[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 109 (Thursday, September 7, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H6352-H6357]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NATIONAL SECURITY AND ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, among many priorities that the
country and the Congress face, our national security is probably
preeminent today in the minds of many people and in the Congress and in
our administration. And today I would like to talk about one aspect of
national security that will probably be unknown to a great many
Americans, and to those few who know about and have studied it, this
will remind them of the potential for this threat to our country,
indeed, to our whole society.
Our first glimpse of the possibility of this threat occurred in 1961.
It was in the Pacific and we were then doing a series of nuclear tests,
and this was our first and last high altitude test. It was over
Johnston Island, and the weapon was detonated above the atmosphere the
first time that we had done that. No one knew what was going to happen
as a result of that test, and the consequences were unexpected and
really quite striking.
Hawaii was about 800 miles away. If you think back to 1961, we did
not have all of the electronics that we have today. We were more in an
electrical infrastructure then than we were in an electronic
infrastructure, and the electrical infrastructures are very much more
robust than an electronic infrastructure because you are dealing with
big structures and heavy wires and so forth. Even so, the effects of
this detonation above the atmosphere resulted in the shutdown of
electrical circuits. There were many disruptions in electrical and
certainly in electronic equipment such as existed those days in Hawaii
800 miles away. The Soviets were also doing testing simultaneously with
ours and they had more experience with this phenomenon. We now have a
name for this phenomenon. We call it electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
And here I have a chart which shows very schematically what is
happening. We detonate the weapon above the atmosphere, and there is an
immediate distribution of gamma rays that travel at the speed of light
that will strike every object within line of sight. And when these
gamma rays reach our atmosphere, they produce what is called Compton
electrons, all of this essentially at the speed of light, and these
Compton electrons then become a force which is very much like a nuclear
storm magnified many, many times. And if you think, Mr. Speaker, of the
disruptions that a robust solar storm can produce to our communications
here, you can get some idea as to the potential impact of an EMP. It is
sometimes called high altitude or HEMP.
We since have learned a great deal more about that than we knew then,
but the feature that we learned then was that wide areas are affected.
You can have very high field strengths, and here it says 50 kilovolts
per meter. We have since learned, as reported by the Russian generals,
and I will come to that report in a few moments, that the Soviets
purportedly designed and built electromagnetic weapons that would
produce 200 kilovolts per meter; so that is four times larger than the
number which is given here in this chart. This was May of 1986. That
was 20-some years after the explosion, but a long time before these
Russian generals were interviewed. There is a very broad frequency band
running from very, very short wavelengths to very long wavelengths. The
pulse lasts more than 2 minutes, but it comes on with such abruptness
that our surge protectors for your computer and other devices are
useless because the pulse is through the surge protector before it sees
it. So there is now nothing out there the equivalent of EMP.
The next chart shows on the right that just about everything is
affected by EMP. It has a missile which is taking off there. We are not
even sure that we can launch through a robust EMP laydown. What I am
told is that we tested our missiles and we found some deficiencies and
we corrected that and we have done that several times, and the last
time we corrected the deficiencies, we intentionally did not test
again, hoping that we had fixed all the deficiencies. But knowing that
if we tested and found deficiencies that that intelligence would
probably get out to our enemies and they would know that we were
vulnerable, and rather than run that risk, we believe that we had
corrected all the deficiencies; so we have not tested, and, hopefully,
a potential enemy will also believe that we have corrected all the
deficiencies. But that is not a certainty. We do not yet know for
certain that we could launch our ballistic missiles through an EMP
laydown. It shows effects on automobiles.
By the way, if you have a car or truck that has a coil and a
distributor, you are probably immune to EMP. But all modern cars, as
you know when you take your car for service, has a lot of computers.
Indeed, a computer is required for servicing your car. So all of the
new vehicles are vulnerable to EMP. Airplanes, only a few of our
military airplanes are EMP hardened. All of the other planes are
vulnerable to EMP effects.
Here on the left it shows the coverage with the height of blast 60
miles and how large an area. That is line of sight, with the simple
geometry of the Earth and the height. If you are 200 miles up, you
cover a bigger area. And if you are 300 miles high up with the center
of that in Iowa, Nebraska, about in that area, it covers our whole
country; or the margins of our country in south Florida, northwest
Washington State, and Maine, all are covered with a blast of about 300
miles high above Nebraska or Iowa.
