[Senate Hearing 109-30]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 109-30
TERRORISM AND THE EMP THREAT TO HOMELAND SECURITY
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, TECHNOLOGY
AND HOMELAND SECURITY
of the
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 8, 2005
__________
Serial No. J-109-5
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
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COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania, Chairman
ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont
CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
JON KYL, Arizona JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware
MIKE DeWINE, Ohio HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin
JOHN CORNYN, Texas CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois
TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
David Brog, Staff Director
Michael O'Neill, Chief Counsel
Bruce A. Cohen, Democratic Chief Counsel and Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security
JON KYL, Arizona, Chairman
ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
JOHN CORNYN, Texas JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware
MIKE DeWINE, Ohio HERBERT KOHL, Wisconsin
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin
LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois
Stephen Higgins, Majority Chief Counsel
Steven Cash, Democratic Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
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STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Page
Kyl, Hon. Jon, a U.S. Senator from the State of Arizona.......... 1
prepared statement........................................... 43
WITNESSES
Fonash, Peter, National Communications System Deputy Manger
(Acting), Department of Homeland Security, Washington, D.C..... 3
Pry, Peter, Senior Staff, Congressional EMP Commission,
Washington, D.C................................................ 5
Wood, Lowell, Commissioner, Congressional EMP Commission,
Livermore, California.......................................... 10
SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD
Fonash, Peter, Deputy Manager (Acting), National Communications
System, Department of Homeland Security, Washington, D.C.,
prepared statement............................................. 32
Pry, Peter, Senior Staff, Congressional EMP Commission,
Washington, D.C., prepared statement........................... 46
Wood, Lowell, Commissioner, Congressional EMP Commission,
Livermore, California, prepared statement...................... 51
TERRORISM AND THE EMP THREAT TO HOMELAND SECURITY
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TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2005
United States Senate,
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology
and Homeland Security
Committee on the Judiciary
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:35 p.m., in
Room SD-226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Jon Kyl,
Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senator Kyl.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JON KYL, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE
STATE OF ARIZONA
Chairman Kyl. This hearing of the Subcommittee on
Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security of the Senate
Judiciary Committee will come to order.
Our hearing today is on ``Terrorism and the EMP Threat to
Homeland Security.'' Let me indicate that conflicts of interest
keep some of my colleagues from being here right now, though
several indicated that they were going to try to stop by. The
record of the hearing, of course, will be very important.
Unfortunately, a conference of Republicans was called, there is
a vote going on right now, and some of my Democratic colleagues
had some conflicts. But hopefully, we will have some other
members join us here before too long.
The subject, as I said, is the electromagnetic pulse and
its potential impact as a tool of terrorism against the United
States. An attack using EMP, which is a phenomenon created by
the detonation of a nuclear weapon, could be devastating to
this country and the public and Congress need to pay more
attention to that danger. That is the reason for the hearing
here today.
Earlier this year, CIA Director Porter Goss gave chilling
testimony about missing nuclear material from storage sites in
Russia that may have found its way into terrorists' hands. FBI
Director Mueller confirmed new intelligence that suggests that
al Qaeda is trying to acquire and use weapons of mass
destruction in some form against us. And the 9/11 Commission
report stated that our biggest failure was one of imagination.
No one imagined the terrorists would do what they did on
September 11.
I want to explore new and imaginative possibilities of
terrorist attacks and methods, and that is why we are here
today, to examine a possibility that poses a grave threat and a
crippling impact to our way of life.
Last year, the EMP Commission found that EMP was one of a
small number of threats that could hold our society at risk of
catastrophic consequences. The effects of an EMP could
potentially shock, damage, or even destroy electrical systems
that fall within the striking range of a nuclear detonation.
And because the United States is heavily dependent on
electrical systems to provide all basic services, an EMP attack
has the potential to have a cascading effect on all aspects of
American society. And finally, particularly because they lack
ICBM capability, terrorists could nevertheless use lesser
technology to launch an EMP weapon over the United States.
The Commission's report found that our infrastructure, such
as electrical power, telecommunications, energy, financial
systems, transportation, emergency services, water purification
and delivery, food refrigeration, all of these things and more
were vulnerable to EMP attack. And in the event of such an
attack, those infrastructures would be rendered unusable, thus
inflicting widespread disruption or failure on a national
scale. The death toll from such an attack is almost
unthinkable.
Unfortunately, the House Armed Services Committee hearing
on the Commission report occurred on the date of the release of
the 9/11 Commission report. As a result, the hearing and the
EMP report received virtually no coverage. Thus, we thought it
was appropriate to reinitiate that discussion with our hearing
here today. We want to review the findings of the Commission,
understand the current risk we face, as well as the steps we
may need to take and are taking to prepare for such an attack.
We have three very distinguished witnesses with us here
today. Dr. Lowell Wood, Jr., is a member of that Commission, a
Commissioner on the National Commission to Assess the EMP
Threat to the United States. He is a member of the Technical
Advisory Group of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, a member of the Undersea Warfare Experts Group of
the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services,
a member of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, a Visiting Fellow
at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and an
officer and member of the Board of Directors of the Fannie and
John Hertz Foundation.
He is also a member of the Laboratory Directors Technical
Staff, University of California, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, where he has held numerous positions since 1972. He
has received numerous awards and prizes for his work and is the
author of several hundred publications.
When I introduce Dr. Wood, I will also ask you please to
introduce other members of the Commission, who I understand are
with us here today, as well.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry was one of the CIA's chief experts on
Soviet plans for EMP attack. During the Cold War, he developed
much of what the U.S. Government knows about Soviet planning
for nuclear war, and in the post-Cold War period, his work has
been central to the U.S. Government's understanding of evolving
Russian threat perceptions and military doctrine.
He is the Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy
Forum, a nonprofit foundation established to advise Congress on
the future threat environment and on the role of nuclear
weapons in U.S. national security policy, and recent served on
the EMP Commission staff, where he was the chief analyst on
foreign views of EMP attack. Dr. Pry holds two Ph.D.s, one in
history, the other in international relations. He, too, has
authored several books on national security and military
issues.
And finally, Dr. Peter Fonash from the Department of
Homeland Security, National Communications Acting Deputy
Manager. He has been a member of the Senior Executive Service
since 1998, has served in both technical and policy positions
in the Federal Government. He earned three degrees from the
University of Pennsylvania, a B.S. in electrical engineering,
an M.S. and Master's of Business Administration at the Wharton
School. He also holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from George
Mason University's School of Information Technology and
Engineering. His 24 years in Federal service were preceded by 4
years in private industry.
We have a very distinguished panel, as you can see, with us
here today. I would also like to recognize the other members of
the EMP Commission who are with us here, and as I said, when I
introduce Dr. Wood, I would like to ask those of you who are
here to stand and be recognized. Their contribution to help us
better understand the EMP threat is significant.
I also want to thank Senator Feinstein, who cannot be with
us today, for her work, along with her staff, and for her
continuing contributions to the work of this Subcommittee.
We hope that even though there are several conflicts that
prevent colleagues from being here, there isn't such big news
that finally we can't at least get some understanding of this
potential threat out to the public so that we can better
understand those kinds of threats that we may face in the
future.
Let me begin our testimony with Dr. Peter Fonash, and then
we will go to Dr. Peter Pry, and then to Dr. Lowell Wood. Dr.
Fonash, the floor is yours, and your statements will be put in
the record in full. Feel free to quote from them or deviate
from them however you wish.
STATEMENT OF PETER M. FONASH, ACTING DEPUTY MANAGER, NATIONAL
COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mr. Fonash. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. My name is
Peter Fonash. I am the Acting Deputy Manager of the National
Communications System, NCS. I am honored to appear before you
today to discuss the issues surrounding the vulnerabilities of
our Nation's critical telecommunications infrastructure to EMP.
The NCS, as you know, is an interagency body that brings
together the telecommunications assets of the Federal
Government that are of significance to national security and
emergency preparedness, NS/EP. The NCS is responsible to ensure
the existence of a national telecommunications structure that
is responsive to the NS/EP needs of the Federal Government and
is capable of providing survivable NS/EP telecommunications
services in all circumstances, including conditions of crisis
or emergency.
Since the height of the Cold War, the development and
maintenance of survivable national telecommunications has been
an enduring national objective. To help achieve this objective,
President Kennedy in 1963 established the NCS to provide
necessary communications for the Federal Government under all
conditions, ranging from a normal situation to national
emergencies and international crises, including nuclear attack.
When put in place at the height of the Cold War the larger
NS/EP goal was promotion of a survivable and resilient national
telecommunications infrastructure. The primary focus was on
state-based largely monolithic threat. The NS/EP
telecommunications role was to enable the U.S. Government to
organize national response efforts to those threats.
In the post-9/11 environment, however, the U.S. faces more
asymmetric threats and potential targets expanded to include
civilian, economic, and other critical targets. This change,
fundamental in terms of actors, intent, capability, and
tactics, creates new challenges for the U.S. Government.
Regarding EMP, Part 205 of Title 47, Chapter 2, of the Code
of Federal Regulations establishes the NCS as the focal point
within the Federal Government for all EMP technical data and
studies concerning telecommunications. That is a function we
have carried out for the last 20 years.
Emerging from the tactical and strategic concerns of the
Cold War, analyses of potential resources of electromagnetic
disruption of telecommunications services have historically
focused most sharply on the effects produced by a nuclear EMP.
Yet while nuclear EMP remains the only mechanism to affect
widespread electromagnetic disruption to telecommunications, it
is important to recognize that the advance of technology has
yielded many more tools capable of producing singular
telecommunications electromagnetic disruptive effects, known as
TEDE, on a more limited but nevertheless significant scale.
