Two recent economic indicators reached out of the newspaper and banged me on the head this week, indicating not only are we not on an economic recovery as President Obama promised, but we are heading for rougher times and a lot of people know it,...maybe not intellectually, but at least they know something is wrong.
Not only from the newspaper, but from a friend of mine who went to the gun show this weekend. He said he has not seen as large as crowd in memory. He told me he saw a 60 year old woman buy a folding stock Mini-14, then bought eight 30 round magazines at another table. My friend said he later saw her empty handed except for a heavy sack which he thought she put the Mini-14 rifle in the car and was buying ammunition. He had many examples of this. Some of the vendors told him they could not keep ammunition on hand.
There is a just published financial report on Americans wanting to be closer to their cash. They are cashing out Certificates of Deposits (CDs) and putting the money in bank checking and savings accounts so they can have it closer and more ready at hand.
People have pulled a reported $145.3 Billion dollars out of mutual funds in the first 8 months this year. That jives with my first and second hand information on many government employees borrowing money from their Thrift Saving Plans (TSP). I know maybe a dozen people who did that just to purchase Survival items,..solar power generators, canned dehydrated foods and Gold - Silver bullion.
A VP at a financial analysis company states "At times of uncertainty, there is a natural human tendency to stay liquid and have money easily accessible."
Certificates of Deposit have declined by $200 Billion in the first six months of this year. Savings accounts have increased by $171 Billion, but we have not seen the difference invested into consumer spending that is tracked by government and public organizations. My bet is that it is going into the untracked markets such as firearms, ammunition, survival and camping gear, and related Survival material such as power supplies, batteries, and solar panels....maybe even land purchases.
To make the economic indicators much worse is the record increase in the U.S. Poverty rate, expect to move to the 15% level when the final report is finished.
This is what the news states: "2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent. Largest increase on record and highest it has been since pre-1973 levels which spawned massive Government welfare program development and spending."
"Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis."
This is in keeping with our assertion that a very probably spark of either a gradual collapse or a dynamic collapse will be when the gap between the "haves" and "have nots" (also know as the people below the poverty level) get so big as they government cannot tax us enough nor divert spending enough to provide the basics for the people below the poverty line. This is a recipe for full blown anarchy and violence.
Get ready for it.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Urban Survival Planning - Can You Recomend the Two Best Survival Books?
UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received the following question on a Private Message from Facebook: "Hey UrbanMan, I have been exposed to some type of Survival concepts or another for a few years now. I thought most of it was either people just wanting to live on their own or the gun nut type. Since looking at several Survival websites I have begin to think that there is something more mainstream about Survival than not. I have a family (wife, two daughters) and live in a townhouse. I'm in the insurance (underwriting) business, so I have a background in looking at and assessing risks. I'm looking at getting educated more on Survival and about all the possibilities you all are calling a potential collapse. Can you recommend one or two of the best books to read to get an idea of what Survival and Prepping are all about. I don't have much time to read, so maybe two books at the most? Oh, and thanks for your articles on Map Reading and Guns, as I find them very interesting. P.S. Actualy was drove me to start researching this was the movie, "The Road". Do you get many comments on this movie?"
Okay, fellow Urbanman. For the sake of giving some examples and entertaining you as you read through these survival books, I am going to assume that you would want to read some Survival stories based on potential scenarios as opposed to a "how to" type book.
I would have to recommend you read "Patriots", by James Wesley, Rawles,......comma before the last name? don't ask,.....and "One Second After" by William Forstchen.
Patriots is about a group of alike minded individuals and couples who envision a economic collapse and plan for it including a stocked and prepared retreat in Southern Idaho to rally at. Good lessons in this book,..good story,...and, well written.
One Second After is about a EMP attack on this country, which destroys the utilities infrastructure and plunges a small town in North Carolina into the dark ages. The benefit of this book is it is basically a "what not to do" story or otherwise a story about people who are totally unprepared. Good story though.
