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Feb. 4, 2023 - InfoWars Films
01:14:33
MUST SEE C.I.A. CONFERENCE: The Existential EMP Threat
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Thank you so much Tim Powers and Artemis for hosting this event and having the space And I also want to thank Rachel Ehrenfeld of the American Center for Democracy, whose idea was originally to have this meeting.
It wouldn't have happened without her.
I would like to introduce our main speaker here, Ambassador R. James Woolsey, who's a former director of the CIA and was the director of the CIA. When I was there, in fact, I went through several CIA directors.
In my opinion, he was the best.
He was definitely the best.
Yeah, actually met with the front troops and cared more deeply, I think, about that job than anyone else who was there.
And the ambassador, Henry Cooper, hardly needs any introduction.
Had been the director of the Strategic Defense Initiative under President Reagan.
You know, engineering background under President Bush.
I stand corrected.
You know, headed up high frontier and has taken on trying to protect this country against the existential threat from electromagnetic pulse as a personal mission and has been looking at it not just at a national level but going to the states.
I myself, you know, most of you probably don't know me.
I'm Dr. Peter Vincent Prye.
I worked in the CIA on this issue.
You know, I've spent most of my professional career working on electromagnetic pulse and weapons of mass destruction.
Then I went on to the House Armed Services Committee.
I served on the Congressional EMP Commission that labored on this for a decade and produced a blueprint for protecting the country that has still not been implemented.
Now I'm the Executive Director of a Task Force on National and Homeland Security at the Congressional Advisory Board.
Our goal is to try to get the country protected on an accelerated basis.
With those comments, Jim, if you would like to take it away.
Well, thanks, Peter.
I appreciate it.
I'm sorry to be late.
I went to...
10 G Street Northwest, which is some distance from here.
Leading my wife on similar occasions to say, Director of Central what?
This problem started out more than a century ago when Tesla, for very good reasons, and Westinghouse defeated Edison and GE. And we ended up with an alternating current grid.
That lets one transmit from a much smaller number of generating stations than we would have needed if we'd gone with direct current, with a relatively limited number of generating stations.
Let one, beginning in the late 19th century, transmit electricity by stepping up with transformers, stringing wires.
Stepping down with transformers, transmit electricity for substantial distances.
Had we gone with Edison's plan, we would have had small coal-fired generators all over every city in the United States.
So Tesla won for good and sufficient reason then.
As time has gone on, from the...
Beginnings of the electric grid in the 1880s until today.
We have essentially had two times in which Americans began to really fear and take cognizance of their infrastructure and worry that something might happen to it.
I'd say after December 7, 1941, that spirit Worrying about German and Japanese submarines offshore and so forth probably lasted three or four, five months.
By then we were pretty clear that we controlled the seas around us and beyond.
And I'm sure some people began to worry about infrastructure on 9-11, but for most people it didn't last very long.
So since we have 18 critical infrastructures in the U.S., water, food, etc., And the other 17 depend to one degree or another on electricity.
The fact that our electric grid is alternating current, transformers being the heart of the system, 2,000 to 3,000 of them in the United States, has created a situation where we were In perfect shape to make some other mistakes.
And the other mistakes that we made, giving due allowance to the brilliance of the engineers who put together the electric grid, it is amazing.
It's a nationwide system, probably the largest machine in the world in a sense.
Most of the time you need to plug in a light, you can plug in a light and you get electricity.
It's a just-in-time system.
For all practical purposes, you're producing the electricity at the same time you use it, so you've got to make constant adjustments.
But in good times, it works.
And so those two blips on the screen, after Pearl Harbor and after 9-11, probably didn't do enough to agitate anyone to try to take another look at the way the electric grid was constructed or any of the assumptions behind it.
As we come up into the 1990s, two things happened.
First of all, the web began to come into existence and people began to rely on it more and more.
Now the web was put together by a handful of geniuses, almost all of them part of my flower child generation.
And for at least some of them, the idea was share.
There is nothing that can go wrong if you share.
The world is like a kindergarten sandbox.
If we just learn to share, everything will be fine.
And we began to share.
And some people...
Nineteen-year-old private first class who decided a teenager decided he would give millions of classified cables to WikiLeaks and on and on.
Lots of people shared.
And it was a potential problem, but nothing manifested itself right away.
And along about the same time, sort of late 90s instead of early 90s, we decided we also...
Ought to decontrol the electric grid so that if you could buy from Tulsa, Oklahoma, electricity more cheaply by half a cent a kilowatt hour in Maine than in Washington State, then buy it from Washington State.
Exchanges would pop up.
Things would work.
And they did.
All of this, in a sense, works.
It was put together with this wild dance of buying and selling electricity all over the country, simultaneously producing while you use, relying for the heart of the matter on two or three thousand pieces of equipment, very easily damaged and protected by a cyclone fence only, virtually every place they are located.
Even at nuclear power stations.
The transformers are normally not protected any better than transformers are anyplace else.
The nuclear materials are in the nuclear station, but the electricity is in most cases outside.
So we have a situation where we put this all together essentially without anyone giving a single thought to security.
There has been virtually no Attention to security.
Even the most basic types.
For example, a few years ago, out here at PJM, the exchange east coast for a number of states, a gentleman showed up from China.
And he said that he was looking into the way electric grids worked, and he wondered if he could look into the files and the plans and so forth for...
PJM. And PJM, I don't know, they called the State Department.
Somebody at the State Department said, oh, well, he's Chinese.
We want to be nice to the Chinese.
Sure.
Let him have a look.
Sure.
And some months later, someone in the federal government finally heard about this and decided to call him and see what was going on.
They got him on the phone.
He spoke very good English.
Chinese intelligence officers often do.
And he said that, yeah, he was nearly through with his work.
They said, would you like to come in and share with us what you were doing?
We can talk to you about what, you know, we're all working on electric grids.