Such tools are, as a general matter, often less costly than are
those necessary to create an EMP. Accordingly, consonant with
its EMP telecommunications mission, NCS has expanded its
analytic activities to include the full range of TEDE sources,
including but not limited to EMP.
With respect to EMP specifically, the NCS has, over the
past two decades, conducted numerous studies, simulations, and
tests of various elements of the telecommunications
infrastructure to electromagnetic interference. The information
derived from these tests was used by the equipment
manufacturers to implement vulnerability mitigation changes in
the design of the switching systems. The results of these tests
led to the conclusion that our Nation's telecommunications
network will experience serious disruption from EMP, but will
be rapidly restored. NCS priority communications programs will
provide critical communication capabilities during the
restoration period.
Finally, as a part of the interim National Infrastructure
Protection Plan, NIPP, recently released by DHS, the NCS serves
as the sector-specific agency for the telecommunications
sector. The NCS is responsible for assessing and mitigating
vulnerabilities to the national telecommunications
infrastructure. Accordingly, recognizing communication's
pivotal role in deterring and/or recovering from an attack, the
NCS has developed a vulnerability mitigation approach that is
designed to address the entire spectrum of potential
disruptions to the nation's telecommunications and ensure
critical communications will be possible under all conditions.
The NCS does not look at EMP or other sources of TEDE in a
vacuum, but rather in a larger context of the full range of
potential threats to the telecommunications infrastructure.
In summary, the existence of EMP effects has been known
since the 1940's. We have tested thoroughly our current
generation of core telecommunications switches and have
determined that there is minimal lasting EMP effect on these
switches. Furthermore, most of our core communications assets
are in large, very well constructed facilities which provide a
measure of shielding. This situation will evolve as we move to
Next Generation Networks, NGN, but we are monitoring this
network evolution by testing critical components of the NGN and
leveraging DOD testing. Furthermore, the NCS has programs and
activities that are designed to minimize the impact of the
entire spectrum of potential disruptions, including EMP.
In moving forward, the NCS has a proven history of
preparing for and responding to all types of threats. We have
demonstrated an ability to develop effective tools and programs
combined with a trusted working relationship with industry to
continually improve the hardness and survivability of our
Nation's communications network.
This concludes my prepared statement. I would be happy to
answer questions you may have at this time or any future time.
Chairman Kyl. We will take all the testimony and then we
will come back and do questions at that time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Fonash appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chairman Kyl. Dr. Pry?
STATEMENT OF PETER VINCENT PRY, SENIOR STAFF, CONGRESSIONAL EMP
COMMISSION, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mr. Pry. The EMP Commission sponsored a worldwide survey of
foreign scientific and military literature to evaluate the
knowledge and possibly of the intentions of foreign states with
respect to electromagnetic pulse attack. The survey found that
the physics of EMP phenomena and the military potential of EMP
attack are widely understood in the international community, as
reflected in unofficial and official writings and statements.
The survey of open sources over the past decade finds that
knowledge about EMP and EMP attack is evidenced in at least
Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan, Sweden, Cuba,
India, Pakistan, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, North Korea,
China, and Russia. Numerous foreign governments have invested
in hardening programs to provide some protection against
nuclear EMP attack, indicating that this threat has broad
international credibility.
At least some of the new nuclear weapons states, notably
India, are concerned that their military command, control, and
communications may be vulnerable to EMP attack. For example, an
Indian article citing the views of senior officers in the
defense ministry concludes, I quote--Mike, if you could put up
the first quotation--``The most complicated, costly,
controversially and critically important elements of nuclear
weaponization are the C3I systems. Saving on a C3I system could
be suicidal. With a no first use policy, the Indian
communication systems have to be hardened to withstand the
electromagnetic pulses generated by an adversarial nuclear
first strike. Otherwise, no one will be fooled by the Indian
nuclear deterrent.''
Many foreign analysts perceive nuclear EMP attack as
falling within the category of electronic warfare or
information warfare, not nuclear warfare. Indeed, the military
doctrines of at least China and Russia appear to define
information warfare as embracing a spectrum ranging from
computer viruses to nuclear EMP attack.
For example, consider the following quote from one of
China's most senior military theorists, Su Tzu-Yun, who is
credited by the PRC with inventing information warfare,
appearing in his book, World War, The Third World War--Total
Information Warfare, and I quote--thank you, Mike, second--
``With their massive destructive, long-range nuclear weapons
have combined with highly sophisticated information technology
and computer technology today and warfare of the looming 21st
century. Information war and traditional war have one thing in
common, namely that the country which possesses the critical
weapons, such as atomic bombs, will have first strike and
second strike retaliation capabilities. As soon as its computer
networks come under attack and are destroyed, the country will
slip into a state of paralysis and the lives of its people will
ground to a halt. Therefore, China should focus on measures to
counter computer viruses, nuclear electromagnetic pulse, and
quickly achieve breakthroughs in those technologies in order to
equip China without delay with equivalent deterrents that will
enable it to stand up to the military powers in the information
age and neutralize and check the deterrence of Western powers,
including the United States,'' end quote.
Some foreign analysts, judging from open source statements
and writings, appear to regard EMP attack as a legitimate use
of nuclear weapons because EMP would inflict no or few prompt
civilian casualties. EMP attack appears to be a unique
exception to the general stigma attached to nuclear employment
by most of the international community in public statements.
Significantly, even some analysts in Japan and Germany, nations
that historically have been most condemnatory of nuclear and
other weapons of mass destruction, in official and unofficial
forums, appear to regard EMP attack as morally defensible.
For example, a June 2000 Japanese article in a scholarly
journal, citing senior political and military officials, appear
to regard EMP attack as a legitimate use of nuclear weapons.
The quote is above. Quote, ``Although there was little chance
that the Beijing authorities would launch a nuclear attack
which would incur the disapproval of the international
community and which would result in such enormous destruction
that it would impede post-war cleanup and policies, a serious
assault starting with the use of nuclear weapons which would
not harm humans, animals, or property, would be valid. If a
nuclear weapon was detonated 40 kilometers above Taiwan,
electromagnetic wave would be propagated which would harm
unprotected computers, radar, and IC circuits on the ground
within a 100-kilometer radius, and the weapons and equipment
which depend on communications electronics technology, whose
superiority Taiwan takes pride in, would be rendered combat
ineffective at one stroke. If they were detonated in the sky in
the vicinity of Ilan, the effects would also extend to the
waters near Yanakuni, so it would be necessary for Japan, too,
to take care. Those in Taiwan, having lost their advanced
technology capabilities, would end up fighting with tactics and
technology going back to the 19th century. They would
inevitably be at a disadvantage with the PLA and its
overwhelming military force superiority.''
An article by a member of India's Institute of Defense
Studies Analysis openly advocates that India be prepared to
make a preemptive EMP attack, both for reasons of military
necessity and on humanitarian grounds. This is the next quote.
Quote, ``A study conducted in the U.S. during the late 1980's
reported that a high-yield device exploded about 500 kilometers
above the ground can generate an electromagnetic pulse of the
order of 50,000 volts over a radius of 2,500 kilometers around
the point of burst, which would be collected by any exposed
conductor. Such an attack will not cause any blast or thermal
effects on the ground below, but it can produce a massive
breakdown in the communication system that is certain that most
of the land communication networks and military command and
control links will be affected and it will undermine our
capability to retaliate. This, in fact, is the most powerful
incentive for preemptive attack, and a high-altitude exo-
atmospheric explosion may not even kill a bird on the ground.''
Although India, Pakistan, and Israel are not rogue states,
they all presently have missiles and nuclear weapons, giving
them the capability to make EMP attacks against their regional
adversaries. An EMP attack by any of these states, even if
targeted at a regional adversary and not the United States,
could collaterally damage U.S. forces in the region and would
pose an especially grave threat to U.S. satellites.
Many foreign analysts, particularly in Iran, North Korea,
China, and Russia, view the United States as a potential
aggressor that would be willing to use its entire panoply of
weapons, including nuclear weapons, in a first strike. They
perceive the United States as having contingency plans to make
a nuclear EMP attack and as being willing to execute those
plans under a broad range of circumstances.
Russian and Chinese military scientists in open source
writings describe the basic principles of nuclear weapons
designed specifically to generate an enhanced EMP effect that
they term super-EMP weapons. Super-EMP weapons, according to
these foreign open source writings, can destroy even the best
protected U.S. military and civilian electronic systems.
Chinese military writings are replete with references to
the dependency of United States military forces and civilian
infrastructure upon sophisticated electronic systems and to the
potential vulnerability of those systems. For example, consider
this quote from an official newspaper of the PLA, already up
there. Quote, ``Some people might think that things similar to
the Pearl Harbor incident are unlikely to take place during the
information age, yet it could be regarded as the Pearl Harbor
incident of the 21st century if a surprise attack is conducted
against the enemy's crucial information systems, command,
control, and communications by such means as electromagnetic
pulse weapons. Even a superpower like the United States, which
possesses nuclear missiles and powerful armed forces, cannot
guarantee its immunity. In their own words, a highly
computerized open society like the United States is extremely
vulnerable to electronic attacks from all sides. This is
because the U.S. economy, from banks to telephone systems and
from power plants to iron and steel works, relies entirely on
computer networks. When a country grows increasingly powerful
economically and technologically, it will become increasingly
dependent on modern information systems. The United States is
more vulnerable to attacks than any other country in the
world.''
Russian military writings are also replete with references
to the dependency of United States military forces and civilian
infrastructure upon sophisticated electronic systems and to the
potential vulnerability of those systems. Indeed, Russia made a
thinly-veiled EMP threat against the United States on May 2,
1999. During the spring of 1999, tensions between the United
States and Russia rose sharply over Operation Allied Force, the
NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. A bipartisan
delegation from the House Armed Services Committee of the U.S.