Read both and see which example best suits you. If you are in the insurance business, you can think of Survival Planning and Preparation, at whatever level, to be a family type insurance policy for uncertain times ahead, which we are surely looking at now.
I have short reviews on both books in my Book Review section of this page (see left hand side) as well as a book carousel at the bottom on this site with both these books as well as others.
Even small amount of Survival planning, Gear and Material acquisition and some knowledge and training would go along way in case something happened along the lines of a economic collapse, EMP attack, civil unrest leading to wide scale violence,...disease pandemic,....and other catastrophic events that would place you and your family in danger. Probably the four primary things you should think about are: Survival Firearms mainly for protection; stocking water; stocking food; and, a plan to go somewhere that is safe - perhaps you have family or friends in rural areas.
P.S. The movie, The Road, is fanciful and best serves to show people where you do not want to be, come the collapse. And don't get me wrong here. I hope that we never see a collapse, but I'm not willing to bet lives on it.
Okay, fellow Urbanman. For the sake of giving some examples and entertaining you as you read through these survival books, I am going to assume that you would want to read some Survival stories based on potential scenarios as opposed to a "how to" type book.
I would have to recommend you read "Patriots", by James Wesley, Rawles,......comma before the last name? don't ask,.....and "One Second After" by William Forstchen.
Patriots is about a group of alike minded individuals and couples who envision a economic collapse and plan for it including a stocked and prepared retreat in Southern Idaho to rally at. Good lessons in this book,..good story,...and, well written.
One Second After is about a EMP attack on this country, which destroys the utilities infrastructure and plunges a small town in North Carolina into the dark ages. The benefit of this book is it is basically a "what not to do" story or otherwise a story about people who are totally unprepared. Good story though.
Read both and see which example best suits you. If you are in the insurance business, you can think of Survival Planning and Preparation, at whatever level, to be a family type insurance policy for uncertain times ahead, which we are surely looking at now.
I have short reviews on both books in my Book Review section of this page (see left hand side) as well as a book carousel at the bottom on this site with both these books as well as others.
Even small amount of Survival planning, Gear and Material acquisition and some knowledge and training would go along way in case something happened along the lines of a economic collapse, EMP attack, civil unrest leading to wide scale violence,...disease pandemic,....and other catastrophic events that would place you and your family in danger. Probably the four primary things you should think about are: Survival Firearms mainly for protection; stocking water; stocking food; and, a plan to go somewhere that is safe - perhaps you have family or friends in rural areas.
P.S. The movie, The Road, is fanciful and best serves to show people where you do not want to be, come the collapse. And don't get me wrong here. I hope that we never see a collapse, but I'm not willing to bet lives on it.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Urban Survival Preparation - Civil Unrest into a Collapse
Civil Unrest into a Collapse,...or perhaps civil unrest as a result of a collapse.........
With the recent civil unrest occurring in Los Angeles after Police shot and killed a Guatemalan immigrant who was threatening them with a knife, we starting thinking about the potential for civil unrest and anarchy resulting from large scale protests and civil unrest over social issues.......and not just from the protests over perceived injustice. We must face the fact that the policies of this Country has bred a dependancy upon Government.
When the Government is no longer able to provide for people,...this change will create large groups of angry people demanding their "share". There will come a point when the government just cannot provide anymore. With the growing gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" and the elimination, or at least great reduction of the Middle Class, we will hit a point where there are a great percent of the population who think they are not getting theirs.
Add possible, nay probable, unrest and anarchist activity from radical ethic groups, such as the stated on-going strategy of militant Hispanics to implement the “Reconquista Plan” where parts of the Southwestern United States revert back to Latino control, or God Forbid - Mexican Governmental control - and we have a caldron of problems brewing. Whether it will cause a collapse or be initiated from another form of collapse remains to be seen.