He said, sure, I'd be glad to be in.
Day after tomorrow, okay?
And they said, yeah, day after tomorrow's fine.
And the next day he flew to Beijing.
What did he take?
What did he learn?
Was he a sophisticated engineer?
Not?
Who knows?
We'll never know.
But whether it is putting cyclone fences and nothing more, Around transformers, which if they are taken down, a handful of them can knock out a major section of the country, and they take well over a year to construct, and they're built in South Korea and Northern Europe.
Whether it is that kind of inattention to security, or sure, if you're Chinese, we like Chinese, come look at our grid plans.
Whatever it is, this country is not well served.
By the way the electric grid is protected or by the people who are doing it.
Now, it is not their fault, the fault of the individual engineers and the others who are only given a specific task, figure out where to put the cyclone fence, and so they put it the best place they can.
It's not their fault.
In a sense, it's all of ours, because there is virtually no structure.
To the electricity grids management.
The Department of Energy, as nearly as I can tell, has a small, competent, very small staff, and they do some studies.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has more substantial responsibilities.
They regulate transmission and its long-range transmission and its cost.
They nominally have some kind of authority for some aspects of security, but probably in the statutes they're pretty murky.
You would say that most of the security is in the hands of NERC, the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation.
NERC is essentially a trade organization of some 3,500.
Utilities.
A footnote.
When the Founding Fathers put together the American Constitution that hot summer in Philadelphia, they had as their model the Roman Republic's Constitution, not Empire, Republic.
And they knew one thing had gone terribly wrong with the Roman Republic, and that was how to control the military.
Much of the rest was pretty good, and it worked kind of like our Constitution.
But controlling the military...
That's what came apart, Caesar, Bruce, all of that.
So when the Founding Fathers were putting our Constitution together, they said, that we've got to fix.
And they fixed it pretty well.
We have a president who's the commander-in-chief, we have a Congress that approves the money, and those are the only players, and you can't choose up sides in the Congress and appropriate only for your favorite general and the way the Romans did, and so forth.
It's a pretty good system that we've got.
But we have one commander-in-chief, so although sometimes we mess up, we've at least got a chance of having a structure that defines an objective and figures out how to deal with fighting a war.
We are at war now with those who want to take down our electricity grid, and we have 3,500 generals.
All equal, that would be the utilities in the United States, who are kind of, sort of, in charge of it a little bit, maybe.
The deputy director of ARPA-E, the energy side of ARPA, told me a few weeks ago that he had crunched these numbers himself, and that the 3,500 utilities in the United States spend less annually on research and development You know,
we have pretty healthy dogs in the U.S. You know, all of us like our dogs.
But perhaps the technology of improving and protecting the grid has a somewhat higher priority than it is being given.
In a situation where we have never really...
Oh, by the way, there are other players in the electricity business.
Probably the most powerful entities are the public service commissions, public utility commissions, of which there are 50 in the country, and they make decisions from time to time about things electrical.
One of the big things they don't want is added pennies per month on consumers' electric bills because then they vote them out of office or get mad at them or write op-eds or whatever.
So they are very, very careful not to let any increase in price come about of electricity, and what that means is that virtually nothing gets spent on security.
So we have a structure of the grid, and those...
Things that need to be done in order to protect it that is almost entirely dysfunctional.
Nobody is really in charge of security for the grid, and no single intelligence with a staff that is planning how to deal with these threats as they come up is in place.
They don't exist.
Consequently, as vulnerabilities come about because people take fresh looks at technology or they learn something that other countries are doing in an area of technology, we are not in a position to respond really at all, much less promptly.
And that creates some very serious problems.
People have begun to...
Pay more and more attention to the vulnerability of the transformers because, as I said, the large ones take a long time to produce and aren't made in this country.
And the utilities have very, very few spares.
Of the 2,000 to 3,000 transformers, we probably have 5% replacement spares and max.
And those are, for the large transformers, those...
Replacements and the transformer itself are extremely large, extremely heavy.
To ship some of them, you have to take roads apart and bridges apart and on and on and on.
Homeland Security and Department of Energy are working on a new set of far more easily transportable transformers, but they're not the very large ones that are the heart of the system.
Dangers to transformers come about, even physical attack, rifles, people are not equipped to deal with it.
And as new technologies, more sophisticated than rifles, come about, much of what one tries to present to...
Governments, officials, and the rest is met by kind of a blank stare.
Now, one of the most important of these is electromagnetic pulse.
It has been around for as long as the sun has been around, so it's been around a very long time.
And every 100 or 200 years, a huge electromagnetic pulse from the sun, a so-called Carrington event, It can have a massive effect on the electromagnetic sphere of the Earth.
Smaller electromagnetic pulses or ejections from the Sun can also cause extraordinary problems.
One in Quebec a few years ago, Peter Pry will remember 1989. Quebec was so powerful that it caused many billions of dollars of damage in Canada.
And the last Peter and I looked at it, I think, a recent report from Lloyd's of London suggests that if that event, instead of having been focused on Quebec, We're at a place on the Sun that it was focused on the Boston-Washington corridor.
It would have done, or would do today, just initially, just the very first shock, something between $600 billion and $2.6 trillion?
Not that much.
$600, it said.06.
Yeah, in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Say in the hundreds of billions of dollars of damage, more than in Quebec.
That doesn't even account for, as far as I can tell, things like the electric grid going down, so farmers' tractors don't work, so trying to figure out how to grow food for all of us.
We have about 2% of the American population growing food.
We used to take...
40-50% to feed the rest of us.
Now it takes 2% if none of their electrical gear works.
Try to imagine what irrigates the vegetables in the Central Valley of California or anything else.
An electromagnetic pulse can be devastating to the grid and it is not Something that has to be, or necessarily will be likely to be, carried out by an adversary.
It can be carried out by the sun.
