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21–324 PDF 2005

S. HRG. 109–30

TERRORISM AND THE EMP THREAT TO

HOMELAND SECURITY

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY 

AND HOMELAND SECURITY

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

MARCH 8, 2005

Serial No. J–109–5

Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY 

ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania, Chairman 

ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah 

CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa 

JON KYL, Arizona 

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio 

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama 

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina 

JOHN CORNYN, Texas 

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas 

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma 

PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont 

EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts 

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware 

HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin 

CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York 

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois 

DAVID BROG, Staff Director 

MICHAEL O’NEILL, Chief Counsel 

BRUCE A. COHEN, Democratic Chief Counsel and Staff Director 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY AND HOMELAND SECURITY

JON KYL, Arizona, Chairman 

ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah 

CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa 

JOHN CORNYN, Texas 

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio 

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama 

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts 

JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., Delaware 

HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin 

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois 

STEPHEN HIGGINS, Majority Chief Counsel 

STEVEN CASH, Democratic Chief Counsel 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS 

Page

Kyl, Hon. Jon, a U.S. Senator from the State of Arizona .................................... 1

prepared statement .......................................................................................... 43

WITNESSES 

Fonash, Peter, National Communications System Deputy Manger (Acting), 

Department of Homeland Security, Washington, D.C. ..................................... 3

Pry, Peter, Senior Staff, Congressional EMP Commission, Washington, D.C. ... 5

Wood, Lowell, Commissioner, Congressional EMP Commission, Livermore, 

California .............................................................................................................. 10

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD 

Fonash, Peter, Deputy Manager (Acting), National Communications System, 

Department of Homeland Security, Washington, D.C., prepared statement .. 32

Pry, Peter, Senior Staff, Congressional EMP Commission, Washington, D.C., 

prepared statement .............................................................................................. 46

Wood, Lowell, Commissioner, Congressional EMP Commission, Livermore, 

California, prepared statement ........................................................................... 51

(1)

TERRORISM AND THE EMP THREAT TO 

HOMELAND SECURITY 

TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2005 

UNITED STATES SENATE, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY

AND HOMELAND SECURITY

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

Washington, DC. 

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:35 p.m., in Room 

SD–226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Jon Kyl, Chairman 

of the Subcommittee, presiding. 

Present: Senator Kyl. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JON KYL, A U.S. SENATOR 

FROM THE STATE OF ARIZONA 

Chairman KYL. This hearing of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, 

Technology, and Homeland Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee will come to order. 

Our hearing today is on ‘‘Terrorism and the EMP Threat to 

Homeland Security.’’ Let me indicate that conflicts of interest keep 

some of my colleagues from being here right now, though several 

indicated that they were going to try to stop by. The record of the 

hearing, of course, will be very important. Unfortunately, a conference of Republicans was called, there is a vote going on right 

now, and some of my Democratic colleagues had some conflicts. But 

hopefully, we will have some other members join us here before too 

long. 

The subject, as I said, is the electromagnetic pulse and its potential impact as a tool of terrorism against the United States. An attack using EMP, which is a phenomenon created by the detonation 

of a nuclear weapon, could be devastating to this country and the 

public and Congress need to pay more attention to that danger. 

That is the reason for the hearing here today. 

Earlier this year, CIA Director Porter Goss gave chilling testimony about missing nuclear material from storage sites in Russia 

that may have found its way into terrorists’ hands. FBI Director 

Mueller confirmed new intelligence that suggests that al Qaeda is 

trying to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction in some 

form against us. And the 9/11 Commission report stated that our 

biggest failure was one of imagination. No one imagined the terrorists would do what they did on September 11. 

I want to explore new and imaginative possibilities of terrorist 

attacks and methods, and that is why we are here today, to examVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:41 May 25, 2005 Jkt 021324 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\21324.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
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ine a possibility that poses a grave threat and a crippling impact 

to our way of life. 

Last year, the EMP Commission found that EMP was one of a 

small number of threats that could hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences. The effects of an EMP could potentially 

shock, damage, or even destroy electrical systems that fall within 

the striking range of a nuclear detonation. And because the United 

States is heavily dependent on electrical systems to provide all 

basic services, an EMP attack has the potential to have a cascading 

effect on all aspects of American society. And finally, particularly 

because they lack ICBM capability, terrorists could nevertheless 

use lesser technology to launch an EMP weapon over the United 

States. 

The Commission’s report found that our infrastructure, such as 

electrical power, telecommunications, energy, financial systems, 

transportation, emergency services, water purification and delivery, 

food refrigeration, all of these things and more were vulnerable to 

EMP attack. And in the event of such an attack, those infrastructures would be rendered unusable, thus inflicting widespread disruption or failure on a national scale. The death toll from such an 

attack is almost unthinkable. 

Unfortunately, the House Armed Services Committee hearing on 

the Commission report occurred on the date of the release of the 

9/11 Commission report. As a result, the hearing and the EMP report received virtually no coverage. Thus, we thought it was appropriate to reinitiate that discussion with our hearing here today. We 

want to review the findings of the Commission, understand the current risk we face, as well as the steps we may need to take and 

are taking to prepare for such an attack. 

We have three very distinguished witnesses with us here today. 

Dr. Lowell Wood, Jr., is a member of that Commission, a Commissioner on the National Commission to Assess the EMP Threat to 

the United States. He is a member of the Technical Advisory Group 

of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a member of 

the Undersea Warfare Experts Group of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services, a member of the U.S. 

Nuclear Strategy Forum, a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and an officer and member of the 

Board of Directors of the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. 

He is also a member of the Laboratory Directors Technical Staff, 

University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 

where he has held numerous positions since 1972. He has received 

numerous awards and prizes for his work and is the author of several hundred publications. 

When I introduce Dr. Wood, I will also ask you please to introduce other members of the Commission, who I understand are with 

us here today, as well. 

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry was one of the CIA’s chief experts on Soviet plans for EMP attack. During the Cold War, he developed 

much of what the U.S. Government knows about Soviet planning 

for nuclear war, and in the post-Cold War period, his work has 

been central to the U.S. Government’s understanding of evolving 

Russian threat perceptions and military doctrine. 

3

He is the Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy Forum, 

a nonprofit foundation established to advise Congress on the future 

threat environment and on the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security policy, and recent served on the EMP Commission 

staff, where he was the chief analyst on foreign views of EMP attack. Dr. Pry holds two Ph.D.s, one in history, the other in international relations. He, too, has authored several books on national 

security and military issues. 

And finally, Dr. Peter Fonash from the Department of Homeland 

Security, National Communications Acting Deputy Manager. He 

has been a member of the Senior Executive Service since 1998, has 

served in both technical and policy positions in the Federal Government. He earned three degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, a B.S. in electrical engineering, an M.S. and Master’s of 

Business Administration at the Wharton School. He also holds a 

Doctor of Philosophy degree from George Mason University’s School 

of Information Technology and Engineering. His 24 years in Federal service were preceded by 4 years in private industry. 

We have a very distinguished panel, as you can see, with us here 

today. I would also like to recognize the other members of the EMP 

Commission who are with us here, and as I said, when I introduce 

Dr. Wood, I would like to ask those of you who are here to stand 

and be recognized. Their contribution to help us better understand 

the EMP threat is significant. 

I also want to thank Senator Feinstein, who cannot be with us 

today, for her work, along with her staff, and for her continuing 

contributions to the work of this Subcommittee. 

We hope that even though there are several conflicts that prevent colleagues from being here, there isn’t such big news that finally we can’t at least get some understanding of this potential 

threat out to the public so that we can better understand those 

kinds of threats that we may face in the future. 

Let me begin our testimony with Dr. Peter Fonash, and then we 

will go to Dr. Peter Pry, and then to Dr. Lowell Wood. Dr. Fonash, 

the floor is yours, and your statements will be put in the record in 

full. Feel free to quote from them or deviate from them however 

you wish. 

STATEMENT OF PETER M. FONASH, ACTING DEPUTY MANAGER, NATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, WASHINGTON, D.C. 

Mr. FONASH. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. My name is 

Peter Fonash. I am the Acting Deputy Manager of the National 

Communications System, NCS. I am honored to appear before you 

today to discuss the issues surrounding the vulnerabilities of our 

Nation’s critical telecommunications infrastructure to EMP. 

The NCS, as you know, is an interagency body that brings together the telecommunications assets of the Federal Government 

that are of significance to national security and emergency preparedness, NS/EP. The NCS is responsible to ensure the existence 

of a national telecommunications structure that is responsive to the 

NS/EP needs of the Federal Government and is capable of providing survivable NS/EP telecommunications services in all circumstances, including conditions of crisis or emergency. 

4

Since the height of the Cold War, the development and maintenance of survivable national telecommunications has been an enduring national objective. To help achieve this objective, President 

Kennedy in 1963 established the NCS to provide necessary communications for the Federal Government under all conditions, ranging 

from a normal situation to national emergencies and international 

crises, including nuclear attack. 

When put in place at the height of the Cold War the larger NS/

EP goal was promotion of a survivable and resilient national telecommunications infrastructure. The primary focus was on statebased largely monolithic threat. The NS/EP telecommunications 

role was to enable the U.S. Government to organize national response efforts to those threats. 

In the post-9/11 environment, however, the U.S. faces more 

asymmetric threats and potential targets expanded to include civilian, economic, and other critical targets. This change, fundamental 

in terms of actors, intent, capability, and tactics, creates new challenges for the U.S. Government. 

Regarding EMP, Part 205 of Title 47, Chapter 2, of the Code of 

Federal Regulations establishes the NCS as the focal point within 

the Federal Government for all EMP technical data and studies 

concerning telecommunications. That is a function we have carried 

out for the last 20 years. 

Emerging from the tactical and strategic concerns of the Cold 

War, analyses of potential resources of electromagnetic disruption 

of telecommunications services have historically focused most 

sharply on the effects produced by a nuclear EMP. Yet while nuclear EMP remains the only mechanism to affect widespread electromagnetic disruption to telecommunications, it is important to 

recognize that the advance of technology has yielded many more 

tools capable of producing singular telecommunications electromagnetic disruptive effects, known as TEDE, on a more limited but 

nevertheless significant scale. Such tools are, as a general matter, 

often less costly than are those necessary to create an EMP. Accordingly, consonant with its EMP telecommunications mission, 

NCS has expanded its analytic activities to include the full range 

of TEDE sources, including but not limited to EMP. 