Congress met in Vienna with their Russian counterparts and the
Duma International Affairs Committee, headed by Chairman
Vladimir Lukin. The object of the meeting was to reduce U.S.-
Russia tensions and seek Russian help in resolving the Balkans
crisis. During the meeting, Chairman Lukin and Deputy Chairman
Alexander Shaponov chastised the United States for military
aggression in the Balkans and warned that Russia was not
helpless to oppose Operation Allied Force.
The next quote is there. Quote, ``Hypothetically, if Russia
really wanted to hurt the United States in retaliation for
NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia could fire a submarine-
launched ballistic missile and detonate a single nuclear
warhead at high altitude over the United States. The resulting
electromagnetic pulse would massively disrupt U.S.
communications and computer systems, shutting down
everything.'' Note that quote is from 1999. That is the last
semi-official nuclear threat made to the United States by
anyone.
Iran, though not yet a nuclear weapons state, has produced
some analysis weighing the use of nuclear weapons to destroy
cities, compared to information warfare, that includes
electromagnetic pulse for the destruction of unprotected
circuits. An Iranian analyst describes terrorist information
warfare as involving not just computer viruses, but attacks
against using electromagnetic pulse.
An Iranian political-military journal in an article
entitled, ``Electronics To Determine Fate of Future Wars,''
suggests that the key to defeating the United States is EMP
attack. Quote, ``Advanced information technology equipment
exists which has a very high degree of efficiency in warfare.
Among these, we can refer to communication and information
gathering satellites, pilotless planes and the digital system.
Once you confuse the enemy communication network, you can also
disrupt the work of the enemy command and decision making
center. Even worse, today, when you disable a country's
military high command through disruption of communications, you
will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country. If
the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways
to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults,
then they will disintegrate within a few years. American
soldiers would not be able to find food to eat, nor would they
be able to fire a single shot,'' end quote.
Iranian flight tests of their Shahab-3 medium-range missile
that can reach Israel and U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf have
in recent years involved several explosions at high altitude,
reportedly triggered by a self-destruct mechanism on the
missile. The Western press has described these flight tests as
failures because the missiles did not complete their ballistic
trajectories. Iran has officially described all of these same
tests as successful. The flight tests would be successful if
Iran were practicing the execution of an EMP attack.
Iran, as noted earlier, has also successfully tested firing
a missile from a vessel in the Caspian Sea. A nuclear missile
concealed in the hold of a freighter would give Iran, or
terrorists, the capability to perform an EMP attack against the
United States homeland without developing an ICBM, and with
some prospect of remaining anonymous. Iran's Shahab-3 medium-
range missile, mentioned earlier, is a mobile missile and small
enough to be transported in the hold of a freighter. We cannot
rule out that Iran, the world's leading sponsor of
international terrorism, might provide terrorists with the
means to execute an EMP attack against the United States.
In closing, a few observations about the potential EMP
threat from North Korea. North Korean academic writings
subscribe to the view voiced in Chinese, Russian, and Iranian
writings that computers and advanced communications have
inaugurated an information age during which the greatest
strength and greatest vulnerability of societies will be their
electronic infrastructures. According to North Korean press,
Chairman Kim Chong-Il is himself supposedly an avid proponent
of this view.
The highest ranking official ever to defect from North
Korea, Hwang Chang-Yop, claimed in 1998 that North Korea has
nuclear weapons and explained his defection as an attempt to
prevent nuclear war. According to Hwang, in the event of war,
North Korea would use nuclear weapons, quote, ``to devastate
Japan to prevent the United States from participating in the
defense of South Korea. Would it, the United States, still
participate even after Japan is devastated? That is how they
think.''
Although Hwang did not mention EMP, it is interesting that
he described North Korean thinking about nuclear weapons
employment as having strategic purposes, nuclear use against
Japan, and not tactical purposes, nuclear employment on the
battlefield in South Korea. It is also interesting that,
according to Hwang, North Korea thinks it can somehow devastate
Japan with its tiny nuclear inventory, although how precisely
this is to be accomplished with one or two nuclear weapons is
unknown.
Perhaps most importantly, note that the alleged purpose of
a North Korean nuclear strike on Japan would be to deter the
United States. At the time of Hwang's defection in 1998, North
Korea's longest-range missile then operational, the No Dong,
limited North Korea's strategic reach to a strike on Japan.
Today, North Korea is reportedly on the verge of achieving an
ICBM capability with its Taepo Dong-2 missile, estimated to be
capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States.
In 2004, the EMP Commission met with very senior Russian
military officers who are experts on EMP weapons. They warned
that Russian scientists had been recruited by Pyongyang to work
on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. They further
warned that the knowledge and technology to develop super-EMP
weapons had been transformed to North Korea and that North
Korea could probably develop these weapons in the near future,
within a few years. The Russian officer said that the threat to
global security that would be posed by a North Korea armed with
super-EMP weapons is unacceptable.
The senior Russian military officers, who claimed to be
expressing their personal views to the EMP Commission, said
that while the Kremlin could not publicly endorse U.S.
preemptive action, Moscow would privately understand the
strategic necessity of a preemptive strike by the United States
against North Korea's nuclear complex in order to prevent North
Korea from achieving a super-EMP weapon that would threaten
global civilization.
This concludes my statement. Thank you for the opportunity
to share this information with the U.S. Senate.
Chairman Kyl. Thank you, Dr. Pry.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Pry appears as a submission
for the record.]
Chairman Kyl. Dr. Wood, would you please begin by
introducing anyone who is here representing the Commission
besides yourself?
STATEMENT OF LOWELL WOOD, COMMISSIONER, CONGRESSIONAL EMP
COMMISSION, LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA
Mr. Wood. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and
gentlemen, my fellow Commissioners and I thank you for the
opportunity to testify today on the findings and
recommendations of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the
United States From Electromagnetic Pulse Attack created by the
Congress in Title 14 of Public Law 106-398.
I am here acting today for Dr. William Graham, the Chairman
of the Commission, who is prevented from being present today
and asked me to convey his regrets and respects to the
Committee. I am accompanied by three of my colleague
Commissioners, who I would like to introduce very briefly, Dr.
Henry Kluepfel, Commissioner of the EMP Commission, Dr. Gordon
Soper, EMP Commissioner, and the senior member of the EMP
Commission, Dr. John S. Foster, Jr., whose service in the
technology components of the national defense dates back to the
beginning of World War II.
Chairman Kyl. And Dr. Foster probably has testified more
times before Congress than I have attended hearings, I might
add.
Mr. Wood. Dr. Foster was doing very notable things for the
technological components of the national defense the year that
I was born, sir.
Chairman Kyl. That doesn't make him old. It is just that he
started at a very young age.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Wood. And gave very distinguished service throughout
the over 60 years that he has been so devoted to the national
welfare, sir.
At the direction of the Congress, the EMP Commission worked
for 2 years in the discharge of its statutory mandate. These
efforts have included conducting actual experiments to test the
potential vulnerability of modern electronic systems to EMP,
and were informed by a global survey of foreign scientific and
foreign military literatures to assess the knowledge and, if
possible, the intentions of rogue states and other nations with
respect to EMP attack, which Dr. Pry, who led this effort for
the Commission, just very aptly summarized for the Committee.
The Commission enjoyed access to all information in the
possession of the government in the course of its work and was
supported by top-quality studies and analyses on the part of
many cognizant government and contractor organizations, as
indeed was specified in the mandating legislation.
The bottom line is that several classes of potential
adversaries, including terrorist groupings, have or can acquire
the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude
nuclear weapon generated electromagnetic pulse. A determined
adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a
high level of either military or nuclear sophisticated. For
example, a Scud missile launched from a freighter off the
Atlantic coast of the United States could constitute a platform
that would enable a terrorist group to mount an EMP attack
against roughly half of the United States in population terms.
Scud missiles can be purchased inexpensively--they are of the
order of $100,000--by anyone, including private collectors in
the world's arms markets.
Terrorists might buy, steal, or be given a ``no
fingerprints'' nuclear weapon. For example, North Korea has
demonstrated a willingness to sell both missiles and nuclear
materials remarkably promiscuously. Iran, the world's leading
sponsor of international terrorism, is widely reported to have
a nuclear weapons program that is more advanced than previously
suspected and is known to have successfully test launched a
Scud missile from a vehicle in the Caspian Sea, as Dr. Pry
noted, a launch mode that could be adapted, as indeed Secretary
of Defense Don Rumsfeld has noted twice in public, could be
adapted to support attack against the United States from the
sea, including EMP attacks.
A nuclear weapon detonated at altitudes above a few dozen
kilometers above the earth's surface would generate a set of
electromagnetic pulses of different types as its various
outputs interact with the earth's atmosphere and the earth's
magnetic field. These electromagnetic pulses propagate from the
burst-point of the nuclear weapon to the line of sight on the
earth's horizon, potentially covering a vast geographic region
and doing so simultaneously, moreover, at the speed of light.
For example, a nuclear weapon detonated at an altitude of
400 kilometers over the central United States would cover with
its primary electromagnetic pulse the entire continental United
States and parts of Canada and Mexico. This is indicated on the
view graph there, which a detonation at about 500 kilometers
over Omaha blankets the entire United States and adjacent
portions of Canada and Mexico with high-intensity EMP.
Of course, regional EMP attacks can be comparably
devastating to smaller portions of the country and that is
indicated for one particular region, the American Southwest, on
the view graph here, which a very low altitude burst, at only
75 kilometers and very modest yield, could nonetheless destroy
a portion of the United States accounting for almost a third of
the gross demographic product.
The immediate effects of EMP are disruption of and damage
to electrical and electronic systems and infrastructures. EMP
is not reported in the scientific literature to have direct
effects on people.