In fact there is a series of books of post collapse on the Reconquista Movement, called “Domestic Enemies” by Matthew Bracken that is actually pretty good reading and I’ll probably get around to doing a book review on it sometime.
Mob mentality and behavior, spawn more Mob mentality and behavior, not necessarily to the intent where it can threaten large areas of population especially for durations longer than a few days. However, the ability to hunker down, protect yourself and your family and live for a few days to a week or so if you found yourself in an area influenced or controlled by a Mob, could be life sustaining.
Imagine if these riots went on for longer than the 4 days that it did and you found yourself forced to leave a safe and defendable position in order to procure food items. That would be dangerous, especially looking like an Anglo in a Hispanic riot or vice versa.
The lesson learned from this is to add the indicators of a riot or civil unrest into your pending collapse indicator tracking system especially if you live in or near urban areas where the lower income level of the population live as this group of people are more pre-disposed to demonstrate and/or demonstrate violenetly against all levels of government as they actually are or just feel more slighted by authorities than other groups. Concentrations of ethnic minorities are also viable subject groups from which mob’s are raised due to the same reasons.
Now to be clear here, I am offering no judgment on the validity of complaints that generate first civil un-rest, then mobs and the resultant possibility of violence. Every group’s perception is their reality. I am more concerned about the resulting dangers from mob operations than the “why”. You should be too. And then plan the "what" you are doing to do.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Urban Survival Planning - More on the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) Threat
If you are a Survivalist and/or a reader of this site and other Survivalist sites, you either have heard about, or have read the Survival novels “Lights Out” and “One Second After”. As I have said many times before, these well written novels, as well as the Survivor classic “Patriots” (and others) serve as a Wargaming and lessons learned experience for those of us planning and preparing for The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAKI) or otherwise known as the Coming Collapse. Since we as Americans have not faced a catastrophic event plunging us into a collapse and therefore widespread Survivalist scenario, we draw possibilities, lessons, techniques and ultimately “wargame” what can happen from the stories of these novels.
As with the story lines in ”Lights Out” and “One Second After”, nuclear devices are detonated creating an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) across wide portions of the United States, collapsing our delicate financial and communications infrastructure which lead to a collapse of utilities and emergency response infrastructure. I hope this article on EMP from STRATFOR enlightens and educates on the EMP threat. Be Prepared.
Gauging the Threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack
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 .
Defining Electromagnetic Pulse
EMP can be generated from natural sources such as lightning or solar storms interacting with the earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetic field. It can also be artificially created using a nuclear weapon or a variety of non-nuclear devices. It has long been proven that EMP can disable electronics. Its ability to do so has been demonstrated by solar storms, lightning strikes and atmospheric nuclear explosions before the ban on such tests. The effect has also been recreated by EMP simulators designed to reproduce the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear device and study how the phenomenon impacts various kinds of electrical and electronic devices such as power grids, telecommunications and computer systems, both civilian and military.
The effects of an EMP — both tactical and strategic — have the potential to be quite significant, but they are also quite uncertain. Such widespread effects can be created during a high-altitude nuclear detonation (generally above 30 kilometers, or about 18 miles). This widespread EMP effect is referred to as high-altitude EMP or HEMP. Test data from actual high-altitude nuclear explosions is extremely limited. Only the United States and the Soviet Union conducted atmospheric nuclear tests above 20 kilometers and, combined, they carried out fewer than 20 actual tests.
As late as 1962 — a year before the Partial Test Ban Treaty went into effect, prohibiting its signatories from conducting aboveground test detonations and ending atmospheric tests — scientists were surprised by the HEMP effect. During a July 1962 atmospheric nuclear test called “Starfish Prime,” which took place 400 kilometers above Johnston Island in the Pacific, electrical and electronic systems were damaged in Hawaii , some 1,400 kilometers away. The Starfish Prime test was not designed to study HEMP, and the effect on Hawaii , which was so far from ground zero, startled U.S. scientists.
