Ex-CIA Director: We're Not Doing Nearly Enough To Protect Against the EMP Threat

An anonymous reader writes: Last week saw the release of an open letter written to President Obama by a committee of notable political, security and defense experts — which includes past and present members of Congress, ambassadors, CIA directors, and others — on the country's concerning level of vulnerability to a natural or man-made Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). An EMP has very real potential for crippling much of our electrical grid instantaneously. Not only would that immediately throw the social order into chaos, but the timeline to repair and restart the grid in most estimated scenarios would take months to a year or more.

Executive Director of the EMP Task Force Dr Peter Pry said, "Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country. ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid. This is unusual, because in the case of every other critical infrastructure, there's an agency in the U.S. government that can require them to take actions for public safety. For example, the Food & Drug Administration can order certain medicines kept off shelves to protect the public safety. ... The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission doesn't have those legal powers or authorities."

Comments

Re:Causes on EMP

[Etherwalk]

The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.

Actually, in the case of a single or small number of nuclear blasts, or a low-atmo nuclear detonation, restoring the power grid is one of the first problems you have.

If you're dealing with total war with a major power, it's pretty much the end of the world anyway. But if you're dealing with a couple of nukes from a newly nuclear nation or as part of a proportional response in a conflict between major powers (game theory in a world where nobody is stupid enough to destroy the world), you have a lot of refugees to deal with and a lot of infrastructure to keep going.

Do you have military needs that take priority? Of course. But you still have civilian needs that you need to provide for and which give your economy the strength to fight a war.

The power grid is very interconnected to provide redundancy. If possible, the major interconnects should *all* be required to be hardened against EMP. I don't know offhand how hard that is, but losing the power grid through New York and DC is a lot better than losing every power plant in the country...

Re:Causes on EMP

[monkeyxpress]

The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.

That's why I find this quite sinister. It looks like they are just blatantly misleading the public to get more funding. If they said they are concerned about someone using a nuclear weapon to take out the power grid, everyone would quickly point out that the problem is not protecting the power grid, but that someone has a nuclear weapon. By making it all fuzzy and saying there are natural causes too, they create a new dissociated threat that most people can't really understand. Further since an EMP is extremely unlikely to happen, they can spend endless amounts 'protecting' the grid and we'll never know whether it actually works.

It's just the modern equivalent of selling magic stones that protect you from monsters. I hope these guys are just thick though, and not actually intelligent people knowingly misleading everyone so they can buy flash cars and houses.

Re:Causes on EMP

[gtall]

Solar flares. We know they will happen, we know big ones will happen.

Re:Surely this is not that hard...

[Karmashock]

As to some philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, other thinkers occasionally having troubled minds... that is nothing new.

If I told you that the man that invented the airplane was convinced elves lived in his ears... would that mean the plane was an unsound invention?

Your argument is literally ad hominem. You're saying that because something was wrong with the person that made an argument that the argument itself is invalid.

I mean... are you literally retarded? Am I speaking to a someone with a football helmet on his head that types on this forum by banging his head into the keyboard?

I mean... you're an AC... so that is quite likely... most of you seem to have the IQ of a stunned trout. But I mean... how can you not know ad hominem is bullshit at this point? You people baffle me. You really do. Fucking learn... anything.

Also it is spelled "xenophobic"... from the greek... xenos.

Also, MAD has nothing to do with xenophobia. Just fyi... totally unrelated concepts.

NASA agrees

[Twinbee]

The bottom line direct from NASA is that there's a 12% chance every decade (or 72% chance every century if you do the math) of a direct hit from the sun. Such an event could send us back to the middle ages, or at least cause widespread destruction and panic (no water, electricity, transport, etc. for days, weeks, possibly months, and all or most computer circuitry, including SSDs (though not optical media) would be frazzled).

I'm going to temper that apocalyptic-looking premise with a quote from that NASA article which may provide a little... comfort.

The worst geomagnetic storm of the Space Age, which knocked out power across Quebec in March 1989, registered Dst=-600 nT. Modern estimates of Dst for the Carrington Event itself range from -800 nT to a staggering -1750 nT.

So, that's 'only' up to 3x as bad as an event that happened in 1989, and we seemed to have got through that okay (their power was cut for 11 hours apparently).

Maybe even NASA is over-reacting a bit on this then..... But like CO2 emissions, it's best not to take the chance. It is possible to protect the grid to a large extent if the world cared enough the risk. I think we're talking in the range of $billions of investment to save $trillions of damage when the inevitable happens (definitely a question of when, rather than if).

Re:Telling it straight

[guises]

Well you can read the wikipedia article if you want, but all of these procedural rules boil down to pretty much the same thing: good rules which exist to foster informed consideration and thoughtful discussion of pending legislation become tools of abuse when the goal stops being about passing good legislation and starts being about pleasing your campaign donors.

The Senate hold was originally about giving a senator time to gather additional information on an issue, now it's a way to stop bills which a senator doesn't like without needing or allowing a vote on them. It can be defeated by a cloture vote, but this requires 60/100 senators rather than a simple majority. This rule has been used to great effect over the last six years to stop anything and everything. You may have heard that our congress over that time has been the least productive congress ever? This is what they've been using to achieve that. Most famously though, Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd used secret holds to stop an anti-corruption transparency bill (temporarily - they were found out pretty quickly). Stevens was later convicted for corruption related to taking money from oil companies, though that conviction was later thrown out for procedural reasons.

Re:Telling it straight

[dj245]

and the person can put a hold on the bill so it can't come to the floor for a vote and they can do it anonymously

Wait what? Can someone explain this to an outsider? Snide comments aside this sounds like the exact opposite of a democracy. I thought only the President had, what it sounds like, something akin to veto powers over bills.

There are two different bills that the GP referenced, the Grid Act and the SHIELD Act.

The GRID act gives special emergency powers to The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to order utilities to do something. This was widely rejected by the industry because some of the powers could force the utility to keep their plants online, even if their machines were being damaged. That's not reasonable. If a grid problem gets to the point where it is damaging generators and other grid infrastructure, we should shut it down. Intentionally damaging a bunch of generators isn't going to keep the grid online if things get to that point.

The SHIELD act was about electromagnetic interference. FERC asked NERC last month to look into this some more. I would rather a government agency with some knowledge and experience on the matter write the rules, rather than a bunch of politicians who are pushing a bill that a lobbyist wrote.