Cooper and Pfaltzgraff EMP White Paper
Experts Henry F. Cooper and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., wrote an 18-page white paper on electromagnetic pulse (PDF) published by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.
“During the Cold War, an ICBM attack from the Soviet Union could have brought us unthinkable devastation and destruction within 30-35 minutes. Although that threat has receded since the end of the Cold War, we now face the possibility that within the much shorter time (on the order of five minutes) that it takes to execute an EMP launch near our coasts, we could be put back into an pre-industrial economy facing possibly irreversible societal breakdown, as William Forstchen so graphically describes in his recent book One Second After and as the 2004 bipartisan Congressionally-mandated EMP Commission set forth in its detailed report. Short- and medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads could be launched from the sea against targets on land, including cities. They could also be launched with nuclear warheads to detonate at altitudes sufficient to have devastating EMP effects.
“According to the EMP Commission, the United States faces an EMP threat that could have catastrophic consequences from even a single nuclear warhead. The EMP threat arises from the ability, whether by terrorists or states, to launch even relatively unsophisticated missiles with nuclear warheads to detonate from 40 to 400 kilometers altitude above the Earth’s surface, with greater heights-of-burst exposing larger areas on the ground to EMP.5 Such action would provide the attacker with high political-military payoff in the form of devastating consequences. An EMP attack would constitute an asymmetric strategy against the United States, which is heavily dependent on electronics, energy, telecommunications networks, transportation systems, banking, the movement of inventories, and food processing and distribution capabilities.
“The EMP Commission reported that EMP was an unanticipated result of a nuclear detonation at an altitude of about 400 kilometers during the Starfish nuclear weapons tests above Johnston Island in the Central Pacific in 1962. Effects, felt some 1400 kilometers away in Hawaii, included “the failure of street lighting systems, tripping of circuit breakers, triggering of burglar alarms, and damage to a telecommunications relay facility.” The Commission also reported that 1962 high altitude nuclear tests conducted by the Soviet Union also produced damage at distances as far away as 600 kilometers to overhead and underground buried cables, together with surge arrester burnout, spark-gap breakdown, blown fuses, and power-supply interruption.
“The destruction and mayhem caused by an EMP explosion would be far more substantial today given the ubiquity of more fragile electronics and our greater reliance on them to run critical infrastructures. Moreover, an EMP burst could directly affect the 3,000 commercial and military flights airborne over the United States at any given time, possibly causing them to crash. Most of those aircraft, equipped with electronic-interface fly-by-wire control systems, would become unguided missiles, plummeting to Earth and leading to many thousands of fatalities and enormous physical damage.”
Tags: EMP