With respect to EMP specifically, the NCS has, over the past two 

decades, conducted numerous studies, simulations, and tests of various elements of the telecommunications infrastructure to electromagnetic interference. The information derived from these tests 

was used by the equipment manufacturers to implement vulnerability mitigation changes in the design of the switching systems. 

The results of these tests led to the conclusion that our Nation’s 

telecommunications network will experience serious disruption 

from EMP, but will be rapidly restored. NCS priority communications programs will provide critical communication capabilities during the restoration period. 

Finally, as a part of the interim National Infrastructure Protection Plan, NIPP, recently released by DHS, the NCS serves as the 

sector-specific agency for the telecommunications sector. The NCS 

is responsible for assessing and mitigating vulnerabilities to the 

national telecommunications infrastructure. Accordingly, recognizing communication’s pivotal role in deterring and/or recovering 

5

from an attack, the NCS has developed a vulnerability mitigation 

approach that is designed to address the entire spectrum of potential disruptions to the nation’s telecommunications and ensure critical communications will be possible under all conditions. The NCS 

does not look at EMP or other sources of TEDE in a vacuum, but 

rather in a larger context of the full range of potential threats to 

the telecommunications infrastructure. 

In summary, the existence of EMP effects has been known since 

the 1940’s. We have tested thoroughly our current generation of 

core telecommunications switches and have determined that there 

is minimal lasting EMP effect on these switches. Furthermore, 

most of our core communications assets are in large, very well constructed facilities which provide a measure of shielding. This situation will evolve as we move to Next Generation Networks, NGN, 

but we are monitoring this network evolution by testing critical 

components of the NGN and leveraging DOD testing. Furthermore, 

the NCS has programs and activities that are designed to minimize 

the impact of the entire spectrum of potential disruptions, including EMP. 

In moving forward, the NCS has a proven history of preparing 

for and responding to all types of threats. We have demonstrated 

an ability to develop effective tools and programs combined with a 

trusted working relationship with industry to continually improve 

the hardness and survivability of our Nation’s communications network. 

This concludes my prepared statement. I would be happy to answer questions you may have at this time or any future time. 

Chairman KYL. We will take all the testimony and then we will 

come back and do questions at that time. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Fonash appears as a submission 

for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. Dr. Pry? 

STATEMENT OF PETER VINCENT PRY, SENIOR STAFF, 

CONGRESSIONAL EMP COMMISSION, WASHINGTON, D.C. 

Mr. PRY. The EMP Commission sponsored a worldwide survey of 

foreign scientific and military literature to evaluate the knowledge 

and possibly of the intentions of foreign states with respect to electromagnetic pulse attack. The survey found that the physics of 

EMP phenomena and the military potential of EMP attack are 

widely understood in the international community, as reflected in 

unofficial and official writings and statements. 

The survey of open sources over the past decade finds that 

knowledge about EMP and EMP attack is evidenced in at least 

Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan, Sweden, Cuba, 

India, Pakistan, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, North Korea, 

China, and Russia. Numerous foreign governments have invested 

in hardening programs to provide some protection against nuclear 

EMP attack, indicating that this threat has broad international 

credibility. 

At least some of the new nuclear weapons states, notably India, 

are concerned that their military command, control, and communications may be vulnerable to EMP attack. For example, an Indian article citing the views of senior officers in the defense minVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:41 May 25, 2005 Jkt 021324 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\21324.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
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istry concludes, I quote—Mike, if you could put up the first 

quotation—‘‘The most complicated, costly, controversially and critically important elements of nuclear weaponization are the C3I systems. Saving on a C3I system could be suicidal. With a no first use 

policy, the Indian communication systems have to be hardened to 

withstand the electromagnetic pulses generated by an adversarial 

nuclear first strike. Otherwise, no one will be fooled by the Indian 

nuclear deterrent.’’ 

Many foreign analysts perceive nuclear EMP attack as falling 

within the category of electronic warfare or information warfare, 

not nuclear warfare. Indeed, the military doctrines of at least 

China and Russia appear to define information warfare as embracing a spectrum ranging from computer viruses to nuclear EMP attack. 

For example, consider the following quote from one of China’s 

most senior military theorists, Su Tzu-Yun, who is credited by the 

PRC with inventing information warfare, appearing in his book, 

World War, The Third World War—Total Information Warfare, and 

I quote—thank you, Mike, second—‘‘With their massive destructive, long-range nuclear weapons have combined with highly sophisticated information technology and computer technology today 

and warfare of the looming 21st century. Information war and traditional war have one thing in common, namely that the country 

which possesses the critical weapons, such as atomic bombs, will 

have first strike and second strike retaliation capabilities. As soon 

as its computer networks come under attack and are destroyed, the 

country will slip into a state of paralysis and the lives of its people 

will ground to a halt. Therefore, China should focus on measures 

to counter computer viruses, nuclear electromagnetic pulse, and 

quickly achieve breakthroughs in those technologies in order to 

equip China without delay with equivalent deterrents that will enable it to stand up to the military powers in the information age 

and neutralize and check the deterrence of Western powers, including the United States,’’ end quote. 

Some foreign analysts, judging from open source statements and 

writings, appear to regard EMP attack as a legitimate use of nuclear weapons because EMP would inflict no or few prompt civilian 

casualties. EMP attack appears to be a unique exception to the 

general stigma attached to nuclear employment by most of the 

international community in public statements. Significantly, even 

some analysts in Japan and Germany, nations that historically 

have been most condemnatory of nuclear and other weapons of 

mass destruction, in official and unofficial forums, appear to regard 

EMP attack as morally defensible. 

For example, a June 2000 Japanese article in a scholarly journal, 

citing senior political and military officials, appear to regard EMP 

attack as a legitimate use of nuclear weapons. The quote is above. 

Quote, ‘‘Although there was little chance that the Beijing authorities would launch a nuclear attack which would incur the disapproval of the international community and which would result in 

such enormous destruction that it would impede post-war cleanup 

and policies, a serious assault starting with the use of nuclear 

weapons which would not harm humans, animals, or property, 

would be valid. If a nuclear weapon was detonated 40 kilometers 

7

above Taiwan, electromagnetic wave would be propagated which 

would harm unprotected computers, radar, and IC circuits on the 

ground within a 100-kilometer radius, and the weapons and equipment which depend on communications electronics technology, 

whose superiority Taiwan takes pride in, would be rendered combat ineffective at one stroke. If they were detonated in the sky in 

the vicinity of Ilan, the effects would also extend to the waters near 

Yanakuni, so it would be necessary for Japan, too, to take care. 

Those in Taiwan, having lost their advanced technology capabilities, would end up fighting with tactics and technology going back 

to the 19th century. They would inevitably be at a disadvantage 

with the PLA and its overwhelming military force superiority.’’ 

An article by a member of India’s Institute of Defense Studies 

Analysis openly advocates that India be prepared to make a preemptive EMP attack, both for reasons of military necessity and on 

humanitarian grounds. This is the next quote. Quote, ‘‘A study conducted in the U.S. during the late 1980’s reported that a high-yield 

device exploded about 500 kilometers above the ground can generate an electromagnetic pulse of the order of 50,000 volts over a 

radius of 2,500 kilometers around the point of burst, which would 

be collected by any exposed conductor. Such an attack will not 

cause any blast or thermal effects on the ground below, but it can 

produce a massive breakdown in the communication system that is 

certain that most of the land communication networks and military 

command and control links will be affected and it will undermine 

our capability to retaliate. This, in fact, is the most powerful incentive for preemptive attack, and a high-altitude exo-atmospheric explosion may not even kill a bird on the ground.’’ 

Although India, Pakistan, and Israel are not rogue states, they 

all presently have missiles and nuclear weapons, giving them the 

capability to make EMP attacks against their regional adversaries. 

An EMP attack by any of these states, even if targeted at a regional adversary and not the United States, could collaterally damage U.S. forces in the region and would pose an especially grave 

threat to U.S. satellites. 

Many foreign analysts, particularly in Iran, North Korea, China, 

and Russia, view the United States as a potential aggressor that 

would be willing to use its entire panoply of weapons, including nuclear weapons, in a first strike. They perceive the United States as 

having contingency plans to make a nuclear EMP attack and as 

being willing to execute those plans under a broad range of circumstances. 

Russian and Chinese military scientists in open source writings 

describe the basic principles of nuclear weapons designed specifically to generate an enhanced EMP effect that they term superEMP weapons. Super-EMP weapons, according to these foreign 

open source writings, can destroy even the best protected U.S. military and civilian electronic systems. 

Chinese military writings are replete with references to the dependency of United States military forces and civilian infrastructure upon sophisticated electronic systems and to the potential vulnerability of those systems. For example, consider this quote from 

an official newspaper of the PLA, already up there. Quote, ‘‘Some 

people might think that things similar to the Pearl Harbor incident 

8

are unlikely to take place during the information age, yet it could 

be regarded as the Pearl Harbor incident of the 21st century if a 

surprise attack is conducted against the enemy’s crucial information systems, command, control, and communications by such 

means as electromagnetic pulse weapons. Even a superpower like 

the United States, which possesses nuclear missiles and powerful 

armed forces, cannot guarantee its immunity. In their own words, 

a highly computerized open society like the United States is extremely vulnerable to electronic attacks from all sides. This is because the U.S. economy, from banks to telephone systems and from 

power plants to iron and steel works, relies entirely on computer 

networks. When a country grows increasingly powerful economically and technologically, it will become increasingly dependent on 

modern information systems. The United States is more vulnerable 

to attacks than any other country in the world.’’ 

