U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

59–747 WASHINGTON : 1999

ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (EMP): SHOULD THIS BE A PROBLEM

OF NATIONAL CONCERN TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, BUSINESSES SMALL AND LARGE, AS WELL AS GOVERNMENT?

FIELD HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS AND OVERSIGHT

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

LAUREL, MD, JUNE 1, 1999

Serial No. 106–17

Printed for the use of the Committee on Small Business

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS

JAMES M. TALENT, Missouri, Chairman

LARRY COMBEST, Texas

JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado

DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey

SUE W. KELLY, New York

STEVEN J. CHABOT, Ohio

PHIL ENGLISH, Pennsylvania

DAVID M. MCINTOSH, Indiana

RICK HILL, Montana

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania

MICHAEL P. FORBES, New York

JOHN E. SWEENEY, New York

PATRICK J. TOOMEY, Pennsylvania

JIM DEMINT, South Carolina

EDWARD PEASE, Indiana

JOHN THUNE, South Dakota

MARY BONO, California

NYDIA M. VELA ́ZQUEZ, New York

JUANITA MILLENDER-MCDONALD,

California

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

CAROLYN MCCARTHY, New York

BILL PASCRELL, New Jersey

RUBEN HINOJOSA, Texas

DONNA M. CHRISTIAN-CHRISTENSEN,

Virgin Islands

ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania

TOM UDALL, New Mexico

DENNIS MOORE, Kansas

STEPHANIE TUBBS JONES, Ohio

CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas

DAVID D. PHELPS, Illinois

GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California

BRIAN BAIRD, Washington

MARK UDALL, Colorado

SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada

HARRY KATRICHIS, Chief Counsel

MICHAEL DAY, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS AND OVERSIGHT

ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland, Chairman

MARY BONO, California

MICHAEL P. FORBES, New York

PATRICK J. TOOMEY, Pennsylvania

RICK HILL, Montana

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

RUBEN HINOJOSA, Texas

CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas

NELSON CROWTHER, Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on June 1, 1999 ................................................................................. 1

WITNESSES

Wiltsie, Ronald J., Program Manager, Strategic Systems, the Johns Hopkins

University Applied Physics Laboratory .............................................................. 3

Soper, Dr. Gordon K., Group Vice President, Defense Group, Inc ...................... 4

Wood, Dr. Lowell, visiting fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution

and Peace, Stanford University .......................................................................... 6

Skinner, Col. Richard W., Principal Director, Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Space, Office of the

Assistant Secretary of Defense (C3I) .................................................................. 9

APPENDIX

Opening statements: Bartlett, Hon. Roscoe ........................................................... 35

Prepared statements:

Wiltsie, Ronald J .............................................................................................. 37

Soper, Dr. Gordon K ......................................................................................... 59

Wood, Dr. Lowell .............................................................................................. 70

Walpole, Robert D ............................................................................................ 84

Skinner, Col. Richard W .................................................................................. 92

Additional material: ‘‘The Commercial and Military Satellite Survivability

Crisis’’, by R.C. Webb, Les Palkuti, Lew Cohn, Lt. Col. Glenn Kweder

and Al Costantine, Defense Electronics, August 1995 .................................. 112

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ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (EMP): SHOULD

THIS BE A PROBLEM OF NATIONAL CONCERN TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, BUSINESSES SMALL AND LARGE, AS WELL AS

GOVERNMENT?

TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1999

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT

PROGRAMS AND OVERSIGHT, COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS, Washington, DC.

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:05 p.m., in the

Parsons Auditorium, Applied Physics Laboratory, The Johns Hopkins University, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, Maryland,

Hon. Roscoe Bartlett, (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Chairman BARTLETT. Let me call our Subcommittee to order.

Good morning. It is a pleasure to welcome you to this hearing of

the Subcommittee on Government Programs and Oversight of the

House Small Business Committee. I would especially like to thank

those of you who have traveled some distance to participate in this

hearing.

This hearing is being held because the damage to our economy,

businesses large and small—not to mention national security—

from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) could dwarf anything associated

with the well-known Y2K problem. Yet the EMP threat is virtually

ignored by our government and is practically unknown to the general public.

Concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possession of such weapons by rogue nations makes a discussion of

problems associated with EMP and the magnitude of those problems a most timely topic. However, few congressional hearings

have been devoted to this topic, and there is little, if any, public

awareness of EMP.

As a matter of fact, I think that, previously, in 1997, we had the

first ever full hearing on EMP effects in the R&D Subcommittee of

our then National Security Committee. So this will be the second

full hearing devoted to the problem of EMP effects.

When I was recently in Vienna, Austria, a member of the Russian Duma, Vladimir Lukin, who was the ambassador to the

United States at the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Clinton administration—he is now chairman of their

Foreign Affairs Committee in the Duma—he was one of three members of the Russian Duma that met with 11 members of the U.S.

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Congress in Vienna about five weeks ago, now, to discuss a framework agreement for ending the conflict in Kosovo. He made two

comments during those discussions which, I felt, were significant.

One was he said that ‘‘You are bombing Yugoslavia and your

president says that it is not war. Could we drop an atomic bomb

on you and say that it was not war?’’

And then, of particular relevance to our hearing today, he said

in the hearing, ‘‘If we really wanted to hurt you’’—and Congressman Curt Weldon, who was leading our delegation, is somewhat

fluent in Russian, at least he can understand it, and he knew what

Vladimir Lukin was saying before the translation, and he pointed

to him and said, ‘‘Do you hear what he’s saying?’’

What Lukin said was, ‘‘If we really wanted to hurt you, we would

launch an ICBM from the sea with little chance of retaliation’’—

because, if it comes from the sea, how do you know who did it in

today’s world?—‘‘and we would detonate the weapon at high altitude, creating an EMP effect which would shut down your country

for a month or two,’’ he said.

I am not sure if he appreciates how vulnerable we may be to that

type of an EMP lay-down.

Well, I felt that that comment was a significant one, coming from

a person of that stature, in particular relevance to our hearing

today.

This statement did not surprise me, but, unfortunately, it would

come as a surprise to most Americans. I believe it is imperative

that our government take steps to defend against EMP. As with

Y2K, the public and businesses need to be informed about what

steps they could take to prevent or minimize damage from EMP.

It would appear that the number of contracts awarded to small

businesses by the federal government for EMP research has diminished significantly in the last five years. Is the federal government

placing the correct priority on the problems associated with EMP

and with the possibility or probability that they may occur? Is the

public being correctly informed by the federal government as to

what EMP is, the magnitude of the threat and the problems associated with it?

It is hoped that the testimony today will answer some, if not all,

of these questions. Also, it is hoped that the hearing and the permanent record available to the public after the hearing, both in

hard copy and in abridged form on the Internet, will provide

heightened awareness of what EMP is and the problems it could

create.

Again, thank you all for participating in this hearing. And thank

you, in the audience, for attending this hearing.

[Mr. Bartlett’s statement may be found in the appendix.]

Chairman BARTLETT. Let me welcome our witnesses.

Mr. Ron Wiltsie, Program Manager, Strategic Systems, Applied

Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, thank you, sir.

Dr. Gordon Soper, Group Vice President, Defense Group, Incorporated.

And Dr. Lowell Wood, senior staff member, Lawrence Livermore

National Laboratory.

I have the testimony of you three and I have read it, and thank

you very much.

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And Col. Richard Skinner, Principal Director, C3ISR and Space

Systems, Department of Defense.

Thank you all very much for being with us. Let me stipulate

that, without objection, your full testimony will be made a part of

the public record. If there is additional information you would like

to add, we will hold the record open for several days so that you

will have an opportunity to do that.

We would encourage you to, perhaps, summarize your written

testimony. There will be ample opportunity during the question

and answer period which follows to amplify on your testimony.

We will begin with Ron Wiltsie.

STATEMENT OF RONALD J. WILTSIE, PROGRAM MANAGER,

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS, APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY,

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Mr. WILTSIE. Good afternoon, Congressman. Thank you for the

opportunity to testify before the Small Business Subcommittee on

Government Programs and Oversight.

In this statement, I will consider the phenomenology of electromagnetic pulse, or EMP as it is called, and identify specific EMPrelated vulnerabilities of ground system components of the civilian

infrastructure.

My full testimony discusses protection against EMP, as well as

nuclear threats to space-based elements of the infrastructure. It

specifically reviews threat environments and the effects of prompt

and delayed radiation exposure on satellite systems. Due to the

limitations of time this afternoon, I will not address those aspects

in these remarks.

This view graph shows the basic phenomenology of an EMP

event. The detonation of a nuclear weapon produces high-energy

gamma radiation that travels radially away from the burst center.

When the detonation occurs at high altitudes, greater than 40

kilometers, the gamma rays directed toward the earth encounter

the atmosphere, where they interact with air molecules to produce

positive ions and recoil electrons, called Compton electrons after

the man who discovered the effect.

The gamma radiation interacting with the air molecules produces

charge separation as the Compton recoil electrons are ejected and

leave behind the more positive ions.

The earth’s magnetic field interaction with the Compton recoil

electrons causes charge acceleration, which further radiates an

electromagnetic field.

EMP is produced by these charge separation and charge acceleration phenomena, which occur in the atmosphere in a layer about

20 kilometers thick and about 30 kilometers above the earth’s surface.

The area of the earth’s surface directly illuminated by EMP is

determined entirely by the height of the burst. All points on the

earth’s surface within the horizon, as seen from the burst point,

will experience EMP effects, as depicted in this view graph.

Note that a burst on the order of 500 kilometers can cover the

entire continental United States. The amplitude, duration, and polarization of the wave depend on the location of the burst, the type

of weapon, the yield, and the relative position of the observer.

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The electric field resulting from a high-altitude nuclear detonation can be on the order of 50 kilovolts per meter with a rise time

on the order of ten nanoseconds and a decay time to half-maximum

of 200 nanoseconds.

A localized lightning strike, by comparison, 10 meters away, has

a higher peak amplitude, but it occurs later than the EMP, and,

therefore, protection may be available.

It is important to point out that the peak amplitude, signal rise

rate, and duration are not uniform over the illuminated area. The

largest peak intensities of the EMP signal occur in that region of

the illuminated area where the line of sight to the burst is perpendicular to the earth’s magnetic field.

At the edge of the illuminated area, farthest toward the horizon

as seen from the burst, the peak field intensity will be lower and

the EMP fields will be somewhat longer-lasting than in the areas

where the peak intensities are largest, but even there, the levels

can be very significant.

The EMP threat is unique in two respects. First, its peak field

amplitude and rise rate are high. These features of EMP will induce potentially damaging voltages and currents in unprotected

electronic circuits and components.

