[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 17384-17390]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 17385]]

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.
  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

[[Page 17386]]

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 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

[[Page 17387]]

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.
  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

[[Page 17388]]

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 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

[[Page 17389]]

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, 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.

[[Page 17390]]



                              {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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