Russian military writings are also replete with references to the 

dependency of United States military forces and civilian infrastructure upon sophisticated electronic systems and to the potential vulnerability of those systems. Indeed, Russia made a thinly-veiled 

EMP threat against the United States on May 2, 1999. During the 

spring of 1999, tensions between the United States and Russia rose 

sharply over Operation Allied Force, the NATO bombing campaign 

against Yugoslavia. A bipartisan delegation from the House Armed 

Services Committee of the U.S. Congress met in Vienna with their 

Russian counterparts and the Duma International Affairs Committee, headed by Chairman Vladimir Lukin. The object of the 

meeting was to reduce U.S.–Russia tensions and seek Russian help 

in resolving the Balkans crisis. During the meeting, Chairman 

Lukin and Deputy Chairman Alexander Shaponov chastised the 

United States for military aggression in the Balkans and warned 

that Russia was not helpless to oppose Operation Allied Force. 

The next quote is there. Quote, ‘‘Hypothetically, if Russia really 

wanted to hurt the United States in retaliation for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia could fire a submarine-launched ballistic 

missile and detonate a single nuclear warhead at high altitude over 

the United States. The resulting electromagnetic pulse would massively disrupt U.S. communications and computer systems, shutting down everything.’’ Note that quote is from 1999. That is the 

last semi-official nuclear threat made to the United States by anyone. 

Iran, though not yet a nuclear weapons state, has produced some 

analysis weighing the use of nuclear weapons to destroy cities, 

compared to information warfare, that includes electromagnetic 

pulse for the destruction of unprotected circuits. An Iranian analyst 

describes terrorist information warfare as involving not just computer viruses, but attacks against using electromagnetic pulse. 

An Iranian political-military journal in an article entitled, ‘‘Electronics To Determine Fate of Future Wars,’’ suggests that the key 

to defeating the United States is EMP attack. Quote, ‘‘Advanced information technology equipment exists which has a very high degree of efficiency in warfare. Among these, we can refer to communication and information gathering satellites, pilotless planes and 

the digital system. Once you confuse the enemy communication 

network, you can also disrupt the work of the enemy command and 

9

decision making center. Even worse, today, when you disable a 

country’s military high command through disruption of communications, you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country. 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. American soldiers would not 

be able to find food to eat, nor would they be able to fire a single 

shot,’’ end quote. 

Iranian flight tests of their Shahab-3 medium-range missile that 

can reach Israel and U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf have in recent 

years involved several explosions at high altitude, reportedly triggered by a self-destruct mechanism on the missile. The Western 

press has described these flight tests as failures because the missiles did not complete their ballistic trajectories. Iran has officially 

described all of these same tests as successful. The flight tests 

would be successful if Iran were practicing the execution of an 

EMP attack. 

Iran, as noted earlier, has also successfully tested firing a missile 

from a vessel in the Caspian Sea. A nuclear missile concealed in 

the hold of a freighter would give Iran, or terrorists, the capability 

to perform an EMP attack against the United States homeland 

without developing an ICBM, and with some prospect of remaining 

anonymous. Iran’s Shahab-3 medium-range missile, mentioned earlier, is a mobile missile and small enough to be transported in the 

hold of a freighter. We cannot rule out that Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism, might provide terrorists 

with the means to execute an EMP attack against the United 

States. 

In closing, a few observations about the potential EMP threat 

from North Korea. North Korean academic writings subscribe to 

the view voiced in Chinese, Russian, and Iranian writings that 

computers and advanced communications have inaugurated an information age during which the greatest strength and greatest vulnerability of societies will be their electronic infrastructures. According to North Korean press, Chairman Kim Chong-Il is himself 

supposedly an avid proponent of this view. 

The highest ranking official ever to defect from North Korea, 

Hwang Chang-Yop, claimed in 1998 that North Korea has nuclear 

weapons and explained his defection as an attempt to prevent nuclear war. According to Hwang, in the event of war, North Korea 

would use nuclear weapons, quote, ‘‘to devastate Japan to prevent 

the United States from participating in the defense of South Korea. 

Would it, the United States, still participate even after Japan is 

devastated? That is how they think.’’ 

Although Hwang did not mention EMP, it is interesting that he 

described North Korean thinking about nuclear weapons employment as having strategic purposes, nuclear use against Japan, and 

not tactical purposes, nuclear employment on the battlefield in 

South Korea. It is also interesting that, according to Hwang, North 

Korea thinks it can somehow devastate Japan with its tiny nuclear 

inventory, although how precisely this is to be accomplished with 

one or two nuclear weapons is unknown. 

Perhaps most importantly, note that the alleged purpose of a 

North Korean nuclear strike on Japan would be to deter the United 

10

States. At the time of Hwang’s defection in 1998, North Korea’s 

longest-range missile then operational, the No Dong, limited North 

Korea’s strategic reach to a strike on Japan. Today, North Korea 

is reportedly on the verge of achieving an ICBM capability with its 

Taepo Dong-2 missile, estimated to be capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States. 

In 2004, the EMP Commission met with very senior Russian 

military officers who are experts on EMP weapons. They warned 

that Russian scientists had been recruited by Pyongyang to work 

on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. They further 

warned that the knowledge and technology to develop super-EMP 

weapons had been transformed to North Korea and that North 

Korea could probably develop these weapons in the near future, 

within a few years. The Russian officer said that the threat to global security that would be posed by a North Korea armed with 

super-EMP weapons is unacceptable. 

The senior Russian military officers, who claimed to be expressing their personal views to the EMP Commission, said that while 

the Kremlin could not publicly endorse U.S. preemptive action, 

Moscow would privately understand the strategic necessity of a 

preemptive strike by the United States against North Korea’s nuclear complex in order to prevent North Korea from achieving a 

super-EMP weapon that would threaten global civilization. 

This concludes my statement. Thank you for the opportunity to 

share this information with the U.S. Senate. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you, Dr. Pry. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Pry appears as a submission for 

the record.] 

Chairman KYL. Dr. Wood, would you please begin by introducing 

anyone who is here representing the Commission besides yourself? 

STATEMENT OF LOWELL WOOD, COMMISSIONER, CONGRESSIONAL EMP COMMISSION, LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA 

Mr. WOOD. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and 

gentlemen, my fellow Commissioners and I thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the findings and recommendations of 

the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From 

Electromagnetic Pulse Attack created by the Congress in Title 14 

of Public Law 106–398. 

I am here acting today for Dr. William Graham, the Chairman 

of the Commission, who is prevented from being present today and 

asked me to convey his regrets and respects to the Committee. I 

am accompanied by three of my colleague Commissioners, who I 

would like to introduce very briefly, Dr. Henry Kluepfel, Commissioner of the EMP Commission, Dr. Gordon Soper, EMP Commissioner, and the senior member of the EMP Commission, Dr. John 

S. Foster, Jr., whose service in the technology components of the 

national defense dates back to the beginning of World War II. 

Chairman KYL. And Dr. Foster probably has testified more times 

before Congress than I have attended hearings, I might add. 

Mr. WOOD. Dr. Foster was doing very notable things for the technological components of the national defense the year that I was 

born, sir. 

11

Chairman KYL. That doesn’t make him old. It is just that he 

started at a very young age. 

[Laughter.] 

Mr. WOOD. And gave very distinguished service throughout the 

over 60 years that he has been so devoted to the national welfare, 

sir. 

At the direction of the Congress, the EMP Commission worked 

for 2 years in the discharge of its statutory mandate. These efforts 

have included conducting actual experiments to test the potential 

vulnerability of modern electronic systems to EMP, and were informed by a global survey of foreign scientific and foreign military 

literatures to assess the knowledge and, if possible, the intentions 

of rogue states and other nations with respect to EMP attack, 

which Dr. Pry, who led this effort for the Commission, just very 

aptly summarized for the Committee. 

The Commission enjoyed access to all information in the possession of the government in the course of its work and was supported 

by top-quality studies and analyses on the part of many cognizant 

government and contractor organizations, as indeed was specified 

in the mandating legislation. 

The bottom line is that several classes of potential adversaries, 

including terrorist groupings, have or can acquire the capability to 

attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon generated electromagnetic pulse. A determined adversary can achieve 

an EMP attack capability without having a high level of either 

military or nuclear sophisticated. For example, a Scud missile 

launched from a freighter off the Atlantic coast of the United 

States could constitute a platform that would enable a terrorist 

group to mount an EMP attack against roughly half of the United 

States in population terms. Scud missiles can be purchased inexpensively—they are of the order of $100,000—by anyone, including 

private collectors in the world’s arms markets. 

Terrorists might buy, steal, or be given a ‘‘no fingerprints’’ nuclear weapon. For example, North Korea has demonstrated a willingness to sell both missiles and nuclear materials remarkably promiscuously. Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism, is widely reported to have a nuclear weapons program that 

is more advanced than previously suspected and is known to have 

successfully test launched a Scud missile from a vehicle in the Caspian Sea, as Dr. Pry noted, a launch mode that could be adapted, 

as indeed Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld has noted twice in 

public, could be adapted to support attack against the United 

States from the sea, including EMP attacks. 

A nuclear weapon detonated at altitudes above a few dozen kilometers above the earth’s surface would generate a set of electromagnetic pulses of different types as its various outputs interact 

with the earth’s atmosphere and the earth’s magnetic field. These 

electromagnetic pulses propagate from the burst-point of the nuclear weapon to the line of sight on the earth’s horizon, potentially 

covering a vast geographic region and doing so simultaneously, 

moreover, at the speed of light. 

For example, a nuclear weapon detonated at an altitude of 400 

kilometers over the central United States would cover with its primary electromagnetic pulse the entire continental United States 

12

and parts of Canada and Mexico. This is indicated on the view 

graph there, which a detonation at about 500 kilometers over 

Omaha blankets the entire United States and adjacent portions of 

Canada and Mexico with high-intensity EMP. 

Of course, regional EMP attacks can be comparably devastating 

to smaller portions of the country and that is indicated for one particular region, the American Southwest, on the view graph here, 

which a very low altitude burst, at only 75 kilometers and very 

modest yield, could nonetheless destroy a portion of the United 

States accounting for almost a third of the gross demographic product. 

The immediate effects of EMP are disruption of and damage to 

electrical and electronic systems and infrastructures. EMP is not 

reported in the scientific literature to have direct effects on people. 