We've worried about it being carried out by an adversary for some time, and so we had the presidential aircraft and strategic air commander's aircraft and a few key nodes in our capacity to retaliate against the Soviets with nuclear weapons that were protected.
From electromagnetic pulse, by the way, the equipment was produced, but very little.
And the problem with that is that with a pulse that is generated by the detonation of a nuclear weapon, one could lose the country's grid.
Mainly by losing the transformers, although also each individual piece of electronic equipment that was within the right range and area would be taken out as well.
So that set of problems is in a way more troubling than the possession by a country like North Korea or Iran of Nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that are designed to attack a specific target, because it's very hard to attack a specific target with a ballistic missile.
You have to reenter, you have to have accuracy, so forth.
But if all you have to do is detonate while it's in orbit, you launch it into orbit and it detonates, you could well have a very substantial share of the U.S. Go down from the EMP. There's three electromagnetic pulse types.
I'll let Peter tell you about them.
But one is of no great consequence.
One affects directly instruments such as your car's ignition.
The other, the third, mainly travels along the transmission lines and affects the grid and the transformers.
But we are not well equipped.
To figure out how to assess dangers that may come about to the grid and take precautionary steps to deal with them.
There are a few members of Congress, there are a few people in the country who have spoken out on this issue and tried to figure out how we could begin to get our arms around it.
But we are behind.
On the combative side of the EMP, we're behind the...
The Russians and the Chinese and quite possibly even the North Koreans since they have relatively little electronic gear to protect.
I think I would close with that by way of introduction and just say I know there are people here in the audience who know a good deal more about EMP than I do and we certainly ought to let them speak.
I wanted to try to set an overall Just a comment or two to supplement what you said, Jim.
As I understand it, and I meant to look this up after last week's discussion, We had a near miss of a solar emission within the last several months, is it?
Yeah, I think so.
Which went by us in the orbit of the Earth.
That if it hit us, it was bigger than the Canadian event by far.
And what Michael said, it was the size of the Carrington event of 1859. So we missed that.
We're still in the...
In the window of Sola Maxima and will be, I suppose, for the rest of this year.
Peter can talk more about that.
The other thing, I want to compliment what you said with an E and an I, for that matter.
I think when I first met you, I was worrying about the survivability of our strategic systems and trying to figure out how We would deal with a serious attack by the Soviet Union.
And not long after that, I had the oversight responsibilities for the programs that dealt with EMP. And there are some people who want to say that EMP is a figment of a bunch of technical guys and their imagination, and I can assure you it isn't that way.
High-altitude test called Starfish Prime in the South Pacific that caused damage in Hawaii some 800 or 900 miles away, I believe it was.
And we were surprised by that.
And I can tell you, because I also oversaw the underground test programs and so on, EMP was more than an annoyance on the instrumentation, even on underground tests years later.
We spent a fair amount of money during the Cold War.
Hardening our strategic systems to electromagnetic pulse, and surely we would not have done that if it were an imaginary thing.
Admiral Monroe oversaw the programs at the Defense Nuclear Agency that dealt with all of these effects.
Spent a lot of money, spent a lot of time, not only how to harden them, but how to maintain systems so that they were not...
Didn't lose the hardness that we built in, designed and built in.
We found problems, even when you had good designs, things weren't built the way they were supposed to be, and even after you built them the way they were supposed to be built, they weren't maintained on occasion to assure the hardening.
Without a serious testing maintenance program, you don't have confidence that you can deal with these problems.
And this is an electromagnetic pulse created by nuclear weapons, as Jim said.
And there are three components.
One of them is lightning.
Everybody knows what lightning is.
You have surge arrestors or whatever to deal with with that effect.
One is the low-frequency, long-wavelength pulse, which is the same as what you get from the sun.
And then there's a very high-frequency, short-wavelength pulse, which causes damage to Solid-state electronics of all sorts.
And all three of those effects can be problems.
The high and the low end are the main ones that create the issue.
In the case of the grid and the sun, the solar, it's the long wavelength pulse that creates the problem.
And I want to say that I'm going to talk to you briefly about missile defense here in a little bit.
Missile defense doesn't protect you from the sun's problem, so dealing with the electric power grid is something you have to have there.
The second thing I'd say about missile defense is there's nothing that I know of that man's ever produced that's perfect.
So defenses don't always work, and if they don't work, it's wise to have some other hardening in the system to assure that you can reconstruct whatever it was that was damaged.
When a nuclear weapon goes off, A couple hundred miles above the United States, no one gets hurt immediately.
The lights go out, and everything that's powered by the grid goes out, and that includes a whole host of things you might think about and some things you might not think about.
I mean, water.
You lose water.
You lose the power for your sewage.
Imagine being in a, you know, 100-story building or whatever, and gravity takes over.
And how you manage life and any more.
I don't know whether you can open these windows here or not.
You don't have air conditioning.
You don't have all the neat things that we've come to rely upon.
And you have chaos pretty quickly.
And that's where people die if we aren't prepared.
Bill Fortune, who I think was going to join us in this conversation, wrote a book called One Second After.
Where he hypothesized what life would be like in the little town he lives in, in Black Rock, is it?
Or something like that.
North Carolina.
Over in the Smokies.
And it creates some really problematic issues, even when you have food and water for your own people to survive.
The cities have great problems and massive.
Migration by foot or whatever, it's hard to imagine, get your head wrapped around, but it's a problem.
And we could use more, I think, serious discussion with the population on that nature, on that problem, and what the consequences would be.
Now I want to talk a little bit about missile defense.
That's what I spent a lot of my...
Life worrying about for the last decade, or several decades, actually.
And we worried initially about the threat from the Soviet Union.
We worried more recently about threats out of North Korea and Iran, eventually with nuclear-armed missiles.
And not the massive attack that we had before, but even one or two.