EMP and its effects were observed extensively during the
U.S. and Soviet atmospheric test programs in 1962. During the
United States' STARFISH nuclear detonation, which was not
designed or intended as a generator of EMP, which occurred at
an altitude of about 400 kilometers above Johnston Island in
the Pacific Ocean, some electrical systems in the Hawaii
Islands, 1,400 kilometers distant, were affected. This
comparatively weak and distant, and indeed inadvertent, EMP
caused the failure of street lighting systems, tripping of
circuit breakers, triggering of burglar alarms, and damage to a
telecommunications relay system, among other reported and
reasonably well-documented effects.
The Russians in their testing that year executed a series
of high-altitude nuclear detonations above their test site in
South Central Asia on Soviet territory. They report that they
observed damage to both overhead and underground buried cables,
some at distances of 600 kilometers from under the burst-point.
They also observed surge arrestor burnout, spark-gap breakdown,
blown fuses, and failures of power supplies of various types,
both civilian and military.
What is particularly significant about EMP is that a single
high-altitude nuclear detonation can produce EMP effects that
can potentially disrupt or damage electronic and electrical
systems over much of the United States virtually simultaneously
at a time determined by an adversary. Thus, the Commission
found that EMP is one of a small number of threat types that
has the potential to hold American society seriously at risk
and that might also result in the defeat of our military
forces.
The electromagnetic field pulses produced by weapons
designed and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a
high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems,
electronics, and information systems upon which any reasonably
advanced society, most specifically including our own, depend
vitally. Their effects on systems and infrastructures dependent
on electricity and electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as
to qualify as catastrophic to the American nation.
Depending on the specific characteristics of the EMP
attack, unprecedented cascading failures of our major
infrastructures could result, in which failure of one
infrastructure could pull down others dependent upon its
functioning, and the failure of these, in turn, could seriously
impede recovery of the first infrastructure to fail. In such
events, a regional or national recovery would be long and
difficult and would seriously degrade the overall viability of
the American nation and the safety and even the lives of very
large numbers of U.S. citizens.
The primary avenues for EMP imposition of catastrophic
damage to the nation are through our electric power
infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications, energy,
and other key infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously
impact other vital aspects of our Nation's life, including the
financial system, means of getting food, water, and health care
to the citizenry, trade, and the production of goods and
services.
The recovery of any one of these key national
infrastructures is dependent on others working. We have a very
tightly integrated, high-efficiency, mutually interdependent
set of national infrastructures. The longer the basic outage,
the more problematic and uncertain the recovery of any of these
infrastructures will be. It is possible, indeed, seemingly
likely, for sufficiently severe functional outages to become
mutually reinforcing until a point is reached at which the
degradation of a set of infrastructures could have irreversible
effects on the country's ability to support any large fraction
of its present human population.
EMP effects from high-altitude nuclear explosions are not
new threats to our Nation. The Soviet Union in the past, and
Russia and other nations today, as Dr. Pry has just masterfully
summarized, are capable of creating these effects.
Historically, this application of nuclear weaponry was mixed
with a much larger proportion of nuclear explosives that was
the primary source of destruction, and thus, EMP as a weapons
effect was not a primary focus of U.S. defensive preparations.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States did not try to
protect its civilian infrastructure against either the physical
or an EMP effect of nuclear weapons and instead depended on
deterrence for whatever safety might be attained.
What is different now is that some potential sources of EMP
threats are difficult to deter. They can be terrorist groups
that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons,
and are motivated to attack the United States without regard
for their own safety or in the belief that they are effectively
undeterrable by the United States. Rogue states, such as North
Korea and Iran, may be developing the capability to pose an EMP
threat to the United States and may also be unpredictable and
difficult to deter.
Single detonations of certain types of relatively low-yield
nuclear weapons can be employed to generate potentially
catastrophic EMP effects over wide geographic areas, and
designs for variants of such weapons may have been illicitly
trafficked for a quarter century. I refer specifically here to
what Dr. Pry labeled as super-EMP.
China and Russia have considered limited nuclear attack
options that, unlike their Cold War plans, employ EMP as the
primary or sole means of attack, as indeed Dr. Pry noted. As
recently as May 1999, during the NATO bombing of former
Yugoslavia, former high-ranking members of the Russian Duma,
meeting with a U.S. Congressional delegation to discuss the
ongoing Balkans conflict, raised the specter of a Russian EMP
attack that would paralyze the United States. Open source
Chinese military writings have described, in the event of a
conflict over Taiwan, using EMP as a means of deterring or
defeating the United States, all as Dr. Pry has raised before
you.
The key difference, the Commission found, from the past is
that the United States has developed more than most other
nations as a modern society. It is heavily dependent on
electronics, telecommunications, energy, information networks,
and a rich set of financial and transportation systems that
critically leverage modern technology. This asymmetry, already
large and growing even larger, is a source of substantial
economic, industrial, and societal advantages, but it creates
vulnerabilities and critical interdependencies that are
potentially catastrophic to the United States.
Therefore, terrorists or state actors that possess
relatively unsophisticated missile armed with nuclear weapons
may well calculate that, instead of destroying a city or a
military base, they may obtain the greatest political-military
utility from one or a few such weapons by using them, or by
threatening their use, in an EMP attack. The current
vulnerability of critical U.S. infrastructures can both invite
and reward such attacks, if not corrected. As Secretary of
Defense Don Rumsfeld has said, vulnerability invites attack, to
which I might add that extreme sustained vulnerability entices
such attack.
However, correction is feasible and well within the
nation's technical means and material resources to accomplish.
Most critical infrastructure system vulnerabilities can be
reduced below those levels that potentially invite attempts to
create a national catastrophe. By protecting key elements in
each critical infrastructure and by preparing to recover
essential services, the prospects for a terrorist or rogue
state being able to impose large-scale long-term damage on the
United States can be minimized. This can be accomplished
reasonably and expeditiously.
Such preparation and protection can be achieved over the
next several years given a well-focused commitment by the
Federal Government and readily affordable levels of resources.
We need to take actions and allocate resources to decrease the
likelihood that catastrophic consequences from an EMP attack
will occur, to reduce our current serious levels of
vulnerability to acceptable levels and thereby reduce
incentives to attack, and to remain a viable modern society,
even if an EMP attack occurs. Since this is a matter of
national security, the Commission felt strongly that the
Federal Government must shoulder the responsibility of managing
the most serious infrastructure vulnerabilities, including
resourcing the timely obviation of these vulnerabilities.
Homeland Security Presidential Directives 7 and 8 lay the
authoritative basis for the Federal Government to act
vigorously and coherently to mitigate many of the risks to the
nation from terrorist attack. The effects of EMP on our major
national civilian infrastructures lie within these directives,
and the directives specify adequate responsibilities and
provide sufficient authorities to deal with civilian sector
consequences of an EMP attack.
In particular, the Department of Homeland Security has been
established, led by a Secretary with the authority,
responsibility, and the obligation to request needed resources
for the mission of protecting the U.S. and recovering from the
impacts of the most serious threats. This official must assure
that plans, resources, and implementing structures are in place
to accomplish these objectives, specifically with respect to
the EMP threat. In doing so, the Department of Homeland
Security must work in conjunction with other governmental
institutions and with experts in the private sector to
efficiently accomplish this mission. It is important that
metrics for assessing improvements in prevention, protection,
and recovery be put in place and then evaluated, and that
progress be reported regularly and independently reviewed.
Specific recommendations are provided in the EMP
Commission's report with respect to both the particulars for
securing each of the most critical national infrastructures
against EMP threats and the governing principles for addressing
these issues of national survival and recovery in the aftermath
of an EMP attack. Much of the problem can be addressed very
economically without major capital investments, but by
developing effective plans to meet the challenges posed by EMP
threats.
For example, one major Commission finding is that the
electric power grid is the keystone infrastructure upon which
all other infrastructures vitally depend. Yet today, there is
no plan for black-starting the national power grid in the event
of a continent-wide collapse of the system. If the electric
power grid can be quickly recovered, the other infrastructures
can be recovered adequately in the aftermath of an EMP attack.
Conversely, if it cannot be quickly recovered, most, if not
all, of the other infrastructures will not only collapse, but
they will be exceedingly difficult to ever bring back.
Making the key aspects of the nation's infrastructure more
robust against EMP attack ill also pay dividends by protecting
against other types of large-scale problems with them, such as
natural disasters.
This concludes my statement, Mr. Chairman. I invite your
attention and that of your colleagues to the fact that several
critical findings and recommendations of the Commission can be
conveyed properly only in closed session. Again, my colleagues
and I thank you for the opportunity to report the findings and
recommendations of the EMP Commission to the United States
Senate.
Chairman Kyl. Thank you very much, Dr. Wood and other
members of the Commission.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wood appears as a submission
for the record.]
Chairman Kyl. I am going to quote just three sentences from
your testimony, especially for those in the media. I think if
you are looking for a take-away, here it is. ``The bottom line
is that several classes of potential adversaries, including
terrorist groupings, have or can acquire the capability to
attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon
generated electromagnetic pulse. A determined adversary can
achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of
either military or nuclear sophistication. The effects on the
systems and infrastructures dependent on electricity and
electronics could be sufficiently ruinous as to qualify as
catastrophic to the nation.''
I guess the final point would be that you indicate that
there are recommendations the Commission has made which, if
implemented, could ameliorate the effects of this, and I want
to get into that. But those three sentences, I think,
illustrate the reason why it is important not to succumb to a
failure of imagination again and for this Subcommittee to
continue in its effort to identify potential kinds of terrorist
threats that we need to look at.
What I would like to ask in my series of questions, and any
of the three of you should feel free to jump in here, it seems
to me that for an amateur, we need to look at it this way.
First, what exactly would an EMP attack do? Why might
terrorists use EMP, and how would they do it? And what could we
do about it? Those are kind of the three key questions.
First of all, and I will probably start with--well, all
three of you actually can discuss this, although I am not sure,
Dr. Fonash, whether you want to get beyond the
telecommunications area. If you do, feel free.