EMP and its effects were observed extensively during the U.S. 

and Soviet atmospheric test programs in 1962. During the United 

States’ STARFISH nuclear detonation, which was not designed or 

intended as a generator of EMP, which occurred at an altitude of 

about 400 kilometers above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean, 

some electrical systems in the Hawaii Islands, 1,400 kilometers distant, were affected. This comparatively weak and distant, and indeed inadvertent, EMP caused the failure of street lighting systems, tripping of circuit breakers, triggering of burglar alarms, and 

damage to a telecommunications relay system, among other reported and reasonably well-documented effects. 

The Russians in their testing that year executed a series of highaltitude nuclear detonations above their test site in South Central 

Asia on Soviet territory. They report that they observed damage to 

both overhead and underground buried cables, some at distances of 

600 kilometers from under the burst-point. They also observed 

surge arrestor burnout, spark-gap breakdown, blown fuses, and 

failures of power supplies of various types, both civilian and military. 

What is particularly significant about EMP is that a single highaltitude nuclear detonation can produce EMP effects that can potentially disrupt or damage electronic and electrical systems over 

much of the United States virtually simultaneously at a time determined by an adversary. Thus, the Commission found that EMP is 

one of a small number of threat types that has the potential to hold 

American society seriously at risk and that might also result in the 

defeat of our military forces. 

The electromagnetic field pulses produced by weapons designed 

and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and information systems upon which any reasonably advanced society, most 

specifically including our own, depend vitally. Their effects on systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and electronics 

could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as catastrophic to the 

American nation. 

Depending on the specific characteristics of the EMP attack, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could 

result, in which failure of one infrastructure could pull down others 

dependent upon its functioning, and the failure of these, in turn, 

could seriously impede recovery of the first infrastructure to fail. 

13

In such events, a regional or national recovery would be long and 

difficult and would seriously degrade the overall viability of the 

American nation and the safety and even the lives of very large 

numbers of U.S. citizens. 

The primary avenues for EMP imposition of catastrophic damage 

to the nation are through our electric power infrastructure and 

thence into our telecommunications, energy, and other key infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact other vital aspects 

of our Nation’s life, including the financial system, means of getting food, water, and health care to the citizenry, trade, and the 

production of goods and services. 

The recovery of any one of these key national infrastructures is 

dependent on others working. We have a very tightly integrated, 

high-efficiency, mutually interdependent set of national infrastructures. The longer the basic outage, the more problematic and uncertain the recovery of any of these infrastructures will be. It is 

possible, indeed, seemingly likely, for sufficiently severe functional 

outages to become mutually reinforcing until a point is reached at 

which the degradation of a set of infrastructures could have irreversible effects on the country’s ability to support any large fraction 

of its present human population. 

EMP effects from high-altitude nuclear explosions are not new 

threats to our Nation. The Soviet Union in the past, and Russia 

and other nations today, as Dr. Pry has just masterfully summarized, are capable of creating these effects. Historically, this application of nuclear weaponry was mixed with a much larger proportion of nuclear explosives that was the primary source of destruction, and thus, EMP as a weapons effect was not a primary focus 

of U.S. defensive preparations. Throughout the Cold War, the 

United States did not try to protect its civilian infrastructure 

against either the physical or an EMP effect of nuclear weapons 

and instead depended on deterrence for whatever safety might be 

attained. 

What is different now is that some potential sources of EMP 

threats are difficult to deter. They can be terrorist groups that 

have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are 

motivated to attack the United States without regard for their own 

safety or in the belief that they are effectively undeterrable by the 

United States. Rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran, may 

be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United 

States and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter. 

Single detonations of certain types of relatively low-yield nuclear 

weapons can be employed to generate potentially catastrophic EMP 

effects over wide geographic areas, and designs for variants of such 

weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter century. I 

refer specifically here to what Dr. Pry labeled as super-EMP. 

China and Russia have considered limited nuclear attack options 

that, unlike their Cold War plans, employ EMP as the primary or 

sole means of attack, as indeed Dr. Pry noted. As recently as May 

1999, during the NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia, former 

high-ranking members of the Russian Duma, meeting with a U.S. 

Congressional delegation to discuss the ongoing Balkans conflict, 

raised the specter of a Russian EMP attack that would paralyze 

the United States. Open source Chinese military writings have deVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:41 May 25, 2005 Jkt 021324 PO 00000 Frm 00017 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\21324.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
14

scribed, in the event of a conflict over Taiwan, using EMP as a 

means of deterring or defeating the United States, all as Dr. Pry 

has raised before you. 

The key difference, the Commission found, from the past is that 

the United States has developed more than most other nations as 

a modern society. It is heavily dependent on electronics, telecommunications, energy, information networks, and a rich set of financial and transportation systems that critically leverage modern 

technology. This asymmetry, already large and growing even larger, is a source of substantial economic, industrial, and societal advantages, but it creates vulnerabilities and critical interdependencies that are potentially catastrophic to the United States. 

Therefore, terrorists or state actors that possess relatively unsophisticated missile armed with nuclear weapons may well calculate 

that, instead of destroying a city or a military base, they may obtain the greatest political-military utility from one or a few such 

weapons by using them, or by threatening their use, in an EMP attack. The current vulnerability of critical U.S. infrastructures can 

both invite and reward such attacks, if not corrected. As Secretary 

of Defense Don Rumsfeld has said, vulnerability invites attack, to 

which I might add that extreme sustained vulnerability entices 

such attack. 

However, correction is feasible and well within the nation’s technical means and material resources to accomplish. Most critical infrastructure system vulnerabilities can be reduced below those levels that potentially invite attempts to create a national catastrophe. By protecting key elements in each critical infrastructure 

and by preparing to recover essential services, the prospects for a 

terrorist or rogue state being able to impose large-scale long-term 

damage on the United States can be minimized. This can be accomplished reasonably and expeditiously. 

Such preparation and protection can be achieved over the next 

several years given a well-focused commitment by the Federal Government and readily affordable levels of resources. We need to take 

actions and allocate resources to decrease the likelihood that catastrophic consequences from an EMP attack will occur, to reduce our 

current serious levels of vulnerability to acceptable levels and 

thereby reduce incentives to attack, and to remain a viable modern 

society, even if an EMP attack occurs. Since this is a matter of national security, the Commission felt strongly that the Federal Government must shoulder the responsibility of managing the most serious infrastructure vulnerabilities, including resourcing the timely 

obviation of these vulnerabilities. 

Homeland Security Presidential Directives 7 and 8 lay the authoritative basis for the Federal Government to act vigorously and 

coherently to mitigate many of the risks to the nation from terrorist attack. The effects of EMP on our major national civilian infrastructures lie within these directives, and the directives specify 

adequate responsibilities and provide sufficient authorities to deal 

with civilian sector consequences of an EMP attack. 

In particular, the Department of Homeland Security has been established, led by a Secretary with the authority, responsibility, and 

the obligation to request needed resources for the mission of protecting the U.S. and recovering from the impacts of the most seriVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:41 May 25, 2005 Jkt 021324 PO 00000 Frm 00018 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\21324.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
15

ous threats. This official must assure that plans, resources, and implementing structures are in place to accomplish these objectives, 

specifically with respect to the EMP threat. In doing so, the Department of Homeland Security must work in conjunction with 

other governmental institutions and with experts in the private 

sector to efficiently accomplish this mission. It is important that 

metrics for assessing improvements in prevention, protection, and 

recovery be put in place and then evaluated, and that progress be 

reported regularly and independently reviewed. 

Specific recommendations are provided in the EMP Commission’s 

report with respect to both the particulars for securing each of the 

most critical national infrastructures against EMP threats and the 

governing principles for addressing these issues of national survival and recovery in the aftermath of an EMP attack. Much of the 

problem can be addressed very economically without major capital 

investments, but by developing effective plans to meet the challenges posed by EMP threats. 

For example, one major Commission finding is that the electric 

power grid is the keystone infrastructure upon which all other infrastructures vitally depend. Yet today, there is no plan for blackstarting the national power grid in the event of a continent-wide 

collapse of the system. If the electric power grid can be quickly recovered, the other infrastructures can be recovered adequately in 

the aftermath of an EMP attack. Conversely, if it cannot be quickly 

recovered, most, if not all, of the other infrastructures will not only 

collapse, but they will be exceedingly difficult to ever bring back. 

Making the key aspects of the nation’s infrastructure more robust against EMP attack ill also pay dividends by protecting 

against other types of large-scale problems with them, such as natural disasters. 

This concludes my statement, Mr. Chairman. I invite your attention and that of your colleagues to the fact that several critical 

findings and recommendations of the Commission can be conveyed 

properly only in closed session. Again, my colleagues and I thank 

you for the opportunity to report the findings and recommendations 

of the EMP Commission to the United States Senate. 

Chairman KYL. Thank you very much, Dr. Wood and other members of the Commission. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Wood appears as a submission 

for the record.] 

Chairman KYL. I am going to quote just three sentences from 

your testimony, especially for those in the media. I think if you are 

looking for a take-away, here it is. ‘‘The bottom line is that several 

classes of potential adversaries, including terrorist groupings, have 

or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a 

high-altitude nuclear weapon generated electromagnetic pulse. A 

determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of either military or nuclear sophistication. 

The effects on the systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as 

catastrophic to the nation.’’ 

I guess the final point would be that you indicate that there are 

recommendations the Commission has made which, if implemented, could ameliorate the effects of this, and I want to get into 

16

that. But those three sentences, I think, illustrate the reason why 

it is important not to succumb to a failure of imagination again and 

for this Subcommittee to continue in its effort to identify potential 

kinds of terrorist threats that we need to look at. 

What I would like to ask in my series of questions, and any of 

the three of you should feel free to jump in here, it seems to me 

that for an amateur, we need to look at it this way. First, what exactly would an EMP attack do? Why might terrorists use EMP, and 

how would they do it? And what could we do about it? Those are 

kind of the three key questions. 

First of all, and I will probably start with—well, all three of you 

actually can discuss this, although I am not sure, Dr. Fonash, 

whether you want to get beyond the telecommunications area. If 

you do, feel free. 