The next chart is a little more detailed presentation of the blast
area. And it shows that it is not simple concentric rings because of
the dynamics of the detonation of a nuclear weapon. You have a
distribution of intensities; but generally speaking, out at the margins
of the country with 480 kilometers, about 300 miles, with a detonation
of that blast, you see from the purple here that you have got about 50
percent of maximum at the margins of our country.
The level to which we tested is classified, but if the Russian
generals are correct that they developed weapons at 200 kilovolts per
meter, that would mean 100 kilovolts per meter at the margins of our
country. And there is concern that even when we test and harden that we
may not have hardened it to an adequate level.
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The next chart answers an important question that I am sure a lot of
people ask at about this point, and that is if there is such enormous
vulnerability to EMP, why would you be talking about that and giving
our potential adversaries a heads up that we are vulnerable? To help
understand that, most Americans may not know about it, but every one of
our potential enemies knows about it. I have here just one little chart
which, as you can see, is not in English. It is in Russian, as a matter
of fact. And although I cannot read Russian, I certainly can look at
the sketches here. And what we see is EMP.
{time} 1730
Here is a weapon detonated above the atmosphere. And here you see the
effect of that. This is the EMP pulse here lasting a long time. By the
way, the fact that the wavelengths in that pulse go from extremely
short to extremely long mean that they can couple with almost
everything.
I am told that the smallest electronic parts on the warehouse shelf
will couple with some of the shortest waves. And long, long lines like
railroad tracks will couple with the longest waves. As a matter of
fact, they will even couple with wires that are buried several feet
underground.
Without technical knowledge, what we are talking about almost seems
like Buck Rogers and science fiction. A blast of a single weapon up to
300 miles in the sky, and by the way, if it were in the daytime and you
were looking away from it, you would not even know it happened. If you
were looking at it, obviously, you would see it because it was very
bright, and it was line of sight.
You are not hurt by it. It has no effect on our bodies. But if you
have an electronic watch, that will stop. If you get in your car, that
probably will not run. The phones will not work. There will be no power
grid. There are literally tens of thousands of what are called SCADA,
which are little control devices in our power grid. And they all
contain chips, micro-electronics. And many of them were manufactured by
organizations that do not even exist now because they have been in the
field for a long time.
And all of those are gone. Signals traveling through fiber will get
there. But if you have anything other than optical switching, if you
have electronic switching, the switches will be gone. And so even if
you are using fiber, you still cannot transmit your data if you are
using other-than-optical switching.
So this chart demonstrates very clearly that our enemies know about
EMP, because this is from a Russian publication, and it shows the
effects of EMP. This is the power grid. They show the transformers
going out.
By the way, if our big transformers go out, there are no replacements
on the shelf. The biggest ones are not even manufactured in this
country. We will need to go to Europe or Scandinavia, and you place
your order, and in a year to 18 months, they will have the transformer
for you.
I was concerned about EMP, and I called a friend of mine, Tom Clancy,
who I knew had an EMP scenario in one of his books. And he lives on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland. I knew him. So I called Tom and asked him
for some information on EMP.
He said, if you have read my book, you know as much about EMP as I
know, but let me refer you to, in his opinion, the smartest man hired
by the U.S. Government. And he gave me the name of a Dr. Lowell Wood
who worked for Lawrence Livermore Lab, one of our big nuclear labs out
in California.
Well, this was back, oh, probably 12, 13 years ago, a while ago. And
cell phones were not all that popular. You may remember that we were
using pagers. If you wanted to communicate with someone, why you paged
them. And that went up to a satellite and back down to their pager. And
they got the little message, please call so and so. I did that with
Lowell Wood. I thought he was in California. And he happened to be in
Washington. And of course the same satellite that would have brought
the signal down to California brought it down to Washington. Within an
hour, he was sitting with me in my office.
Dr. Lowell Wood was indeed a font of knowledge on electromagnetic
pulse. I was concerned that, because of cost considerations, that our
military was waiving EMP hardening on essentially all of its new
weapons systems and that that made us vulnerable to an EMP attack.
And so I got in legislation the establishment of an EMP commission.