Generally, until recently, we didn't worry about EMP being coupled to that.
And frankly, I didn't get spun up on this issue until about six or eight months ago when I learned for the first time that Congress was blocking dealing with the electric power grid.
I didn't think anybody in their right mind would just accept this kind of vulnerability, and that's when I got all spun up to deal with the issue.
When I started looking into it, I realized that, you know, all of our efforts ever since missile defense became a serious subject in the 60s, and Bell Labs worked on Nike Zeus and Spartan and Sprint and those nuclear-armed systems, and making sure that we could deal with our own weapons going off and with the issue of salvage fusing and all that became a major problem in the design of our own weapon systems way back then.
But as I thought about this issue, I came to realize that we postured ourselves for the Soviets attacking us over the North Pole.
And so we've deployed our interceptors.
Originally, we were going to build just a site up in North Korea.
Actually, originally, we were going to build a number of sites.
North Dakota.
North Dakota.
Right, sorry.
They're not there yet.
They're not there.
And we built a site, and it was operational for six months, I believe, before we shut it down.
But everything was postured to deal with an attack over the North Pole, and it still is.
Systems that were...
Deploying in Alaska and California are vectored toward dealing primarily with the North Korean threat.
At least the Alaskan site would have a shot at Iranian launches over the North Pole if they weren't going too far south along the East Coast.
But we don't have a lot of confidence in that capability.
And so we need something to go with what we have.
The AEGIS, Navy's AEGIS system, ballistic missile defense system, in my judgment, is the most capable defense we have today.
It has an excellent test record.
And it has been operated since day one by the operational crews.
They're not dedicated on these ships to defending the country against ballistic missiles.
They have other missions.
But they carry defensive interceptors wherever they go.
And when they are in the neighborhood of the United States, along the East Coast, let's say, they have the inherent capability of shooting down ICBMs from Iran.
I say they have the inherent capability because we haven't given them the de facto capability.
In order to have that, they need a radar up in the northeastern part of the United States, say in Maine.
And the radar doesn't have to be all that sophisticated.
It's basically what's referred to now as a TIPI-2 radar.
It's essentially the same X-band radar that is deployed with our THAAD, THAAD missile defense programs.
But with a cue from that, a ship off the coast of northern Virginia, say at Norfolk or wherever, could defend the eastern seaboard between Washington and New York.
If you put another radar around Camp Lejeune, you can defend the southern part of the United States.
And that's with the Aegis systems that's deployed today.
If you keep up with these programs, you know we're going to be building ground-based Aegis sites in Romania and in Poland.
The Romanian site goes in in 2015, I believe it is, and the site in Poland.
2017. And when we get to the Poland site, we'll have a faster interceptor, which would be more capable if you put that on a ship as well, and it will fit in the vertical launch tube, or at least if we continue with the program we have going now, it could defend the entire eastern seaboard with a single radar up north.
And I passed out these pictures, and you can find them.
Some sketches in the back of what our current capabilities are for just what's deployed today and what's already in the budget, funded, and will be deployed overseas, anyway, within the next three to five years.
And I said they were on ships, but if you put them on the shore, of course, they can work there, too.
So if you could put an Aegis or...
That could protect the northeastern seaboard reasonably quickly.
But the ships will do the job.
And whenever I talk about this, there's always somebody that raises the issue of picket ships.
They say, well, the Navy is never going to like the idea of, you know, having to patrol the coast and serve as a picket ship.
What they don't appreciate is that there are ships on our coast all the time.
Last year, on an average day, picked at random, there were two ships along the eastern seaboard.
And there were three to six more that were either in port or they were being modified.
Now, I haven't sat down with the operations types.
Maybe Bob could help with this, but I don't think it takes a genius to figure out how to have an ad hoc defense capability with just what is naturally occurring on our eastern coast all the time.
But we have to plan to do it, and you have to train to do it, and so on.
Hank, could I add one thing about why this is so important?
Hank said everything's designed to come over the pole, Addison.
We're defending over the pole.
With a fractional orbital bombardment system, which the Soviets invented and which we've had too, you could launch to the south, come around the south pole, and detonate an EMP shot above the United States without ever having passed within the path.
Of the radars and defense systems.
Now, it doesn't mean they couldn't be reorganized to point south, in part.
I mean, Hank just told you basically how to do that.
But it hadn't been done.
So, today, you have a vulnerability to the type of threat that he's describing coming around the South Pole without any even detection, much less.
You're a great straight man.
That's where I was going next.
I'm sorry.
That's all right.
I mentioned that we were dealing with the attack from the north.
And it's not only a hypothetical that this could be done, as Jim said.
The Russians did it and I guess could do it again because they...
Ceased and desisted as part of the deal, I think, on the SALT II agreement, which was never ratified.
And so there isn't even a legal constraint that holds them back.
But more than that, you don't need the fancy system that they were building.
You just put the bomb on a satellite.
And both North Korea and Iran in the last year have launched satellites over the South Pole.
Or nearly over the South Pole.
They could certainly re-vector so that they come over the South Pole.
And on their initial flight over the United States detonate, say over Omaha, somewhere there.
And you could possibly take down the entire grid.
We have no defense against that.
We don't even have a radar system that would see it coming.
Another picture that's in here, thanks to Peter, you'll see.
You can describe it in more detail.
It shows the radar fans that have evolved from the Cold War radars, and it's hard to see, but there's a gap to the south.
We've got lots of radars looking north and to the east and the west, but we're wide open to the south for the main warning radars that we have.
And the optimum place to put that would be in the Panama City area of Florida.
Eglund Air Force Base, Tindall Air Force Base are major test ranges for the Air Force and the Navy, and it wouldn't take up much room to have a site there.
So, again, it doesn't take a genius to fill the gaps, but you have to plan to do it, you have to program to do it, you have to man it and train it.