Mr. FONASH. Sir, I would like to restrict my comments to predominately telecommunications— 

Chairman KYL. Okay. 

Mr. FONASH.—and not discuss threat at all, and some of your 

questions address threat and that is more appropriate for DOD or 

CIA to address those questions. 

Chairman KYL. Right. Well, I will just ask you to jump in then 

when you want to, if you would. 

But with respect to what an EMP attack would do, my own amateur view is that it would just fry all the electronic circuits and everything we have and I can’t imagine hardly anything in our society that isn’t controlled by some kind of a pump or a computer or 

communication of some kind or other. Would one of you be just a 

little bit more specific about—just paint a scenario of what would 

happen when this nuclear device exploded in the atmosphere, generates these pulses that come down on earth, as you have it right 

there over my home town of Phoenix, Arizona. 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman— 

Chairman KYL. And, excuse me, just bearing in mind that we 

have a nuclear generating plant there, we have Hoover Dam right 

outside, between Phoenix and Las Vegas there, as well as a whole 

lot of other kind of facilities that I am sure you can imagine. 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, the first thing that needs to be made 

clear is there has never been a large-scale EMP attack on any site 

anywhere, ever. So there necessarily is a large component of extrapolation from the measurements that have been made from the 

high-altitude nuclear tests. And those measured features have been 

taken into quasi-laboratory environments and there, various types 

of equipment, both military and, under the auspices of the Commission, a great deal of civilian equipment has been subjected to the 

measured circumstances that are created by a high-altitude nuclear 

detonation. 

Then another large measure of extrapolation is made from the 

damage to functionality and the physical damage that is seen to be 

imposed in those laboratory circumstances to what would happen 

if those circumstances were applied all over a country or over a 

large region. 

So there are two major aspects of extrapolation between measurements that were made primarily in the early 1960’s and what 

we believe would happen if an EMP attack was imposed on a counVerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:41 May 25, 2005 Jkt 021324 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 S:\GPO\HEARINGS\21324.TXT SJUD4 PsN: CMORC
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try or a large region thereof. So those are very important qualifications, and that is why there can be some ground for discussion between technical experts on precisely what the circumstances would 

be, two large sections of extrapolation. 

The Commission’s findings, after listening to all of the experts, 

sponsoring a great deal of work on its own, which had never been 

done for the civilian infrastructure previously, was that the effects 

can be anywhere from highly transient, highly localized geographically, and a mere annoyance of the scale of a large electric power 

blackout. That is on the low end. On the high end, the consequences would be loss of major national infrastructures over the 

entire continent for an indefinitely great period. 

Where things fall in the spectrum in between these two extremes 

depends critically on the nature of the explosion, the place at which 

it is conducted geographically, the altitude at which it is conducted, 

the type of explosive which is used, which was determined by the 

Commission both on its own and with substantial foreign inputs to 

be an exceedingly critical parameter, and finally, on the degree of 

preparation that is taken against the consequences of such an attack. 

So this is an area which, to use technical jargon, the parameter 

space is kind of as big as all outdoors. It goes all the way from, 

as I said, the consequences of a blackout, which might have economic, as we saw a couple of years ago, might have economic scales 

of $20 billion, in round numbers, and essentially no loss of life, just 

a great deal of inconvenience, to something which would literally 

destroy the American nation and might cause the deaths of 90 percent of its people and would set us back a century or more in time 

as far as our ability to function as a society. 

Chairman KYL. Now, with respect to that latter kind of a threat, 

a lot of things would have to be coincident. You would have to have 

a dramatic set of circumstances, the right kind of weapon, the right 

altitude, and all of the other factors. But take that most serious 

case, or something somewhat less than that, and describe specifically the kinds of things that would physically occur. What physically occurs to the infrastructure of Phoenix, Arizona, in that 

event, or the State? 

Mr. WOOD. What happens is that a nuclear explosion is caused 

to occur at a significant altitude, a few dozen to a few hundred kilometers, by any means that can be arranged for. One of the means 

that might concern us very much at the present time is a Taepo 

Dong-2 missile carrying an advanced nuclear warhead from North 

Korea. 

One of the striking things that you heard today from Dr. Pry, 

which has not been tabled previously in public, is that North Korea 

should not be considered as just potentially possessing first generation nuclear weapons, but potentially the most advanced nuclear 

weapons that exist on the planet because they have received a 

great deal of foreign assistance. 

So when we stop to think about being attacked from North 

Korea, we shouldn’t think about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We 

should think about flavors of destruction that have never been seen 

before on this planet. 

Chairman KYL. Well, taking— 

18

Mr. WOOD. So when that— 

Chairman KYL.—taking that kind of weapon, what physical— 

Mr. WOOD. When that type of weapon is exploded at several 

dozen to a few hundred kilometers above the United States, if it 

happened in the middle of the day, you might see or hear nothing. 

The lights would go out. A great deal of things instantly dependent 

on electricity would go away. And depending on the nature of the 

damage, its severity, its geographical descent, the lights might 

come back on hours later, they might come back on decades later. 

If they come back on in hours, as we know from blackouts, there 

is just a great deal of inconvenience and substantial economic loss. 

If the lights stay off for more than a year in this country, the Commission’s estimate was the loss of life would run into the tens of 

millions, perhaps a great deal more. You miss the harvest. You 

have no refrigeration, no transportation, no anything except what 

we had as a country in the 1880’s. Most Americans will die in that 

interval. 

Chairman KYL. Well, how much of our country, and maybe I can 

ask Dr. Pry to answer this, how much of our country depends upon 

some kind of electrical system working? 

Mr. PRY. Our entire country depends on some type of electrical 

system working. If I could add to what Dr. Wood has said about 

what the effects would be, what it might be like, one should think 

about the kinds of blackouts that happened in the aftermath of 

hurricanes, for example. In addition to the other data that he 

talked about, the Commission also sponsored studies that took a 

look at the consequences of major blackouts that were induced by 

storms—ice storms, hurricanes, that sort of thing. 

We tend to think of those as fairly commonplace because they 

tend to be isolated geographically and there is something called the 

edge effect, because they will effect—for example, Hurricane Andrew affected eight counties in Central Florida, and so we had the 

entire rest of the country was unaffected and we were able to come 

in and recover from that very quickly. 

But if you look at what happened in those eight counties, there 

was no food. There was no water. There was no communications. 

People couldn’t even communicate to find where they could go to 

get food and water. There were rippling societal consequences 

where there was basically a breakdown of law and order and it became a chaotic situation where the National Guard had to be sent 

in to— 

Chairman KYL. You said they couldn’t communicate. What would 

happen with the electromagnetic pulse that would prevent communication? 

Mr. PRY. Well, it would knock out—first, it knocks out the power 

grid, so there is no electricity to run televisions, for instance. Most 

people don’t have battery-powered radios anymore. Most of the radios that are around depend on electricity. Everything depends on 

electricity. 

Transportation was paralyzed in that area because the traffic 

lights couldn’t work. 

Chairman KYL. Could you pump gasoline? 

Mr. PRY. You couldn’t pump gasoline. You basically had only as 

much as gasoline as was available in the tank of your car. This 

19

happened during the August blackout in New York, as well. You 

saw these same infrastructure failures passing off, flowing from the 

failure of the electric power grid, collapsing like dominoes, each of 

the infrastructures, including the telecommunications infrastructure. It didn’t become a catastrophe because of the edge effect, because we were able to move in there, and also because it was just 

the power grid that was down, in the case of New York, and so fairly easily repairable. It could be repaired in a week or two. 

But if you extrapolate something like that happening for months 

or years, you are obviously talking about a life-threatening kind of 

a catastrophe because you cannot endure, or you cannot support 

the population without food, without water for those protracted periods of time, nor can one count on societal stability for protracted 

periods of time. I think the Andrew experience in those eight counties, what happened there in terms of social cohesion is instructive 

in terms of what could happen on a national basis if such a disaster were to occur. 

And you don’t need the—and I completely concur with Dr. Wood 

about the range of uncertainty that exists in these things, but we 

ought not to take—he was talking about the super-EMP. The thing 

is, we don’t know how low down you can go with that threat. It 

might well be that in order to achieve these things, it may be possible that even without a super, with a first generation weapon, 

you might be able to do it. 

And the reason for this is the keystone infrastructure is the electric power grid. When that collapses, the rest of the infrastructures 

are going to collapse, as well. And the electric power grid, as we 

learned from New York, is always operating on the edge of failure. 

It is old. It has not been modernized and updated. In Commission 

work, there are cases where a falling tree branch has caused a 

multi-State blackout that has lasted a week. 

Chairman KYL. Let me— 

Mr. PRY. If a falling tree branch can do that, a first generation 

atomic weapon, I hate to think what that could do. 

Chairman KYL. And I want to get to the kind of weapon that 

might be used and how a terrorist group might want to do that. 

Let me just ask one last question. In Phoenix during the hot part 

of August, there was a fire at a switching station for one of the 

utilities and two transformers were burned. We were on the edge 

of a catastrophic failure in Phoenix because of that because the 

only place where the transformers could be purchased, I believe, 

was someplace in Italy. It took a long time to get them there and 

they had to be transported by a very large, special kind of truck. 

Thankfully, we had enough generation and transformer capacity to 

just barely work out of the problem. But would a nuclear weapon 

cause damage to things like switching facilities, transformers, as 

well as other kinds of circuitry? 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, I think the situation that you just described is existing in most, if not every, city across the country. If 

the United States was subjected to a continental-scale EMP attack, 

you would see damage of the type that you describe, but of a much 

more serious character, to all of the major transformers at once 

that are connected and that are postured so that they would see 

20

not the instantaneous component, but the slow or several-minute 

duration component. 

This is not hypothesis. This is the type of damage which is seen 

to transformers in the core of geomagnetic storms. The geomagnetic 

storm, in turn, is a very tepid, weak flavor of the so-called slow 

component of EMP. 

So when those transformers are subjected to the slow component 

of the EMP, they basically burn, not due to the EMP itself but due 

to the interaction of the EMP and normal power system operation. 