And the EMP commission was set up and functioned for 2 years. Normally
our commissions work for a year. But because of the details of this
legislation, they were able to work for 2 years. They brought forth a
big report. This is the executive summary of that report. And this was
issued in 2004.
This is the Executive Summary of the Report of the Commission to
Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse EMP
Attack.
And here are a number of PowerPoint presentations that they prepared,
because they were going around the country briefing a large number of
organizations, Federal and State and private, on the results of their
study.
The next chart shows the commissioners. Here you will see Dr. Johnnie
Foster is the developer of almost all of our new atomic weapons. Dr.
Bill Graham, who was the chair of this, was Rumsfeld's co-chair when
they did that very important study on the emerging ballistic missile
threat that came out a few years ago.
It is interesting. I spent a couple of days in Moscow with Bill
Graham and Rumsfeld when we were briefing members of the Russian Duma
so that they would understand that our withdrawal from this treaty that
prohibited us from protecting ourselves against intercontinental
ballistic missiles had nothing to do with Russia because we cannot
imagine that we could produce a robust enough protection system to
protect us against the literally thousands of intercontinental
ballistic missiles that Russia has. But there are some new players on
the scene out there, like China and North Korea and Iran and who knows
who may get in line.
And we could, we felt, with the development of a system, the
successful test just a few days ago, be able to take out a few weapons
from a country like this.
Another very important member of this commission was Dr. Joan
Woodward, who is the deputy director of the Sandia Labs out in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was out visiting my son there who works at
the labs. And he brought me home some material from the lab that led me
to believe that they might have some knowledge that would be helpful in
this EMP study.
So I asked for a briefing. I had not looked at the list and
remembered specifically who was on this list of commissioners. And I
came in for a 5-hour classified briefing on the commission's work. And
Dr. Joan Woodward had at her disposal all of the resources of the
Sandia Labs. So they did a really magnificent job of studying the
threat, not just to our military but to our national infrastructure.
The next chart shows something which alarmed them. This is from their
commission report. We have redacted here the names of the Russian
generals. But they interviewed two Russian generals who told them that
Russia had designed and built a super EMP nuclear weapon capable of
generating 200 kilovolts per meter. That is an enormously high pulse.
Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea.
Now, I am not saying this. I am taking this from the report of the EMP
commission. Russian, Chinese and Pakistani scientists are working in
North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in
the near future. Now, this is the assessment of the EMP commission.
The next chart just builds on the point that I made that most of our
citizens may not know anything about EMP, because it is really a Buck
Rogers Star Wars kind of a phenomena. It almost seems like science
fiction.
The fact is that, although few of our people know about EMP, all of
our potential enemies know about EMP.
And I just wanted to make that very clear, because I do not want
anybody to have the notion that we are somehow informing a potential
enemy of something that he does not know about.
This first quote here is a very interesting one. This is not exactly
the quote as I remember, but it is a pretty
[[Page H6354]]
good paraphrase, because I was there. It was May 2nd of 1999. And I was
sitting in a hotel in Vienna, Austria, with ten other Members of our
Congress and three members of the Russian Duma.
I can tell you exactly when we were there. We were there when the
three prisoners, hostages, whatever you want to call them were released
by Yugoslavia. You may remember that event. They were released to Jesse
Jackson as you may remember.
For 2 days we sat in that hotel room hammering out a framework for an
agreement. Five days later, that was voted by the G-8. Russia joined
the G-7, because the only country that the Bosnians had enough respect
for to be controlled by them was Russia. And when the G-7 joined with
Russia, they used the framework agreement that we had developed. And
that ended the hostilities there as you may remember.
Well, one of the three Russians there was Vladimir Lukin. He was the
ambassador here at the end of Bush 1, the beginning of the Clinton
administration. At the time we were there, he was the chair of their
equivalent of our International Relations Committee in the Russian
Duma.
He is a fairly short fellow with even shorter arms. And he was
extremely angry. And he sat there for 2 days with his arms folded
across his chest looking at the ceiling. And then he made this
statement, and what he said was, as I remember it, ``if we really
wanted to hurt you with no threat of retaliation, we would launch an
SLBM and we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country and
shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.''
That was Vladimir Lukin. Another Russian who was there, who was I
think the third ranking Communist, and yes, there is still a big
Communist Party in Russia, who was the third ranking Communist,
Alexander Shurbanov. And he smiled and he said, ``if one weapon would
not do it, we have some spares, like I think at least 7,000 spares.''