Second, the area covered by an EMP signal can be immense. As

a consequence, large portions of extended power and communications networks, for example, can be simultaneously put at risk.

Such far-reaching effects are peculiar to EMP. Neither natural phenomena nor any other nuclear weapon effects are so widespread.

In summary, we have found that the phenomena are very real

and well understood by the nuclear weapons effects community.

Our strategic systems and our command and control and communications infrastructure have been designed and built to survive

and operate effectively in such an environment. However, there

would likely be pronounced effects on the civilian infrastructure

from such a pulse.

The magnitude and extent of these effects is difficult even to estimate, and, therefore, it is probably not feasible to completely protect the entire infrastructure from the effects of such a pulse.

This concludes my statement. I hope that I have been able to

give you an idea of the phenomenology associated with EMP. I sincerely thank you for the opportunity to address the Committee.

[Mr. Wiltsie’s statement may be found in the appendix.]

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you very much.

Dr. Soper.

STATEMENT OF MR. GORDON K. SOPER, GROUP VICE

PRESIDENT, DEFENSE GROUP, INC.

Dr. SOPER. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, ladies

and gentlemen. I am Gordon Soper. I am the Group Vice President

of a small research company called Defense Group, Inc.

I certainly appreciate the opportunity to speak today, first, as a

representative of small business and as a recent graduate of 34

years of federal service with the Department of Defense.

As you noted, our formal written testimony has been inserted in

the record. I will confine my brief oral remarks to a summarization

of that and, obviously, be prepared to respond to your questions.

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You mentioned, Mr. Chairman, that almost two years ago, the

Chairman of the President’s Commission on what was called the

Critical Infrastructure Protection Program testified before the R&D

Subcommittee of the, then, House National Security Committee,

and I quote, ‘‘the threat of a major debilitating EMP attack generated by a nuclear weapon is remote at this time.’’

In the same testimony, the Chairman said, and I quote again,

‘‘Such an event is so unlikely and difficult to achieve that I do not

believe it warrants serious consideration at this time.’’

I believe we are here this afternoon to keep the debate on this

important issue open, and I thank you for that opportunity.

Granted, an EMP attack is not very likely and it is most certainly difficult to achieve. But the major potential consequences for

our national infrastructure call for a more considered response.

I do not believe that EMP is being considered in the ongoing infrastructure protection program. And, except for hearings such as

this, the government is devoting relatively little attention to this

problem, in my judgment.

I know, as you do, that there are many tough choices facing our

country today. We are at war. There are many and important demands on our taxpayers’ dollars. In the face of these demands, is

it prudent to spend some, if any, of these precious resources on a

threat that, to many people, seems far too remote?

I personally believe, however remote, that an EMP attack would

result in unacceptable disruption and damage to our commercial

electronic infrastructure. We thus are faced with an obvious dilemma. It is without question that ‘‘unprotected’’ electronic systems

must be considered at risk when exposed to the environments and

effects of nuclear weapon detonations. Unfortunately, the level of

risk and the consequences of continental-wide exposure of our electronic infrastructure are simply not calculable to any degree of certainty.

Arguments have been put forth that our electronics infrastructure is of itself so complex, so vast, and so redundant that we can

be confident that not all systems will fail simultaneously when exposed to a nuclear explosion environment, particularly a high-altitude nuclear detonation.

It is fair, on the other hand, to assume that upset and damage

will occur, but it is impossible on this scale to predict precisely how

extensive the damage will be or to predict confidently beforehand

whether the system will operate adequately after being exposed to

this threat.

Perhaps as a starting point at trying to quantify a ‘‘protection’’

plan for a typical commercial electronics infrastructure, government and industry, working as partners, could begin with a threepoint approach.

First, we must focus on protecting those elements that we cannot

afford to lose. Next, we should develop a procedure for restarting

those systems after distributed, wide-area system failures. Finally,

we must be prepared to accept a certain degree of risk for those

elements that we simply cannot afford to adequately protect. But

we must know which is which.

I have worked on this problem my entire professional career. As

my colleague Ron Wiltsie has said, EMP is real. EMP will be genVerDate 20-MAR-2000 10:12 Apr 14, 2000 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00008 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59747 pfrm02 PsN: 59747
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erated if nuclear weapons go off. EMP energy, with certainty, will

be transmitted into our microelectronics-based society. There truly

could be a serious, and, in my opinion, perhaps unacceptable, impact on our civilian infrastructure.

I believe that this matter deserves greater attention than it is

being given today. We, as a nation, need a balanced, a rational, and

a careful review of this issue to better understand the potential effects on our increasingly sophisticated and, perhaps, increasingly

fragile electronics and the aggregate effects on the fast-growing,

interconnected, and interrelated networks of systems that make up

our civilian and military infrastructure.

One final word or caution, if I may. Look at us. We are getting

old. Well, let me speak for myself, at least. The intellectual foundation that underpins this esoteric science is atrophying. I do not see

it being replaced. This is not a growth industry for businesses,

large or small.

We need your support, Mr. Chairman. You and your colleagues

must help to ensure stable budgets for the limited research that is

being sponsored by organizations such as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the work that is being done at our national

laboratories. Without this support, small businesses like mine, like

DGI, will not be able to hire and to train the young scientists that

will carry on this effort. The threat is not going to go away.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I enjoyed talking

to you.

[Dr. Soper’s statement may be found in the appendix.]

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you very much for your testimony.

Tom Clancy may not know all of you, and if he knew all of you,

he may not have introduced me to Dr. Lowell Wood the way he did,

because he indicated to me that Dr. Wood was the smartest man

hired by the U.S. Government, so I was anxious to meet Dr. Wood,

and I will say that, after meeting him, I am not sure that I would

argue with Tom Clancy. So, I am really pleased to have Dr. Lowell

Wood here today.

Dr. Wood.

STATEMENT OF MR. LOWELL WOOD, SENIOR STAFF MEMBER,

LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Dr. WOOD. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Both you and

our mutual friend, Tom Clancy, are much too kind.

Electromagnetic pulses, EMP, generated by high-altitude nuclear

explosions have riveted the attention of the military nuclear technical community for three-and-a-half decades, since the first comparatively modest one very unexpectedly and abruptly turned off

the lights over a few million square miles of the mid-Pacific.

This EMP also shut down radio stations and street lighting systems, turned off cars, burned out telephone systems, and wreaked

other mischief throughout the Hawaiian Islands, nearly 1000 miles

distant from ground zero.

The potential for even a single high-altitude explosion of a more

deliberate nature to impose continental-scale devastation of much

of the equipment of modern civilization and of modern warfare soon

became clear. EMP became a technological substrate of the black

humor of the times: suppose they gave a war and nobody came?

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It was EMP-imposed wreckage, at least as much as that due to

blast, fire, and fallout, which sobered detailed studies of the postnuclear attack recovery process during the 1970s, when essentially

nothing electrical or electronic could be relied upon to work, even

in rural areas far from nuclear blasts.

It was surprisingly difficult to bootstrap national recovery and

post-attack America, in these studies, remains stuck in the very

early 20th century until electrical equipment and electronic components began to trickle in to a Jeffersonian America from abroad.

For obvious reasons, the entire topic of EMP was highly classified in those times and congressional oversight was generally circumspect and conducted in closed session. Indeed, this is the first

oversight hearing of which I am aware which has taken place outside the rather cloistered confines of the Armed Services Committees and only the second open one held by any committee.

And I congratulate you, Mr. Chairman, for the extraordinary vision and dedication to bedrock, albeit less fashionable aspects of

the nation’s security and well being, which are evidenced by today’s

hearing.

The third decade following the high-altitude tests of the early

sixties saw the expenditure of roughly five billion present-day dollars by the Defense Special Weapons Agency, now part of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and its predecessors, the Defense

Atomic Support Agency and the Defense Nuclear Agency, to develop a detailed, working-level understanding of EMP and related

nuclear effects phenomena and the consequences for both our own

and our adversaries’ military hardware systems.

Substantially larger sums were expended by other components of

the DOD in order to express this understanding as force and being,

primarily to defend especially vital military equipment against

EMP’s destructive effects.

Regrettably, these defensive efforts directed towards strategic

military capabilities were not perfectly fruitful. To be sure, there

were some outstanding success stories. However, a number of important military systems were quite incompletely defended and

some were defended only on paper.

Even more regrettable was the fact that much military hardware

and systems, especially those not considered vital to the conduct of

strategic war, were not hardened against the EMP very much at

all.

As a result, at the present time, our national profile of vulnerability to EMP attack is highly uneven, with large parts of our

military machine and virtually all of the equipment undergirding

modern American civilization being EMP-vulnerable.

Through the end of the cold war, our national posture, though

unfortunate, arguably could be tolerated. Only one nation, the Soviet Union, could mount EMP attacks on the U.S. and likely only

as the first major punch of a fight to the death conducted with

EMP-hardened means.

Indicated responses to any EMP attack then were clear. To be

sure, the maximum Soviet capability to impose such attacks still

exists today, as you noted, in your opening statement, Mr. Chairman, in the strategic forces of the Russian federation.

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And I unhesitatingly predict that it will continue to exist for

many decades to come. Russian rulers, even the Russian version of

liberal democratic leaders, if we ever see such, will not readily forsake such a whip hand over the entire planet.

Today, we watch the ongoing diffusion by purchase and perhaps

by illicit routes, at least as much as by indigenous development, of

nuclear weapons technologies throughout the third world. At the

same time, we are compelled to acknowledge the unique opportunities for defeating both advanced U.S. forces abroad and the American nation itself, which are offered to our adversaries by EMP-centered attacks.

You have heard about the revolution in military affairs and the

promise which it extends for far greater effectiveness of a post-revolutionary American military. You have likely heard far less about

the classic Achilles heel which EMP poses to any information-intensive military force completely dependent for its electronic data

flows on EMP-fragile integrated circuits.

There arises the regrettably real prospect that EMP weaponry,

assuredly if nuclear and, perhaps, even if non-nuclear, could

abruptly transform a future Desert Storm-type operation from another historic victory to a memorable American defeat.

Such EMP weaponry could also be deployed with only slightly

more advanced means from space to rip up the electrical and electronic infrastructure of the American homeland. Thus, the de facto

national policy of nakedness to all of our potentially EMP-armed

enemies takes on ever more the character of national scale masochism. It is perverse and irrational and is assuredly not necessary

or foreordained.

Relative to the two years since any committee of the House last

held a hearing on this subject, it is useful to ask what has changed

and what has not.