Transformers burn, and when they burn, sir, they go and they are 

not repairable, and they get replaced, as you very aptly pointed 

out, from only foreign sources. The United States, as part of its 

comparative advantage, no longer makes big power transformers 

anywhere at all. They are all sourced from abroad. 

And when you want a new one, you order it and it is delivered—

it is, first of all, manufactured. They don’t stockpile them. There 

is no inventory. It is manufactured, it is shipped, and then it is delivered by very complex and tedious means within the U.S. because 

they are very large and very massive objects. They come in slowly 

and painfully. Typical sort of delays from the time that you order 

until the time that you have a transformer in service are one to 

2 years, and that is with everything working great. 

If the United States was already out of power and it suddenly 

needed a few hundred new transformers because of burnout, you 

could understand why we found not that it would take a year or 

two to recover, it might take decades, because you burn down the 

national plant, you have no way of fixing it and really no way of 

reconstituting it other than waiting for slow-moving foreign manufacturers to very slowly reconstitute an entire continent’s worth of 

burned down power plant. 

Chairman KYL. Let me now switch to a different inquiry. Terrorists are very clever, but sometimes it seems to me they are more 

interested in something really showy than something that might be 

even more damaging. I am presuming something that I don’t know 

here, and a smart terrorist just might figure that this is exactly the 

thing that he wants to try to achieve. But I always thought that 

if there were access to a nuclear weapon, that the biggest bang 

would be to blow up a whole lot of Americans in a city, cause the 

collateral damage, but primarily the immediate loss of lives. 

So the first question that came to my mind is, while I could understand in war or preparation for war a power, and just to use a 

hypothetical case like China, for example, or North Korea, might 

want to freeze our capabilities with an EMP kind of attack, would 

a terrorist necessarily turn to that as the first choice? And then, 

of course, the response comes in, well, maybe that is not a matter 

of choice, but it is a matter of convenience. What were the scenarios that the Commission looked at that led it to conclude that 

this might well be doable and something that a terrorist would actually decide was the best thing to do or the only thing that could 

be done? 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, the Commission proceeded not on a 

scenario-driven fashion but on a capabilities-based manner, and so 

we looked at the capabilities that would have to be brought into existence by an attacker to impose various levels of damage and we 

21

tried to steer fairly clear of sketching ways, particular ways in 

which particular people might choose to do this because, frankly, 

thinking like a terrorist or thinking like a rogue state leader or 

whatever is well outside the competencies that the individual Commissions brought. None of us have been terrorists and very few of 

us have led rogue states, and so we merely looked at the capabilities that could enable such behaviors. 

Chairman KYL. Not inviting a comment about Berkeley there. 

[Laughter.] 

Mr. WOOD. So the inflow bottom line, or line that we drew across 

the bottom of our considerations is that we wouldn’t look or worry 

about capabilities that didn’t impose at least $100 billion worth of 

damage on the United States in a stroke and went on up from 

there. 

The damage to the infrastructures that we contemplated went on up into $10 trillion scales—trillion dollar—that is to say, a large 

fraction of the total capital value, capital plant value of the United 

States as a nation. The thing which is impressive to us is that nuclear explosives and ballistic missiles to carry them up to altitude 

costing of the order of a million dollars could potential impose $10 

trillion worth of damage. That is to say, ratchet it up by something 

of the order of a factor of $10 million-fold. That was extraordinarily 

high leverage. 

Now, terrorists might be very much inclined towards attacking 

iconic targets, but if it is a semi-rational terrorist, he probably 

looks for leverage and one of the types of leverage that is probably 

most impressive is dollar leverage. How much can I destroy per 

what I invested? Osama bin Laden boasted of how little he spent 

on the attack on the Twin Towers and how much damage was imposed and so forth. So at least some senior terrorists think in those 

terms, think in terms of return on investment, if you will, and/or 

at least their financial backers think in those terms, and so it 

didn’t seem totally inappropriate to look at, well, what could be 

done with a single or a very small number of weapons that could 

be purchased or otherwise obtained for very reasonable values on 

the world market? 

There is roughly 35,000 Scud ballistic missiles, for instance, in 

existence at the present time. As I said, they sell for a small fraction of a million dollars apiece, and private collectors in the continental United States have taken delivery as private individuals on 

Scud missiles in their homes that were in operational condition. So 

these things are easy to come by. Probably the most challenging 

thing from a terrorist’s standpoint is getting either an ordinary nuclear weapon for an ordinary EMP or an advanced one for superEMP and getting somebody to launch it from Canada, Mexico, 

tramp freighters off the coast, any of many places where an attack 

of at least a regional character, if not a national character, could 

be pressed against the United States. 

Chairman KYL. I realize that you all are very scientific and precise in your approach to these problems, and you caveat your conclusions very carefully, that you are not into scenario analysis. But 

with respect to the average person thinking about how, not how 

likely it would be, but at least whether there is some remote possibility that this could occur and, therefore, it would be something 

22

that we would want to put assets against to try to protect against 

it or to deal with it if it occurred, there has to be some element 

of probability involved. 

And so one gets into questions of how easy it would be, for example, for a terrorist organization, as opposed to a state, to launch a 

guided missile against a specific target in the United States with 

a nuclear warhead on it and whether that would be just as easy 

to do as detonating something in the air that would cause this kind 

of damage. 

You pointed out that the range of missile available to a terrorist 

would not be an ICBM today, presumably, but would be a shorterrange missile so that it would have to be launched from something 

off our coast or in an adjacent area. But as you note in testimony 

and as Dr. Pry noted, that could come from a seaborne vessel from 

which Scud-type missiles have been successfully launched, is that 

correct? 

Mr. WOOD. Indeed, the Secretary of Defense has pointed out 

twice in the last year and a half that at any given time, any of a 

couple of dozen vessels off the coast of the United States count 

mount such an attack, and those have been, as I pointed out, kind 

of off-the-cuff statement in news conferences as, hey, everybody understands and knows that. 

Chairman KYL. Yes. 

Mr. PRY. If I could add to what Dr. Wood has said, al Qaeda is 

known to own 80 freighters. I think that is the estimate. They are 

supposed to own 80 freighters. The Scuds, some models, the Scud1 can be purchased for $50,000. So that is well within their capability. The hard part is the nuclear weapon. 

If you had a Scud and a freighter, would you attack a city to kill 

people versus doing the EMP? Well, one problem you have with 

that mode of attack for going against the city is that it is so inaccurate that the likelihood is, well, you are running a great risk that 

you might not hit the city at all. That isn’t a problem with the 

EMP because the area of effect is so great that all you have to do 

is just get it up to the proper altitude. So that technical consideration might well tend to— 

Chairman KYL. This is a very important point that I would like 

to just have us dwell on for just a moment, because it does help 

to answer the question of why potentially an EMP attack. I mean, 

one answer is you are very rational and you know how to leverage 

money and to get the most bang for the buck, Dr. Wood’s testimony 

earlier. The second reason would be that it might be very difficult 

to launch a missile with the kind of guidance available for a Scud 

missile, for example, to actually hit your target in the United 

States if you were doing this from a barge or a freighter offshore, 

is that correct? 

Mr. PRY. Oh, yes, and there is additional considerations. You 

know, a missile that is going to go to ground, to actually hit a city, 

is going to be more vulnerable to missile defenses than an EMP. 

An EMP only has to complete half its trajectory, and doing it the 

other way, to go after a city, has to complete its full trajectory, and 

at the end of the trajectory is exactly when you are going to be 

most vulnerable to missile defenses. 

23

And look at what are you trying to accomplish? Suppose you had 

a first generation weapon. Suppose you, instead of using a missile, 

suppose you had a suitcase-type thing or you wanted to send it into 

New York Harbor or something like that. Well, with a 20-kiloton 

weapon, you are not going to destroy the City of New York. You 

will kill a couple of hundred thousand people and then pray that 

the United States doesn’t find out who your state sponsor was, because then we would turn that state sponsor into a plate of glass. 

With EMP, you at least have a possibility of actually killing millions of people, millions of people, and getting a much bigger bang 

for the buck. 

Moreover, whereas the attack on a city could backfire in the 

sense of instead of breaking the will of the American people in the 

war on terrorism, it could just further enrage us and steal our resolve to project our military forces and use our strength to prosecute that war, when you think of, well, how could the terrorists 

possibly win the war on terrorism, this is one of the few options 

that is available for them to actually win the war on terrorism. If 

they could destroy the United States as a superpower by disrupting 

our infrastructures, they would win the war on terrorism. 

Perhaps this is why Iran is doing the kinds of tests it is doing 

with those Shahab-3s that have been burst at high altitude. We 

have described them as test failures. They have described them as 

successes, as I alluded to in the testimony. And why do that test 

off of a freighter? 

And we also know from al Qaeda that Osama bin Laden, one of 

the reasons he attacked the World Trade Centers was financial. 

They were hoping to disrupt our economy. That was one of their 

goals. It isn’t just to kill people, it is to do as much damage as they 

can to us, including economically and financially. 

Mr. WOOD. Returning to your core thrust just briefly, Mr. Chairman, the basic thing that should intrigue an attacker, a rational 

attacker, about mounting an EMP attack is, as Dr. Price said, you 

only have to do half of the normal ballistic missile mission. Two 

things that are crucial that were cited by implication that deserve 

to be emphasized is that you only have to throw the payload up. 

That is the essence of the thing. You aren’t concerned at all with 

precision targeting, and very importantly, when you come down, 

you have to face the so-called atmospheric reentry problem, which 

can be quite challenging, particularly for a longer-range, higherspeed missile. 

EMP attacks don’t have to cope with that at all, so they throw 

away at once the requirement to cope with missile defenses, that 

is terminal phase missile defenses. They don’t have to have good 

guidance. They don’t have to have reentry systems. They literally 

can be a Fourth of July-type rocket with a nuclear explosive on the 

front. And so that is a set of enabling things which make an attack 

much, much easier to launch. 