You see, the reason for no fear of retaliation was that if it was
launched from the ocean, we would never know where it came from. Well,
that was his comment.
Now, all of this is from the EMP commission. None of those are my
statements. 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.
Again, a survey of worldwide military and scientific literature
sponsored by the commission found widespread knowledge about EMP and
its potential military utility, including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt,
India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.
This next bullet is kind of repeated in the next chart, so I will
skip to this one. 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.
{time} 1745
It should be noted that you do not have to be very technically adroit
or very competent to launch an EMP weapon, because if you miss by 100
miles that is just about as good as a direct hit because there is a
large area that this covers.
A Scud missile can launch about 180 miles high. That will not blanket
the whole United States, but a Scud missile launched from a ship off
our coast could shut down all of New England and much of the mid-
Atlantic area with an EMP blast. Now, if you thought recovery from
Katrina was difficult, imagine an area many times that large with no
remaining infrastructure in terms of communications or power. That is
the problem we would have. If it blankets our Nation, of course, we
have an essentially irresolvable problem.
The next chart continues with what our potential adversaries know
about EMP, and again, all of this is from the EMP commission report. If
the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways, and
this is an interesting one from Iranian Journal in 1998, even before
the present wild man who is there, if the world's industrial countries
fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous
electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years.
150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. It is probably more than
that now, and if the enemy forces succeeded in infiltrating the
information network, which an EMP would do if it shuts us down, then
the whole organization would collapse, the American soldiers could not
function, nor would they be able to fire a single shot. Now, I am not
sure that is totally true, because I think our guns are pretty much
immune to the EMP, but it is largely true.
We have now about 35,000 people in South Korea. We believe that with
the technology we have that we are a match for the million-man North
Korean Army, but if the North Koreans were to launch an EMP weapon,
just fire straight up, if you will, and detonate a weapon above the
atmosphere, our soldiers would, in effect, be no taller in terms of
combat capability than the North Korean soldiers who probably are
pretty EMP immune because they do not have very sophisticated
equipment.
Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of
directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse. This is the Iranian
Journal. Terrorists have attempted to acquire nonnuclear radio
frequency weapons. This is a statement from the EMP Commission.
So you see that essentially all of our presently believed potential
enemies are writing about EMP. It is not that they do not know about
it, and my concern is that most Americans do not know about it, which
is why we are talking about it.
Why would they be interested in EMP? Again, this is from the
commission. States or terrorists may well calculate that using a
nuclear weapon for EMP test offers the greatest utility. We talk about
asymmetric warfare. An EMP weapon is the ultimate asymmetric weapon.
One little country with a Scud launcher and a crude nuclear weapon and
a transsteamer from which they could launch it, and by the way, we
cannot see with our satellites through the thinnest canvas. If the Scud
launcher is on the deck and covered by a canvas, we could not
distinguish it from baled hay or crates of bananas.
In fact, there is one interesting story on an EMP attack in our
country, and this may be kind of a look at the future. It has our
country attacked from the sea, and after the weapon is launched, the
ship is sunk. So now even if you find the ships there are no
fingerprints. The ship is gone.
Well, these are the reasons they may use it. 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. There is no way that a nuclear
weapon could be used to produce so much damage to our country as with
an electromagnetic pulse detection by detonating it at high altitude.
If it took out all of Los Angeles or New York City, you would not
have done anywhere near as much damage to our country as simply
detonating it above the atmosphere and for using an EMP pulse which
would shut down all of our communications and all of our power grids.
Mr. Speaker, think about a world, and it would not be quite this but
nearly this, a world in which the only person you can talk to is the
person next to you unless you happen to be a ham operator with a vacuum
tube set, and then you could talk to another operator who had a vacuum
tube set. By the way, the vacuum tubes are a million times less
susceptible to EMPs than the microelectronics that we use now. And in
this world, the only way pretty much you can go anywhere is to walk
unless you happen to have a friend who has a car that has a coil and
distributor, and that car probably will work.
The second bullet here is a very interesting one, for two reasons.
The country that does this believes they are relatively immune to a
massive retaliation with our nuclear weapons. Even if we knew who did
it, are we justified in incinerating their grandmothers and their
babies because they took out our computers? That is in effect, Mr.