The natural laws governing EMP have not changed, nor has the

EMP-oriented Russian strategic nuclear war machine. American

preparedness against EMP has not improved. Rather, the operation

of Moore’s Law continues to endow our national infrastructure with

ever higher performance and thus more innately fragile electronics.

Notably, third world nuclear weaponry capabilities and longrange rocketry both continue to advance rapidly. Specifically North

Korea, a nation which has elected to lose perhaps as much as a

tenth of its population to starvation over the past few years and

which is still formally at war with the United Nations and with the

United States, nonetheless has been allowed to gain nuclear weapons capabilities and is, even now, on the threshold of intercontinental ballistic missile ownership.

I am sure that if my colleague, Robert Walpole, could be with us

today, he would emphasize those points, as he has in recent briefings, both public and private.

In short, our previously low to mediocre national position vis-avis EMP attacks has deteriorated remarkably over the past two

years, and it is not exaggerating to forecast major peril. It is therefore heartening to see the Congress remain apprised of the EMP

threat, for too much of the executive branch has seemingly resigned itself or, worse by far, is actively diluting itself, as my colVerDate 20-MAR-2000 10:12 Apr 14, 2000 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00011 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59747 pfrm02 PsN: 59747
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league, Dr. Soper, just quoted regarding the nature and severity of

EMP.

The executive branch is currently struggling to prepare in a

timely manner to cope with the so-called Y2K problem. You should

be devoting far more concern to the issue of EMP effects on the nation’s infrastructure, for the former, Y2K problem, now is a matter

of possible inconvenience, here and there, for a duration of a few

days, while the latter, the EMP threat, is truly a life-and-death

issue for the nation.

In my prepared statement, I offer a sketch of a plan for a congressional initiative to harden the civilian aspects of the national

infrastructure. I believe that such a plan could be implemented

quickly and with modest cost and could confer major benefits to the

nation’s security against this most asymmetrical and unconventional of foreign threats on a few-year time scale.

This plan leverages the substantial and praiseworthy progress

being made by the services in quickly and inexpensively hardening

COTS, commercial off-the-shelf, hardware of many types for tactical use in EMP-shadowed circumstances.

Such progress may be made with very modest means indeed. Indeed, means such as these, the sort of means that you can pick up

at the neighborhood corner electronics shop, what has kind of replaced the dime store in modern America.

I look forward to responding to any questions or comments which

you and your colleagues might have regarding this plan.

For the sake of America’s future in a nuclear, multi-polar world,

one in which diffusion of nuclear weaponry and the means of delivering it at high altitude presently take place more rapidly than at

any other time in history, I appeal most earnestly to you and your

colleagues to remain seized of this vital issue, for it is one of the

few which in and of itself carries the potential of military victory

or defeat, perhaps even of national well being with the devastation

of American civilization.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be grateful if my prepared

statement can be included in the hearing record as you indicated.

[Dr. Wood’s statement may be found in the appendix.]

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Col. Skinner.

STATEMENT OF COL. RICHARD W. SKINNER, PRINCIPAL DIRECTOR, COMMAND, CONTROL, COMMUNICATIONS, INTELLIGENCE, SURVEILLANCE, RECONNAISSANCE AND SPACE,

OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

Col. SKINNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am Rick Skinner. I

currently serve as the Principal Director, Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Space

Systems in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

And thank you for the opportunity to address the community on

an issue that is of some importance to the Department of Defense,

that is, electromagnetic pulse and, similarly, radio frequency weapons. I have submitted a statement for the record, but I would like

to summarize a few key points for the Committee.

We know the detonation of a nuclear weapon above the earth’s

atmosphere will produce electromagnetic pulse that can, under cerVerDate 20-MAR-2000 10:12 Apr 14, 2000 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00012 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59747 pfrm02 PsN: 59747
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tain circumstances, damage electronic equipment. If the equipment

was built and maintained to EMP-hardened specification, the energy will be safely dissipated.

But, in the case of commercial equipment, we do not know what

margins or tolerances have been built into this equipment, so it is

difficult to predict the extent to which temporary or permanent disruption to the equipment’s normal operation will be experienced.

When we put this equipment into a complex network, it is difficult

to predict how the network will respond to an EMP event.

While EMP is a threat, it is not considered a highly probable

threat in today’s world. The President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, led by retired General Tom Marsh, recently

assessed threats and vulnerabilities to the national interest and

the national infrastructure.

The commission’s review included telecommunications, electrical

power grids, oil and gas systems, banking and financial systems,

emergency services and the continuity of government.

The commission reported that an EMP event would potentially

devastate portions of the national infrastructure. At the same time,

the commission found EMP is one of the least likely threats. The

commission also considered radio frequency weapons. The commission concluded that our adversaries could find easier ways to do

more damage than by either use of EMP or RF weapons and that,

because of this, the potential for such an event was unlikely.

While an unlikely threat, EMP and RF weapons would have serious impact in military command and control systems, so we have

programmed a study and developed responses to this threat. We

spend approximately $25 million a year on these activities.

We have a defense technology objective, that is, a science and

technology priority, for balanced electromagnetic hardening technology. The goal of this effort is to develop and demonstrate innovative and affordable methods for integrated hardening of systems

and testing of military applications against high-power microwave

and high-altitude electromagnetic pulse effects.

Some of the efforts underway within this technology objective are

the development of a personal computer-based EMP environment

and coupling software model, a generic, simple-to-install hardware

kit for hardening commercial off-the-shelf computers, and a radio

frequency attack detector we call a witness chip. There are other

activities within this technology objective, but I thought these three

may be of most interest to you.

Based on DOD-sponsored research and other studies from the

government and private sector, we have found several things you

may find useful. In general, consumer electronics may be upset, but

often are not permanently damaged by low to moderate levels of

EMP. There are more detailed summaries of our findings in this

area in my statement for the record.

Number two, the move from copper communications cable to fiber

optics will create a more resilient infrastructure. Fiber optics do

not act as an antenna to collect electromagnetic energy and therefore reduce EMP vulnerabilities.

Three, the widespread use of automated systems and factories

and medical systems has resulted in the design and manufacture

of commercial equipment which is highly immune to noisy elecVerDate 20-MAR-2000 10:12 Apr 14, 2000 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59747 pfrm02 PsN: 59747
11

trical environments which are similar to EMP. These design concepts are being employed in other consumer electronics as well. In

fact, as Lowell showed, you can go to Radio Shack and find a RF

surge protector which, in many ways, represents some of the techniques we would use to protect a system against EMP.

Number four, and most important, perhaps, is that the life cycle

maintenance of EMP protection must be addressed if EMP is a concern. This means that modifications, inspections, repair actions,

and operations must take into account the EMP integrity of the

equipment. This additional operations and maintenance burden

must be addressed whenever a decision is made to protect against

EMP vulnerabilities.

You may also be interested in another effort which is now just

getting underway because it is a small business innovative research activity which the U.S. army is soliciting contracts for. The

effort has the title Mitigation of Magnetohydrodynamic Electromagnetic Pulse Effects on Long Lines for Missile Defense Systems

and Infrastructure Protection.

The objective of the program is to identify, develop, and demonstrate low-cost techniques to protect military and critical infrastructure systems with long power and communications lines from

the effects of EMP.

We would hope that the results of this and similar efforts will

assist in our understanding of how best to address the potential

EMP threat to our military capability and our national infrastructure.

In summary, we know that while an unlikely event EMP could

inflict damage to the national infrastructure. We have taken measures to ensure the critical military command and control structures

the nation depends on to respond to such an event are resilient to

these threats.

There is concern that a combination of the commercial power

grid, telecommunications networks in the private sector, and computing systems remains vulnerable to widespread outages and upsets due to EMP.

Detailed analysis of critical civilian systems would be useful to

better understand the magnitude of the problem. We look to the

government’s critical infrastructure protection program to address

these concerns.

Mr. Chairman, on behalf of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, I appreciate the opportunity to present these comments on

EMP-related programs and look forward to your questions.

[Col. Skinner’s statement may be found in the appendix.]

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you very much.

What I would like to do first is to get on the record the recent

references to EMP and such public things as what ‘‘Nuclear Train,’’

I think, was a recent two-part series on television——

Dr. SOPER. ‘‘Atomic Train,’’ I think.

Chairman BARTLETT. What was it?

Dr. SOPER. ‘‘Atomic Train.’’

Chairman BARTLETT. ‘‘Atomic Train?’’ ‘‘Atomic Train.’’

How many such references to EMP can the members of the panel

remember so that we can get it on the record?

12

What I want to do is to substantiate that we are not giving away

national secrets in talking about EMP, that it is out there in the

public.

What other references can you remember? One of you had a list

of these in your testimony, I remember.

Dr. SOPER. I referred to at least three. I think the first one, I remember, was a made-for-T.V. movie called ‘‘The Day After.’’ The

reference to EMP in the ‘‘Atomic Train,’’ and a reference in a

James Bond Movie, ‘‘Golden Eye,’’ and at least one other, ‘‘Pandora’s Box,’’ I think. And there have been a number of articles in

Popular Mechanics-like publications that talk about EMP.

I have written a few articles for publications like Defense Electronics in an effort to, at least, demystify EMP and make the public

aware of this relatively esoteric subject.

But, at any rate, attempts have been made at bringing this issue

to the public. There are no formal programs that are sponsored by

the government. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management

Agency, for example, might be one that you would expect. I just do

not know. But those few that I have mentioned are the ones that

I remember where EMP was mentioned.

And as I think I said in my written testimony, and my colleague

Dr. Wood would appreciate this, some severe liberties were taken

with the physics and the description of EMP in some of these movies and publications. So one needs to be careful. While they may

be describing EMP, the underlying physics would perhaps not pass

a graduate exam at the University of Tennessee, my alma mater.

Chairman BARTLETT. Dr. Wood?

Dr. WOOD. Mr. Chairman, I also was concerned that, since this

was an open hearing, that matters be traceable to public documents of the government, and the one that I would particularly

commend to the Committee’s attention is a book, actually a series,

that were sponsored for many years by the old United States Atomic Energy Commission, edited by Samuel Glastone and Philip

Dolan, entitled ‘‘The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.’’

This is a volume of most of a thousand pages which discusses nuclear weaponry effects from the standpoint, if you will, of a military

officer or a senior policy-oriented civilian to tell them, basically,

how nuclear weapons perform and what their effects in the environment are.

There is a quite extensive discussion of EMP there, including

some of its quantitative features, and so it is certainly feasible to

speak in public rather extensively and in fair detail of what the effects of EMP are.

