Seventy years after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. finds itself in much the same situation that it was in prior to World War II. There is a great effort to cut military spending, bring troops home from abroad, and scale back our international exposure. The country’s critical financial situation is one reason. Yet a nuclear-obsessed Iran, an emerging China and Russia, along with smaller rogue actors are enough of a threat to justify a vigilant and even aggressive guard. Add to this the weariness of two prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the comparison is complete
On Dec. 7, 1941 the United States suffered the worst intelligence failure in its history—before or since—when Japanese planes destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The most astounding aspect of the Pearl Harbor attack was that the U.S. had already broken the Japanese code and was listening to its communications. The U.S. had hundreds of cryptologists and linguists, mostly from the Navy, listening to Japanese wireless communications. But it wasn’t enough.
“We knew something was going to happen on Sunday, December 7th at around noon Washington time,” Henry Kissinger said at a speech I attended two years ago in New York City. “The problem is that nobody knew that when it’s noon in Washington, it’s around 7 a.m. in Hawaii.”
In other words, despite being on a war footing with Japan and knowing from intercepted communications that the Japanese were planning for a significant event to affect Japanese-U.S. relations that Sunday, our government couldn’t conceive of—and didn’t defend against—an attack on its largest Pacific naval facility, Pearl Harbor. (more…)
It’s bewildering. Pathetic. Frightening. And it seems that the mainstream media avoids talking about it for fear that Americans will panic. Well, Americans ought to be panicking — anything to get them to bang on Congress’s door and force our representatives to immediately act on the pending legislature now in Congress called the SHIELD Act — a bill based on the previous HR 5026 — that unanimously passed in the House of Representatives on June 9, 2010.
The disaster I am referring to is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which can easily be caused either by Mother Nature as a geomagnetic solar storm or by an enemy with a low-cost, short range, ship-launched missile armed with a nuclear warhead. The national consequences of an EMP destroying our electrical grid are far-reaching, with long-lasting, continent-wide crippling effects to our electricity-dependant infrastructure.
At the press conference organized by EMPactAmerica on September 23, 2011, this dangerous threat to our national security was exposed for what it truly is — the most likely event to happen to the U.S., naturally or man-made, that has the potential to bring the country to its knees.
The National Academy of Science points out that protecting the grid against this threat is critical, and getting a bill passed is necessary to do that. An EMP, if not deflected, will shut down and paralyze our country. Just think about the role electricity plays in water, food, heating and cooling, communications, transportation, distribution, the economy and banking. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, who made a statement on the floor of the House in support of the HR 5026, told Congress that an EMP attack would create $1-$2 trillion in damages and take four to ten years to recover. The truth is that within one year we would no longer be a sovereign nation. (more…)
Over the past decade there has been an ongoing debate over the threat posed by electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to modern civilization. This debate has been the most heated perhaps in the United States, where the commission appointed by Congress to assess the threat to the United States warned of the dangers posed by EMP in reports released in 2004 and 2008. The commission also called for a national commitment to address the EMP threat by hardening the national infrastructure.
There is little doubt that efforts by the United States to harden infrastructure against EMP — and its ability to manage critical infrastructure manually in the event of an EMP attack — have been eroded in recent decades as the Cold War ended and the threat of nuclear conflict with Russia lessened. This is also true of the U.S. military, which has spent little time contemplating such scenarios in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The cost of remedying the situation, especially retrofitting older systems rather than simply regulating that new systems be better hardened, is immense. And as with any issue involving massive amounts of money, the debate over guarding against EMP has become quite politicized in recent years.
We have long avoided writing on this topic for precisely that reason. However, as the debate over the EMP threat has continued, a great deal of discussion about the threat has appeared in the media. Many STRATFOR readers have asked for our take on the threat, and we thought it might be helpful to dispassionately discuss the tactical elements involved in such an attack and the various actors that could conduct one. The following is our assessment of the likelihood of an EMP attack against the United States. (more…)
By Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, of Maryland serves as ranking member of the air and land forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and Peter Vincent Pry, president of EMPact America
– August 2, 2010
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Why do we suppose Iran cannot accomplish in 20 years of trying–with access to vast amounts of unclassified data on nuclear weapons design and equipped with 21st-century technology–what the U.S. accomplished in three years during the 1940s? Why do we suppose that Iran, with resources vastly superior to Israel’s, and helped by Russia, China and North Korea, cannot match or surpass Israel’s nuclear-weapons feat? Why does Iran, with its provocative attitude toward the U.S. and the entire world, act like a nuclear-weapons state? Iran only needs a single nuclear weapon to destroy the United States. A nuclear EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack could collapse the national electric grid and other critical infrastructures that sustain the lives of 310 million Americans. Iran writes about EMP attack and appears to practice EMP missle strikes. Last year, Iran orbited a small satellite along a trajectory that could have placed an EMP field over the entire contiguous United States, were the satellite a small nuclear or “super-EMP” weapon.
Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons: Congress Must Understand the Risk
Published on March 3, 2010 by Baker Spring WebMemo #2822
In 2004, the congressionally mandated Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack released an unclassified executive report on its broader study of the U.S.’s vulnerability to EMP weapons strikes.[1] In 2008, the commission released a follow-up report that detailed the vulnerabilities of the critical infrastructures of the U.S. to EMP strikes.[2] Taken together, these two reports make it clear that an EMP attack could inflict severe damage on the U.S. As the initial report stated, “EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.”
Congress should not let the Obama Administration ignore the commission’s findings. Instead, it should mandate an updated assessment of which countries may be pursuing EMP weapons and associated delivery systems and platforms. Further, Congress should demand that the Administration develop, test, and ultimately field defenses against EMP attacks, including improved ballistic missile defenses capable of countering short-range ballistic missiles that can carry EMP warheads.
What Is EMP?
EMP is triggered by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at a high altitude over the earth. As a result of this detonation, an electromagnetic field radiates down to the earth, creating electrical currents.
These fields cause widespread damage to electrical systems—the lifeblood of a modern society like the U.S. In turn, the damaged electronic systems can cause a cascade of failures throughout the broader infrastructure, including banking systems, energy systems, transportation systems, food production and delivery systems, water systems, emergency services, and—perhaps most damaging—cyberspace. (more…)