High-altitude nuclear testing effectively ended before the parameters and effects of HEMP were well understood. The limited body of knowledge that was gained from these tests remains a highly classified matter in both the United States and Russia. Consequently, it is difficult to speak intelligently about EMP or publicly debate the precise nature of its effects in the open-source arena.
The importance of the EMP threat should not be understated. There is no doubt that the impact of a HEMP attack would be significant. But any actor plotting such an attack would be dealing with immense uncertainties — not only about the ideal altitude at which to detonate the device based on its design and yield in order to maximize its effect but also about the nature of those effects and just how devastating they could be.
Non-nuclear devices that create an EMP-like effect, such as high-power microwave (HPM) devices, have been developed by several countries, including the United States . The most capable of these devices are thought to have significant tactical utility and more powerful variants may be able to achieve effects more than a kilometer away. But at the present time, such weapons do not appear to be able to create an EMP effect large enough to affect a city, much less an entire country. Because of this, we will confine our discussion of the EMP threat to HEMP caused by a nuclear detonation, which also happens to be the most prevalent scenario appearing in the media.
Attack Scenarios
In order to have the best chance of causing the type of immediate and certain EMP damage to the United States on a continent-wide scale, as discussed in many media reports, a nuclear weapon (probably in the megaton range) would need to be detonated well above 30 kilometers somewhere over the American Midwest. Modern commercial aircraft cruise at a third of this altitude. Only the United States , United Kingdom , France , Russia and China possess both the mature warhead design and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability to conduct such an attack from their own territory, and these same countries have possessed that capability for decades. (Shorter range missiles can achieve this altitude, but the center of the United States is still 1,000 kilometers from the Eastern Seaboard and more than 3,000 kilometers from the Western Seaboard — so just any old Scud missile won’t do.)
The HEMP threat is nothing new. It has existed since the early 1960s, when nuclear weapons were first mated with ballistic missiles, and grew to be an important component of nuclear strategy. Despite the necessarily limited understanding of its effects, both the United States and Soviet Union almost certainly included the use of weapons to create HEMPs in both defensive and especially offensive scenarios, and both post-Soviet Russia and China are still thought to include HEMP in some attack scenarios against the United States.
However, there are significant deterrents to the use of nuclear weapons in a HEMP attack against the United States , and nuclear weapons have not been used in an attack anywhere since 1945. Despite some theorizing that a HEMP attack might be somehow less destructive and therefore less likely to provoke a devastating retaliatory response, such an attack against the United States would inherently and necessarily represent a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland and the idea that the United States would not respond in kind is absurd. The United States continues to maintain the most credible and survivable nuclear deterrent in the world, and any actor contemplating a HEMP attack would have to assume not that they might experience some limited reprisal but that the U.S. reprisal would be full, swift and devastating.
Countries that build nuclear weapons do so at great expense. This is not a minor point. Even today, a successful nuclear weapons program is the product of years — if not a decade or more — and the focused investment of a broad spectrum of national resources. Nuclear weapons also are developed as a deterrent to attack, not with the intention of immediately using them offensively. Once a design has achieved an initial capability, the focus shifts to establishing a survivable deterrent that can withstand first a conventional and then a nuclear first strike so that the nuclear arsenal can serve its primary purpose as a deterrent to attack. The coherency, skill and focus this requires are difficult to overstate and come at immense cost — including opportunity cost — to the developing country. The idea that Washington will interpret the use of a nuclear weapon to create a HEMP as somehow less hostile than the use of a nuclear weapon to physically destroy an American city is not something a country is likely to gamble on.
In other words, for the countries capable of carrying out a HEMP attack, the principles of nuclear deterrence and the threat of a full-scale retaliatory strike continue to hold and govern, just as they did during the most tension-filled days of the Cold War.