The matters which the government still considers classified are

the details in respect to how nuclear weaponry, particularly specially designed nuclear weaponry, might produce particularly large

bursts of EMP or bursts of EMP that have very unusual characteristics that could defeat defensive means. Those are the things, and

the only things, which are still withheld in any public debate.

Chairman BARTLETT. Recently in the news was an indication

that among those things which the Chinese have been able to secure from our national labs was the design of an EMP-enhanced

weapon. That is correct? Are any of you familiar with that?

13

Dr. WOOD. I am not able to speak to that, Mr. Chairman. I am

sorry.

Chairman BARTLETT. Okay. This was in the public press that

this was one of the several things that they, presumably, had been

able to get from our national laboratories.

Two other public references——

Dr. WOOD. I will be happy to speak to you about that privately.

Chairman BARTLETT. Yes. All I am referencing is what was in

the public press, that that was one of the things which they were

able to get from our national laboratories.

I first contacted Tom Clancy because in one of his books, he had

an EMP scenario, and when I first began an exploration of this, I

knew Tom Clancy did good research, and so that is how I got introduced to Dr. Wood, when I called Tom. He suggested he knew little

more than was in his book but that I could learn a great deal more

from Dr. Wood.

A number of years ago, there was a series on television called

‘‘Amerika,’’ spelled with a K. You may remember this series. It was

a made-for-television series. It was several episodes, several different evenings were spent with the whole scenario. And some

bombs were dropped on Central America and one of the things that

happened was that cars quit running, obvious reference to EMP effect. So you can also find it there.

I just wanted to, at the beginning, indicate that this was in the

public knowledge if one chose to look. Although most people are not

aware of it, it is there, it is out there. We are not talking about

something that the world does not know.

Mr. Wiltsie, I wonder if you could show for us again your EMP

ground coverage slide. Could you do that? Would that be feasible

to show that?

Mr. WILTSIE. Can I have the third slide, please?

Chairman BARTLETT. This is the one. The Rumsfeld Report indicated that they had determined that third world countries were

now taking everyday surface ships and modifying them so that you

could put missile launchers, like a Scud launcher, on one of those

ships. As I understand it, the common Scud gets an apogee of

about 180 miles, is that correct?

Dr. WOOD. The extended range Scuds at maximum range, sir,

the ones that we saw in Desert Storm, got to about 150 kilometers.

The M–9s that the Chinese have been selling into the third world

will, indeed, get to above 200 kilometers altitude when you are firing at maximum range. So, yes, 150 to 250 kilometers are the peak

altitudes.

Chairman BARTLETT. Which of those circles there would indicate

the range for the coverage for a Scud?

Mr. WILTSIE. The tan circle is the height of burst of about 100

kilometers, Congressman, and so it is somewhere between the inside of this and about the middle of it, so you get some significant

coverage over the continental United States with that type of weapon.

Chairman BARTLETT. But launched from the sea, it could not get

that far inland? How far inland could it get, at apogee?

Mr. WILTSIE. Well, it depends on the launch platform and how

close you bring it to the continental United States and what the

14

capability of the launch system is that you have on board that merchant ship.

I would point out that, early in the U.S. ballistic missile program, the sea-launched ballistic missiles, we fired some from merchant-type ships for test purposes prior to going to sea.

Dr. WOOD. Basically, Mr. Chairman, if you move that surface

zero from where it is over Kansas or Nebraska, you move that back

to Washington D.C., it would be feasible for a ship on the high seas

launching a Desert Storm-type Iraqi Scud to put that surface zero

anywhere in the Virginia-West Virginia area, as I said, firing outside American territorial waters.

Chairman BARTLETT. So if the center of that circle is now the

West Virginia area, it would cover most of the eastern United

States.

Mr. WILTSIE. Yes.

Chairman BARTLETT. Perhaps excluding south Florida and

Maine?

Dr. WOOD. Well, we used to refer in cold war days to a blue-preferred red attack, Mr. Chairman, and that is the West-Coasters

preferred anti-American attack. You drop it on the East Coast.

Chairman BARTLETT. The point that I am trying to make here is

that the capability exists for a third world power with a commercial ship modified to put a launcher on it, Scud launchers, essentially every third world nation has a Scud launcher, and if they do

not have an atomic weapon, they perhaps can get one from a Russian who has not been paid for the past six months. They are becoming more widely available. Several countries have them now.

The point I was trying to get was that this is not a potential for

20 years from now. It is a potential for here and now, is it not?

Dr. WOOD. The Rumsfeld Commission last summer, Mr. Chairman, specifically raised that possibility. Since that time, you have

been able to read in the newspapers, that the Iranians are testing

just such a missile in the Caspian Sea, that is to say a sealaunched Scud-type missile.

We are also aware of the fact, sir, that last summer, the Iranians

tested the Shahap III missile, which had a range of 800 kilometers,

which is greater than that of the Iraqi missiles in Desert Storm.

So there is a specific example of a nation which the current administration repeatedly has cited as a leading state supporter of

international terrorism which the administration does not credit

with currently owning nuclear weapons, but does own nuclear-capable missiles which have a range greater than the Iraqis demonstrated in Desert Storm and which missile classes are being tested in barge launches in the Caspian Sea, and it is very difficult to

believe that they intend to deploy those missiles in the Caspian

Sea.

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you.

Mr. Wiltsie, if you were to hypothesize a launch from the sea—

and, by the way, Vladimir Lukin indicated that there would be little risk of retaliation if the launch occurred from the sea simply because you would not know which of the dozen countries capable of

the launch had actually done it, so who are you going to incinerate

if there is a launch from the sea—but if you are going to

hypothesize——

15

Dr. WOOD. That is a classic example, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman BARTLETT. Yes, sir.

Dr. WOOD. Chairman Lukin, of course, as you indicated in your

statement, has a very extended background with respect to Soviet,

and now Russian, national security matters. And that is a prospect

which was very extensively considered in times past.

It is difficult to take his statements as anything other than coming from a very knowledgeable expert on the other side.

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you. Yes, he was the ambassador, as

I mentioned, at the end of the Bush administration, the beginning

of this administration. He is now chairman of foreign affairs.

Dr. WOOD. He is generally considered to be one of the most capable Soviet ambassadors in recent decades.

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you.

Dr. WOOD. If I might mention one other item referring to the

Duma debate. In the Duma debate a few years ago, I believe less

than three years ago, with respect to whether the Russian federations should ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty, one of the

statements which was offered, first to Mr. Lukin’s defense committee of the Duma, and then in open debate in the Duma, from

the Russian defense minister was a statement that the comprehensive test ban should not be ratified by the Russian confederation

because it would cut off the vital phases of development of enhanced EMP weaponry by the Russian federation, and this was

cited by the Russian defense minister as, from his standpoint, one

of the primary reasons why the CTBT should not be ratified by

Russia.

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you.

I would like to return for just a moment to the coverage slide and

ask Mr. Wiltsie——

Mr. WILTSIE. Can we dim the lights again, please?

Chairman BARTLETT. If we were to hypothesize four launches,

northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest, with a Scud, which

is now available to a lot of different powers, would that blanket all

of the United States? It would appear to me that it would, with

considerable overlap.

Mr. WILTSIE. There is a good possibility that it could. You would

have to be careful where you placed your launch platforms.

You would have to, perhaps, get a launch platform into the Gulf

of Mexico area and up off the northwest coast of the United States,

but I think if you are using merchant ships with Scud-like missiles,

yes, you can largely cover the continental United States with four

simultaneous launches and you will probably have some increased

effect in some areas by the multiple nature of the launches. More

than one launch causes you more severe problems.

Chairman BARTLETT. Dr. Soper, what sort of intensity of laydown would you expect from that kind of a scenario?

Dr. SOPER. If I remember correctly, some work was done by the

Defense Nuclear Agency, now part of the Defense Threat Reduction

Agency, that posed the question of how many high-altitude detonations would it take to essentially blanket the United States with

EMP in the tens of kilovolts per meter range?

16

And I know the answer to that, and the reason I am not stating

it is because I do not remember whether it is classified or not and

I will be glad to address that with you off line.

Chairman BARTLETT. I have seen, Dr. Wood, public statements to

the effect that a single large—that is a megaton or more—weapon

detonated at 300 miles high over Nebraska would produce at the

margins of our country 10 to 20 kilovolts. Is that not correct?

Dr. WOOD. It is certainly the case, sir, that megaton-class weaponry is capable of doing that. However, it should be realized that

it is also possible to do that with specially designed weapons whose

yield would be much, much, much less than a megaton.

Chairman BARTLETT. It might be worth noting that the weapons

that the Chinese have on 18 of their Long March missiles which,

presumably, are capable of reaching our country, are 4.4 megatons,

correct?

Dr. WOOD. That is the approximate yield which is publicly attributed to them, sir, but the point is that the EMP yield of a nuclear

weapon is not at all well correlated necessarily with its explosive

yield. You can get much larger yields with a specially designed 10

kiloton device, you can get much larger electromagnetic pulses with

a specially designed kiloton device than you can with a crudely designed 10 megaton device. The EMP output of a device, its EMP

consequences, are very poorly related to its total explosive yield.

Chairman BARTLETT. But for the record, is it not true that EMP

is an unavoidable consequence of every nuclear explosion?

Dr. WOOD. Indeed.

Chairman BARTLETT. So whether you are aiming for it or not,

you get an EMP——

Dr. WOOD. Oh yes. You kind of get the base output, no matter

what you do. If you wish to maximize the EMP consequences of a

nuclear explosion, you can make those consequences be very, very

severe or quite modest yield. But, in general, for a given class of

device, as you increase the yield, the EMP consequences of it will

increase, but the point that I am trying to make is that if you hop

from class to class of nuclear weaponry, you can find classes in

which the EMP yield can be very, very large, even though the explosive yield is very modest indeed.

Dr. SOPER. One aspect that we should remember is, for the most

part, we are focusing on what is generally called high-altitude

EMP. The unique aspect of a high altitude nuclear detonation is

that it can be ‘‘see’’ horizon-to-horizon and places at risk, simultaneously, many electronic systems.

Bursts on or near the ground produce localized, but very intense,

electromagnetic environments as well that can couple into electrical conductors, antennas and the like. It does not have the great

expanse, of course, that a high-altitude nuclear detonation does.

Dr. WOOD. That is a very good point of Dr. Soper’s. My remarks

with respect to different classes of nuclear explosives and their

EMP consequences were concerned with high-altitude bursts that

have very large area coverage.

Mr. WILTSIE. I would point out, Mr. Congressman, that DTRA,

in their old days, it was DNA and so forth, did some calculations

that gave you 20 kilovolts per meter for a burst at about 300 kilometers over the large area of the United States and the only thing

17

I am not sure of is what the yield was that they used on that weapon. Those calculations have been done.

