Journalists and commentators mainly on the political right, prompted partly by a government report in March, have been seeking to keep public attention on the possibility of a society-devastating electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. They focus mainly on a nuclear bomb as the cause.
EMPs, whether caused by a bomb or the sun, are an old concern. In 2011, the New York Times’s William Broad reported that former Republican speaker of the house Newt Gingrich had been “ringing alarm bells” about them. In the present venue, a 2014 media report quoted commentators in asking “Could an ‘electric Armageddon’ bring civilization ‘to a cold, dark halt’? Observers in the media consider huge electromagnetic disruptions, both solar and human-caused.” Last September, Physics Today’s David Kramer reported on EMPs.
In recent months, however, conservative media have emphasized them. And though that government report called EMPs a “risk,” reporters and opinion writers have been calling them a “threat.”
In a bland statement about the federal report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) summarized what it called “electromagnetic risks caused by a man-made EMP or a naturally occurring solar weather event.” Either, the GAO said, “could have a significant impact on the nation’s electric grid as well as other infrastructure sectors...such as communications. These risks could lead to power outages over broad geographic areas for extended durations.” Responding to “congressional requesters” and recalling a 2008 report, the GAO called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “identify internal roles to address electromagnetic risks, and collect additional risk inputs to further inform assessment efforts.” It also called for DHS and the Energy Department to “collaborate to ensure critical electrical infrastructure assets are identified” and to “engage with industry stakeholders to identify and prioritize risk-management activities” including R&D.
No blandness appeared, however, in a 13 June Wall Street Journal op-ed calling the GAO report “an alarming account of the bureaucratic dysfunction obstructing EMP mitigation” and complaining that measures recommended in 2008 to upgrade the grid and protect power plants haven’t been advanced. The headline warned, “EMPs: A threat we’re not ready for.” The subheadline exclaimed that an “electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear device or solar storm would be catastrophic, yet the U.S. remains unprepared.”
The op-ed invoked the authority of a 2013 study from Lloyd’s of London to assert that an “EMP produced by solar activity could cause extended blackouts for 40 million Americans and cost as much as $2.6 trillion.” It added that in 2014, “the executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security told Congress that EMPs pose ‘existential threats that could kill 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse.’” It ended with this political accusation: “The departments of Homeland Security and Energy are not protecting Americans from these threats. They are not doing their jobs.”
Notable from just before the GAO report’s appearance was a February National Review commentary that began this way:
North Korea launched its second satellite on Saturday, yet the national press continues to ignore this existential threat. The White House has not recognized that a nuclear-armed North Korea has demonstrated an ability to kill most Americans with an electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack. And White House spokesmen and the media have misled the public with unjustified assurances that North Korea has not yet miniaturized nuclear warheads for missile or satellite delivery.
We, who have spent our professional lifetimes analyzing and defending against nuclear-missile threats, warned years ago that North Korea’s Unha-3 space launch vehicle could carry a small nuclear warhead and detonate it a hundred or so miles over the United States to create an EMP, leading to a protracted nationwide blackout. The resulting societal chaos could kill millions.
The piece also renewed warnings that Iran poses an EMP threat. Here’s how National Review identified the authors, most of whose names have frequently appeared elsewhere as well in public EMP discussions:
Ambassador R. James Woolsey, former director of central intelligence, is the chancellor of the Institute of World Politics and the chairman of the Leadership Council of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; William R. Graham was President Reagan’s science adviser, and acting administrator of NASA, and is the chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission; Ambassador Henry Cooper was the director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; Fritz Ermarth was chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served in the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA.
EMP articles in 2016 haven’t been confined to right-leaning media, but several conservative publications have joined their kindred spirits at National Review and the WSJ. An EMP news article, framed in terms of the the GAO report, appeared in May at the Washington Free Beacon, which takes its name from a passage in a Ronald Reagan speech. A similar piece appeared at PJ Media, which tellingly lists “doctored climate change data” as a leading example of what it covers. In a February article, PJ Media reported that Woolsey “cautioned that the threat will intensify the longer politicians wait to address the security of the electric grid” and that he believes “federal government officials and experts in the electrical business do not want the public to believe the grid is vulnerable so they do not focus on the issue.” A May posting at American Thinker began, “The nightmare scenario of an America sent back centuries in time before electricity, refrigeration, and smart phones has grown unnervingly closer with the presence of two North Korean satellites with orbits over a blissfully unaware American populace and an Obama administration indifferent to the apocalyptic threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.” EMP pieces also appeard in January at the Washington Examiner and in May at the Daily Caller.