And the final thing I want to talk about is another one that's a bewildering thing to me.
Not only on the EMP Commission, James, as I recall, you served on the Missile Defense Threat Commission as well with Don Rumsfeld.
And 1998, as a part of that, it was identified that you don't need ICBMs or even long-range satellites or anything like that to attack the United States.
You can put a rocket on a ship and line staff.
It was designed to empower the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission so it could protect the grid.
Give it the...
Powers it needs to protect the grid.
Just the way the Federal Aviation Administration, for example, has the power to tell the airline industry, you can't fly airplanes if they've got cracks in their wings.
Same thing here.
To give FERC that kind of authority so that it will make a level playing field for all of the 1,500 utilities so that they all have to do the same thing so nobody gets any kind of a competitive advantage.
Everybody has to be equally responsible in taking...
The relatively low-cost measures that are necessary, but they must do it.
Right now, they're not doing it voluntarily, and nobody in the government has the authority to tell them to do it.
That's why the SHIELD Act is absolutely necessary.
The SHIELD Act is the successor to the GRID Act.
Now that the Republicans control the House, they have, basically, it's the GRID Act, you know, the Republican version of it, very similar, you know, There are some minor differences between the bills, but they are essentially the same bill, and they both have enjoyed very strong bipartisan support.
But they haven't been able to get the bill through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has very friendly relationships with, guess who, the NERC, the North American Electrical Liability Corporation.
And that has been the problem, one of the problems.
So getting the S.H.I.E.L.D. Act passed is one emergency thing that probably should be done as soon as possible.
Between the Grid Act and the Shield Act, I'd say, let's see, when did they start?
2009 is when Congress first started trying to pass bills like that.
2009. And here it is, 2013, and we still haven't been able to get it through.
And we've got North Korean freighters showing up with nuclear-capable missiles in the Caribbean.
The other thing we need to do is the Department of Homeland Security should implement...
A new national planning scenario focused on EMP. This was a core recommendation of the EMP Commission made back in 2008. You know, these national planning scenarios are the basis for all federal, state, and local emergency planning and training and resource allocation.
Even if you can't get the S.H.I.E.L.D. Act passed, at least if you had the national planning scenario focused on EMP, it would be an enormous step toward getting the whole country protected.
Let's let people raise issues with us.
We've talked about you for a while.
One last thing.
We'll shut up and open it to questions.
The last thing is we have to give enormous credit to the state of Maine.
I hope the whole country follows the example of Andrea Boland, state representative from the state of Maine, who heroically, back in February...
We're tired of waiting for Washington.
Geomagnetic storms, nuclear MP, non-nuclear MP, these pose a mortal threat to the people of the state of Maine.
And it took her exactly, let's see, from February to June.
It took a few months for the state of Maine.
You know, to actually pass LD-131.
They are the first state in the United States to have passed a bill.
They're not waiting for Washington.
They're going to move forward and protect their grid.
And that's an example.
If Washington will not act, then the states should act to protect their people.
Absolutely.
So I apologize for taking so long.
One of the wry things about all this is that in the book One Second After that Hank mentioned, and in NBC's series Revolution, The central theme is the United States after the grid goes down.
And so Hollywood and late night TV and novelists are well ahead of the government of the United States on this matter.
I'd like to amplify one point very quickly that Jim and Peter made.
I'd like to talk about the aspect that there are really two aspects of the EMD threat.
One is the threat to the military systems.
One is threat to the civilian systems.
As Hank said, I worked in the 70s on the military systems.
We spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Conducting underground nuclear tests to expose weapon systems to the EMP fluids of these weapons.
We developed simulators that you could, without conducting an actual nuclear explosion, expose aircraft, ships, and larger weapon systems to, in fact, I'm sure many or several, at least in the room, Participated in this.
My first underground nuclear test was Hyde LaGole in 1977, the first one I managed.
And I don't know if all of you are aware that Nevada Test Site was regarded as where DOE did tests to design new weapons.
Well, DOD... In the form of the Defense Nuclear Agency, ran its own separate tests at a different location.
DNA then was the national lab for studying nuclear weapon effects.
What's your question?
So the point was that the military side As Peter just mentioned, has been very active in this and knows just what to do.
The civilian side, as all three of these gentlemen have said, think about the civilian side for just one minute.
Nobody's in charge.
There are thousands of individual utilities, and as Jim said, they're trying to reduce the cost of a...
Kilowatt hour of electricity by every means possible.
Nobody is going to do this if they don't have to.
So just, I never thought I'd say these words, but having spent the last half of my life, I'm in my 80s, on this issue of EMP. The only way I can see to do it is to create a government agency that has the power to protect America from the civilian,
the American electric grid from EMB. Nice.
I just want to point out that this is Vice Admiral Robert Monroe who ran, that was the director of the Defense Nuclear Agency.
Responsible for protecting U.S. military forces.
He should have been on this panel if I had organized it better.
Excuse me.
Thank you.
Go ahead.
Please.
A question.
You're looking for a two-part, looking for a federal authority to force the utilities to do the right thing.
First question would be, how much does it cost for a medium utility, say, with a million meters, a million customers, to do the right thing?
Second question is, I would assume you've made this presentation to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Because of all people, they don't want station blackout.
In the wake of Fukushima, loss of off-site power.
Every civilian nuclear plant has diesel generators.
But you run out of diesel pretty fast.
Right.
It's always assumed that the off-site power will be restored, and the on-site diesel generators are a temporary thing.
A general EMP would have Fukushima's all over the country.
Yes, absolutely.
Every week.
And I guess the third question, in terms of the imposition of regulation, the 2005 Energy Policy Act converted what used to be the voluntary NERC from a reliability council of utilities to the reliability corporation.
And don't they have the authority, congressionally, to impose reliability standards?
Let me turn to you first.
Kind of, sort of.