Chairman BARTLETT. What kind of damage would you expect

from 10 to 20 thousand volts, that is 10 to 20 kilovolts? What

would you expect in microelectronic equipment?

Dr. WOOD. I know of no microelectronic equipment, per se, that

could stand anything like that type of electric field. As I commented in my opening statement and also in my prepared statement, modern microelectronics are becoming ever more fragile with

the passage of time, as far as their intrinsic hardness is concerned,

because the elementary devices, the individual transistors, become

ever smaller and, thus, it takes a smaller and smaller amount of

EMP-imposed power to destroy those devices.

Now, it is indeed the case that, because of the very high frequency and that ever higher frequency at which such devices operate these days, that it has become highly desirable to wrap them

in metallic wrappers, if you will, to keep one device from generating electromagnetic interference which would impair the proper

operation of the neighboring device.

The Federal Communications Commission, for instance, requires

certain types of decoupling and of wrappers, conductive wrappers,

for such equipment. And so you have two countervailing effects: the

devices themselves, modern integrated circuits, are ever more fragile, but, because of their high frequency of operation, they are

wrapped in things which make them ever more robust.

And so the product of a very large number and a very small

number is what gives you the net EMP hardness for a system.

That number, frankly, can wander all over the map. Some systems

can be amazingly tough, even though they are composed of exceedingly fragile components inside them. Some systems which, on the

other hand, are not extremely well decoupled from the environment

may be very fragile, indeed, even though they have rather old components that are intrinsically fairly robust.

So you really have to test individual pieces of equipment and you

have to test systems and, very, very crucially, Mr. Chairman, you

have to test them in realistic circumstances. Some of the testing I

have seen done is kind of comically bad in that they will take a

piece of computer gear and they will take all the cables off of it and

they will set it in the test environment and they will not plug it

in to a power line and they will test it and then say, ‘‘My goodness,

look how robust it is.’’

But if you bothered to plug in an a modem or you bothered to

plug in a power line or, particularly, if you bothered to turn the

power on so that the computer was running at the time, you would

discover a very, very different EMP vulnerability and it would be

a much more severe vulnerability.

So it is important to look at systems and it is important to look

at them in realistic operating conditions, not contrived testing conditions. And some of the contrived ones are remarkably misleading.

But in realistic testing conditions, you have to look at them and the

good news is it is pretty easy to do that.

Chairman BARTLETT. Dr. Soper.

Dr. SOPER. I think Dr. Wood hit on a very important comment

that I would like to amplify a little bit. Namely, it is engineeringly

18

simple to design an EMP-protected enclosure. Volumes the size of

this room are not difficult to protect and at a not-exorbitant cost.

But the one thing that Dr. Wood pointed out, and I think needs

mentioning, is that we must have the ability to test the improvements that we have made, in order to demonstrate that the protection that you have provided do, indeed, provide that protection.

When we were doing underground nuclear testing—at least the

Department of Defense nuclear testing on effects—not one time did

we put a system underground that we had tested before or had designed as well as we could, that we did not find a problem. Not one

single time.

And analysis allows you to learn more and more about what you

know about and absolutely nothing about what you do not know

about. It is the unknown unknowns that, quite often, create the

large problem.

And as I scan the audience, I see a few people here, today, that

helped in the very basic EMP protection designs that, if used and

if tested—and there are ways to test those designs so I do not

mean to imply that EMP needs to be tested in an underground environment—that if it is realistically tested, you can, with some degree of certainty, know that the equipment inside will survive.

It is obviously unrealistic to test at one time an entire continentwide electronics-based infrastructure. You could do it with a highaltitude nuclear test, but I suspect that that is environmentally not

wise.

Dr. WOOD. You will get to do the environmental impacts statement on that.

Dr. SOPER. So I think what Dr. Wood is pointing out is that there

are ways to approach the problem with EMP and there are ways

to protect against it, realistically and cost-effectively and with some

surety, but it needs to be done carefully and it, in general, is cheaper if you do it at the very beginning than if you do it later in its

life cycle when you decide, ‘‘Oh, there is a problem here and I need

to go back and protect.’’

Dr. WOOD. As a specific example, Mr. Chairman, the type of

EMP robustness that is associated with power line surges is feasible to gain for the cost of two or three dollars worth of parts. Literally, you can protect a computer system—a personal computer

system, for instance, may cost two or three thousand dollars—for

a tenth of a percent if you design it in from the beginning. The

total cost might be has high as 1 percent.

This is discovered not only by people who are working commercially but even those folks in the armed forces that trying to take

commercial equipment and adapt it for military purposes, hardening against EMP, discovering that very modest changes, things

that can be done quickly and easily even after the equipment is

manufactured and is sold to the DOD, discovering that costs of the

order of 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent, are not at all atypical as

far as gaining the EMP hardening is concerned.

It is the doing of it and the testing and the certification of it

which is the really important thing. Dr. Soper made a very crucial

point and that is when military systems over the last few decades

were hauled into specially engineered environments so they could

be realistically tested for EMP, in spite of intensive endeavor beVerDate 20-MAR-2000 10:12 Apr 14, 2000 Jkt 010199 PO 00000 Frm 00021 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HEARINGS\59747 pfrm02 PsN: 59747
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forehand to make sure that those systems would be robust, they

never passed. They always failed.

They had to be fixed and sometimes fixed again and sometimes

even fixed a third time before they would pass that type of rigorous

full-op system scale examination, you know, with Mother Nature

conducting the exam and DNA coming in afterwards and issuing

the score sheet.

So it is important to not only view as modern technology—and

some of these components here did not exist 20 years, these very

high-tech lightning arresters, these little green objects—it is important to exercise prudence by designing them and putting them into

your equipment, but it is also crucial to test to make sure that you

did the right things and that you did the right things right as you

have done it.

Small errors in attempting to secure EMP hardness can have

ruinously large consequences. Good intentions do not quite do the

job with respect to EMP robustness.

Chairman BARTLETT. I would like to spend just a moment on

looking at this hardening.

It is my understanding that the rise time of an EMP pulse is

measured in nanoseconds, which is very, very much faster than

lightning, for instance, that usual lightening arrestor probably

won’t work, the surge protectors for lightning will not work as a

surge protector for EMP. That is correct?

Dr. WOOD. The fast component of EMP is, indeed, just as you

have described it. It rises much, much faster, many orders of magnitude faster, than does the electric field associated with a standard lightning bolt. Yes, sir.

And so standard lightning protective means have little, if any, efficacy as far as EMP defenses are concerned. They are just too slow

and, indeed, in many of our military systems that are designed to

exploit EMP effects, a lot of attention is given to making the rise

time be exceedingly brief because you can step around many types

of EMP defenses by having as high a frequency a pulse, as fast a

rise time as you possibly can generate.

Chairman BARTLETT. But are there surge protectors that will respond quickly enough to protect from EMP?

Dr. WOOD. Very definitely.

Dr. SOPER. Yes.

Chairman BARTLETT. But they are generally not used, is what

you are saying?

Dr. WOOD. They were very difficult to lay hands on a quarter

century ago. They were expensive, they were finicky, they were not

terribly robust, and so forth.

General advance of the technological base and, specifically, requirements for protecting very delicate electronic equipment have

made those components available, not only readily available these

days, but exceedingly cheaply available.

As I said, components such as these, very fast surge clippers, you

simply could not buy a quarter century ago, almost for love nor

money, DOD could buy them, but that was about all. Nowadays,

everybody walks down and buys them for a buck nineteen at retail

in single quantities. And they are remarkably effective as far as

20

clipping the pulses associated with EMP on power and signal lines

both.

Chairman BARTLETT. One of the reasons that we are paying little

attention to this as a nation is that, in the view of many people,

the probability is very low and, therefore, it is not worth the effort.

I remember that Tom Marsh, in our hearing just less than two

years ago now indicated that—and he was chair of the Presidential

Commission on Critical Infrastructure—he indicated that they had

looked at EMP but decided it was not a high probability and, therefore, they did not look at it any further.

I suggested at that hearing that, if he had not done so already,

that I was sure when he went home that evening, he was going to

cancel the fire insurance on his home because it was not much

probability that his home was going to burn and therefore why

would he commit these resources to buy an insurance policy on the

home?

I want to come back to the coverage and the Scud launchers and

so forth, because I have the feeling that if we had an enemy that

had only four nuclear weapons, that he could probably do us greater harm by exploding them at altitude than he could by dropping

them on any four places in the country. Would that not be correct?

Dr. WOOD. Of course. That is self-evident.

Chairman BARTLETT. Now, if that is self-evident and since more

and more of our potential enemies are——

Dr. WOOD. You do not have to take my word for it. You could

ask Mr. Lukin, Chairman Lukin.

Chairman BARTLETT. Yes, I am sure he understands that. But if

more and more of our enemies——

Dr. WOOD. Everybody understands that who has looked seriously

at the matter, and those that dismiss it and say that it is a negligible threat and so forth are simply whistling past the graveyard,

Mr. Chairman.

Chairman BARTLETT. My concern is that this is not a really unlikely occurrence. If we have enemies that are bent on doing us

harm, all of them now have Scud launchers. Several of them have

nuclear weapons. Those who do not have them will be able to acquire them within the foreseeable future. And if, in fact, we are as

vulnerable as many people think we are to an EMP lay-down, why

would that not be the attack of choice? This is, I would think, the

ultimate, asymmetric terrorist weapon, is it not?

Dr. WOOD. There are, as I said—you know, from the cold war

days—the blue preferred red attacks and an EMP attack is the

blue unpreferred red attack. It is the thing which the defender

least wants to face and so the defender is very strongly inclined to

say let us just pretend it will never happen.

The fact of the matter is that in every war game, every strategic

war game that I ever either was present at or read about, the Soviet attack on the United States always commenced with an EMP

lay-down. It did not do it because it was traditional. It did it because it was so insanely effective.

You know, what do you do with your first few bombs at the very

beginning of a major attack? You do the EMP lay-down—frankly,

you use them in any way that most strongly damages your opponent, the guy that you are attacking. And the way that they always

21

went was EMP lay-down. They did not use them to attack SAC

headquarters in Omaha. They certainly did not waste them on

Washington, DC. They always went for the EMP lay-down, and it

was because it was a much more effective way to expend the first

half-dozen or dozen major explosions than any other way there

was. And that persists to the present time.