Speaker, all they would have done is take out our microelectronics. The
consequences of that, of course, are devastating, but the second reason
is that we probably would not know who did it.
[[Page H6355]]
I cannot imagine, except for Russia, any country that would launch a
nuclear weapon from their soil. Our satellites are really good. We
would certainly detect it. We would know where it came from, and we
would retaliate. If they attack us, it is going to be from the sea.
They cover three-fourths of the Earth's surface. They are very
difficult to monitor. The north Atlantic shipping lanes are crowded
with ships. It is essentially impossible to keep track of specific
ships in that shipping lane.
EMP could, compared to a nuclear attack on the cities, kill many more
Americans in the long run from indirect effects of collapsed
infrastructure, power, communications, transportation, food and water.
I was given a prepublication copy of a novel which I hope comes out
because I think Americans need to know what the potential is, and it
was the story of a community in the hills of North Carolina after an
EMP attack. It goes through the first year; and to give some emphasis
to this statement, it could kill many more Americans. This is a novel,
but they did a lot of research. They had reason to believe, I think, it
was probably pretty close to the truth.
If you go to a country that has no communications and no power and
will not have any communications or power and essentially no
transportation because all of our transportation now except for these
old cars and trucks are dependent on microelectronics, the story they
told was that at the end of the first year 80 percent of the people in
this North Carolina community were dead, most of them from lack of
food.
The average city has 3 days' supply of food. If the trucks do not
keep coming in over the superhighway, and by the way the serving of
food on your plate tonight, the average serving traveled 1,500 miles to
get there, to give you some idea of how vulnerable we are to
transportation losses.
They were lucky, because the authors concluded in their book that
probably 90 percent of our population would be dead by the end of the
year, and in New York City with its millions of people, the novel at
the end of the year had them with 25,000 people still alive.
These are unimaginable consequences. The effects could be just
overwhelmingly devastating, and a little later I will give you some
quotes from some very prominent Americans who understand, and you may
be surprised of the source of these quotes when you see them.
Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire
regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military
strengths 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. Most of these rogue states
have little microelectronics. If we retaliate with EMP laydown, they
would be a little discomfited compared to the effect on us.
The next chart is an interesting one and far too complex to go
through in the few moments we have to look at it here. But they spent a
lot of time looking at our national infrastructure and the
interdependency of the various aspects of our infrastructure.
Their study and conclusions reminded me of the counsel of a very
prominent American. This was a number of years ago, Harrison Scott
Brown, from CalTech, a geophysicist who I think held a number of
seminars called ``The Next Hundred Years,'' and in those seminars, he
looked at where the world might be and the various scenarios for the
next hundred years.
One of the scenarios way back in the 1960s and 1950s that had been
looked at was a nuclear war. He cautioned that recovery from a nuclear
war would be very difficult, and what he said then is true in spades
today. He noted that our very complex infrastructure was developed
through an evolutionary process, through the exploitation of high-
quality, readily-available raw materials, iron ore in the Midwest,
which was so good that you could almost literally have a backyard
smelter. There is still one of those little smelters, by the way, not
working of course, just a tourist site now up near Thurmont, Maryland,
not very many miles from here.
He cautioned that since our infrastructure was built with these high-
quality, readily-available materials like coal that was exposed by
erosion of the soil from the coal, oil that was very shallow and very
abundant in Pennsylvania, that if our infrastructure collapsed, that we
probably could not reestablish it without heavy industry, and heavy
industry would have collapsed.
I thought just in the last day or two how appropriate his concerns
were when I thought of this recent big, and it is big but it is not
going to save the day, oil find in the Gulf of Mexico. How could you
ever drill through 7,000 feet of water and I think about 30,000 feet of
soil without the products of heavy industry? You could not, of course,
and what this chart shows is that all of our infrastructure, like a
house of cards, is interrelated. Any one is pulled out and the rest
collapse. Of course, the one essential to everything is power. When
that is gone, all is gone. Nothing works.
They spent a great deal of time, and you can get a copy of this
report, and you can read the concerns that they have.
One of the few high altitude nuclear detonations, to confuse the EMP,
one 300 miles will cover the whole country. Unprecedented cascading
failure of our electronics-dependent infrastructure could result. I
think, Mr. Speaker, we probably ought to change that verb. It would
result.