Rogue Actors
One scenario that has been widely put forth is that the EMP threat emanates not from a global or regional power like Russia or China but from a rogue state or a transnational terrorist group that does not possess ICBMs but will use subterfuge to accomplish its mission without leaving any fingerprints. In this scenario, the rogue state or terrorist group loads a nuclear warhead and missile launcher aboard a cargo ship or tanker and then launches the missile from just off the coast in order to get the warhead into position over the target for a HEMP strike. This scenario would involve either a short-range ballistic missile to achieve a localized metropolitan strike or a longer-range (but not intercontinental) ballistic missile to reach the necessary position over the Eastern or Western seaboard or the Midwest to achieve a key coastline or continental strike.
When we consider this scenario, we must first acknowledge that it faces the same obstacles as any other nuclear weapon employed in a terrorist attack. It is unlikely that a terrorist group like al Qaeda or Hezbollah can develop its own nuclear weapons program. It is also highly unlikely that a nation that has devoted significant effort and treasure to develop a nuclear weapon would entrust such a weapon to an outside organization. Any use of a nuclear weapon would be vigorously investigated and the nation that produced the weapon would be identified and would pay a heavy price for such an attack (there has been a large investment in the last decade in nuclear forensics). Lastly, as noted above, a nuclear weapon is seen as a deterrent by countries such as North Korea or Iran , which seek such weapons to protect themselves from invasion, not to use them offensively. While a group like al Qaeda would likely use a nuclear device if it could obtain one, we doubt that other groups such as Hezbollah would. Hezbollah has a known base of operations in Lebanon that could be hit in a counterstrike and would therefore be less willing to risk an attack that could be traced back to it.
Also, such a scenario would require not a crude nuclear device but a sophisticated nuclear warhead capable of being mated with a ballistic missile. There are considerable technical barriers that separate a crude nuclear device from a sophisticated nuclear warhead. The engineering expertise required to construct such a warhead is far greater than that required to construct a crude device. A warhead must be far more compact than a primitive device. It must also have a trigger mechanism and electronics and physics packages capable of withstanding the force of an ICBM launch, the journey into the cold vacuum of space and the heat and force of re-entering the atmosphere — and still function as designed. Designing a functional warhead takes considerable advances in several fields of science, including physics, electronics, engineering, metallurgy and explosives technology, and overseeing it all must be a high-end quality assurance capability. Because of this, it is our estimation that it would be far simpler for a terrorist group looking to conduct a nuclear attack to do so using a crude device than it would be using a sophisticated warhead — although we assess the risk of any non-state actor obtaining a nuclear capability of any kind, crude or sophisticated, as extraordinarily unlikely.
But even if a terrorist organization were somehow able to obtain a functional warhead and compatible fissile core, the challenges of mating the warhead to a missile it was not designed for and then getting it to launch and detonate properly would be far more daunting than it would appear at first glance. Additionally, the process of fueling a liquid-fueled ballistic missile at sea and then launching it from a ship using an improvised launcher would also be very challenging. (North Korea, Iran and Pakistan all rely heavily on Scud technology, which uses volatile, corrosive and toxic fuels.)
Such a scenario is challenging enough, even before the uncertainty of achieving the desired HEMP effect is taken into account. This is just the kind of complexity and uncertainty that well-trained terrorist operatives seek to avoid in an operation. Besides, a ground-level nuclear detonation in a city such as New York or Washington would be more likely to cause the type of terror, death and physical destruction that is sought in a terrorist attack than could be achieved by generally non-lethal EMP.
Make no mistake: EMP is real. Modern civilization depends heavily on electronics and the electrical grid for a wide range of vital functions, and this is truer in the United States than in most other countries. Because of this, a HEMP attack or a substantial geomagnetic storm could have a dramatic impact on modern life in the affected area. However, as we’ve discussed, the EMP threat has been around for more than half a century and there are a number of technical and practical variables that make a HEMP attack using a nuclear warhead highly unlikely.