The laws of nature have not changed. The United States vulnerability to EMP has not changed. Nothing has changed. But this is

such an unpreferred red attack—and I am speaking of generic red,

here, against generic blue—it is so strongly unpreferred that the

way that is becoming fashionable to cope with it simply to deny it,

to say, ‘‘Surely this cannot be. Mommy, make this not to happen.’’

Chairman BARTLETT. Let us go back in history to our first highaltitude burst where we learned about EMP. One of them was at

the Johnston Island, the Starfish, was it, in 1962?

Dr. SOPER. Yes.

Chairman BARTLETT. Was there one at Kwajalein Atoll, too?

Dr. SOPER. I do not think so.

Chairman BARTLETT. How many of these high-altitude bursts

have we real experience with?

Dr. SOPER. We had four in 1962 and two in 1958. Teak and Orange in 1958 and four in 1962, Starfish being the highest, and it

was a 1.4 megaton burst at 400 kilometers. Checkmate, Kingfish—

and what was the other one—Checkmate, Kingfish, Starfish and—

at any rate, there were four at different altitudes.

Chairman BARTLETT. And it was roughly 800 to 1000 miles from

Hawaii?

Dr. SOPER. Eight hundred.

Chairman BARTLETT. Eight hundred miles from Hawaii?

Dr. SOPER. Starfish was off Johnston Atoll. Yes.

Chairman BARTLETT. And what were the effects on Hawaii of

that burst?

Dr. WOOD. As I said in my opening statement, sir, they shut

down radio stations, street lighting systems, they stopped cars,

burned out telephone systems. Those are the effects which are documented in public and referred to in ‘‘The Effects of Nuclear Weapons’’ by Glastone.

Chairman BARTLETT. We did not have very much in microelectronics, then, and I know of no computers in cars. Were that to be

repeated today, what would the effects be?

Dr. WOOD. It clearly would be much more severe, because the

electronics that would be subjected to that electromagnetic pulse

are much more vulnerable to them.

Dr. SOPER. And I am not sure this is useful, but remember, the

same nuclear detonation at high altitude that creates EMP on the

ground also affects satellites within line of sight of the burst as

well as—we know from those high altitude tests—disrupts the communication channels that link the ground station to the satellite.

So one should not limit your consideration—if you are going to

do a balanced study of this—from EMP as the only damaging effect

from high-altitude nuclear detonations, but rather recognize that

other bad things happen as well, if that gives you any comfort.

Chairman BARTLETT. Let us turn for a moment to the satellite

picture. How much more intense is the radiation, the effects from

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this high-altitude nuclear explosion, than the worst solar storms

that we see that disrupt our communications?

Dr. WOOD. On the ground or in space, sir?

Chairman BARTLETT. In space.

Dr. WOOD. In space, the flavor of damage that comes at you that

is like EMP is really of a rather different sort. There is no atmosphere to generate the electromagnetic pulse, but there is the spacecraft itself, and what you will realize there is called system-generated EMP. It is the consequence of having matter around in the

immediate vicinity of the electronics that you are concerned about

and the effect, as I said, is different in kind as well as different in

magnitude.

It generally imposes a much more severe threat, as far as electronic survival is concerned, at a reference distance from a reference explosion, because, as I said, you are kind of in the radiating region itself. The spacecraft is intercepting the radiation from

the device, it is converting it into radio frequency and microwave

frequency electrical energy within the spacecraft and, unless you

are extremely careful, major chunks of your electronic plant tend

to die on the spot, die instantly.

Chairman BARTLETT. These, as I understand, are called prompt

effects?

Dr. WOOD. These are the prompt effects, sir. There are also the

delayed effects associated with the radioactive debris from the nuclear device remaining in the magnetosphere of the earth, and that

radioactive debris ‘‘pumps up,’’ is the popular term, and it is a fairly accurate description—it greatly augments the flux particles in

the Van Allen belts of the earth, and these enhanced populations

of high-energy particles tend to destroy spacecraft on a continuing

basis.

Anything from minutes to weeks of damage are done before the

electronics will actually fail. Instead of failing on time scales of 10

or 20 years, they fail on time scales of tens of minutes to, typically,

a few tens of days.

Dr. SOPER. I call your attention to an article in ‘‘Defense Electronics’’. It is not all that old. It was written in 1995. ‘‘Satellite Survivability in Space: Don’t Count on It.’’ It is, I think, one of the

early attempts at describing the phenomena that Dr. Wood just

mentioned; not only are there prompt effects but delayed effects, as

the satellites continually pass through these pumped up Van Allen

belts, and lists in here the degradation of many of the well-known

satellites. It, perhaps, is an interesting article to read and it is scientifically correct.

Chairman BARTLETT. Without objection, we will include that as

a part of this record, because I think that it is relative to what we

are talking about.

[The information may be found in the appendix.]

Dr. WOOD. It is relevant, sir, both with respect to civilian and

military satellites, and, of course, there is a wealth of both of those.

The very large majority of satellites in earth orbit that are functioning these days are civilian, and they carry everything from your

TV programs to a good chunk of the traffic on the Internet. They

provide environmental monitoring and, of course, there are the scientific research satellites.

23

All of these are potentially vulnerable to both the prompt and the

delayed effects of nuclear explosions at high altitude and, as Dr.

Soper has pointed out, the links on the ground, the so-called

ground stations with which one gives commands to satellites, sends

data up to satellites, and receives data from satellites—those

ground stations are exceedingly sensitive, necessarily, because the

satellites do not have the ability to transmit or receive power readily because of the small antennas they must necessarily deploy.

Ground stations are exceedingly sensitive and they are among

the ones which can be expected to die most readily from the effects

of electromagnetic pulse on the ground.

And so when we speak of civilian infrastructure, we should be reminded that key portions of civilian infrastructure exist in space

these days, and those portions, both because of their fragile ground

links and because the satellites themselves are fragile, can be expected to be highly vulnerable to even a single high-altitude nuclear explosion.

Chairman BARTLETT. How many satellites do we have that are

hardened to EMP?

Dr. WOOD. We have the military satellites, sir.

Chairman BARTLETT. How many of those are there? Two? Is that

correct? The two MILSTAR satellites?

Col. SKINNER. Certainly, the two MILSTAR satellites have been

hardened specifically against this kind of threat, but that is not to

say that the other defense satellites are not hardened as well. For

example, our early warning satellite systems must be hardened

against the eventuality that an adversary would try to preempt our

ability to detect their attack on the United States.

So every satellite system has its own set of requirements that respond to the perceived threat against that kind of system, but I

certainly do agree with the rest of the witnesses on this panel that

some commercial systems have completely ignored the potential

threat.

I will say that the most systems operating geosynchronous are

because of the long lives expected of satellites operating at that location do take the long duration dose quite well and are built to

quite high standard, but the promptness, which Dr. Wood has explained, will take out satellites, and particularly those operating in

the new emerging low earth orbiting communications satellites unless they are hardened against that threat will succumb to radiation very, very quickly and shorten their lives very substantially.

Dr. WOOD. On the time scale of most of two decades ago, Mr.

Chairman, satellites whose survivability in wartime was considered

crucial were actually taken and tested by the Defense Nuclear

Agency against nuclear EMP, and these tests were formidable.

They were remarkable, as far as their engineering features were

concerned.

They were also remarkably expensive, and yet the tests were

done because it was considered important in the 1960s and 1970s

and in the early 1980s to understand and to have, at a certifiable

level, confidence that some subset of satellites would actually survive.

Regrettably enough, that practice has ceased in recent times and,

now, with all respect to not only the colonel but the department

24

which he represents, the Department of Defense simply is not in

a position to certify objectively that any of its satellites are EMP

robust. They simply cannot do that anymore.

Chairman BARTLETT. Including the two MILSTAR?

Dr. WOOD. Yes, sir. Including the two MILSTAR. They simply

can not certify that they are robust, objectively. The can tell you

they believe they are. They can submit stacks of documents with

people’s signatures on them as high as the sky saying that all these

people think they are, but they can no longer tell you that they are

known to be robust.

Chairman BARTLETT. It is my understanding that some 85 to 90

percent of all military communications traffic now moves over commercial sources. Is that correct?

Col. SKINNER. That is the kind of number that we see on a dayto-day basis. Yes, sir.

Chairman BARTLETT. Which means that after a high-altitude

burst, within a relatively short period of time, the military would

be denied 85 to 90 percent of its present communication capability?

Col. SKINNER. Well, keeping in mind, now, that the high-altitude

bursts that we are talking about are in the 300 kilometer range

and our geosynchronous satellites are 40,000 kilometers above the

earth, we have some advantage in a reduction of field strength at

that longer distance from the burst. But certainly we do not expect

our survivable communications command and control system to be

supported on commercial satellites except via good luck, and because of that our essential emergency communications network is

based on EMP-protected communication systems.

Dr. WOOD. And MEECN, by and large, does not count on satellites surviving. The Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network has features which do not involve satellites extensively for just the reasons that you have been exploring, Mr. Chairman. It is not just civilian satellites, but a number of military satellites whose survivability in an EMP-intensive environment could

be considered to be very much in doubt.

Chairman BARTLETT. If we were to presume an EMP lay-down

producing 10 to 20 kilovolts, how much of our national infrastructure would be disrupted and how much of it would be damaged by

that kind of voltage?

Dr. WOOD. It has never been tested, sir, and so, objectively, no

man can say. Estimates can be made, the basis, for instance, of

what happens to long-distance electrical transmissions systems and

long-distance telephone systems during severe solar storms, which

generate very low frequency, low amplitude electromagnetic pulse

light phenomena.

In other words, of the three basic flavors of nuclear electromagnetic pulse, there is a very low frequency, low amplitude portion of it that is mimicked by severe solar storms and when we look

at the consequences for telephony and power systems of those

storms and we look and see what the pulses are that are measured

and calculated to be generated by nuclear explosions, we say,

‘‘Hmm. Those systems are not going to survive the low frequency

portions of nuclear EMP, now are they?’’

25

Chairman BARTLETT. Is it conceivable that our power grid and

our communications network would be shut down by such an EMP

attack?

Dr. WOOD. Ten to 20 kilovolts, in my considered not completely

ignorant professional opinion, would shut down the power grid in

this country if it saw a 10 to 20 kilovolt nuclear EMP and the low

frequency correlates of that. Yes, sir.

Chairman BARTLETT. Yes, sir?

Dr. SOPER. I tend to be on Lowell’s side on this, but you should

understand there is a ongoing, and I would use the word ‘‘raging’’

debate over just that issue. I think EPRI—and I am not sure I remember what that acronym stands for——

Dr. WOOD. The Electrical Power Research Institute.