Power energy transport, telecom and financial systems are
particularly vulnerable and interdependent. EMP disruption of these
sectors could cause large scale infrastructure failures for all aspects
of the national life. Both civilian and military capabilities depend on
these infrastructures without adequate protection, and today, we have
essentially none, Mr. Speaker. Without adequate protection, recovery
could be prolonged months to years.
Mr. Speaker, you cannot hold your breath for months or years. Now,
all of this is from the EMP Commission set up by Public Law 106-398,
title XIV. These are not my words. These are the words of the people
from the EMP Commission.
The next chart, again directly from the commission, says that EMP is
one of a small number of threats that may, and, boy, are they capable
of understatement. These are scientists primarily, and scientists are
not preachers or politicians. They are given to understatement. EMP is
one of a small number of threats that may hold at risk the continued
existence of today's U.S. civil society. That is the way of saying, Mr.
Speaker, that EMP could end our civil society. When they say ``hold at
risk the continued existence,'' that means discontinue the society,
disrupt our military forces and disrupt our ability to project military
power.
Far too many of our weapons systems are not hardened. At a series of
hearings over the last several years, I have frequently asked, after a
robust EMP laydown, how much of our war fighting capability remains?
And the short answer is, usually not much.
{time} 1800
Now, that is about to change, because I now understand that a memo is
circulating in the Pentagon asking all of our departments there to make
an assessment of their EMP vulnerabilities. Hopefully, that will result
in a program to correct this deficiency.
The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than
in the Cold War. Then there was one. Today, who knows how many there
are. Any country that has a crude nuclear weapon that they might make
or buy, a Scud launcher and a transsteamer they can put it on is
capable; not of blanketing our whole country, but taking out the whole
northeast and Mid-Atlantic area would be devastating. This would be
orders of magnitude greater than Katrina, and we still really haven't
recovered from that one.
Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP strategic attack option. I
read earlier a number of quotes from the commission, from journals in
these foreign countries noting that they really know about it, the
threat not adequately addressed in U.S. national and homeland security
programs. I said, Mr. Speaker, they were capable of gross
understatement. We are paying essentially no attention to it.
You know, my house is probably not going to burn down, but I wouldn't
sleep well tonight, I wouldn't sleep tonight if I knew that I didn't
have fire
[[Page H6356]]
insurance on my home. I would want to call the agent and get a binder.
Now, what are the odds that my house is going to burn tonight? Very
small. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that in the reality of today's
world, there is a bigger probability that there will be an EMP laydown
than that any one house or building will burn. Now, if you are
uncomfortable being unprotected by fire insurance, you really ought to
be uncomfortable being unprotected from EMP.
The next chart shows the conclusions of the EMP Commission. The EMP
threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United
States. As a matter of fact, there is almost no other single event that
you can name, except the impact of a large meteor from space perhaps,
that you could note that would have the devastating effects of an EMP
laydown. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable
levels. And they have a large number of pages and a lot of
recommendations.
We just recently extended the life of the EMP Commission for 18
months after their first meeting, and their first meeting was just a
few weeks ago. So the EMP Commission, unlike most commissions doing
this kind of work, they produce a paper, and then the report just
collects dusts, and they go away. But this one is not going away, and I
hope we can keep it in existence for a long time.
The EMP Commission needs to be there watching our response to make
sure that we are doing the right thing. They now have an extension of
life of about 18 months. They are a few weeks into that, so they are
going around educating people, sectors of government, private sector
and so forth.
By taking action, this EMP threat could be reduced. It could be
reduced to manageable levels. If you are building a device, and EMP
hardened, it may increase the cost of the device only 5 or 10 percent,
maybe even less. If you wait until after the device is built, it may
cost you as much to harden the device as it did to build it. If you are
building in the hardening, it is not all that expensive or not all that
difficult.
The strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, and
that is telling other people you do this, you are going to pay for it;
preparation, protection and recovery. We need to be looking at all of
these.
A fascinating study is, what would you do if this happened? What
resources do you have available? How would you mobilize those
resources? What would you do to provide the most good for the most
people with the resources you have available? These are fascinating
studies, and essentially nobody is looking at them.