Mr. Fonash. Sir, I would like to restrict my comments to
predominately telecommunications--
Chairman Kyl. Okay.
Mr. Fonash.--and not discuss threat at all, and some of
your questions address threat and that is more appropriate for
DOD or CIA to address those questions.
Chairman Kyl. Right. Well, I will just ask you to jump in
then when you want to, if you would.
But with respect to what an EMP attack would do, my own
amateur view is that it would just fry all the electronic
circuits and everything we have and I can't imagine hardly
anything in our society that isn't controlled by some kind of a
pump or a computer or communication of some kind or other.
Would one of you be just a little bit more specific about--just
paint a scenario of what would happen when this nuclear device
exploded in the atmosphere, generates these pulses that come
down on earth, as you have it right there over my home town of
Phoenix, Arizona.
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman--
Chairman Kyl. And, excuse me, just bearing in mind that we
have a nuclear generating plant there, we have Hoover Dam right
outside, between Phoenix and Las Vegas there, as well as a
whole lot of other kind of facilities that I am sure you can
imagine.
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman, the first thing that needs to be
made clear is there has never been a large-scale EMP attack on
any site anywhere, ever. So there necessarily is a large
component of extrapolation from the measurements that have been
made from the high-altitude nuclear tests. And those measured
features have been taken into quasi-laboratory environments and
there, various types of equipment, both military and, under the
auspices of the Commission, a great deal of civilian equipment
has been subjected to the measured circumstances that are
created by a high-altitude nuclear detonation.
Then another large measure of extrapolation is made from
the damage to functionality and the physical damage that is
seen to be imposed in those laboratory circumstances to what
would happen if those circumstances were applied all over a
country or over a large region.
So there are two major aspects of extrapolation between
measurements that were made primarily in the early 1960's and
what we believe would happen if an EMP attack was imposed on a
country or a large region thereof. So those are very important
qualifications, and that is why there can be some ground for
discussion between technical experts on precisely what the
circumstances would be, two large sections of extrapolation.
The Commission's findings, after listening to all of the
experts, sponsoring a great deal of work on its own, which had
never been done for the civilian infrastructure previously, was
that the effects can be anywhere from highly transient, highly
localized geographically, and a mere annoyance of the scale of
a large electric power blackout. That is on the low end. On the
high end, the consequences would be loss of major national
infrastructures over the entire continent for an indefinitely
great period.
Where things fall in the spectrum in between these two
extremes depends critically on the nature of the explosion, the
place at which it is conducted geographically, the altitude at
which it is conducted, the type of explosive which is used,
which was determined by the Commission both on its own and with
substantial foreign inputs to be an exceedingly critical
parameter, and finally, on the degree of preparation that is
taken against the consequences of such an attack.
So this is an area which, to use technical jargon, the
parameter space is kind of as big as all outdoors. It goes all
the way from, as I said, the consequences of a blackout, which
might have economic, as we saw a couple of years ago, might
have economic scales of $20 billion, in round numbers, and
essentially no loss of life, just a great deal of
inconvenience, to something which would literally destroy the
American nation and might cause the deaths of 90 percent of its
people and would set us back a century or more in time as far
as our ability to function as a society.
Chairman Kyl. Now, with respect to that latter kind of a
threat, a lot of things would have to be coincident. You would
have to have a dramatic set of circumstances, the right kind of
weapon, the right altitude, and all of the other factors. But
take that most serious case, or something somewhat less than
that, and describe specifically the kinds of things that would
physically occur. What physically occurs to the infrastructure
of Phoenix, Arizona, in that event, or the State?
Mr. Wood. What happens is that a nuclear explosion is
caused to occur at a significant altitude, a few dozen to a few
hundred kilometers, by any means that can be arranged for. One
of the means that might concern us very much at the present
time is a Taepo Dong-2 missile carrying an advanced nuclear
warhead from North Korea.
One of the striking things that you heard today from Dr.
Pry, which has not been tabled previously in public, is that
North Korea should not be considered as just potentially
possessing first generation nuclear weapons, but potentially
the most advanced nuclear weapons that exist on the planet
because they have received a great deal of foreign assistance.
So when we stop to think about being attacked from North
Korea, we shouldn't think about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We
should think about flavors of destruction that have never been
seen before on this planet.
Chairman Kyl. Well, taking--
Mr. Wood. So when that--
Chairman Kyl.--taking that kind of weapon, what physical--
Mr. Wood. When that type of weapon is exploded at several
dozen to a few hundred kilometers above the United States, if
it happened in the middle of the day, you might see or hear
nothing. The lights would go out. A great deal of things
instantly dependent on electricity would go away. And depending
on the nature of the damage, its severity, its geographical
descent, the lights might come back on hours later, they might
come back on decades later.
If they come back on in hours, as we know from blackouts,
there is just a great deal of inconvenience and substantial
economic loss. If the lights stay off for more than a year in
this country, the Commission's estimate was the loss of life
would run into the tens of millions, perhaps a great deal more.
You miss the harvest. You have no refrigeration, no
transportation, no anything except what we had as a country in
the 1880's. Most Americans will die in that interval.
Chairman Kyl. Well, how much of our country, and maybe I
can ask Dr. Pry to answer this, how much of our country depends
upon some kind of electrical system working?
Mr. Pry. Our entire country depends on some type of
electrical system working. If I could add to what Dr. Wood has
said about what the effects would be, what it might be like,
one should think about the kinds of blackouts that happened in
the aftermath of hurricanes, for example. In addition to the
other data that he talked about, the Commission also sponsored
studies that took a look at the consequences of major blackouts
that were induced by storms--ice storms, hurricanes, that sort
of thing.
We tend to think of those as fairly commonplace because
they tend to be isolated geographically and there is something
called the edge effect, because they will effect--for example,
Hurricane Andrew affected eight counties in Central Florida,
and so we had the entire rest of the country was unaffected and
we were able to come in and recover from that very quickly.
But if you look at what happened in those eight counties,
there was no food. There was no water. There was no
communications. People couldn't even communicate to find where
they could go to get food and water. There were rippling
societal consequences where there was basically a breakdown of
law and order and it became a chaotic situation where the
National Guard had to be sent in to--
Chairman Kyl. You said they couldn't communicate. What
would happen with the electromagnetic pulse that would prevent
communication?
Mr. Pry. Well, it would knock out--first, it knocks out the
power grid, so there is no electricity to run televisions, for
instance. Most people don't have battery-powered radios
anymore. Most of the radios that are around depend on
electricity. Everything depends on electricity.
Transportation was paralyzed in that area because the
traffic lights couldn't work.
Chairman Kyl. Could you pump gasoline?
Mr. Pry. You couldn't pump gasoline. You basically had only
as much as gasoline as was available in the tank of your car.
This happened during the August blackout in New York, as well.
You saw these same infrastructure failures passing off, flowing
from the failure of the electric power grid, collapsing like
dominoes, each of the infrastructures, including the
telecommunications infrastructure. It didn't become a
catastrophe because of the edge effect, because we were able to
move in there, and also because it was just the power grid that
was down, in the case of New York, and so fairly easily
repairable. It could be repaired in a week or two.
But if you extrapolate something like that happening for
months or years, you are obviously talking about a life-
threatening kind of a catastrophe because you cannot endure, or
you cannot support the population without food, without water
for those protracted periods of time, nor can one count on
societal stability for protracted periods of time. I think the
Andrew experience in those eight counties, what happened there
in terms of social cohesion is instructive in terms of what
could happen on a national basis if such a disaster were to
occur.
And you don't need the--and I completely concur with Dr.
Wood about the range of uncertainty that exists in these
things, but we ought not to take--he was talking about the
super-EMP. The thing is, we don't know how low down you can go
with that threat. It might well be that in order to achieve
these things, it may be possible that even without a super,
with a first generation weapon, you might be able to do it.
And the reason for this is the keystone infrastructure is
the electric power grid. When that collapses, the rest of the
infrastructures are going to collapse, as well. And the
electric power grid, as we learned from New York, is always
operating on the edge of failure. It is old. It has not been
modernized and updated. In Commission work, there are cases
where a falling tree branch has caused a multi-State blackout
that has lasted a week.
Chairman Kyl. Let me--
Mr. Pry. If a falling tree branch can do that, a first
generation atomic weapon, I hate to think what that could do.
Chairman Kyl. And I want to get to the kind of weapon that
might be used and how a terrorist group might want to do that.
Let me just ask one last question. In Phoenix during the hot
part of August, there was a fire at a switching station for one
of the utilities and two transformers were burned. We were on
the edge of a catastrophic failure in Phoenix because of that
because the only place where the transformers could be
purchased, I believe, was someplace in Italy. It took a long
time to get them there and they had to be transported by a very
large, special kind of truck. Thankfully, we had enough
generation and transformer capacity to just barely work out of
the problem. But would a nuclear weapon cause damage to things
like switching facilities, transformers, as well as other kinds
of circuitry?
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman, I think the situation that you just
described is existing in most, if not every, city across the
country. If the United States was subjected to a continental-
scale EMP attack, you would see damage of the type that you
describe, but of a much more serious character, to all of the
major transformers at once that are connected and that are
postured so that they would see not the instantaneous
component, but the slow or several-minute duration component.
This is not hypothesis. This is the type of damage which is
seen to transformers in the core of geomagnetic storms. The
geomagnetic storm, in turn, is a very tepid, weak flavor of the
so-called slow component of EMP.
So when those transformers are subjected to the slow
component of the EMP, they basically burn, not due to the EMP
itself but due to the interaction of the EMP and normal power
system operation. Transformers burn, and when they burn, sir,
they go and they are not repairable, and they get replaced, as
you very aptly pointed out, from only foreign sources. The
United States, as part of its comparative advantage, no longer
makes big power transformers anywhere at all. They are all
sourced from abroad.