And the last time I looked at their record, for voluntary rules, the average time it took them to get them out was, I think, six months or so.
But once they got into anything that had any teeth in it, and they had to proceed by consensus, so everybody chimes in again and again and again, the average time...
From initiating the procedure to completing a rule was three years and eight months.
And what's interesting about three years and eight months is that is the length of the time the United States was in World War II. Sounds like a bureaucracy.
I was going to comment about the NRC as well.
I'm hopeful that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will take this seriously.
In the first place, there are a number of commissioners, past and present, who know something about this problem.
A lot of former submarine officers of one form or another are familiar with nuclear matters generally, and while they were doing their bit with SB, they were learning about nuclear weapons effects of the sort we're talking about here as well.
So I don't think there's a problem in teaching them.
About this issue, and in the wake of the Japanese problem a while back, for the reasons you mentioned, I think they're sensitive to the issue.
So that's one pocket where there's real competence, and I think they have authorities to act separately from other places in the government because of the nuclear, the N-word, if you will, and it's been that way since the beginning.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that I believe that there is a possibility of seeing a positive change in the Department of Energy.
Two things.
Ernest Moniz, PhD physicist from MIT, some of us conspired to get a question on his agenda during the confirmation hearing, and he answered in what I consider to be a positive way.
Senator Murkowski, who is the ranking member, asked if he was planning to understand the EMP issues and the power grid issues.
And in his response, he basically said he needed to learn more about that.
But yes, he wanted to worry about the entire resiliency of the grid.
Come back to your point, Jim, which would include EMP, but all the other vulnerabilities, potential vulnerabilities to the grid as well.
He, in essence, said he was going to deal with both the man-made and nuclear threats.
So I think there's a real chance that DOE is going to be serious.
People try to limit your questions to one question, and responders, wherever in the room, up here or not in the room, try to limit your answers to something brief.
So, go ahead.
Regarding the DHS, what is the status now of them putting that on as a national planning scenario?
And secondly, in the write-up that you gave us today in preparation for this meeting, you talked about the DHS cutting back on monies for training of the utilities.
Can you elaborate?
I met with some of them the other day about this vulnerability from rifle fire that Peter talked about in California.
I think they're seriously getting involved in that and saying what they can do about it.
I don't know about your first question.
I know that they have been looking at draft scenarios and considering the possibility.
But given the amount of pressure that's coming from Congress, I'm not going to say that I'm hopeful they're actually going to adopt such a scenario.
But at least they're moving in the right direction.
Back in September of last year, an excellent briefing was given by DHS where they acknowledged the threat, acknowledged they had responsibility for it, and I know that was followed by letters from Congress asking them again to come up with a national planning scenario for an EMP. Bureaucracies move slowly.
You know, maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.
I did want to add one thing in because a very crucial question was asked by this other gentleman about the cost.
What are the costs?
And I think we need to address that.
The commission estimated that the whole national electric grid could be protected for a cost of $2 billion, which is what we give to Pakistan every year in foreign aid.
Solar?
No, that's everything.
That's everything.
Robust protection that would include non-nuclear as well.
That estimate has actually come down as vendors who specialize in this kind of protection.
Have looked at it, so there are estimates now on the order of $500 million, and the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission estimated that making this protection would cost the average rate payer an annual increase in their electric bill of $0.20 annually.
So it's a very affordable kind of a thing.
Money isn't the reason or shouldn't be the excuse for not doing anything.
Further questions from down the table here?
Yes.
There were people at the state of Oklahoma who were concerned about this issue.
What did you do in the claim that you do the table with the state of Oklahoma?
You were on top of the Maine issue more than anything else.
Yeah, sure.
legislature who cares about the issue could introduce an initiative and it could be similar or identical to the initiative LD-138-1 that was put forward in Maine.
There's usually committees that deal with energy that matters and That was what they started with in the state of Maine.
In their case, they have a joint House-Senate committee on energy that basically deals with the utilities and the regulatory committee.
And they started off being very skeptical because they hadn't even heard the VMP before and didn't know anything about it.
But we had, including Ambassador Wolsey, Ambassador Cooper, you know, we had a parade of experts who did understand this and impressed upon them how important this was.
And it kind of restores your faith in democracy after our long frustration here in Washington.
To see that it only took a matter of a few months for the legislatures in the state of Maine to do the right thing.
And what they did was they ended up passing the bill which would launch a plan, you know, to protect the Maine grid.
And I think the next step after that, when they examine the plans and the alternative costs of those plans, they're going to go forward with...
From the utilities.
Right.
Further.
Yes.
Just two quick sentences and then a question.
When I was serving in the Air Force, there was a radar in Texas that was along southward.
So it did exist.
So we can't fix that problem.
The other statement is I'm concerned about the solution set that is proposed by the SM-3s because a ship off any part of the coast could launch and that range would be impossible to prevent.
But the question I have is how do we...
Can we, for example, build resiliency or sustainability?
For example, having systems shut down, but when, after an event, turn on, in other words, a backup system.
What are the solutions to build redundancy or resilience or sustainability in case the EMP protection doesn't work?
Good question.
Hank?
On the SM-3, it's a kinematic issue.
Where you are located versus where the launch point is.
And of the interceptors that we have, it has demonstrated an ability to hit an ascent phase, both short, medium, and intermediate range missiles.
But it has to be near where they're being launched.
That's why I said I want four sites around the Gulf of Mexico.
That gives you an idea of where.
You know, what the separation has to be.
That could be used to something on the order of two when the higher velocity interceptors are available.
Peter asked if they have to be deployed at sea.
Can it be Navy ashore, Aegis ashore, or does it have to be at sea?
It could be Aegis ashore or Aegis at sea.
My point to you earlier was we have ships there now, and we're not using them.
Now, you know, maybe they wouldn't give you perfect defense, but it's better than no defense.
