Interesting scare story in today’s (Wednesday’s) Wall Street Journal.
Clifford May, a writer and think-tank guy (the Foundation for Defense of of Democracies) writes about the danger of an electromagnetic-pulse attack now and then. Most recently, the Republican-American published a column of his on this subject in July 2011.
An EMP attack essentially would be a nuclear strike, but the bomb would go off in the high atmosphere so it wouldn’t destroy buildings or kill people directly. Instead, it would produce an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the electrical grid, which would require months or even years to repair. It has been estimated that an EMP attack could kill 90 percent of the U.S. population because it would block essential products and services, and cause societal breakdown, say the authors, R. James Woolsey and Peter Vincent Pry. That sounds high to me; I’m inclined to think Americans would get together and greatly minimize the immediate harm. But the death toll surely would be in the millions no matter how hard we tried to mend our divisions in a crisis and take care of each other.
This is really a double threat because an EMP strike could be launched by an entity utterly lacking in malicious intent: the sun. It happened in 1859 and nearly happened again, quite recently. Since people began using electrical devices, beginning with the telegraph, more than a century and a half ago, we’ve been lucky to have been struck just once by a solar EMP. It comes down to whether the earth happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during a solar disturbance that produces a destructive EMP.
Messrs. Woolsey and Pry concentrate on the possibility of a deliberate EMP strike, possibly by a rogue regime such as Iran or North Korea, but the Russians or Chinese also could pull it off. The latter countries are not led by suicidal regimes, and their leaders wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing unless they believed they could blame it on someone else. Would the Iranians or North Koreans launch such an attack, knowing they might be incinerated by a U.S. reply? Surely they know that while your car and my television wouldn’t operate after an EMP strike, America’s nuclear-weapons system has been protected and would work just fine. And America certainly would be within its rights, under international law, to launch a nuclear strike against a country that could be proved to have hit us with an EMP. But while Americans and others might reasonably expect the Russians and Chinese to behave rationally with respect to their own self-interest, the same cannot necessarily be said for Iran and North Korea, to say nothing of ISIS and other terrorist organizations that may gain possession of a nuke.
What’s really staggering about this threat is the relatively low cost of protecting ourselves from it, whether it’s caused by the sun or a nuclear bomb: $2 billion. That’s a rounding error in America’s $17 trillion national debt; it’s less than one-tenth of the one-year budget of just one state (Connecticut). That’s a 2008 estimate; it might cost more now. But that’s a pretty small price to pay for securing the veneer of civilization every one of us enjoys.
Congress members who have brought up frivolous proposals (Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District; Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., come readily to mind) ought to give at least a passing thought to how they’ll look in the history books if an EMP disaster does come to pass, and historians will record that they did nothing — indeed, did actual harm, since their frivolous, nanny-state bills distracted Congress from matters like EMP protection — about an attack or natural disaster that would “bring … our civilization to a cold, dark halt.”