And when you want a new one, you order it and it is
delivered--it is, first of all, manufactured. They don't
stockpile them. There is no inventory. It is manufactured, it
is shipped, and then it is delivered by very complex and
tedious means within the U.S. because they are very large and
very massive objects. They come in slowly and painfully.
Typical sort of delays from the time that you order until the
time that you have a transformer in service are one to 2 years,
and that is with everything working great.
If the United States was already out of power and it
suddenly needed a few hundred new transformers because of
burnout, you could understand why we found not that it would
take a year or two to recover, it might take decades, because
you burn down the national plant, you have no way of fixing it
and really no way of reconstituting it other than waiting for
slow-moving foreign manufacturers to very slowly reconstitute
an entire continent's worth of burned down power plant.
Chairman Kyl. Let me now switch to a different inquiry.
Terrorists are very clever, but sometimes it seems to me they
are more interested in something really showy than something
that might be even more damaging. I am presuming something that
I don't know here, and a smart terrorist just might figure that
this is exactly the thing that he wants to try to achieve. But
I always thought that if there were access to a nuclear weapon,
that the biggest bang would be to blow up a whole lot of
Americans in a city, cause the collateral damage, but primarily
the immediate loss of lives.
So the first question that came to my mind is, while I
could understand in war or preparation for war a power, and
just to use a hypothetical case like China, for example, or
North Korea, might want to freeze our capabilities with an EMP
kind of attack, would a terrorist necessarily turn to that as
the first choice? And then, of course, the response comes in,
well, maybe that is not a matter of choice, but it is a matter
of convenience. What were the scenarios that the Commission
looked at that led it to conclude that this might well be
doable and something that a terrorist would actually decide was
the best thing to do or the only thing that could be done?
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman, the Commission proceeded not on a
scenario-driven fashion but on a capabilities-based manner, and
so we looked at the capabilities that would have to be brought
into existence by an attacker to impose various levels of
damage and we tried to steer fairly clear of sketching ways,
particular ways in which particular people might choose to do
this because, frankly, thinking like a terrorist or thinking
like a rogue state leader or whatever is well outside the
competencies that the individual Commissions brought. None of
us have been terrorists and very few of us have led rogue
states, and so we merely looked at the capabilities that could
enable such behaviors.
Chairman Kyl. Not inviting a comment about Berkeley there.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Wood. So the inflow bottom line, or line that we drew
across the bottom of our considerations is that we wouldn't
look or worry about capabilities that didn't impose at least
$100 billion worth of damage on the United States in a stroke
and went on up from there.
The damage to the infrastructures that we contemplated went
on up into $10 trillion scales--trillion dollar--that is to
say, a large fraction of the total capital value, capital plant
value of the United States as a nation. The thing which is
impressive to us is that nuclear explosives and ballistic
missiles to carry them up to altitude costing of the order of a
million dollars could potential impose $10 trillion worth of
damage. That is to say, ratchet it up by something of the order
of a factor of $10 million-fold. That was extraordinarily high
leverage.
Now, terrorists might be very much inclined towards
attacking iconic targets, but if it is a semi-rational
terrorist, he probably looks for leverage and one of the types
of leverage that is probably most impressive is dollar
leverage. How much can I destroy per what I invested? Osama bin
Laden boasted of how little he spent on the attack on the Twin
Towers and how much damage was imposed and so forth. So at
least some senior terrorists think in those terms, think in
terms of return on investment, if you will, and/or at least
their financial backers think in those terms, and so it didn't
seem totally inappropriate to look at, well, what could be done
with a single or a very small number of weapons that could be
purchased or otherwise obtained for very reasonable values on
the world market?
There is roughly 35,000 Scud ballistic missiles, for
instance, in existence at the present time. As I said, they
sell for a small fraction of a million dollars apiece, and
private collectors in the continental United States have taken
delivery as private individuals on Scud missiles in their homes
that were in operational condition. So these things are easy to
come by. Probably the most challenging thing from a terrorist's
standpoint is getting either an ordinary nuclear weapon for an
ordinary EMP or an advanced one for super-EMP and getting
somebody to launch it from Canada, Mexico, tramp freighters off
the coast, any of many places where an attack of at least a
regional character, if not a national character, could be
pressed against the United States.
Chairman Kyl. I realize that you all are very scientific
and precise in your approach to these problems, and you caveat
your conclusions very carefully, that you are not into scenario
analysis. But with respect to the average person thinking about
how, not how likely it would be, but at least whether there is
some remote possibility that this could occur and, therefore,
it would be something that we would want to put assets against
to try to protect against it or to deal with it if it occurred,
there has to be some element of probability involved.
And so one gets into questions of how easy it would be, for
example, for a terrorist organization, as opposed to a state,
to launch a guided missile against a specific target in the
United States with a nuclear warhead on it and whether that
would be just as easy to do as detonating something in the air
that would cause this kind of damage.
You pointed out that the range of missile available to a
terrorist would not be an ICBM today, presumably, but would be
a shorter-range missile so that it would have to be launched
from something off our coast or in an adjacent area. But as you
note in testimony and as Dr. Pry noted, that could come from a
seaborne vessel from which Scud-type missiles have been
successfully launched, is that correct?
Mr. Wood. Indeed, the Secretary of Defense has pointed out
twice in the last year and a half that at any given time, any
of a couple of dozen vessels off the coast of the United States
count mount such an attack, and those have been, as I pointed
out, kind of off-the-cuff statement in news conferences as,
hey, everybody understands and knows that.
Chairman Kyl. Yes.
Mr. Pry. If I could add to what Dr. Wood has said, al Qaeda
is known to own 80 freighters. I think that is the estimate.
They are supposed to own 80 freighters. The Scuds, some models,
the Scud-1 can be purchased for $50,000. So that is well within
their capability. The hard part is the nuclear weapon.
If you had a Scud and a freighter, would you attack a city
to kill people versus doing the EMP? Well, one problem you have
with that mode of attack for going against the city is that it
is so inaccurate that the likelihood is, well, you are running
a great risk that you might not hit the city at all. That isn't
a problem with the EMP because the area of effect is so great
that all you have to do is just get it up to the proper
altitude. So that technical consideration might well tend to--
Chairman Kyl. This is a very important point that I would
like to just have us dwell on for just a moment, because it
does help to answer the question of why potentially an EMP
attack. I mean, one answer is you are very rational and you
know how to leverage money and to get the most bang for the
buck, Dr. Wood's testimony earlier. The second reason would be
that it might be very difficult to launch a missile with the
kind of guidance available for a Scud missile, for example, to
actually hit your target in the United States if you were doing
this from a barge or a freighter offshore, is that correct?
Mr. Pry. Oh, yes, and there is additional considerations.
You know, a missile that is going to go to ground, to actually
hit a city, is going to be more vulnerable to missile defenses
than an EMP. An EMP only has to complete half its trajectory,
and doing it the other way, to go after a city, has to complete
its full trajectory, and at the end of the trajectory is
exactly when you are going to be most vulnerable to missile
defenses.
And look at what are you trying to accomplish? Suppose you
had a first generation weapon. Suppose you, instead of using a
missile, suppose you had a suitcase-type thing or you wanted to
send it into New York Harbor or something like that. Well, with
a 20-kiloton weapon, you are not going to destroy the City of
New York. You will kill a couple of hundred thousand people and
then pray that the United States doesn't find out who your
state sponsor was, because then we would turn that state
sponsor into a plate of glass. With EMP, you at least have a
possibility of actually killing millions of people, millions of
people, and getting a much bigger bang for the buck.
Moreover, whereas the attack on a city could backfire in
the sense of instead of breaking the will of the American
people in the war on terrorism, it could just further enrage us
and steal our resolve to project our military forces and use
our strength to prosecute that war, when you think of, well,
how could the terrorists possibly win the war on terrorism,
this is one of the few options that is available for them to
actually win the war on terrorism. If they could destroy the
United States as a superpower by disrupting our
infrastructures, they would win the war on terrorism.
Perhaps this is why Iran is doing the kinds of tests it is
doing with those Shahab-3s that have been burst at high
altitude. We have described them as test failures. They have
described them as successes, as I alluded to in the testimony.
And why do that test off of a freighter?
And we also know from al Qaeda that Osama bin Laden, one of
the reasons he attacked the World Trade Centers was financial.
They were hoping to disrupt our economy. That was one of their
goals. It isn't just to kill people, it is to do as much damage
as they can to us, including economically and financially.
Mr. Wood. Returning to your core thrust just briefly, Mr.
Chairman, the basic thing that should intrigue an attacker, a
rational attacker, about mounting an EMP attack is, as Dr.
Price said, you only have to do half of the normal ballistic
missile mission. Two things that are crucial that were cited by
implication that deserve to be emphasized is that you only have
to throw the payload up. That is the essence of the thing. You
aren't concerned at all with precision targeting, and very
importantly, when you come down, you have to face the so-called
atmospheric reentry problem, which can be quite challenging,
particularly for a longer-range, higher-speed missile.
EMP attacks don't have to cope with that at all, so they
throw away at once the requirement to cope with missile
defenses, that is terminal phase missile defenses. They don't
have to have good guidance. They don't have to have reentry
systems. They literally can be a Fourth of July-type rocket
with a nuclear explosive on the front. And so that is a set of
enabling things which make an attack much, much easier to
launch.
And then when you start looking for telltale features and
so forth, this combination of launching off a barge in the
Caspian, what in the world motivation does the Iranian
government have for launching off a barge against Israel,
against Iraq, against any of its traditional local enemies?
Launch off a barge? It makes no sense at all. What sense does
it make to have your test detonate its payload at high altitude
in mid-course? No sense whatsoever, and yet they do this. So
you either say they are crazy, which is the lazy way out, or
you say, what in the world are they intending to actually do?
