February 27, 2018—Publish EMP Commission Reports!

“I appreciate the urging that we not let our guard down … recognizing that this [threat] is complicated and multifaceted … truly daunting … and that we need to start out locally … It is important that we in congress be reminded of the urgency and imperative of our task and I think we were given that message this morning. ” Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK),Chairlady of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at the conclusion of the May 4, 2017 Hearing on EMP and policy options to protect the grid.

I very much appreciated Senator Murkowski’s concluding comments after hearing former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and me testify that the state-of-affairs needed much improvement, at this hearing “to examine the threat posed by electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and policy options to protect energy infrastructure and to improve capabilities for adequate system restoration.”

Her concluding comments came after she gave me the privilege of saying a final word to conclude this 2-hour hearing, during which Speaker Gingrich and I warned of our current unprepardness, in sharp contrast to all others who testified that things were under control. Click here for a link to the entire 2-hour hearing (that begins with Chairlady Murkowski’s introduction between 28 and 29 minutes in) as well as the written testimony of all witnesses at that hearing, for the record.

Click here for my May 9, 2017 discussion of this important hearing, which I want to update because there has been little if any improvement, while the overall situation has deteriorated.

As a prelude to my recommendations on how best to deal with this threat — which focused on protecting the grid from the bottom-up (beginning at the local level in conjunction with various electric energy generation companies, utility companies and cooperative electric power companies (CoOps)), I quoted from observations by EMP Commission Chairman Dr. William R. Graham in his April 20 letter to Secretary of Energy Rick Perry:

Nuclear EMP is the ultimate cyber weapon in the military doctrines and plans of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran for Combined Arms Cyber Warfare that they see as a decisive new Revolution in Military Affairs.
Protecting the grid from the worst threat — nuclear EMP attack — can also mitigate lesser threats, including from natural EMP from solar storms, non-nuclear EMP from radiofrequency weapons, cyber-attacks, physical sabotage and severe weather.
State electric grids can be “islanded” by installation of surge arrestors, blocking devices, Faraday cages, and other devices to protect individual states, even though they may be part of a larger regional electric grid, from a prolonged catastrophic blackout. For example, Texas State Senator Bob Hall has introduced legislation to harden the Texas Electric Grid.
The Commission is profoundly concerned that the 2014 Obama administration intelligence community assessment of nuclear EMP is profoundly erroneous, and perhaps the worst ever produced on EMP, and that has been used to thwart efforts to protect the nation against nuclear EMP by dismissing the threat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The Commission is very concerned over misleading and erroneous studies by the NERC and others that grossly underestimate the natural EMP threat from solar storms, and dangerously, have become the basis for grossly inadequate standards for EMP/GMD protection approved by the Obama administrations’ FERC.
The Commission is also concerned over misleading and erroneous studies recently completed by industry’s Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in cooperation with Obama administration holdovers in the Department of Energy, that grossly underestimate the nuclear EMP threat.

Click here for Dr. Graham’s complete sobering letter and observations that provide key information for those charged with assessing and responding to the current vulnerabilities in the management and execution of efforts to provide a viable electric power grid. Note that these considerations are clearly within the purview of the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to which Speaker Gingrich and I testified.

But be apprised that Dr. Graham never received any response from Secretary Perry, or senior DOE staff, regarding his succinctly stated concerns. Nor from other alleged responsible government officials that he also informed of such critically important facts, largely being ignorred.

Moreover, click here for my previous discussion of Dr. Graham’s important related video presentation to many local and state officials and concerned citizens at the National Guard Headquarters on Capitol Hill and around the nation. He began this “Dupont Summit” briefing by discussing the high altitude nuclear test data available as benchmarks to guide our understanding of EMP, as he well understands as one of the original technical investigators in the early 1960s, seeking to understand the “surprise” from our high altitude tests in the South Pacific.

In particular, the Starfish Prime test was for years our primary direct source of information, which demonstrated damage/destruction of half our satellites and even electric systems about 900 miles away in Hawaii. (That era’s vacuum tube electronics was relatively hard to those EMP effects — today’s electronics would have suffered much greater damage.)

The results surprised our nation’s best scientists at the time — and the theory explaining the results was subsequently developed by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Air Force Weapons Laboratory (where as USAF Lieutenants, Bill Graham and I were heavily involved in understanding nuclear weapons effects and how to protect against them), the Physics Division of the RAND Corporation and subsequently R&D Associates (RDA), where I again joined Bill in continuing to help the Defense Department protect our strategic forces against nuclear weapons effects.