Critical military capabilities must be survivable; and they are not
today, I hope we are moving to address that; and endurable to
underwrite U.S. strategy.
The next chart shows a continuation of their conclusions, and this
reflects that, in the 2006 Defense Authorization, we extended it for 18
months.
Terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our
civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of an
attack.
Vulnerability invites attack. I really am a pacifist. I don't like
war. That is why I am a big, big supporter of our military, because I
really subscribe to the philosophy that the most certain path to peace
is to prepare for war. If you are really prepared for war, you are
probably not going to have a war. We are not prepared for this kind of
an eventuality, and our very unpreparedness invites this kind of an
asymmetric attack.
The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical
infrastructure. And what do we do to protect it? And what do we do to
recover? And it notes here that the power grid is a particularly
vulnerable and essential one. Without power, you have essentially
nothing. Everything goes down without power.
The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan to
help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur. What do you do
as a family to prepare? What do you do as a community to prepare? What
do you do when it happens? Citizens need to become as self-sufficient
as possible.
I am not telling you this; I am reading this from the report. If you
are not as self-sufficient as possible, then you become a liability.
You are no longer an asset to your country. You become a liability. So
it should be the goal of every American to be as self-sufficient as
possible, because then you become an asset and not a liability.
The next quote is a really interesting one, and I mentioned some
really prominent Americans are concerned about this, and so this is
from the Washington Post, ``One Way We Could Lose the War on Terror''
by U.S. Senator Jon Kyl from Arizona. ``Last week, the Senate Judiciary
Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland
Security, which I chair,'' he says, ``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, an EMP attack, is one of
only a few ways 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 could conceive of a 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've been warned,
and we better be prepared to respond.''
Thank you, Senator Kyl. Thank you for your recognition that this is a
problem. Thank you for your counsel that we ought to be doing something
about it. But, you know, I still don't see us doing much about it.
Another article that appeared in the public, ``The Impact of EMP is
Asymmetric.'' This is by 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 electromagnetically dependent and less specialized and are more
capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern
conveniences.''
If you don't have modern conveniences, you are not going to miss
modern conveniences.
``Conversely, the United States would be subject to widespread
paralysis and doubtful recovery,'' he says. That really is true,
doubtful recovery, ``following a surprise EMP attack. Therefore,
terrorists and their coincidentally allied state sponsors may determine
that, given just a few nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, the
subjection of the United States to a potentially nonattributable,''
from the sea, from above, ``nonattributable EMP attack is more
desirable than the destruction of selected cities.'' I would think so.
``Delayed mass lethality is assured over time through the cascade of
EMPs indirect effects that would bring our highly specialized and
urbanized society to a disorderly halt.'' That is a very euphemistic
way, Mr. Speaker, of saying that most of us would die.
The next chart shows the capability, which we exercised and have now
mothballed, where we could put a whole airplane and zap the airplane.
Now, this is not quite a realistic simulation of an EMP attack, but it
is the best we could do, because there are no long line effects here.
You just can't simulate miles of wire and railroad tracks. But we used
to have these facilities, and we have now mothballed them. We used to
test our airplanes. And some of our most important airplanes are
hardened. Indeed, those which are hardened are, obviously, classified.
But it is not that we would not have an ability to respond. We would.
But to whom? Who did it? And what would be our response?
Mr. Speaker, we have spent several minutes now talking about a threat
which I suspect few listeners had any idea existed. I hope that quoting
this report and high profile people like Jon Kyl has convinced the
listener that this is not just science fiction, that this is a real
possibility indeed.
If there is going to be a conflict, Mr. Speaker, with these powers, I
think it is more than a possibility, I think it is a probability that
any of these small adversaries that have a nuclear weapon could
devastate us more with an EMP laydown than with any other use of that
weapon. And the reason I am here in this time that we are talking about
national security, Mr. Speaker, is because I believe that, although
there are more urgent concerns about national security, like an open
border through which 11, 12, 20, who knows how many million illegal
immigrants could come,
[[Page H6357]]
there could just as well have been that many terrorists. By the way,
there is an old adage that talks about the tyranny of the urgent.
Iraq and what we are doing there is really urgent. Every day it is on
the President's plate. The border and the outrage of American citizens
that we haven't been able to close that border is really urgent. And it
is just a truism for families, for businesses, for countries, the
tyranny of the urgent. The urgent always sweeps the important off the
table. And one of the really important things that we need to be about
is preparing for the eventuality of an EMP laydown.