Chairman Kyl. So before we get to how do we fix this
problem, then, we have got sort of the means and the motive
pretty well established as well as a huge amount of damage
should such an attack occur. We, therefore, get to the question
of what can we do about it and there has been work done on this
both in terms of the Department, as Dr. Fonash discussed, as
well as the recommendations that the Commission made in its
report.
Perhaps we could spend just a little bit of time on that,
because we don't want to leave people too afraid that we are
going to wake up tomorrow morning with a huge problem on our
hands here. What are we doing about it? What can we do about
it?
Mr. Wood. I would just like to, before we leave the first
section, Mr. Chairman, to comment that the Commission's report
to the Congress is in three basic segments. One is the
Executive Summary and the main body of the report, all of which
are unclassified or in the late stages of being formally
declared to be unclassified. We hope to see that out entirely
very soon past the executive branch reviews.
The second main piece is concerned with military matters,
which the Commission was charged with looking at military
vulnerabilities, as well. That report is classified secret and
is available through appropriate channels at the present time.
The third one, which is classified top secret with special
caveating and labels and so forth that would typically go with
intelligence matters, addresses specifically the points that
you referred to, from whence is the attack coming and when and
how soon and with what likelihoods and why would people be
motivated to be doing it and what are they actually doing. That
is very highly classified and that report and its findings and
recommendations obviously can be addressed only in closed
session. That is what I referred to in my opening statement.
But there is a great deal of information that was examined by
the Commission and assessed and findings and recommendations
based on it in that final relatively small portion of the
report, which necessarily is discussed only in very cloistered
circumstances. But it is discussed.
Chairman Kyl. Dr. Pry, would you like to perhaps first
address the problem, the recommendations of the Commission?
Mr. Pry. Yes. Ultimately, this is really a good news story.
Despite the catastrophic nature of the threat, I think one of
the breakthroughs the Commission really did--made--it came up
with, in a sense, a blueprint that, if followed, in three to 5
years, at affordable, modest cost could mitigate, so mitigate
the effects of the EMP threat that we could take it out of the
catastrophic category and recover from this particular threat.
That is a huge accomplishment.
You can't say that about the other handful of threats that
could destroy us as a society, like genetically engineered
smallpox, for example. Things like that are still such a
formidable problem, most people are still trying to get their
arms around how to solve it. But this one is doable.
Much of it involves common sense. For example, those
transformers Dr. Wood referred to, instead of having the
ability to replace only 1 percent of the transformers in this
country, which is about what we have got now, maybe we should
have about 150 of these transformers purchased in advance,
stored on-site in metal sheds that are welded in such a way
that they become cages so that they would be protected from the
effects of EMP, disconnected from the power grid. Then you
could quickly replace those transformers, and as we found from
our analysis, once you get that power grid up, you can bring
back all the other infrastructures fairly expeditiously. That
wouldn't cost that much. That could be accomplished in three to
5 years.
There are other things that don't involve buying anything,
but it is just a case of thinking about it and planning. Take
diesel-electric locomotives, for example. There are tens of
thousands of them in this country. Each diesel-electric
locomotive, they can generate about a megawatt of electricity.
In Canada, for years, they have been using them during the
winter to power villages and small towns. That is how much
electricity you get out of one of these things.
We are taking the wheels off and sending them to Iraq,
American diesel-electric locomotives, to supplement the
destroyed electric infrastructure over in Iraq. Maybe we need a
plan in the aftermath of an attack like this, or a cyber
terrorist attack or something else that would interfere with
our power grid, to take advantage of the tens of thousands of
diesel-electric locomotives. Where do we drive them to? What
are the highest priority things?
I would suggest maybe we need to drive them to those
regional food warehouses, the larder of the United States.
There are maybe a couple of hundred regional food warehouses in
which a 60-day supply of food, you know, supplies all of the
States. In the supermarket, you have only got about a day or
two worth of food. Where the food comes from, it is transported
by truck from these regional storehouses which critically
depend on refrigeration and temperature control, so the food
will spoil very quickly. Maybe we need to get diesel-electric
locomotives to each of these things to keep them powered up,
and to hospitals and to other critical nodes in communications
and in the power infrastructure so that we can most
expeditiously bring things back in that aftermath.
The Commission found another example. There is a particular
fuse that is just by accident of its design that is much less
susceptible than the fuses that are currently used in traffic
signals, to control traffic lights and other kinds of traffic
regulation. This fuse costs, like, one penny more than the fuse
that is currently used, but is much harder to the effect.
So these are just some examples of things that would go
very inexpensively a long way toward mitigating the problem. I
would underscore most of all, though, the big transformers and
the fact that I don't think we can afford to be dependent on a
foreign country, not have reserve transformers in this country
to bring back our power grid.
Chairman Kyl. We will talk about communications in just a
second, but I can think of so many other problems that could
arise. In order to pump water, you have to have electricity.
Mr. Pry. Yes.
Chairman Kyl. You could get into a fire situation or other
situations in which you could have a conflagration that you
couldn't deal with because you couldn't get water on it or
other kind of fire retardant, for example.
Mr. Wood. Indeed, the Commission found that just exactly
that problem was likely to be an exceedingly serious one, sir,
in the immediate aftermath of an EMP attack, that the fires,
once started, would spread completely out of control and
without human intervention, effective human intervention,
something for a lack of ability to source water onto those
fires, create fire breaks, and so forth. So that is the sort of
immediate aftermath.
If a terrorist wanted to have something iconic happen as a
result of an EMP attack, it would be that in a matter of hours
after a very large-scale attack, America's cities would be in
flames and they would burn until they burned down. And in the
following few days, as people were unable to get food in
markets and so forth, four million Americans under the age of 1
year of age would die of starvation because there wasn't infant
formula and the other specialty items that people are used to
always finding in stores, so they need them. Young children are
very fragile and we would lose four million infants under the
age of one in the first two weeks, most all of them, and so
forth.
So the damage would be pretty dramatic. Nobody gets killed
right away, but in the immediate aftermath, America in a lot of
senses would be hammered to its knees unless, and this is a
crucial--excuse me, sir--unless, as Dr. Pry pointed out, and
this was a key finding of the Commission, the attacks were
regional and the edge effects could be martialed very, very
swiftly and effectively so that the rest of America came to the
rescue of the portion that had been brought under.
Chairman Kyl. But for that, we have to start with a plan.
Mr. Wood. Of course. We have to not only have the plan, but
we have to have the things to enable the plan very quickly.
Chairman Kyl. Right. Now, do any of you know whether the
recommendations of the Commission have been dealt with in any
specific way by the Department of Homeland Security? Leave out
Department of Defense, because that is really a different
issue.
Mr. Fonash. Let me answer that in two ways. First of all,
let me talk to you about telecommunications and then let me
talk about DHS infrastructure protection in general.
Chairman Kyl. Thanks.
Mr. Fonash. With regards to telecommunications, we have
participated, the Commission, we actually testified in front of
the Commission. As I said before, for over 20 years, we have
been testing equipment against EMP and other electromagnetic
effects. So we are very well aware of the Commission's
recommendations. We have implemented many of those
recommendations. And we also continue our testing program. We
remain vigilant in communications against the EMP threat or any
other type of EMP or electromagnetic effect against
telecommunications.
Telecommunications basically is the--the telecommunications
infrastructure we have today is relatively impervious to EMP.
It would be disrupted, but then it will be restored. It can be
restored.
There is a dependency of our telecommunications
infrastructure on power, but that is an dependency that we are
aware of and we are working at. And during a blackout, going to
the New York blackout, communications functioned well. The
basic communications worked through the blackout, and that is
due to the fact that major communications centers have multiple
sources of back-up power, one being that they have battery
back-up, and then in addition to battery back-up, they have
diesel generators.
Now, of course, there is a dependency on the diesel
generators on fuel, and so eventually, if you don't get the
diesel generators refueled, there would be a problem. But
during a blackout in New York, the telecommunications basically
functioned.
Now, with regards to the overall issue, is the Department
of Homeland Security addressing this, since the creation of the
Department of Homeland Security in 2003, we have been trying to
protect our critical infrastructures, and what we have done is
we have created the interim National Infrastructure Protection
Plan consistent with Homeland Security Presidential Directive
7, which directed us to develop a process to protect our
critical infrastructures. And the interim National
Infrastructure Protection Plan really lays out a framework, a
risk management framework and a process for protecting the 17
infrastructures of this country, and I speak for only one of
17, but there are 17 infrastructures.
DHS, in our role of the National Infrastructure Protection
Plan, we provide leadership across the infrastructures. We
coordinate across the infrastructures. We develop process and
tools. And we are the sector leads in certain infrastructures,
for example, telecommunications, but we also work in
interdependencies. Interdependencies cross infrastructure. For
example, interdependency of other infrastructures on power is
an example.
But we put in the process. We are identifying the assets.
We want to assess those vulnerabilities of those assets. We are
going to prioritize those assets in terms of the impact of any
damage to those assets with those vulnerabilities, and then we
will protect and we will establish metrics.
And I want to say, so those are the things that we have put
into place and we seek input in terms of vulnerabilities from
all sources and we would certainly consider the Commission's
report while we work with DOE, who is the sector lead for
energy, as they develop their sector plan for how they plan on
protecting the energy infrastructure.
Chairman Kyl. Dr. Pry?
Mr. Pry. I respectfully disagree with my colleague that the
telecommunications infrastructure is as robust as is described
against the EMP effect. This is a nether card, which is an
example. It is ubiquitous. There are millions of these in the
communications infrastructure. The Commission sponsored testing
against a moderate level of EMP and it was damaged. The damage
is indicated by the arrow that was indicated here. To have
massive failure of this kind of an item would be a very serous
blow to our communications infrastructure.