Okay.
You had a question?
Because they took the initiative.
Are you guys organized to go in if you get interest?
If people are able to generate interest in the state, do you guys go in and read like legislators?
Why don't you talk about the meeting in Atlanta?
This is a pickup team so far.
That's a good statement.
My task force, which includes Cindy Ayers, who's sitting across from you, we are willing to do that.
We will go anywhere.
To any state to try to help.
And Maine, part of the reason was because of that person.
I mean, Andrea Boland just happened to know about EMP. And another thing that I think that a lot of them found compelling about it is that Maine is right across the street.
I mean, their neighbor is eastern Canada, which is where the 1989 Hydro-Quebec storm hit.
And in fact, they were affected by some of that too, as well as part of the northeast blackout.
So Maine was no stranger.
To, you know, to these threats and to the consequences of blackouts.
In fact, they had had a serious blackout just from snowstorms that had occurred that winter.
And, you know, so that raised people's consciousness about the idea of a protracted blackout that could last weeks, months, or years.
I was asked in the congressional testimony, I did a short while back, whether NERC was positioned to deal with...
A full range of outages.
And I said, I thought probably tree branches were a little too much for them, but they could probably handle the squirrels.
Right.
We lost power for a week in El Derecho last year.
I know exactly.
Yeah, we did too.
Before you leave this, Peter, talk about the Atlanta meeting.
Yes, there's going to be a meeting beginning on 11 August.
The National Council of State Legislatures.
And, you know, our EMP coalition is going to have a substantial presence there to appeal to the states, to educate them.
Including Andrea.
Yeah, including Andrea.
Andrea Boland, in fact, is leading our delegation down there.
To appeal to the states, to educate them on this threat, and to encourage them to undertake state initiatives as a way of supplementing or as an alternative.
If Washington fails to act on this, the people should know and the state should have the option, at least, of knowing that other states are taking initiatives.
And there are other states, by the way, that are already moving in this direction.
I know North Carolina is very interested in taking initiatives, as is Texas.
Alaska was one of the first states, under Sarah Palin, they actually passed a bill through the state legislature calling upon the Department of Homeland Security to work with Alaska.
And Utah.
So some states are already aware of this threat and are moving on their own to act to protect their people.
We've got a few more minutes.
Yes.
I have a question given the obvious difficulty of getting things happening in Washington.
And then we have, for example, the growing, developing smart grid.
It doesn't appear that there's a lot of security being built into the smart grid.
So sounding like it's becoming a smart but windy grid.
And then we've dissolved the strategic grain reserves that we used to have during the Cold War.
And so it seems like our ability to withstand food crises that could be a result makes all these things more urgent.
Is there something at the local level that people can also do to complement these efforts at the national level, whether it's microgrids or local food, something or other, that we can become more resilient at the local level and so everyone can take part in this effort?
And I just let folks at Washington fix it for us.
I think it's largely going to be a matter of state governance.
It's sort of hard to do things city by city or county by county or whatever, but most state governments know their turf reasonably well and are positioned to get insurers and...
And other businesses that are highly relevant to this and the utilities working together in public-private partnerships.
I think state by state is probably the way to go.
Peter?
Peter, I have a question for you.
The severest critics of EMP threat, not from the Sun, but Nucre, is that yield has to be in the megaton range.
The weapon, therefore, is going to be very heavy and, therefore, can only be launched by an ICBM. Can you answer those?
Sure.
Those are myths, and I'm afraid a lot of those myths derived from my own work at the CIA, you know, some 20 years ago when we identified the preferred Soviet ICBM was the SS-18 Mod 1, which had a huge 25-megaton warhead on it.
But they were going after our hardened, critical...
Military critical infrastructures, which were hardened against EMP. So they wanted to generate the strongest field strengths they could at that time.
And also at that time, the technology of enhanced or super EMP weapons was not known.
When you're talking about the civilian critical infrastructures, the grid, communications, transportation systems, these have never been hardened against EMP. They're very soft targets.
And one of the things the commission did is we took modern...
We looked at technologies from all of these infrastructures.
We put them in the EMP simulators and looked at the field strengths that were necessary.
You know, they will fail at very low field strengths.
In fact, we could not come up with a yield, a low enough yield, where we said, well, you don't have to worry about weapons of this yield or below because the EMP isn't strong enough.
Any nuclear weapon, any nuclear weapon, doesn't matter what the yield is.
It doesn't have to be a super EMP weapon.
Basically at 30 kilometers altitude.
And you don't need a missile either, by the way.
You can take a meteorological balloon and get up to 30 kilometers with a crude first-generation weapon, and if you detonated that anywhere over the eastern seaboard, it would probably collapse the eastern grid that generates 70% of our electricity.
So it's a really great catastrophic option for a low-tech adversary, low-tech where nuclear is concerned.
So you don't even strictly need ballistic missiles to pull this off.
And you don't need high-yield, sophisticated weapons.
Although those weapons, that kind of technology is clearly within the grasp.
We think the North Koreans probably have the super.
And if the North Koreans have got it, Iran is not going to be far behind because they're working together.
Yes?
Yes, I think I'll direct this to Director Woolsey.
A little bit about attribution now.
You were talking about...
The fact that basically we want to see, we've heard that the threats are North Korea and Iran, but I tend to think that the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China are probably sponsoring them,
and they're probably following Sun Tzu's concept of when you're weak, when you're strong, pretend you're weak, whereas Iran and North Korea arguably would be doing the contrary.
But also Japan, I'm wondering if you could really trust Japan, because Japan is a cyber partner of ours, and I'm also wondering whether or not the Russians and Chinese, they probably have a lot of their agents undercover as Islamists, so that if we heard that Iran attacked us, they might say they were doing it for Allah, but they might actually be doing it for another hour.