An August 2015 Washington Times piece by Woolsey and Pry had carried the headline “A Shariah-approved nuclear attack: An EMP would accomplish ‘death to America.’” It got boosted by an Investor’s Business Daily editorial. Two years earlier, IBD had posted the EMP editorial “How North Korea could destroy the United States.” In an April 2016 Washington Times op-ed, Woolsey and Pry reiterated their warnings about North Korea.
But the recent coverage hasn’t appeared exclusively on the right. The Washington Post posted articles in January and June. The first tied worries of a nuclear-burst EMP to the Republican Party and relied heavily on the views of physicist Yousaff Butt, whose November 2012 New York Times op-ed warned about the threat of “a powerful ‘once-in-a-century’ solar storm.” That January Post article played down the risk, saying that an “EMP requires a very specific combination of things coming together in order to be effective. It requires a nuclear explosion with a payload...substantially larger than the recent test in North Korea, for example. It requires a missile that can deliver the bomb to a precise point in the atmosphere. And it requires a willingness to bear the brunt of the action.” But the article emphasized the threat from solar activity.
The Post’s June piece came from former American Meteorological Society president Alexander MacDonald, who recently retired as director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. He observed, “The threat the Democrats see is climate change. The threat the Republicans see is terrorism on a massive scale.” MacDonald proposed that the “core solution to both of these problems is a technology that was not fully ready five years ago but is ready now: an underground high voltage direct current (HVDC) electric transmission network.” His piece explained that such an “underground energy interstate” would be shielded from EMPs and would facilitate defeat of the intermittency problem of solar and wind energy.
A search of the term “electromagnetic pulse” in the New York Times, though, turns up mentions in 2016 only in transcripts of Republican presidential debates in January and February. Also on the left, last year a former assistant secretary of defense for operational energy coauthored an EMP piece at Slate that mildly questioned, but by no means rejected, the general sense of alarm.
Among right-leaning publications, the Wall Street Journal has a long record of opinion pieces raising EMP alarm. Three years ago, from Woolsey and Pry, it was “How North Korea could cripple the US: A single nuke exploded above America could cause a national blackout for months.” They declared that a “surgical strike to prevent North Korean development of an ICBM has never been more urgent.”
Two years ago, also from Woolsey and Pry, it was “The growing threat from an EMP attack: A nuclear device detonated above the U.S. could kill millions, and we’ve done almost nothing to prepare.” That op-ed observed that “surge arrestors, faraday cages and other devices that prevent EMP from damaging electronics, as well micro-grids that are inherently less susceptible to EMP, have been used by the Defense Department for more than 50 years to protect crucial military installations and strategic forces.” The authors added, “These can be adapted to protect civilian infrastructure as well. The cost of protecting the national electric grid, according to a 2008 EMP Commission estimate, would be about $2 billion—roughly what the US gives each year in foreign aid to Pakistan.”
One year ago, from Cooper and Pry, it was “The threat to melt the electric grid: An electromagnetic-pulse attack from North Korea or another U.S. enemy would cause staggering devastation.” They warned against “electromagnetic-pulse barbarians of the 21st century” and noted that, after a decade of absence, the North American Aerospace Defense Command was moving back into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., for protection from EMPs. They also lamented the death of various pieces of federal EMP-preparation legislation.
On 20 June, the WSJ ran three EMP letters. Two of them leveled the accusation that the Obama administration worries about climate change when, according to the accusers, EMPs are a far more dangerous threat.
But the third summarized the argument for alarm. It warned, “EMP from the sun might last a month and destroy unprotected electric grids around the world. An enemy missile with a hydrogen bomb warhead detonated far above the Earth’s atmosphere could shut down electric grids from coast to coast in North America. Consequences would include no functioning pumps at gas stations, no working cash registers, no pumping of water out of reservoirs or pumping of natural gas or oil in pipelines, communications limited to word-of-mouth and hand-delivered notes and no functioning banks or governments.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