The blackouts example that was referred to, the blackouts,
of course, lasted only a short period of time, and while it is
true that there are nodes in the communications infrastructure
that have generators, one of the things I wanted to comment on
when you raised the issue of fire is that we found it to be the
trend that is happening in terms of the robustness of these
generator facilities and battery facilities. It is actually
going in the wrong direction. There is a tension between the--
in the fire codes, a concern about storing large quantities of
flammable petroleum products to run these generators, and in
many cases, in many cities, they are scaling back on the amount
of petrol that is allowed to be stored for the generators. So
the time that you can run these generators is getting less and
less when really, the trend probably, if you take EMP seriously
as a threat, ought to be going in the other direction to give
you a more protracted capability to generate electricity.
Mr. Wood. If I could interject there just very briefly, Mr.
Chairman--
Mr. Pry. The problem is not just simply fuel storage, which
the Commission found was indeed an alarming trend, and that it
is not only going in the wrong direction, but it is going in
the wrong direction very rapidly in that not only are the
allowed fuel depots becoming smaller, but even the permission
to start and operate the emergency generator systems is being
strongly circumscribed by air pollution considerations. You
literally can't run these systems for more than very brief
intervals without having a variance on your operating permit to
allow you to go on for four hours or eight hours.
Mr. Wood. There is very substantial concern that the
apparent ability to backup electric power for the
communications system is simply illusory and is becoming more
so very swiftly. Excuse me. Go ahead.
Mr. Pry. If I could continue, a third point is the super-
EMP weapon, okay. What are you robust and hardened against? The
notion of this new technology is basically a discovery of the
EMP Commission. It was a consequence of reviewing foreign
military writings and actually meeting with foreign military
officers that there is a technology out there which our own
experts have looked at and consider highly plausible and that
this might already have been weaponized.
The threat, the wave form, both the strength of--the field
strengths that you are talking about and the wave form are very
different from those that we were thinking about during the
Cold War. We can't really get into it in great detail here in
this unclassified forum, but that is a new threat, and so how
could one be confident that you are robust against that threat
that we are only now just beginning to understand?
And last, in terms of the familiarity, I suppose it is
possible to be familiar with the Commission's recommendations,
because I know some of our Commissioners have worked with--have
talked to people from Homeland Security, but the fact of the
matter is that Volume 3 of the Commission report, which is
where the detail about our recommendations is, is not available
to any agency or department yet. I mean, it is still going
through the security classification review process and hasn't
been issued yet.
So I can see how one might know about some of the
recommendations generically from the Executive Summary, and
then perhaps gotten some detail from some of our Commissioners,
but I have to be kind of skeptical about the idea that there is
great familiarity with a report that has not yet been delivered
to either the Department of Defense or the Department of
Homeland Security.
Chairman Kyl. Is there a specific process by which the
Commission believes it can be in communication with the
appropriate agencies, primarily DOE, DOD, and DHS, and a
process, then, of review and action for planning would follow?
Is there a fairly clear path there, or is that something
probably that we should help to create and foster?
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman, the Commission, as specified in the
statute, is a creature of the Congress--
Chairman Kyl. Right.
Mr. Wood.--and it is an advisory body to the Congress. It
had input from the executive branch primarily in the way the
individual Commissioners were appointed by the Secretary of
Defense, primarily, and also by the Director of FEMA, now a
part of DHS. But the specification was--the mandate to the
Commission was to assess, find, recommend, and report, and that
is what we are doing, and to the extent that the Congress has
in mind activities or responsibilities beyond that, they need
to instruct us.
Chairman Kyl. I think probably with your advice, and I will
be in touch with you and will certainly be in touch with DHS,
as well, probably try to put together a letter to all of the
various heads of the departments concerned with a request that
as soon as the--well, to transmit the reports as they currently
are and make sure that as they are each completed, at the
appropriate levels of classification, that they are transmitted
and that a process for agency interaction and response be
created with a report back to the Congress. If that hasn't been
done by anyone else in the Congress, I will pursue that.
Dr. Pry?
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman, the basic issue there was that DHS,
of course, did not exist when the Commission was mandated--
Chairman Kyl. Right.
Mr. Wood.--in Public Law 106-398, and so it was completely
impossible to contemplate DHS being involved. So the
Congressional rectification really updating of the arrangements
is eminently appropriate there.
We have briefed and we will continue to brief senior
officers and officials of the Department of Defense in the
portion of the Commission's mandate that was concerned with
military systems, but frankly, the key thing that the
Commission was to do with respect to vulnerability of civilian
infrastructure is dangling at the present time as far as formal
arrangements are concerned simply because DHS didn't exist at
the time and the Director of FEMA no longer has the
responsibilities that the legislation contemplated when the law
was enacted.
So the Congress taking the initiative to update the
administrative arrangements would be eminently appropriate. It
is one of the things that was a basic recommendation of the
Commission.
Mr. Pry. If I could add to what Dr. Wood has said, yes,
because it does contrast with our relationship with the
Department of Defense, where the Commission findings have been
briefed all the way up to the Wolfowitz level, to the Navy
Secretary. We haven't had equivalent briefings like that with
the Department of Homeland Security. As Dr. Wood points out,
Homeland Security didn't exist at the time the legislation was
drafted, and so there was perhaps not the legislative
obligation or opportunity to have the kind of cooperation that
we had with the Department of Defense.
The Department actually participated. I mean, DTRA, the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency, we had staff from DTRA that
actually participated in our work, was present at all of the
deliberations. It wasn't a matter of one or two briefings here
and there. They were actually deeply involved in the work of
the Commission.
We would hope that a similar relationship could evolve--
needs to evolve with the Department of Homeland Security
because that is where the primary threat is these days,
actually. It is not--there are serious matters in our military
forces, too, but primarily, it is a homeland security issue.
Another part of that problem, of course, is that after this
Commission delivers its report to Congress, which is going to
happen as a consequence of giving briefings like this, its
legislative mandate goes away and so the Commission ceases to
exist. Over on the House side, and we are hoping to convince
people on the Senate side, as well, perhaps this is not a good
thing to do at this juncture, that we need to extend the life
of the Commission. We have a unique body of expertise here in
this Commission and a blueprint that the Commission can help
advise Congress on following and help advise the other
departments and agencies of the government. We are in the
process on the House side of reintroducing legislation to give
it a more homeland security kind of direction so that the
departments can work together in the same productive way that
we have worked with the Department of Defense.
Mr. Wood. The enabling legislation, sir, includes a mandate
to the Secretary of Defense to deliver a report within a year
of the Commission's report commenting on the Department of
Defense's response and thinking and so on on the issues. Again,
because of the lack of currency of the legislation, there is no
corresponding mandate to the Secretary for Homeland Security.
Mr. Pry. That is correct.
Chairman Kyl. I appreciate all of that. I think this is a
propitious time, then, to hold this hearing to not only remind
ourselves of the potential for a threat here, but also to get
straight what we can do with these recommendations as you
conclude your work with the classified version and as you
advise the Department of Defense and report back to Congress,
as well, how we can also expand the reach of these
recommendations to the Department of Homeland Security as well
as anyone else like DOE that would need to be aware of them,
too.
If that requires a mandate to continue the Commission's
work, it sounds to me like that would be a good idea. In any
event, informally if not formally, we can certainly direct
where the reports should go and set up some meetings so that we
can continue to work on the fixes to the problem rather than
just identifying the problem and leaving it dangle there.
So unless there is anything else that you all would like to
offer, let me just tell you that, on behalf of the Committee,
what I will do is get together with my colleagues, draft up an
approach to this issue, the existence of the Commission, the
issuances of the reports, both classified and non-classified,
the inclusion of the Department of Homeland Security in the
process, and anything else that we think we need to do to
follow up on these recommendations, and we will communicate
with you all and then take whatever action we think is
necessary here in the Congress, as well.
Because of my time constraints, if not yours, I am going to
terminate the hearing unless there is anything else that any of
you would like to add. This has been most informative. We don't
mean to scare everybody to death, but by the same token, the
failure of imagination, 9/11 Commission report, and it doesn't
take much imagination to figure out what could go wrong here.
And to the extent that there are some fixes that can be put in
place, we need to identify those and get about the business of
doing it because this is, in fact, serious business.
Mr. Wood. Mr. Chairman, I think you have very aptly
summarized it. I think the basic thrust, the bottom-line
mission from the Commission's standpoint would be that the EMP
attack threat is one which is a curious sort of character, that
we have prepared to cope with it for decades from a military
standpoint, but have, for reasons that I addressed at the
outset, didn't much concern ourselves with the civilian
implications whatsoever. By doing so, we may have created
something of a 21st century Maginot line for the United States,
where we are relatively robust in our ability to wage war as
far as EMP is concerned, but are exceedingly vulnerable on
different fronts which invite, if they don't outright entice,
flanking attacks against the American nation.
Chairman Kyl. I thank you. For those who might not, again,
be familiar with the background of the people who have served
on this Commission, I don't think this country could have
brought forth a better group of people, a smarter group of
people with more expertise in some of the most esoteric aspects
of science than the group of Commissioners here. We very much
appreciate your service. Some of you have served in so many
different capacities this government and our National security.
We don't always think of you--I see these fine men and women
here in the audience here with their uniforms on and we
properly pay them all the thanks that we possibly can for what
they are doing on the front line. It is also the fact that we
have a lot of folks working here in Washington and elsewhere on
very, very difficult problems that also help to ensure our
security, and I want to thank all of those people, as well.
So I thank all of you for being here today. We will follow
up in all the ways that I think are indicated as appropriate
here and see if we can at least provide a degree of security
against the threat that we have identified here today. Thank
you.
This meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:16 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
[Questions and answers and submissions for the record
follow.]
[Additional material is being retained in the Committee
files.]
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