When considering the EMP threat, it is important to recognize that it exists amid a myriad other threats, including related threats such as nuclear warfare and targeted, small-scale HPM attacks. They also include threats posed by conventional warfare and conventional weapons such as man-portable air-defense systems, terrorism, cyberwarfare attacks against critical infrastructure, chemical and biological attacks — even natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tsunamis.
The world is a dangerous place, full of potential threats. Some things are more likely to occur than others, and there is only a limited amount of funding to monitor, harden against, and try to prevent, prepare for and manage them all. When one attempts to defend against everything, the practical result is that one defends against nothing. Clear-sighted, well-grounded and rational prioritization of threats is essential to the effective defense of the homeland.
Hardening national infrastructure against EMP and HPM is undoubtedly important, and there are very real weaknesses and critical vulnerabilities in America ’s critical infrastructure — not to mention civil society. But each dollar spent on these efforts must be balanced against a dollar not spent on, for example, port security, which we believe is a far more likely and far more consequential vector for nuclear attack by a rogue state or non-state actor.
This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR. http://www.stratfor.com
As with the story lines in ”Lights Out” and “One Second After”, nuclear devices are detonated creating an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) across wide portions of the United States, collapsing our delicate financial and communications infrastructure which lead to a collapse of utilities and emergency response infrastructure. I hope this article on EMP from STRATFOR enlightens and educates on the EMP threat. Be Prepared.
Gauging the Threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack
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 .
Defining Electromagnetic Pulse
EMP can be generated from natural sources such as lightning or solar storms interacting with the earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetic field. It can also be artificially created using a nuclear weapon or a variety of non-nuclear devices. It has long been proven that EMP can disable electronics. Its ability to do so has been demonstrated by solar storms, lightning strikes and atmospheric nuclear explosions before the ban on such tests. The effect has also been recreated by EMP simulators designed to reproduce the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear device and study how the phenomenon impacts various kinds of electrical and electronic devices such as power grids, telecommunications and computer systems, both civilian and military.
The effects of an EMP — both tactical and strategic — have the potential to be quite significant, but they are also quite uncertain. Such widespread effects can be created during a high-altitude nuclear detonation (generally above 30 kilometers, or about 18 miles). This widespread EMP effect is referred to as high-altitude EMP or HEMP. Test data from actual high-altitude nuclear explosions is extremely limited. Only the United States and the Soviet Union conducted atmospheric nuclear tests above 20 kilometers and, combined, they carried out fewer than 20 actual tests.
As late as 1962 — a year before the Partial Test Ban Treaty went into effect, prohibiting its signatories from conducting aboveground test detonations and ending atmospheric tests — scientists were surprised by the HEMP effect. During a July 1962 atmospheric nuclear test called “Starfish Prime,” which took place 400 kilometers above Johnston Island in the Pacific, electrical and electronic systems were damaged in Hawaii , some 1,400 kilometers away. The Starfish Prime test was not designed to study HEMP, and the effect on Hawaii , which was so far from ground zero, startled U.S. scientists.
High-altitude nuclear testing effectively ended before the parameters and effects of HEMP were well understood. The limited body of knowledge that was gained from these tests remains a highly classified matter in both the United States and Russia. Consequently, it is difficult to speak intelligently about EMP or publicly debate the precise nature of its effects in the open-source arena.
The importance of the EMP threat should not be understated. There is no doubt that the impact of a HEMP attack would be significant. But any actor plotting such an attack would be dealing with immense uncertainties — not only about the ideal altitude at which to detonate the device based on its design and yield in order to maximize its effect but also about the nature of those effects and just how devastating they could be.
Non-nuclear devices that create an EMP-like effect, such as high-power microwave (HPM) devices, have been developed by several countries, including the United States . The most capable of these devices are thought to have significant tactical utility and more powerful variants may be able to achieve effects more than a kilometer away. But at the present time, such weapons do not appear to be able to create an EMP effect large enough to affect a city, much less an entire country. Because of this, we will confine our discussion of the EMP threat to HEMP caused by a nuclear detonation, which also happens to be the most prevalent scenario appearing in the media.