And then when you start looking for telltale features and so 

forth, this combination of launching off a barge in the Caspian, 

what in the world motivation does the Iranian government have for 

launching off a barge against Israel, against Iraq, against any of 

its traditional local enemies? Launch off a barge? It makes no 

sense at all. What sense does it make to have your test detonate 

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its payload at high altitude in mid-course? No sense whatsoever, 

and yet they do this. So you either say they are crazy, which is the 

lazy way out, or you say, what in the world are they intending to 

actually do? 

Chairman KYL. So before we get to how do we fix this problem, 

then, we have got sort of the means and the motive pretty well established as well as a huge amount of damage should such an attack occur. We, therefore, get to the question of what can we do 

about it and there has been work done on this both in terms of the 

Department, as Dr. Fonash discussed, as well as the recommendations that the Commission made in its report. 

Perhaps we could spend just a little bit of time on that, because 

we don’t want to leave people too afraid that we are going to wake 

up tomorrow morning with a huge problem on our hands here. 

What are we doing about it? What can we do about it? 

Mr. WOOD. I would just like to, before we leave the first section, 

Mr. Chairman, to comment that the Commission’s report to the 

Congress is in three basic segments. One is the Executive Summary and the main body of the report, all of which are unclassified 

or in the late stages of being formally declared to be unclassified. 

We hope to see that out entirely very soon past the executive 

branch reviews. 

The second main piece is concerned with military matters, which 

the Commission was charged with looking at military 

vulnerabilities, as well. That report is classified secret and is available through appropriate channels at the present time. 

The third one, which is classified top secret with special 

caveating and labels and so forth that would typically go with intelligence matters, addresses specifically the points that you referred 

to, from whence is the attack coming and when and how soon and 

with what likelihoods and why would people be motivated to be 

doing it and what are they actually doing. That is very highly classified and that report and its findings and recommendations obviously can be addressed only in closed session. That is what I referred to in my opening statement. But there is a great deal of information that was examined by the Commission and assessed and 

findings and recommendations based on it in that final relatively 

small portion of the report, which necessarily is discussed only in 

very cloistered circumstances. But it is discussed. 

Chairman KYL. Dr. Pry, would you like to perhaps first address 

the problem, the recommendations of the Commission? 

Mr. PRY. Yes. Ultimately, this is really a good news story. Despite the catastrophic nature of the threat, I think one of the 

breakthroughs the Commission really did—made—it came up with, 

in a sense, a blueprint that, if followed, in three to 5 years, at affordable, modest cost could mitigate, so mitigate the effects of the 

EMP threat that we could take it out of the catastrophic category 

and recover from this particular threat. That is a huge accomplishment. 

You can’t say that about the other handful of threats that could 

destroy us as a society, like genetically engineered smallpox, for example. Things like that are still such a formidable problem, most 

people are still trying to get their arms around how to solve it. But 

this one is doable. 

25

Much of it involves common sense. For example, those transformers Dr. Wood referred to, instead of having the ability to replace only 1 percent of the transformers in this country, which is 

about what we have got now, maybe we should have about 150 of 

these transformers purchased in advance, stored on-site in metal 

sheds that are welded in such a way that they become cages so 

that they would be protected from the effects of EMP, disconnected 

from the power grid. Then you could quickly replace those transformers, and as we found from our analysis, once you get that 

power grid up, you can bring back all the other infrastructures fairly expeditiously. That wouldn’t cost that much. That could be accomplished in three to 5 years. 

There are other things that don’t involve buying anything, but it 

is just a case of thinking about it and planning. Take diesel-electric 

locomotives, for example. There are tens of thousands of them in 

this country. Each diesel-electric locomotive, they can generate 

about a megawatt of electricity. In Canada, for years, they have 

been using them during the winter to power villages and small 

towns. That is how much electricity you get out of one of these 

things. 

We are taking the wheels off and sending them to Iraq, American 

diesel-electric locomotives, to supplement the destroyed electric infrastructure over in Iraq. Maybe we need a plan in the aftermath 

of an attack like this, or a cyber terrorist attack or something else 

that would interfere with our power grid, to take advantage of the 

tens of thousands of diesel-electric locomotives. Where do we drive 

them to? What are the highest priority things? 

I would suggest maybe we need to drive them to those regional 

food warehouses, the larder of the United States. There are maybe 

a couple of hundred regional food warehouses in which a 60-day 

supply of food, you know, supplies all of the States. In the supermarket, you have only got about a day or two worth of food. Where 

the food comes from, it is transported by truck from these regional 

storehouses which critically depend on refrigeration and temperature control, so the food will spoil very quickly. Maybe we need to 

get diesel-electric locomotives to each of these things to keep them 

powered up, and to hospitals and to other critical nodes in communications and in the power infrastructure so that we can most expeditiously bring things back in that aftermath. 

The Commission found another example. There is a particular 

fuse that is just by accident of its design that is much less susceptible than the fuses that are currently used in traffic signals, to 

control traffic lights and other kinds of traffic regulation. This fuse 

costs, like, one penny more than the fuse that is currently used, 

but is much harder to the effect. 

So these are just some examples of things that would go very inexpensively a long way toward mitigating the problem. I would underscore most of all, though, the big transformers and the fact that 

I don’t think we can afford to be dependent on a foreign country, 

not have reserve transformers in this country to bring back our 

power grid. 

Chairman KYL. We will talk about communications in just a second, but I can think of so many other problems that could arise. 

In order to pump water, you have to have electricity. 

26

Mr. PRY. Yes. 

Chairman KYL. You could get into a fire situation or other situations in which you could have a conflagration that you couldn’t deal 

with because you couldn’t get water on it or other kind of fire retardant, for example. 

Mr. WOOD. Indeed, the Commission found that just exactly that 

problem was likely to be an exceedingly serious one, sir, in the immediate aftermath of an EMP attack, that the fires, once started, 

would spread completely out of control and without human intervention, effective human intervention, something for a lack of ability to source water onto those fires, create fire breaks, and so forth. 

So that is the sort of immediate aftermath. 

If a terrorist wanted to have something iconic happen as a result 

of an EMP attack, it would be that in a matter of hours after a 

very large-scale attack, America’s cities would be in flames and 

they would burn until they burned down. And in the following few 

days, as people were unable to get food in markets and so forth, 

four million Americans under the age of 1 year of age would die 

of starvation because there wasn’t infant formula and the other 

specialty items that people are used to always finding in stores, so 

they need them. Young children are very fragile and we would lose 

four million infants under the age of one in the first two weeks, 

most all of them, and so forth. 

So the damage would be pretty dramatic. Nobody gets killed 

right away, but in the immediate aftermath, America in a lot of 

senses would be hammered to its knees unless, and this is a crucial—excuse me, sir—unless, as Dr. Pry pointed out, and this was 

a key finding of the Commission, the attacks were regional and the 

edge effects could be martialed very, very swiftly and effectively so 

that the rest of America came to the rescue of the portion that had 

been brought under. 

Chairman KYL. But for that, we have to start with a plan. 

Mr. WOOD. Of course. We have to not only have the plan, but we 

have to have the things to enable the plan very quickly. 

Chairman KYL. Right. Now, do any of you know whether the recommendations of the Commission have been dealt with in any specific way by the Department of Homeland Security? Leave out Department of Defense, because that is really a different issue. 

Mr. FONASH. Let me answer that in two ways. First of all, let me 

talk to you about telecommunications and then let me talk about 

DHS infrastructure protection in general. 

Chairman KYL. Thanks. 

Mr. FONASH. With regards to telecommunications, we have participated, the Commission, we actually testified in front of the 

Commission. As I said before, for over 20 years, we have been testing equipment against EMP and other electromagnetic effects. So 

we are very well aware of the Commission’s recommendations. We 

have implemented many of those recommendations. And we also 

continue our testing program. We remain vigilant in communications against the EMP threat or any other type of EMP or electromagnetic effect against telecommunications. 

Telecommunications basically is the—the telecommunications infrastructure we have today is relatively impervious to EMP. It 

would be disrupted, but then it will be restored. It can be restored. 

27

There is a dependency of our telecommunications infrastructure 

on power, but that is an dependency that we are aware of and we 

are working at. And during a blackout, going to the New York 

blackout, communications functioned well. The basic communications worked through the blackout, and that is due to the fact that 

major communications centers have multiple sources of back-up 

power, one being that they have battery back-up, and then in addition to battery back-up, they have diesel generators. 

Now, of course, there is a dependency on the diesel generators 

on fuel, and so eventually, if you don’t get the diesel generators refueled, there would be a problem. But during a blackout in New 

York, the telecommunications basically functioned. 

Now, with regards to the overall issue, is the Department of 

Homeland Security addressing this, since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, we have been trying to 

protect our critical infrastructures, and what we have done is we 

have created the interim National Infrastructure Protection Plan 

consistent with Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7, which 

directed us to develop a process to protect our critical infrastructures. And the interim National Infrastructure Protection Plan 

really lays out a framework, a risk management framework and a 

process for protecting the 17 infrastructures of this country, and I 

speak for only one of 17, but there are 17 infrastructures. 

DHS, in our role of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, 

we provide leadership across the infrastructures. We coordinate 

across the infrastructures. We develop process and tools. And we 

are the sector leads in certain infrastructures, for example, telecommunications, but we also work in interdependencies. Interdependencies cross infrastructure. For example, interdependency of 

other infrastructures on power is an example. 

But we put in the process. We are identifying the assets. We 

want to assess those vulnerabilities of those assets. We are going 

to prioritize those assets in terms of the impact of any damage to 

those assets with those vulnerabilities, and then we will protect 

and we will establish metrics. 

And I want to say, so those are the things that we have put into 

place and we seek input in terms of vulnerabilities from all sources 

and we would certainly consider the Commission’s report while we 

work with DOE, who is the sector lead for energy, as they develop 

their sector plan for how they plan on protecting the energy infrastructure. 

Chairman KYL. Dr. Pry? 

Mr. PRY. I respectfully disagree with my colleague that the telecommunications infrastructure is as robust as is described against 

the EMP effect. This is a nether card, which is an example. It is 

ubiquitous. There are millions of these in the communications infrastructure. The Commission sponsored testing against a moderate level of EMP and it was damaged. The damage is indicated 

by the arrow that was indicated here. To have massive failure of 

this kind of an item would be a very serous blow to our communications infrastructure. 