Among other things we learned that these effects could be produced by much smaller yield nuclear explosions than the 1.4 megaton Starfish Prime device — e.g., by much smaller, lighter weapons with yields of only 10 kilotons or so, not unlike the yields demonstrated by several North Korean underground nuclear tests.

In those days, the vulnerabilities of our strategic systems to EMP — and our efforts to rectify those vulnerabilities were highly classified, unavailable to the private sector — including those designing and operating critical civil infrastructure such as the electric power grid.

But today, key information is still being withheld (quite irresponsibly in my opinion) from those in the private sector needing it to harden the electric power grid (and other critical infrastructure) to nuclear weapons effects — though it has long been declassified. Last December, Bill made this point explicitly clear by including the following chart in his briefing.

This almost 35 year old report by Gerry Schlegel, another colleague from the Air Force Weapons Laboratory and R&D Associates, was published on 31 March 1983 and declassified on September 12, 2017, at least for “U.S. Government Agencies and their contractors” — but astonishingly not for the engineers responsible for designing, deploying, operating, maintaining, and upgrading our critical civil infrastructure, especially the electric power grid.

“Distribution Statement C” requires such “other” requests to be “referred” to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which has been withholding important unclassified information from those who need it to protect the electric power grid. Note the associated date, September 12, 2017, was slightly before expiration of the EMP Commission that had requested this security review — as well as for a dozen other important reports — still stagnating in the DoD/DTRA security review bureaucracy.

According to Dr. Graham, at least two of these reports include what should be unclassified analyses including data from the 1961 Soviet/Russian high altitude tests, that were better instrumented than were our “hurry up” tests following the Soviet abrogation of the 1958 Atmospheric Nuclear Test Moratorium. We obtained these data a quarter century ago, in the early 1990s after the end of the Cold War.

So why are they still being withheld from those engineers who need it to protect our critical civil infrastructure????

Dr. Graham suggested in his Dupont Summit briefing that the private sector should request copies of these key reports via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Fine, but why should this be required? Who is hiding what from whom?

So, what about the disposition of other related EMP Commission reports still being stalled by classification reviews? An excuse for the DOE Laboratories at best to “reinvent the wheel?” . . . Now without the benefit of nuclear testing? What phony nonsensical precautions!

Please understand that Russian General Officers told EMP Commissioners a decade ago that Russia had “accidentally” passed to North Korea how to build low yield “Super EMP weapons” — connect the dots! And that we still withhold from private sector engineers key information on how to protect the electric power grid against effects that North Korea claims to be a “strategic goal!”

Understandably, those in the private sector responsible for our critical civil infrastructure are seeking key information as best they can. But must they resort to the Freedom of Information Act to get what they need from the government storehouse?

And why have those who first mastered these important matters been “matured out” and “mustered out” of the mix of those available to work on this important, actually existential threat, issue?

The EMP Commissioners, who had served for 17 years without compensation, were the best and most competent source of guidance for those currently charged with the responsibility of dealing with the existential threats to the electric power grid. But they were stupidly and summarily dismissed by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018.

The NDAA 2018 also calls for a new EMP Commission, with politically charged instructions assuring delays while the congressional interests divide and decide how the new Commission will be constituted.

Meanwhile the now retired EMP Commission final reports are still being withheld by the Department of Defense (DoD) during its still pending “security review.”

Such political/bureaucratic difficulties led me to conclude several years ago that I would never see major progress in dealing with the EMP existential threat in my lifetime, especially if the current conditions remain — and they have gotten worse, in part for the above reasons.

Since I could see no prospect for meaningful improvement, I decided to try a different approach and work the problem from the “bottom up” . . . literally.

I observed in my May 4, 2017 written testimony that I entered this phase with several biases, based on a lifetime of pertinent experiences, which have survived to this day and which guide my assessments and recommendations.

I have no confidence that we will ever harden the entire grid, so I believe we have to establish priorities — I give top priority to assuring the safety and viability of our ~100 nuclear power plants that produce about 20-percent of the nation’s electricity, and half the electricity of my home state South Carolina. Thus, I believe our top priority is to build protected “islands” around our nuclear power plants.
To assure the viability of the nuclear power plants, we must first assure their cooling water systems are viable in an indefinite grid shutdown to avoid Fukushima-like disasters.
We must assure that sufficient generating and loading conditions provided by the surrounding “island” in the grid — and linked with other critically important elements of the grid — are available to restart the nuclear power plants — and other power plants, which will shut down to protect themselves if the grid goes down.
I don’t believe anything that isn’t regularly tested and subjected to independent critical review — effective design and deployment is not enough; truly effective testing and maintenance are major challenges.
Accomplishing these objectives requires considerable emergency management cooperation at the local level — without which there is little hope for most citizens who today depend on electricity for life-line services in our “just-in-time” economy.