Attack Scenarios
In order to have the best chance of causing the type of immediate and certain EMP damage to the United States on a continent-wide scale, as discussed in many media reports, a nuclear weapon (probably in the megaton range) would need to be detonated well above 30 kilometers somewhere over the American Midwest. Modern commercial aircraft cruise at a third of this altitude. Only the United States , United Kingdom , France , Russia and China possess both the mature warhead design and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability to conduct such an attack from their own territory, and these same countries have possessed that capability for decades. (Shorter range missiles can achieve this altitude, but the center of the United States is still 1,000 kilometers from the Eastern Seaboard and more than 3,000 kilometers from the Western Seaboard — so just any old Scud missile won’t do.)
The HEMP threat is nothing new. It has existed since the early 1960s, when nuclear weapons were first mated with ballistic missiles, and grew to be an important component of nuclear strategy. Despite the necessarily limited understanding of its effects, both the United States and Soviet Union almost certainly included the use of weapons to create HEMPs in both defensive and especially offensive scenarios, and both post-Soviet Russia and China are still thought to include HEMP in some attack scenarios against the United States.
However, there are significant deterrents to the use of nuclear weapons in a HEMP attack against the United States , and nuclear weapons have not been used in an attack anywhere since 1945. Despite some theorizing that a HEMP attack might be somehow less destructive and therefore less likely to provoke a devastating retaliatory response, such an attack against the United States would inherently and necessarily represent a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland and the idea that the United States would not respond in kind is absurd. The United States continues to maintain the most credible and survivable nuclear deterrent in the world, and any actor contemplating a HEMP attack would have to assume not that they might experience some limited reprisal but that the U.S. reprisal would be full, swift and devastating.
Countries that build nuclear weapons do so at great expense. This is not a minor point. Even today, a successful nuclear weapons program is the product of years — if not a decade or more — and the focused investment of a broad spectrum of national resources. Nuclear weapons also are developed as a deterrent to attack, not with the intention of immediately using them offensively. Once a design has achieved an initial capability, the focus shifts to establishing a survivable deterrent that can withstand first a conventional and then a nuclear first strike so that the nuclear arsenal can serve its primary purpose as a deterrent to attack. The coherency, skill and focus this requires are difficult to overstate and come at immense cost — including opportunity cost — to the developing country. The idea that Washington will interpret the use of a nuclear weapon to create a HEMP as somehow less hostile than the use of a nuclear weapon to physically destroy an American city is not something a country is likely to gamble on.
In other words, for the countries capable of carrying out a HEMP attack, the principles of nuclear deterrence and the threat of a full-scale retaliatory strike continue to hold and govern, just as they did during the most tension-filled days of the Cold War.
Rogue Actors
One scenario that has been widely put forth is that the EMP threat emanates not from a global or regional power like Russia or China but from a rogue state or a transnational terrorist group that does not possess ICBMs but will use subterfuge to accomplish its mission without leaving any fingerprints. In this scenario, the rogue state or terrorist group loads a nuclear warhead and missile launcher aboard a cargo ship or tanker and then launches the missile from just off the coast in order to get the warhead into position over the target for a HEMP strike. This scenario would involve either a short-range ballistic missile to achieve a localized metropolitan strike or a longer-range (but not intercontinental) ballistic missile to reach the necessary position over the Eastern or Western seaboard or the Midwest to achieve a key coastline or continental strike.