Dr. SOPER. The Electrical Power Research Institute. And some of

their people looked into this issue, as did the Department of Energy, and I do not have at my fingertips the results of that. But

there are well-meaning people who have looked at this in some scientific detail that suggest that there would not be a catastrophic

shutdown of the power grid. So there is a debate on that issue as

well as the telecommunications infrastructure.

Dr. WOOD. I appreciate Dr. Soper’s comment on that, because it

needs to be clear that this is a matter of opinion. I gave you only

my personal opinion. Other professional opinions may differ. The

fact of the matter is that the tests have not been done.

Dr. SOPER. That is correct.

Dr. WOOD. It is certainly feasible to do the tests and those who

say that it is feasible to do the test, very simply, fall short of a nuclear explosion. You inject current and voltage into power systems

and see how they perform. The very fact that these tests have

never been done, I suggest, says that the optimists know what the

answer will be, and it will not support their position. If they are

so confident that there will be no consequences, I challenge them

to do the tests.

Chairman BARTLETT. And the test is doable?

Dr. WOOD. Oh, yes.

Dr. SOPER. Oh, yes.

Dr. WOOD. Very simply, in a straightforward manner, with entirely non-nuclear means. You just take high-power pulse generating equipment and inject pulses into electric power systems and

say, ‘‘Now, how do they perform?’’

And having looked in some detail over the past 35 years with respect to how civilian power systems do perform and why they undergo large-scale outages, I can assure you they do not degrade

gracefully.

They degrade anti-gracefully, if you will, Mr. Chairman, something like a high-tech house of cards. You pull out a key card and

the whole structure crumbles on a time scale of tens of seconds to

a few minutes. They are not built to be stressed. They are built to

stand up to lightning stroke in worst case, an isolated lightning

stroke. If you put down lightning strokes all over the system, they

fail, and they fail in a quite readily predictable fashion, and the

terrible thing about them, Mr. Chairman, is, once having failed,

they do not get back up.

26

The power system is built to run in stay state. It is not build to

come up when it has a great deal of load connected to it and generation arrives in a hit-and-miss sort of fashion. And it is not feasible, as people have discovered—everything from the northeast

blackout of 1965 on to the more recent smaller scale spectacular

blackouts that have occurred at various places around the country—it is not feasible to put a power system back together automatically.

It is put together by people using telephones and walkie talkies

and so forth, and they basically paste the system back together on

a time scale of tens of minutes to many hours.

And if those systems, if the telephone systems and the walkie

talkies and so on, do not work as well, and there are not neighboring power systems that are intact that can provide generation,

that can serve as power sinks as necessary and so forth, the system

just simply does not come back up. And it is not a matter of, ‘‘Well,

is it going to take a day or is it going to take a week?’’ or whatever

the answer is. It just does not come back up ever.

Chairman BARTLETT. But can we not go to the warehouse and

get the spare parts that were zapped and put them back in?

Dr. WOOD. If your test equipment happens to be working, then

you will slowly be able to repair the systems that burned out, but,

of course, the test equipment died too.

When a large power system’s transformer gives out, when the insulation fails internal to a transformer on a large power system,

what you do is you ship in a new transformer, typically on a time

scale of three to twelve months and you ship it in by barge and

huge trucks and so forth and you install it in place. It is a major

operation. It is massive surgery at that particular switching station

or main interconnection substation.

When big power system components fail, they have failed permanently and you repair them on time scales, literally, sir, of months.

That is to have a single component fail.

When you have a hundred components failed all over an interconnection—it has never happened before and nobody has any idea

how long it would take to rebuild it, but I confidently predict it

would take well in excess of a year and that is if all the rest of

the national technical infrastructure, economic infrastructure, and

so forth were working.

Chairman BARTLETT. Will it be working?

Dr. WOOD. Of course not. It will all have failed. That is the nature of a large-scale EMP attack. Everything fails. Not every single

component everywhere fails, but the pattern is that of a shotgun

blast. You may get hit here, you may get there, or whatever, but

most all of it will have got hit somewhere with at least one pellet

and that is the same sense in which EMP failure will occur.

Some things—by happenstance, by good luck, by robust construction, by being in a sheltered environment, in a tin warehouse or

something like that—some components will survive. Most will fail.

And because they fail at random points, they will be, first of all,

difficult to determine that they truly have failed, and, secondly,

there will not be nearly enough spare parts to replace them, even

if all the power equipment and the derricks and the cranes and the

27

barges and the trains and so forth—even if those were all working,

which, of course, they will not be.

Chairman BARTLETT. The picture you are painting is a pretty

grim one. If it took a year to get our power grid back operational,

what happens in the meantime?

Dr. WOOD. My loose, informal characterization of it sir, is it is

a continental-scale time machine. We essentially pick up the continent and move it back in time by about one century and you live

like our grandfather and great-grandfathers and so on did in the

1890s until you rebuild. You do without telephones. You do without

television, and you do without electric power, mostly, except in a

few fortunate locations.

You just live, as I said, in a Jeffersonian America, a pastoral

America. And if it happens that there is not enough fuel to heat

with in the winter time and there is not enough food to go around

because agriculture has become so inefficient and so on, the population simply shrinks to meet the carrying capacity of the system.

Chairman BARTLETT. But, demographically, we are very different

than our Jeffersonian beginnings, are we not?

Dr. WOOD. Within a factor of ten. There would be tens of millions

of Americans left.

Chairman BARTLETT. I appreciate this characterization because

what we want to accomplish by this hearing is two things, one to

indicate that small business needs to be better utilized. There is

lots of capability in small business to address this problem. It is

not being addressed. And the other intent of our hearing is to raise

the public consciousness.

This is an eventuality which we cannot risk, in my view, which

is why I have fire insurance on my home because, were that to

burn, that would be a catastrophic event for me, so I insulate myself against that by buying an insurance policy.

Dr. WOOD. And yet, Mr. Chairman, the likelihood that your home

will burn in any given year is, perhaps, one chance in 300 to one

chance in 500. That is why your fire insurance has the magnitude—your premium, the annual premium, has the magnitude

that it does. Several centuries will go by, on the average, before

your home will burn.

And what you have to ask the people who come before this Committee and before the armed services committees, before the intelligence committees, and so forth, is, ‘‘Can you give me a certification of likelihood of an EMP attack of one part in 300 per year?

Otherwise, where is the national fire insurance?’’

Chairman BARTLETT. Which is a very good way of characterizing

it.

Dr. Soper, you had a comment?

Dr. SOPER. If I may, Mr. Chairman, might I ask you a question?

Is that all right?

Chairman BARTLETT. Yes, sir.

Dr. SOPER. We have all stated our appreciation that you are

holding this hearing and are willing to ask the kinds of questions

that you are.

Are you the single voice in Congress thinking and asking questions about this? I know that I have spoken before to Congressman

Weldon and others, but it seems to me that, before this issue gets

28

fully debated and all sides are heard and the issues are clearly defined and programs for small business, and large as well, put into

place to help answer those questions, you have to get more of your

fellow Congresspersons involved and energized and perhaps more

hearings in different committees need to be held.

It is a difficult problem, as Dr. Wood has pointed out. It is a potentially devastating problem, as all of us, I think, would agree,

and it is more than, I think, one person in Congress, perhaps, can

take on by him or herself.

So my suggestion, or my request, would be to encourage your fellow Congressmen and Congresswomen to pick up the mantle and

ask these same questions or work on this problem.

Chairman BARTLETT. Thank you. We are in a lot better shape

than when we started. When we started, two-thirds of the members

of our National Security Committee, now the Armed Forces Committee, did not even know what EMP was. Now, I think, they all

know what it is. We certainly have the attention of Curt Weldon

and his Subcommittee on R&D.

They held the first ever full hearing. This is the second in the

life of the Congress. The third will be held this summer and it will

be focused almost exclusively on the effects of EMP on the national

infrastructure, because we are very concerned that we need a

study, that we need a concerted effort to look at what those effects

would be and what we can now do to ameliorate those effects and

what we can do after the event to recover from it. I think we need

to look at it in both of those veins.

So it is getting more attention in the Congress and each of us

in the Congress tends to focus on issues where we think we can

make a difference. This is one of the areas that has kind of been

ceded to me.

I have the recognition now of a number of the members of our

National Security, our Armed Forces committee, and we are focusing on this and hoping to raise the public consciousness so that

something will happen.

After all, it will not happen until the public consciousness is

raised. We have a representative government and the people we

represent need to demand that their government focus on issues of

importance to them and I think this is one of those.

Dr. SOPER. This is true, that chemical and biological agents and

their weaponry is also part of weapons of mass destruction portfolio

and chemical and biological issues did not receive that much attention until, I am told—I do not know this for sure, I am told that

President Clinton read Mr. Preston’s Book ‘‘The Cobra Event’’ or

‘‘The Cobra Affair’’ where this was discussed and literally within a

few days, briefings were put together by the Department of Defense

and briefed into the Oval Office.

I am not suggesting that you go bang on his door to talk about

the EMP issue, but it goes without question that that high-level attention, in general, begets high-level attention. I am not sure how

useful that comment was, but——

Chairman BARTLETT. I appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Dr. Wood, you had a comment?

Dr. WOOD. I would suggest, in the context of the general matter

of informing the Congress and the public and the hearings that

29

have been held and that you contemplate holding that you have already made a remarkable degree of progress, Mr. Chairman. That

is, there does not seem to be very much debate with respect to not

only what EMP is—I mean, that, after all, is a technical matter—

but what its consequences would be.

There just does not seem to be a lot of argument about that, at

least that I have heard. The argument is simply over how likely is

it. And I would suggest that you and your like-minded colleagues

are well over halfway to the finish line because you have got the

technical basis, the factual basis, fairly well nailed down and stipulated to.

You know, at the present time, everybody says, ‘‘Yes, if it happened, it could be remarkably severe. The consequences could be

grave, that we might be knocked out as a modern nation.’’

You know, this, I think, is a remarkable amount of progress, considering that the matter really has not been publicly debated for

more than two or three years.

The people—and I would suggest that the issue before the Congress at the present time is a very clear cut one relative to other

issues of comparable gravity and complexity—namely, you simply

have to ask the folks who say it can happen for the bases of their

belief. Where are the analyses?

Gen. Marsh, for instance, where are the analyses that support

your belief that this, in spite of its devastating potential, that it is

so unlikely that nothing need be done?

I recall to you the, perhaps applicable, perhaps not applicable,

circumstances around the Challenger disaster 13 years ago that,

when the Rogers Commission commenced inquiring of NASA as to

why they had done the things that they had done and not done

other things and so forth, they said that the shuttle had one chance

in 100,000 of crashing and losing the shuttle and the crew on any

given mission. One chance in 100,000, so they never worried about

it.