As discussed in my written and verbal testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I have no confidence that the currently dysfunctional institutions in Washington will ever deal effectively with this truly existential threat to our country.

So a couple of years ago, I decided to seek to work toward solutions at the local level, from the “bottom up.” I am working with colleagues at Duke Energy — one of the nation’s largest electric power companies, if not the largest, on a project we call the “Lake Wylie Pilot Study.” (I’m working pro bono so there should be no appearance of conflicting interests.)

On Lake Wylie fed by the Catawba River, Duke operates Nuclear and Hydroelectric Power Plants in York County, SC and a Coal Power Plant in Gaston County, NC. (Duke’s Corporate Headquarters in Charlotte is in neighboring Mecklenburg County, NC.) We are also working with the local Electric Utility organizations and Electric Cooperatives (CoOps) to assure a viable “island” in the grid around Lake Wylie — to assure the safety of the nuclear power plant and essential services to the citizens within that “island.”

We are also paying close attention to water-wastewater services, in my opinion, second only to electricity in importance — e.g., without water-wastewater services dependent on electricity, deaths in hospitals are expected within hours.

Moreover, Duke Energy needs information on Electric Utility Company and CoOps infrastructure and their infrastructure hardening status to manage loading conditions on its power plants and provide needed electricity to the citizens of the three counties mentioned above. And for York County, where most if not all citizens receive their electricity via infrastructure owned and operated by a Rock HIll Utility company or CoOps that purchases electricity from Duke Energy.

We hope our Pilot Study will be a model for others around the nation — composed by a thousand or so such utility companies and CoOps. Hardening the entire grid is a very complex and demanding challenge. Duke Energy management has agreed to share the lessons learned with other energy companies around the nation.

Because of the complexities of hardening the grid, I have no confidence we will ever harden it all.

We must prioritize: The top priority should be to assure that, in case of a major grid blackout, our nuclear power plants remain safe — and can be restarted to produce needed electricity ASAP. Duke Energy plans to do that — but details of much of the rest of the complex grid are beyond Duke’s control — and to serve the public interest the cooperation of many local authorities and citizens is essential. To achieve that objective, I believe we must work from the bottom up.

Thus, we are working with local, county and state officials and associated utility companies and other CoOps to understand how best to assure infrastructure connectivity to enable a Black Start following a major grid shutdown, beginning with the Lake Wylie “Island” in the grid.

There are thousands of utility companies and CoOps in the United States — so solving this important problem for that integrated “crazy quilt” distribution system is very complicated. This was part of my reason for testifying last May that I seriously doubt I will see a solution result in my lifetime from a “top-down” federal or state initiative.

This is not to argue against such initiatives — which are important at least for consciousness-raising purposes. But I do worry that at best they have proven to be very inefficient in producing serious progress in actually dealing with a truly existential threat.

And regrettably, the federal establishment is not doing all it can to make important information available to those working the problem from the bottom-up.

As Dr. Graham concluded in his Dupont Summit briefing — again click here for my complete December 12, 2017 message, there are two alternative approaches to deal with this unsettling condition — a fork in the road, worthy of a Yogi Berra comment: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

The best fork in the road is obviously the “fast effective way” — but in my opinion it requires a major change in overall leadership. The DoD’s stewardship has been so irresponsible that I would not trust the nation’s survivability solely to their leadership.

Thus, something is needed beyond reconstituting an EMP Commission as directed by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018.

And, among the first things that should be accomplished, the DoD should be directed immediately to provide appropriately declassified information to the private sector, especially the energy companies around the nation, so they can take necessary engineering steps to protect the American people from the consequences of an EMP attack.

Because of the urgent importance of the existential EMP threat and the disaggregated, dysfunctional nature of Washington’s interagency process, I urge that all interagency activities be integrated under competent leadership in the White House — with an unfettered direct reporting chain of command to the President.

Bottom Lines.

Publish the EMP Commission Reports for the widest distribution possible, NOW!

If we are subject to an EMP attack, I believe that those who undertake that attack will include a prelude of physical and cyber components to confuse, degrade and otherwise diffuse our ability to respond effectively.

These other threats were considered in the October 1997 Report of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, led by Retired USAF General Robert T. Marsh — but EMP was then highly classified and not included.

President Trump should establish by Executive Order a reinvigorated (with an updated expanded charter) Critical Infrastructure Commission to include dealing with EMP threat, whatever comes of the NDAA 2018. And that Commission should report directly to the President.

As a model, click here for the October 1997 Marsh Commission report.

Stay tuned . . .

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

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