The problem with some of these areas, it's true for EMP, and it's true for cyber, and it could well be true for the folks who use the AK-47s on the Transformers in San Jose, is that we are used to, historically, knowing who it was.
We were fighting.
People wore uniforms, Japanese planes that attacked Pearl Harbor, had big red moons on them.
That was only a fringe problem for most of the 20th century wars of not knowing who you were dealing with and who they represented and why they had come against you.
People actually still declared war back then.
That's no longer the case.
If you got an EMP shot from something coming around the South Pole, First of all, you might not know it came around the South Pole because you might not have your radars trained right, but you might not have the foggiest idea whether it was the North Koreans or the Iranians or somebody else, or of their motivation.
And one has suppositions that the Chinese need us to buy their stuff, and so they're perhaps somewhat less likely to come try to knock us out.
It might depend on the circumstances.
There are lots of possibilities in which you could have a serious threat of that sort from China.
So EMP is just one, although it's an incredibly important one, is just one of the circumstances of modern hostilities and people, Hezbollah working with Lebanon and Hezbollah working with Syria and Sunni.
Gorillas coming into the picture, are they Al-Qaeda or are they not?
All of this is a mess.
And we can't deal with all of it successfully.
We've got to take the things first and foremost, I think, that would really essentially take down our civilization.
and I take my hat off to Peter and Hank and the folks at Bob and the folks who have been working on this a lot longer than I have for keeping zeroed in on this, and I think they're now starting to get some traction in the country as a whole.
But these problems of who's doing this and why aren't going to go away, I'm afraid they're going to be with us for a long time.
We've got another few minutes very far back.
How is the room with the program center?
Is the United States working with Mexico and Canada in case of...
I don't know of anything yet that's come up to me.
Part of the whole point of this is that we're not doing anything about EMP even within this country, let alone working with our allies.
Not yet.
Hank?
Well, there were a couple of things I wanted to catch up on.
I'm trying to keep up with all this.
It slipped my mind.
I'll write them down.
Come back.
I listened to the questions.
We'll close down here in about another 5-10 minutes.
Go ahead, Peter.
Pakistan.
I was told to announce that the parking garage closes at 7 o'clock if people are parked in the parking garage.
And so, you know, you've got to be aware of that.
Anybody who's parked in the parking garage, feel free to wave at us as you leave.
Otherwise, we'll keep going another few minutes.
So I missed the question about Pakistan.
What about it?
Here they have nuclear, and it's a fragile regime.
Do you see that as a major?
I do see them as a potential threat.
They also have a close working relationship with North Korea.
Their gory medium-range ballistic missile is the North Korean Nodong, which they just souped up.
And also because their regime is so unstable.
What if those weapons fell under the hands of the Taliban or radicals within Pakistan?
So they're also a concern.
And there's one, although people haven't asked this question, I don't want us to break up without this point.
The plan the Commission came up with is what we call an all-hazard strategy.
This plan wouldn't just protect you against DMP, nuclear, natural.
It would protect against all hazards, or at least mitigate them.
For instance, the worst-case cyber scenario, where you use computer bugs and computer hacking to manipulate the SCADA systems, okay?
Change the way the electricity comes into the big transformers.
SCADA is supervisory control and data acquisition.
It's the control systems.
Yeah, exactly.
If you had a surge arrestor to protect against the nuclear natural EMP, it would also protect against that, because it doesn't care whether it's an EMP or whether it's a different waveform that's manipulated by computer cyber-type bugs.
The Faraday cage, which is just a big metal box that you could put around these big transformers.
Make it thick enough, in addition to protecting against EMP, it'll also stop rifle fire or rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
It also would stop tree branches and trees that could get hurled about by tornadoes and hurricanes, which is the most common failure mode during these storms.
So, you know, these are just sort of common-sense things that you think the electric power industry would have done a long time ago just to protect against...
Normal storms and things of that sort.
So we're not just talking about EMP protection.
If this small amount of money we're spent would be taking care of the whole range in an all-hazards approach.
Time for two more.
Here and here, and we're going to call them.
I was just wondering if you could comment on the payload of the Marine satellite launch that went tumbling out of control, supposedly, at about 500 kilometers, tracks over the central part of the United States to the east coast.
That's a 220. Yeah, it weighs 220 pounds.
Right.
Kilograms.
500 pounds.
Well, I'm not sure if it were detonated.
It doesn't matter.
If it were detonated 100, 200, 300 miles up above, it would send out a large EMP pulse.
And whether or not it was...
Totally devastating or not.
It might depend on its size.
I'm not sure I understand your question.
Are you saying because the satellite was tumbling that that would interfere with the EMP attack?
No.
Well, that has been asked.
It wouldn't.
It wouldn't make any difference.
The gamma rays propagate spherically, and so it wouldn't matter what the position of the satellite was.
And it still could be detonated, even though it's not.
Yeah, sure.
Put a timer on it.
You'd probably have multiple fusing options for it.
You know, you wouldn't need a radio signal and probably wouldn't use a radio signal or something like that.
You just have it go off automatically.
Hank, you get the last word.
You know orbital mechanics, right?
Right.
There were two things, I thought, to tie together.
First of all, on the Panamanian ship, whatever, the North Korean ship, at least I've seen reports that that same ship earlier this year was in China and in Russia, to the point you were on.
These folks play together.
And the question about the scenarios, I talked with, I'm not going to give out names because I don't want to get in particular trouble inside the bureaucracy about Peter's suggestion of including an EMP scenario and I was told by a fairly senior official there that nobody pays any attention to the scenarios and it was suggested to me that what we needed was a national exercise on all this and I said I'm really not interested in a national exercise because Washington's dysfunctional,
and I can't think of a more dysfunctional organization than DHS. But what about a regional one?
And I'm very interested in pursuing that with the National Guard and within Region 4 and the states surrounding that part of my home state, South Carolina.
Thank you for joining us.
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