Electromagnetic Pulse (14 page)

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Deploy ballistic missile defense. The surest way to protect the United States from a high-altitude EMP is by deploying a ballistic missile defense system that can intercept and destroy a warhead before it could be detonated above the U.S. This would prevent an EMP attack and eliminate any potential harm to U.S. systems, and it could even deter rogue leaders from considering the use of EMP. Deploying a missile defense architecture that can intercept a missile early in flight (during the ascent phase) would render rogue missiles ineffective, thereby undermining the rationale to use them. Moreover, because protecting America's entire civilian electronic infrastructure is not fiscally feasible and because a ballistic missile is the most likely delivery vehicle for an EMP attack, the most prudent method to protect America is a missile defense system that could destroy a ballistic missile before it reaches U.S. airspace.

As the EMP Commission reported, the threat of an EMP attack on America is real and one for which the United States is vulnerable. While the world focused on weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, the scientists and policy analysts that made up the EMP Commission believed it was imperative that an EMP attack must be considered with equal weight. The profound impact that an EMP attack would have on America—a developed, modern, electronically oriented country, has forced other similarly situated nations to reassess their protection against such attack.

Looking toward the future, America should consider its options for protecting its infrastructure against such a debilitating attack. Those options are limited but include deploying an effective missile defense system and hardening electronic systems against EMP. As the commission indicated, the implications of an EMP attack need to be assessed further with greater severity and inevitability as America considers possible protective actions against this threat.

The EMP Commission was reestablished via the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, to continue its efforts to monitor, investigate, make recommendations, and report to Congress on the evolving threat to the United States from a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse attack.

Chapter Twelve
United States Policy Stance

Protecting the homeland means more than our borders

The Congressional EMP Commission spent eight years developing a plan to protect all infrastructures from EMP – a plan that would also mitigate threats from cyber-attack, sabotage, and natural disasters. The Commission estimated in 2008 it would cost $2 billion to harden the grid’s critical nodes (i.e., roughly 2,000 large and medium-sized transformers and their associated SCADA systems, etc.) The remainder of the proposed plan could have been implemented within five years, at a cost of $20 billion.

Those sums are modest when compared with the unimaginably high costs associated with trying to recover from a HEMP attack. To put this in perspective had Washington adopted the Commission’s plan, it would have been completed at the time of this book’s release. By comparison, $20 billion, the high estimate of the Commission’s suggested plan, is equal to seventeen days of interest on our national debt. The cost, however, has been an excuse for inaction.

In 2008, the bipartisan Electromagnetic Pulse Commission testified before Congress that U.S. society is not structured, nor does it have the means, to provide for the needs of three hundred million Americans without electricity.

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The current strategy for recovery from a failure of the electric grid leaves us ill-prepared to respond effectively to a manmade or naturally occurring EMP event that would potentially result in damage to vast numbers of components nearly simultaneously on an unprecedented geographic scale;

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Should the electrical power system be lost for any substantial period, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic to society, including potential casualties of more than ninety percent of the population, according to the Chairman of the EMP Commission;

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Adverse impacts on the electric infrastructure are potentially catastrophic in an EMP event, unless practical steps are taken to provide protection for critical elements of the electric system.

Finally, most experts predict that the occurrence of severe geomagnetic storms is inevitable; it is only a matter of when.

In 2015, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee debated a bill to protect our critical infrastructure as the power industry urged lawmakers to keep the complexity of the electric grid in mind as part of the legislation. The bill, introduced by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the committee Chairman, called for the federal government to develop a strategy to protect critical infrastructure from geomagnetic disturbances caused by solar storms, and electromagnetic pulses, which are generated by nuclear and non-nuclear devices.

The bill included an amendment by Johnson, acting under lobbyist pressure, which addressed electric cooperative industry concerns. Lobbyists argued that combining electromagnetic pulse and geomagnetic disturbance threats in planning, preparing or mitigating efforts were improper. They suggested pulling the threats apart and addressing them separately.

The current legislation in the House combines the two types of threats. According to industry representatives, they should be treated separately because they require distinctly different planning, preparation, mitigation, and recovery efforts.

The power sector claims it practices
defense in depth
to balance preparation, prevention, response, and recovery for various hazards to electric grid operations. The industry’s priorities are to protect the most critical grid components against the most likely threats, build in system resiliency, and to develop contingency plans for response and recovery.

One industry representative, Bridgette Bourge, said, “When considered as part of the broader spectrum of potential threats to the electric grid, a nuclear-induced electromagnetic pulse is considered an extremely low likelihood, high-consequence event. That doesn’t mean the electric industry disregards or ignores its significance, but that it is considered appropriately as part of a broader risk management strategy.”

“These events, and threats of these events, are very different and should be treated that way,” said Bourge. “They are unique in how and what they impact. It is true that a geomagnetic storm is significantly less damaging than a nuclear EMP.”

In other words, we don’t think there is a likelihood that a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse attack will take place in the U.S., and therefore we don’t want to go through the expense of hardening the power grid against it.

