Electro-magnetic pulse

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By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

With hurricane season upon us once again, the recent anniversary of one of the most deadly and destructive in our nation's history -- the mega-storm called Katrina -- was an occasion for remembering what can happen if we are unprepared.

Unfortunately, what was arguably the most important lesson of that hurricane has still not been addressed: the truly catastrophic vulnerability of all of the infrastructures upon which our society critically depends to interruptions of the electrical grid.

Worse yet, there are both looming man-induced and far more devastating natural means of precipitating such interruptions that we have not begun to address. Should these eventuate, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will look like, well, a day at the beach.

It is no exaggeration to say that the effect of one or the other of these assaults on our electrical grid could be to engender what Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called "a world without America."

As Katrina demonstrated, if the electricity goes off for any protracted period, a cascading ripple-effect takes down the means by which we communicate, get food and water, access financial resources, receive medical services, dispose of sewage and move from one location to another. The longer the time without electricity, the more difficult it is to bring such other infrastructures back on line.

If some of the roughly 300 transformers that are the backbone of our electrical grid are damaged or destroyed, the interruption to the electrical grid will not be brief. Today, we have few backups in place. These large and complex pieces of equipment are all produced overseas and it takes at least a year to take delivery of even one, let alone many.

William R. Graham, President Reagan's science adviser, estimates that, if the electricity is off in large sections of America (far more than the relatively small area afflicted by Katrina) for as long as a year, the effect will not simply be on the quality of life here. He says as many as 9 in 10 of our men, women and children will die from starvation, disease and/or exposure.

Mr. Graham knows whereof he speaks. He has served for years as the chairman of a congressionally empaneled commission made up of many of the most knowledgeable scientists in the United States. Their job has been to examine in detail a phenomenon known as electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) that could be used by our enemies like Iran to effect such devastation.

The Graham panel has come to be known as the EMP Threat Commission and it has developed a particularly worrisome scenario. A nondescript freighter off one of our coasts could launch with no warning a relatively short-range ballistic missile. Were that missile armed with even a relatively small and crude nuclear weapon that was detonated in space high over the United States, it would unleash large quantities of gamma rays.

As those rays interact with the upper atmosphere, the effect would be to create an immense burst of electromagnetic energy. Any electrical or electronic device -- including the grid's transformers -- not shielded against this pulse would be, at best, taken temporarily off-line. More likely, they will be made permanently unusable.