When we consider this scenario, we must first acknowledge that it faces the same obstacles as any other nuclear weapon employed in a terrorist attack. It is unlikely that a terrorist group like al Qaeda or Hezbollah can develop its own nuclear weapons program. It is also highly unlikely that a nation that has devoted significant effort and treasure to develop a nuclear weapon would entrust such a weapon to an outside organization. Any use of a nuclear weapon would be vigorously investigated and the nation that produced the weapon would be identified and would pay a heavy price for such an attack (there has been a large investment in the last decade in nuclear forensics). Lastly, as noted above, a nuclear weapon is seen as a deterrent by countries such as North Korea or Iran , which seek such weapons to protect themselves from invasion, not to use them offensively. While a group like al Qaeda would likely use a nuclear device if it could obtain one, we doubt that other groups such as Hezbollah would. Hezbollah has a known base of operations in Lebanon that could be hit in a counterstrike and would therefore be less willing to risk an attack that could be traced back to it.
Also, such a scenario would require not a crude nuclear device but a sophisticated nuclear warhead capable of being mated with a ballistic missile. There are considerable technical barriers that separate a crude nuclear device from a sophisticated nuclear warhead. The engineering expertise required to construct such a warhead is far greater than that required to construct a crude device. A warhead must be far more compact than a primitive device. It must also have a trigger mechanism and electronics and physics packages capable of withstanding the force of an ICBM launch, the journey into the cold vacuum of space and the heat and force of re-entering the atmosphere — and still function as designed. Designing a functional warhead takes considerable advances in several fields of science, including physics, electronics, engineering, metallurgy and explosives technology, and overseeing it all must be a high-end quality assurance capability. Because of this, it is our estimation that it would be far simpler for a terrorist group looking to conduct a nuclear attack to do so using a crude device than it would be using a sophisticated warhead — although we assess the risk of any non-state actor obtaining a nuclear capability of any kind, crude or sophisticated, as extraordinarily unlikely.
But even if a terrorist organization were somehow able to obtain a functional warhead and compatible fissile core, the challenges of mating the warhead to a missile it was not designed for and then getting it to launch and detonate properly would be far more daunting than it would appear at first glance. Additionally, the process of fueling a liquid-fueled ballistic missile at sea and then launching it from a ship using an improvised launcher would also be very challenging. (North Korea, Iran and Pakistan all rely heavily on Scud technology, which uses volatile, corrosive and toxic fuels.)
Such a scenario is challenging enough, even before the uncertainty of achieving the desired HEMP effect is taken into account. This is just the kind of complexity and uncertainty that well-trained terrorist operatives seek to avoid in an operation. Besides, a ground-level nuclear detonation in a city such as New York or Washington would be more likely to cause the type of terror, death and physical destruction that is sought in a terrorist attack than could be achieved by generally non-lethal EMP.
Make no mistake: EMP is real. Modern civilization depends heavily on electronics and the electrical grid for a wide range of vital functions, and this is truer in the United States than in most other countries. Because of this, a HEMP attack or a substantial geomagnetic storm could have a dramatic impact on modern life in the affected area. However, as we’ve discussed, the EMP threat has been around for more than half a century and there are a number of technical and practical variables that make a HEMP attack using a nuclear warhead highly unlikely.
When considering the EMP threat, it is important to recognize that it exists amid a myriad other threats, including related threats such as nuclear warfare and targeted, small-scale HPM attacks. They also include threats posed by conventional warfare and conventional weapons such as man-portable air-defense systems, terrorism, cyberwarfare attacks against critical infrastructure, chemical and biological attacks — even natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tsunamis.
The world is a dangerous place, full of potential threats. Some things are more likely to occur than others, and there is only a limited amount of funding to monitor, harden against, and try to prevent, prepare for and manage them all. When one attempts to defend against everything, the practical result is that one defends against nothing. Clear-sighted, well-grounded and rational prioritization of threats is essential to the effective defense of the homeland.
Hardening national infrastructure against EMP and HPM is undoubtedly important, and there are very real weaknesses and critical vulnerabilities in America ’s critical infrastructure — not to mention civil society. But each dollar spent on these efforts must be balanced against a dollar not spent on, for example, port security, which we believe is a far more likely and far more consequential vector for nuclear attack by a rogue state or non-state actor.
This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR. http://www.stratfor.com
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