Chapter Thirteen
Recent Legislative History

U.S. Congress

In 2005, the Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States was released and provided in part:

“The United States should take steps to reduce the vulnerability of the nation and the military to attacks with weapons designed to produce electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects. We make this recommendation although the Commission is divided over how imminent a threat this is. Some commissioners believe it to be a high priority threat, given foreign activities and terrorist intentions.

“Others see it as a serious potential threat, given the high level of vulnerability. Those vulnerabilities are of many kinds. U.S. power projection forces might be subjected to an EMP attack by an enemy calculating – mistakenly – that such an attack would not involve risks of U.S. nuclear retaliation. The homeland might be attacked by terrorists or even state actors with an eye to crippling the U.S. economy and American society. From a technical perspective, it is possible that such attacks could have catastrophic consequences. For example, successful attacks could shut down the electrical system, disable the internet and computers—and the economic activity on which they depend—incapacitate transportation systems (and thus the delivery of food and other goods), etc.

“Prior commissions have investigated U.S. vulnerabilities and found little activity under way to address them. Some limited defensive measures have been ordered by the Department of Defense to give some protection to important operational communications. But EMP/IEMI vulnerabilities have not yet been addressed effectively by the Department of Homeland Security. Doing so could take several years. The Congressional EMP Commission has recommended numerous measures that would mitigate the damage that might be wrought by an EMP attack."

In response to the report, it took the Stimulus Bill of February 2009 to allocate $11 billion to the Department of Energy for “smart grid activities, including modernizing the electric grid. Unless such improvements in the electric grid are focused in part on reducing EMP vulnerabilities, vulnerability might well increase.”

GRID ACT 2010 -The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act

In 2010, the House passed the GRID Act, which would have protected 300 of the country’s biggest transformers. The measure died in the Senate later that year.

In a surprising election-year gambit, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski gutted the legislation despite strong bipartisan support that would have protected the U.S. power grid from solar flares and Electromagnetic Pulse weapons. Her staff claimed she preferred a “clean” energy bill backed by Senate Democrats.

The original bill, known as the GRID Act, authorized the federal government to take emergency measures to protect some 300 giant power transformers around the country. It passed the House of Representatives by a unanimous voice vote in August, an unusual show of bipartisan support in this Congress.

But when it went to the Senate, the bill was gutted of the measures to protect the power grid from EMP attack by Murkowski and committee chairman Jeff Bingamon, D-N.M., while other portions of the bill were added to her energy bill, S. 1462, the American Clean Energy Act of 2009.

“Sen. Murkowski stripped H.R. 5026 of the main elements designed to protect our infrastructure and did not add them to her bill,” said Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition. An aide to Murkowski said that Murkowski voted for stripping out the EMP provisions of the bill on practical, not political, grounds.

“The bill was going nowhere. The administration opposed it, and favored a government-wide effort, not a piecemeal approach.” The aide added that blaming Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Energy Committee, for altering legislation being managed by the majority Democrats was “an election-year gambit by far right wing groups. Murkowski did not place a hold on the House bill.”

The SHIELD Act – Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act

The SHIELD Act is the first legitimate attempt Congress has taken to protect the power grid from an EMP attack or solar flare. Reps. Trent Franks and Yvette Clarke introduced the bipartisan SHIELD Act, which mandates many of the same safeguards as outlined in the GRID Act of 2010.

Here is what the SHIELD ACT would do:

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The SHIELD Act, which amends section 215 of the Federal Power Act, encourages cooperation between industry and government in the development, promulgation, and implementation of standards and processes that are necessary to address the current shortcomings and vulnerabilities of the electric grid from a major EMP event

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The SHIELD Act incorporates most of the EMP-related language of HR 5026 from the 111th Congress, which passed overwhelmingly through the House, but was stalled in the Senate during the Lame Duck due mostly to additional language regarding cyber-security threats

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The SHIELD Act also requires that standards be developed within six months, as opposed to one year, of enactment, to ensure a faster timeline of protection.

When the bill was introduced, former Speaker Gingrich voiced his support, but the House Energy and Commerce Committee blocked the legislation.

GRID ACT 2014

The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense (GRID) Act would allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee—
FERC
— to issue emergency orders to protect the electricity infrastructure from threats, said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the bill’s sponsors. FERC would also attain regulatory power to protect against grid vulnerabilities.

“Unless we act now, the United States will continue to remain vulnerable to the 21st century cyber armies preparing to wage war on our banking, health care, and defense systems by knocking out America’s electricity grid,” Markey said in a statement. “The GRID Act will help secure our nation’s electrical grid against devastating damage from physical or cyber terrorist attacks, and from natural disasters.”

Markey previously sponsored the GRID Act in 2010 when he was in the House. It passed there, but not in the Senate.

“We will remain vulnerable to attacks that could cause devastating blackouts until security is increased and regulatory gaps are closed,” Waxman said. “The GRID Act provides regulators the authority they need to ensure that the grid is adequately protected.”

The bill’s provisions, and the rules FERC would be authorized to establish are designed to protect against “physical, cyber, electromagnetic pulse and other threats” to the electric grid.

Electric utilities opposed the GRID Act the last time it was proposed. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said the bill would give FERC too much power over utilities.