not know this. Not one person in 50 in the United States will 
know it, but it is very obvious that all of our potential enemies know 
about this. Our very vulnerability invites that attack. Because we are 
so vulnerable, because it is so asymmetric, we invite that attack. Mr. 
Speaker, we need to do everything we can to lessen the probability of 
attack. And the longer we go unprotected from EMP, the more we invite 
this attack and the more vulnerable we are. U.S. strategy to address 
the EMP threat should balance prevention, preparation, protection, and 
recovery.
  We have been talking primarily, Mr. Speaker, about prevention, about 
hardening, so that those pulses will not get through so that it will 
not fry the equipment and our infrastructure can keep working. There 
are a number of things we need to do in preparation.
  One of the things we need to do is to have the equivalent of the old 
civil defense. In our homeland security we really are not looking at 
civil defense. Those who are my age and maybe a little younger but 
mostly my age can very well remember all those fallout shelters, and 
the young people may have noticed some of those rusting signs and 
wondered what they were because there were fall-out shelters almost 
everywhere a generation ago.
  In the 1950s, IBM was lending their employees money interest-free to 
build backyard shelters. We were expecting the potential of a bolt out 
of the blue, that nuclear weapons would be rained down on us. And there 
were brochures put out by the government telling us how to build a 
fall-out shelter, what to put in the fall-out shelter, what we needed 
to buy. EMP is not going to be anywhere near as hard to protect 
ourselves against as a nuclear explosion and all that fall-out. But to 
the extent that each of us and our families and our communities are 
prepared for this, our country is going to be enormously stronger 
should this happen to us.
  And, Mr. Speaker, whether one is preparing for an EMP attack or for a 
terrorist attack or anything that disrupts our usual economy, we have 
about 3 days' supply of food in any one of our big cities. If the 
trucks do not keep coming, the supermarket may be open 24 hours a day, 
but when we are in there, Mr. Speaker, we are going to see that as we 
are taking it off the shelf, they are stocking the shelves. This goes 
on continually because there are only about 3 days of food. What would 
happen if our trucks could not run? What would our cities do after 
those 3 days after the food was gone? It is very easy, Mr. Speaker, to 
stock far more than 3 days of food in one's house.
  A number of years ago, there was a very well-known economist by the 
name of Howard Ruff. He had made some predictions about the stock 
market that made him kind of an icon in his day, and people would come 
to him for advice. And a very interesting story, when they came with 
their money and said, How should we invest our money Mr. Ruff, he would 
say, Do you have a year's supply of food for your family? They would 
say, No. He would say, If you do not have a year's supply of food for 
your family, you do not have any money to invest. The first thing you 
need to do is buy a year's supply of food for your family, and then 
come back and we will talk about how to invest the rest of your money 
because that is the best investment that you need to make.
  They would come back, and he would say, You have a year's supply of 
food?
  Yes, sir.
  Well, he said, do you have a bag of silver?
  A bag of silver is a bag of junk silver and one may do something else 
but they need the equivalent of this. That is junk silver. It is silver 
that has no numanistic value, and it is in bags that are sealed and 
they have a $1,000 face value. He said, Unless you have a bag of silver 
for each member of your family, you have not made the second most 
important investment you could make; so go buy that and come back and 
we will talk about what to do with the rest your money.
  These are the kinds of things that Americans need to be thinking 
about. What can they do, Mr. Speaker, what can their family do, what 
can their church group do so that they are not going to be a liability 
on the society should there be a terrorist attack that shuts down these 
services or should there be a national EMP attack that shuts them down 
all over our country? We can do something, Mr. Speaker, to prepare 
ourselves so that we are going to have some sense that we can make it 
through so that we are not going to be a liability on the system.
  Let me show the last chart here now in our conclusion. The fiscal 
year 2006 defense authorization bill contains a provision that extends 
the EMP Commission's life to ensure that their recommendations will be 
implemented. We want them watching to see what we are doing. We want 
them to tell us and to tell the public. We are a representative 
government here; and when our

[[Page H4894]]

people call in and say, Are you doing this, are you doing that, my wife 
points out that if we do not represent our constituents, we will not 
represent our constituents. So if the people across our country demand 
that we be prepared, that we tell them how to be prepared themselves, 
then we will do this.
  The terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our 
civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of an 
attack. Our very vulnerability invites this attack. Mr. Speaker, we 
obviously cannot do it yesterday. We certainty need to do it today and 
tomorrow to begin to protect ourselves against it.
  The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical 
infrastructures. What are the first things, Mr. Speaker, that we need 
to turn our attention to? Where would a minimal investment pay the 
biggest dividends? And we need to have people studying this. The EMP 
Commission has made a lot of very good suggestions. If we simply 
followed those suggestions, we would be a long way to where we need to 
be. The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan to 
help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur, and then the 
little note that our citizens need to become as self-sufficient as 
possible.
  Mr. Speaker, we have spent the better part of an hour talking about 
something that one might expect to see in a science fiction movie or in 
some magazine that is talking about the improbable. But what we are 
talking about here is a very possible, and I think probable, event. It 
is something that the American people have not been very much aware of. 
We hope that this awareness, as the EMP Commission continues its work, 
will be more widespread. We hope that the American people will respond 
by doing two things: one, demanding that their government, that their 
Representative make the right kinds of choices and appropriate the 
right kinds of moneys to start on the path to developing a military 
that is immune to EMP attacks and to, as quickly as possible, develop a 
national infrastructure that will not collapse like a house of cards 
with an EMP attack. And, also, I believe that our citizens will demand 
that we tell them what they can do.
  There is an interesting phenomenon, Mr. Speaker. If in anticipation 
of a hurricane this fall, one goes to the grocery store now and stocks 
up on some things that they need, they are going to be a patriot 
because they are improving the economy. If they wait until the 
hurricane is on its way and then they go to the store to stock up on 
what they need, they are no longer a patriot. They are now a hoarder. 
So exactly the same act is really a very good act or a very bad act 
depending upon when they do it. If they buy it in long anticipation of 
the event, they are now a real patriot. They are providing some 
assurance that they will not be a liability and they are helping the 
economy. If they wait until the threat is at their door and they now 
buy it, now they are a hoarder and nobody wants a hoarder. So our 
homeland security needs to help us to know what we need to do so that 
we will be as self-sufficient as possible, an asset and not a 
liability.
  Mr. Speaker, there is an old saying that to be forewarned is to be 
forearmed. I know that probably not even one in 50 Americans has ever 
heard of EMP, but I will assure the Members that all of our potential 
enemies know all about EMP. We see it in their writings. We see it in 
their war games. And what we need to do, Mr. Speaker, is to proceed as 
rapidly as we can to develop a military that is immune to EMP, to 
develop an infrastructure that as quickly as possible will be less and 
less damaged by EMP, and to provide each American citizen with the 
information they need so that they, their family, their social club, 
their church, as individuals, as families, as groups, can plan so that 
they will be as self-sufficient as possible in whatever emergency 
occurs.
  And who knows what the terrorists might do to us. This is clearly the 
most devastating, the most asymmetric attack that could be made on our 
country; but there could be lesser ones that could for one's family, 
one's locality be just as devastating as an EMP attack.
  Mr. Speaker, I know the American people will respond and know when 
our enemies see us responding that the risk of this kind of attack will 
be immensurably lessened because the less vulnerable we are, the less 
likely they are to attack.

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