My last chart is a kind of a colorful one. This is a satellite
photograph of the Ural Mountains, and it is labeled the Yamantau region
in Russia. And this facility is ordinarily spoken of as Yamantau
Mountain because it is in a mountain, and you can see from the figure
down in the lower right there, it is about 600 miles almost due east of
Moscow in the Ural Mountains.
Beginning with Brezhnev, in about 1980, the Soviets, and now the
Russians, have a closed city there. In our liaison with the Russian
Duma, we have become fairly friendly with a number of those Duma
members, our counterparts there, and we asked them about closed cities.
And they say, oh, yes, we have closed cities. When you draw a map of
the region, the city is not even on the map. It is closed. People don't
go there unless they are needed to work there, and they do not leave
there unless they are no longer needed there.
Mezhgorye is the closed city. It happens to be in two little pockets
in the mountains, because one valley wasn't big enough to house it, but
there were at one time 60,000 people that we could estimate from our
satellite living there. That would be about 20,000 workers that were
working on Yamantau Mountain.
Yamantau Mountain is the largest nuclear secure facility in the
world. We have had two defectors from that Yamantau Mountain. They each
have told us what they know.
{time} 1815
What we know from what they told us is that it is enormously large,
as large as inside our beltway; it has train tracks running in two
directions, so they intend to move a lot of material; and it has
enormous rooms carved out of soft rock beneath hard rock. It is an
ideal geologic formation for producing this kind of a facility.
The number of people at Mezhgorye, since they are finished digging,
has now shrunk to about 15,000, as our satellites indicate, which means
there are about 5,000 working at Yamantau Mountain.
What are they doing there? By the way, this is so secret in Russia
that the cost of this, which has to be enormous, does not show in the
financial lines of any of the ministries. It is the equivalent of our
black programs, for those of you who are familiar with black programs.
To give you some idea how important this is to the Russians,
continuing work on Yamantau Mountain is more important than paying
their military officers, because they have continued work there when
they couldn't pay their military officers. It is more important to them
than the $200 million for the service module on the International Space
Station. That was embarrassing to them when they couldn't fund that and
we had to fund the service module, which was their responsibility, on
the International Space Station.
Now, there is no conceivable use of Yamantau Mountain except during
or after a nuclear war. This kind of gives you a little opportunity to
get into the heads of the Russian leaders. From their writings and from
their actions, it is quite justified to draw the conclusion that they
believe that nuclear war is inevitable and winnable.
Now, I have no idea, and I have had a number of classified briefings,
I have no idea what they plan to do in Yamantau Mountain. But one thing
is certain, it has no use except during or after a nuclear war.
I wanted to end with this, Mr. Speaker, to bring the message that
nuclear war is not unthinkable and therefore it will not happen,
because apparently the Russians do not believe that it is unthinkable.
By the way, they span 11 time zones. Their enormous country goes
almost halfway around the world. They have less than half the people
that we have and a geography that size, I think only six cities of more
than 1 million people. And if wealth is determined by natural resources
and raw materials, Russia is the wealthiest country on the globe. They
have everything their heart could desire, except a rational government,
their heart could desire for a robust economic system. They could close
the door and with their resources live happily ever after.
Almost nobody else can do that. We cannot do that. We import about
two-thirds of our oil, we have no diamonds, nickel, chromium, tungsten.
You would not have these lights in the ceiling without importing
things.
So I just wanted to end, Mr. Speaker, with this chart which shows
that our potential enemies believe that there could be a nuclear war
and they are preparing for it by spending money on Yamantau Mountain,
scarce money.
They were doing this, by the way, when money was scarce. It is not
scarce now. They are awash in cash because oil is $65, $70, $75 a
barrel. But they were spending money on this before they were flush
with money.
So my hope is, and I believe we should have time, that the American
people in our society and in our military can plan, adapt, design,
build, so that we will be immune.
We are much more likely to have this attack if we are vulnerable to
the attack, and at the moment we are explicitly vulnerable. We don't
need to be that way. The creativity and ingenuity of the American
people can make us essentially immune to this, Mr. Speaker, and we need
to be about it.
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