Now, the fact of the matter is they had one chance in 24, which

is quite a bit different than a chance in 100,000. At least that was

the objective record.

And so when the Rogers Commission went back and said, ‘‘Well,

where did that one chance in a hundred thousand per flight come

from?’’ They discovered it was represented many places in the

record, but they could find no analysis whatsoever that supported

the number. None.

It was literally a free-floating established article of faith in the

NASA church that it was a chance in 100,000, but no basis for it

whatsoever. Not one guy had ever sat down and written a threepage or a ten-page or a thirty-page analysis saying that we have

only ten parts per million of likelihood of failure per mission. There

is nothing there.

Nowadays, the established likelihood, the documented likelihood

and so forth, is one launch in 40 will crash. And that is what happens when not only NASA but their independent contractors and

so forth went back and did the study of the same system that was

believed to have a chance in 100,000. It now has lots and lots of

analysis. Instead, it is one chance in 40. And that difference of a

factor of 2500 is remarkably large.

30

And so I say to the folks that are on the record as saying, ‘‘Ignore

this. It can not possibly happen. It would be terrible if it did, but

it will not happen,’’ is where is your analyses? Where are the numbers that say what the likelihood is of the U.S. getting hit with an

EMP lay-down, not just from Mr. Lukin and his friends in the

former Soviet Union, but from the North Koreans, the Iraqis, the

Iranians, the South Asians, the whatever? Where is the analysis

that says that?

And, by the way, we sure hope that there will not be a Rumsfeld

Commission that comes along six weeks after the CIA, the Director

of Central Intelligence last May testified that there was 10 to 15

years of margin before the North Koreans would have an ICBM; six

weeks later comes the Rumsfeld Commission that says, ‘‘It might

happen in a matter of five years or less,’’ and six weeks after that,

sir, they did it. They launched a prototype ICBM. You know, three

months after the DCI said, ‘‘Do not worry, you got 10 to 15 years.’’

And so you ask, ‘‘Well, where was the analysis that supported

that 10 to 15 year estimate?’’ and, by and large, it did not exist.

So there is a lot of free-floating, very widely subscribed to, highly

established superstition, sir, with respect to national security

issues, and it does not much matter whether it is North Korean

ICBMs or EMP or biological warfare attacks coming out of the Middle East. These are free-floating, sir. They have no basis in analysis, let alone a basis in fact.

Chairman BARTLETT. I do not know how one arrives at the probability, but I would just like to, for a moment, reiterate some of the

things that we have gone over in our question-and-answer period

here.

The first is that a number of nations now have the capability,

with modifying commercial ships and a Scud launcher, to place a

missile over our continent.

Secondly, you would not know——

Dr. WOOD. If I might interject, sir?

Chairman BARTLETT. Sir?

Dr. WOOD. To do so in a fashion that might be exceedingly difficult to trace or to attribute. That is to say, it is a Lukin-type attack, if I can adapt your quotation. It not only happens, but it happens in a fashion and in a manner that is basically impossible to

respond to. There is no basis for retaliation because the United

States government could not establish, to American standards of

proof, as to where the attack came from.

Chairman BARTLETT. Now, would that not immeasurably increase the probability that it would occur? If they had the capability, if the effect on us would be devastating and if we did not

even know who did it so that we would not know to whom to respond, would not that increase the probability that it might happen.

Dr. WOOD. When I was a kid growing up, this was called ‘‘leaning with your glass chin.’’ You know, you provide an exceedingly attractive opportunity for your opponent and then you do nothing to

defend against it.

Yes, sir. That is seemingly exactly what it is, and I think the reason that I would disagree so strongly with Gen. Marsh’s testimony

of July of 1997 is simply that, in a world in which people did not

31

respond to incentives, his assessment might have considerable validity. But when you have people that dislike the United States and

dislike everything that it does and stands for and this, that, or

whatever, dislike it rather intensely, they have the method, motive

and opportunity to do something about that dislike because we

have left ourselves wide open to EMP attack and they have the potential of attacking without it being known as to where the attack

came from, you have created an enormous incentive. You know, in

terms of human motivation and human behavior, you have created

an enormous incentive for just that type of attack.

Chairman BARTLETT. Talking about people disliking us, a recent

member of the Duma came to our country the week before last and

he said that our president had been able to accomplish in 45 days,

at that time, what the Soviet Communists had failed to accomplish

in 70 years; that was to get the Russian people to hate Americans.

For the first time since the cold war began, Russians were in the

streets demonstrating against America. The Soviet Communists

had failed to do that in 70 years. He said our president accomplished that in 45 days of bombing of Kosovo.

Dr. WOOD. Not to worry, Mr. Chairman. You know, do not get

too excited. It is still six months before Duma elections and it is

a full year until they select another president. Not to worry too

much.

Chairman BARTLETT. I want to ask members of the panel if they

have any observations they have not had an opportunity to make

before we adjourn our meeting.

Dr. SOPER. The only comment that I would like to make is that

I am disappointed that one chair is empty, because I think one of

the important—albeit difficult to discuss in open session—important issue is, at least as a government impression of the threat, of

the probabilities that Dr. Wood is talking about, it would have been

nice to at least have had that on the record to understand.

Chairman BARTLETT. From classified and non-classified discussions with Bob Walpole, I can tell you that his position—I believe

the position of the CIA is very much closer to the position of Dr.

Soper and Dr. Wood than it is to the position of DOD.

Is that a fair assessment, Dr. Wood?

Dr. WOOD. That is my impression from a number of classified

discussions and briefings that I have done in the company of Mr.

Walpole.

I, of course, do not want to put words in his mouth, and I would

like to clarify, Mr. Chairman, in this context that I summarized the

statements of DCI 13 months ago on the subject of the North Korean and Iranian missile threats as saying that the analysis turned

out to be remarkably thin and thoroughly mistaken.

I would like to clarify that as saying that I think that Mr. Walpole and his colleagues supported the DCI within the parameters

that they were given to work within. It is just that they never

thought, and Mr. Walpole has said this publicly, that the North Koreans would jump so rapidly to a three-stage rocket.

You know, three stages is kind of the number that you need if

you are a fledgling, missile only power if you want ICBM capability, and it was believed that that would be a long time coming.

Well, it turned out to be an incredibly short time coming.

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So within the parameters that they worked and the way that the

job that they were given to do, they, I think, performed credibly.

The problem was simply that they were wrong by 10 to 15 years.

I know that Mr. Walpole has clarified very substantially subsequently, the parameters within which they worked and, as I said,

I think they did a very professional job within those parameters,

but the institutional parameters were simply wildly wrong.

Chairman BARTLETT. The religious world is very familiar with

the miracle of conversion. The CIA has recently had that experience relative to these kinds of threats, I think.

Mr. Wiltsie, the Applied Physics Laboratory has been for our

military an honest broker for a number of years now. There are obviously different opinions relative to the probability of an EMP laydown, different opinions relative to the effect of an EMP lay-down,

different opinions relative to what we ought to be doing in anticipation of that kind of an eventuality.

Is this the kind of thing that the Applied Physics Laboratory

could be an honest broker for or would there be others who would

be more appropriately fitted for this role?

Mr. WILTSIE. Well, I think the Applied Physics Laboratory certainly could be an honest broker for this. I mean, I am not qualified

to say if there are others that are more qualified than APL to do

such a task, but we have looked at it at your behest since early

1997 and I think we have a feeling for the technology involved and

probably could serve a useful purpose in that role.

Chairman BARTLETT. I thank you very much. We certainly need

someone to look at the national picture, not the military, the civilian part of it. What would be the likely consequences, immediate

consequences? What would be the long-term consequences? What

could we do to ameliorate those effects and what would we do after

the event occurred?

And I do not think that either of these have been given very

much attention and I think that, considering the devastating effects that this might very well have on our country, that this would

be a very inviting opportunity for enemies, and I think that it is

somewhat irresponsible of us not to be looking at what we could

do to ameliorate the effects and what we might do after the event

occurred.

And the analogy of the insurance policy—that is all that I would

ask, is that a prudent nation should invest in an adequate insurance premium the way you do for your home and the liability on

your automobile and that sort of thing. We have not done that, I

think, in any way relative to this. It has been ignored.

Perhaps it is too hard, Dr. Wood, and if it is too hard to deal

with, you just ignore it. Do you think that has been something of

a factor in our response?

Dr. WOOD. Yes. That and the intellectual tenor of the times is

in the direction of kind of a comprehensive denuclearization of

American military thought and, thus, of the civilian consequences

of it.

I would just invite your consideration, Mr. Chairman, and that

of your colleagues in Congress, to the qualitative difference between the situation that obtained after a rather junior—I think he

was a deputy foreign minister or assistant foreign minister of

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China made the remark a few years ago that we would not interfere with the Chinese dealing with the Taiwan issue because we

cared more about Los Angeles than we cared about Taipei. Well,

that caused the Washington establishment, at least from my perspective, to run off screaming into the night.

You come back with a statement that you and a number of your

colleagues, including Mr. Weldon, heard from the chairman of the

defense committee of the state Duma of Russia and a gentleman

who is very highly placed in the Russian national security establishment, by saying, ‘‘If we really wanted to hurt you, here is what

we would do,’’ and describe a very credible threat and you can hear

a pin drop in response.

There is not only nobody running off screaming in the night, they

are not even murmuring in the daytime about it. You know, it is

a remarkable difference.

You know, the Chinese can barely extend a credible threat. They

could blow up a dozen and a half American cities and that is the

end of it. The Russians can incinerate the North American continent, and yet they say, ‘‘You know, if we really wanted to hurt

you, this is what we would do.’’

I am very struck by the difference in reaction to it.

Chairman BARTLETT. And he said that without fear of reprisal.

Dr. WOOD. Sure.

Chairman BARTLETT. Because it would be done from the sea and

because we would not know who did it.

Dr. WOOD. The Russians and, very frankly, most everybody else,

but the Russians in their sleep know how to attack from the sea

so that we would never see the attack coming. Never ever. Very reliably. Certifiably, if you will, how to attack so that it was

unattributable.

Chairman BARTLETT. Well, I want to thank all of you very much

for coming. You have helped immeasurably in our goal of raising

the public consciousness of this.

We will hold the record open for questions from our colleagues,

if they wish to ask them, and we will hold the record open for additional inputs that all of you would like to make.

I want to thank the Applied Physics Laboratory for hosting us

and I want to really thank all of you for coming and testifying

today.

Our hearing will be in adjournment.

[Whereupon, at 2:05 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

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