The blackouts example that was referred to, the blackouts, of 

course, lasted only a short period of time, and while it is true that 

there are nodes in the communications infrastructure that have 

28

generators, one of the things I wanted to comment on when you 

raised the issue of fire is that we found it to be the trend that is 

happening in terms of the robustness of these generator facilities 

and battery facilities. It is actually going in the wrong direction. 

There is a tension between the—in the fire codes, a concern about 

storing large quantities of flammable petroleum products to run 

these generators, and in many cases, in many cities, they are scaling back on the amount of petrol that is allowed to be stored for 

the generators. So the time that you can run these generators is 

getting less and less when really, the trend probably, if you take 

EMP seriously as a threat, ought to be going in the other direction 

to give you a more protracted capability to generate electricity. 

Mr. WOOD. If I could interject there just very briefly, Mr. Chairman— 

Mr. PRY. The problem is not just simply fuel storage, which the 

Commission found was indeed an alarming trend, and that it is not 

only going in the wrong direction, but it is going in the wrong direction very rapidly in that not only are the allowed fuel depots becoming smaller, but even the permission to start and operate the 

emergency generator systems is being strongly circumscribed by air 

pollution considerations. You literally can’t run these systems for 

more than very brief intervals without having a variance on your 

operating permit to allow you to go on for four hours or eight 

hours. 

Mr. WOOD. There is very substantial concern that the apparent 

ability to backup electric power for the communications system is 

simply illusory and is becoming more so very swiftly. Excuse me. 

Go ahead. 

Mr. PRY. If I could continue, a third point is the super-EMP 

weapon, okay. What are you robust and hardened against? The notion of this new technology is basically a discovery of the EMP 

Commission. It was a consequence of reviewing foreign military 

writings and actually meeting with foreign military officers that 

there is a technology out there which our own experts have looked 

at and consider highly plausible and that this might already have 

been weaponized. 

The threat, the wave form, both the strength of—the field 

strengths that you are talking about and the wave form are very 

different from those that we were thinking about during the Cold 

War. We can’t really get into it in great detail here in this unclassified forum, but that is a new threat, and so how could one be confident that you are robust against that threat that we are only now 

just beginning to understand? 

And last, in terms of the familiarity, I suppose it is possible to 

be familiar with the Commission’s recommendations, because I 

know some of our Commissioners have worked with—have talked 

to people from Homeland Security, but the fact of the matter is 

that Volume 3 of the Commission report, which is where the detail 

about our recommendations is, is not available to any agency or department yet. I mean, it is still going through the security classification review process and hasn’t been issued yet. 

So I can see how one might know about some of the recommendations generically from the Executive Summary, and then 

perhaps gotten some detail from some of our Commissioners, but 

29

I have to be kind of skeptical about the idea that there is great familiarity with a report that has not yet been delivered to either the 

Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security. 

Chairman KYL. Is there a specific process by which the Commission believes it can be in communication with the appropriate agencies, primarily DOE, DOD, and DHS, and a process, then, of review 

and action for planning would follow? Is there a fairly clear path 

there, or is that something probably that we should help to create 

and foster? 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, the Commission, as specified in the 

statute, is a creature of the Congress— 

Chairman KYL. Right. 

Mr. WOOD.—and it is an advisory body to the Congress. It had 

input from the executive branch primarily in the way the individual Commissioners were appointed by the Secretary of Defense, 

primarily, and also by the Director of FEMA, now a part of DHS. 

But the specification was—the mandate to the Commission was to 

assess, find, recommend, and report, and that is what we are 

doing, and to the extent that the Congress has in mind activities 

or responsibilities beyond that, they need to instruct us. 

Chairman KYL. I think probably with your advice, and I will be 

in touch with you and will certainly be in touch with DHS, as well, 

probably try to put together a letter to all of the various heads of 

the departments concerned with a request that as soon as the—

well, to transmit the reports as they currently are and make sure 

that as they are each completed, at the appropriate levels of classification, that they are transmitted and that a process for agency 

interaction and response be created with a report back to the Congress. If that hasn’t been done by anyone else in the Congress, I 

will pursue that. 

Dr. Pry? 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, the basic issue there was that DHS, 

of course, did not exist when the Commission was mandated— 

Chairman KYL. Right. 

Mr. WOOD.—in Public Law 106–398, and so it was completely impossible to contemplate DHS being involved. So the Congressional 

rectification really updating of the arrangements is eminently appropriate there. 

We have briefed and we will continue to brief senior officers and 

officials of the Department of Defense in the portion of the Commission’s mandate that was concerned with military systems, but 

frankly, the key thing that the Commission was to do with respect 

to vulnerability of civilian infrastructure is dangling at the present 

time as far as formal arrangements are concerned simply because 

DHS didn’t exist at the time and the Director of FEMA no longer 

has the responsibilities that the legislation contemplated when the 

law was enacted. 

So the Congress taking the initiative to update the administrative arrangements would be eminently appropriate. It is one of the 

things that was a basic recommendation of the Commission. 

Mr. PRY. If I could add to what Dr. Wood has said, yes, because 

it does contrast with our relationship with the Department of Defense, where the Commission findings have been briefed all the 

way up to the Wolfowitz level, to the Navy Secretary. We haven’t 

30

had equivalent briefings like that with the Department of Homeland Security. As Dr. Wood points out, Homeland Security didn’t 

exist at the time the legislation was drafted, and so there was perhaps not the legislative obligation or opportunity to have the kind 

of cooperation that we had with the Department of Defense. 

The Department actually participated. I mean, DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, we had staff from DTRA that actually participated in our work, was present at all of the deliberations. It wasn’t a matter of one or two briefings here and there. 

They were actually deeply involved in the work of the Commission. 

We would hope that a similar relationship could evolve—needs to 

evolve with the Department of Homeland Security because that is 

where the primary threat is these days, actually. It is not—there 

are serious matters in our military forces, too, but primarily, it is 

a homeland security issue. 

Another part of that problem, of course, is that after this Commission delivers its report to Congress, which is going to happen 

as a consequence of giving briefings like this, its legislative mandate goes away and so the Commission ceases to exist. Over on the 

House side, and we are hoping to convince people on the Senate 

side, as well, perhaps this is not a good thing to do at this juncture, 

that we need to extend the life of the Commission. We have a 

unique body of expertise here in this Commission and a blueprint 

that the Commission can help advise Congress on following and 

help advise the other departments and agencies of the government. 

We are in the process on the House side of reintroducing legislation 

to give it a more homeland security kind of direction so that the 

departments can work together in the same productive way that we 

have worked with the Department of Defense. 

Mr. WOOD. The enabling legislation, sir, includes a mandate to 

the Secretary of Defense to deliver a report within a year of the 

Commission’s report commenting on the Department of Defense’s 

response and thinking and so on on the issues. Again, because of 

the lack of currency of the legislation, there is no corresponding 

mandate to the Secretary for Homeland Security. 

Mr. PRY. That is correct. 

Chairman KYL. I appreciate all of that. I think this is a propitious time, then, to hold this hearing to not only remind ourselves of the potential for a threat here, but also to get straight 

what we can do with these recommendations as you conclude your 

work with the classified version and as you advise the Department 

of Defense and report back to Congress, as well, how we can also 

expand the reach of these recommendations to the Department of 

Homeland Security as well as anyone else like DOE that would 

need to be aware of them, too. 

If that requires a mandate to continue the Commission’s work, 

it sounds to me like that would be a good idea. In any event, informally if not formally, we can certainly direct where the reports 

should go and set up some meetings so that we can continue to 

work on the fixes to the problem rather than just identifying the 

problem and leaving it dangle there. 

So unless there is anything else that you all would like to offer, 

let me just tell you that, on behalf of the Committee, what I will 

do is get together with my colleagues, draft up an approach to this 

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issue, the existence of the Commission, the issuances of the reports, both classified and non-classified, the inclusion of the Department of Homeland Security in the process, and anything else 

that we think we need to do to follow up on these recommendations, and we will communicate with you all and then take whatever action we think is necessary here in the Congress, as well. 

Because of my time constraints, if not yours, I am going to terminate the hearing unless there is anything else that any of you 

would like to add. This has been most informative. We don’t mean 

to scare everybody to death, but by the same token, the failure of 

imagination, 9/11 Commission report, and it doesn’t take much 

imagination to figure out what could go wrong here. And to the extent that there are some fixes that can be put in place, we need 

to identify those and get about the business of doing it because this 

is, in fact, serious business. 

Mr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, I think you have very aptly summarized it. I think the basic thrust, the bottom-line mission from the 

Commission’s standpoint would be that the EMP attack threat is 

one which is a curious sort of character, that we have prepared to 

cope with it for decades from a military standpoint, but have, for 

reasons that I addressed at the outset, didn’t much concern ourselves with the civilian implications whatsoever. By doing so, we 

may have created something of a 21st century Maginot line for the 

United States, where we are relatively robust in our ability to wage 

war as far as EMP is concerned, but are exceedingly vulnerable on 

different fronts which invite, if they don’t outright entice, flanking 

attacks against the American nation. 

Chairman KYL. I thank you. For those who might not, again, be 

familiar with the background of the people who have served on this 

Commission, I don’t think this country could have brought forth a 

better group of people, a smarter group of people with more expertise in some of the most esoteric aspects of science than the group 

of Commissioners here. We very much appreciate your service. 

Some of you have served in so many different capacities this government and our National security. We don’t always think of you—

I see these fine men and women here in the audience here with 

their uniforms on and we properly pay them all the thanks that we 

possibly can for what they are doing on the front line. It is also the 

fact that we have a lot of folks working here in Washington and 

elsewhere on very, very difficult problems that also help to ensure 

our security, and I want to thank all of those people, as well. 

So I thank all of you for being here today. We will follow up in 

all the ways that I think are indicated as appropriate here and see 

if we can at least provide a degree of security against the threat 

that we have identified here today. Thank you. 

This meeting is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:16 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.] 

[Questions and answers and submissions for the record follow.] 

[Additional material is being retained in the Committee files.]

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