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The subcommittee is meeting here today to explore in more detail EMP effects on our military systems and the civilian infrastructure, how confident we are that we can predict these effects, our potential vulnerabilities, what policies and practices guide our efforts to protect our systems, and the steps we have taken and can take to ameliorate these vulnerabilities.
EMP can be generated in several ways, but the widest effects are caused by a high-altitude nuclear blast, although we will ask questions about other than nuclear blasts causing EMP. All of us here understand that the threats posed to our military systems and civilian infrastructure by high-altitude EMP are not new. Atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950's and 1960's revealed a number of then unanticipated results, including electrical and communications disruptions hundreds of miles from the test sites.
There may be, however, new dimensions in vulnerabilities that we need to look at more carefully. In the 1950's, electronic systems used vacuum tubes, not very sophisticated, but resistant to EMP. Today, computers with more and more microcircuits packed into smaller and smaller chips are key to the efficiency of virtually all commerce in the United States. These have much more computing power, but are also much more sensitive to disruption and more easily disabled by EMP. As our reliance grows, so does our potential vulnerability.
Likewise, potential military vulnerability may be growing. The revolution from military affairs has brought with it a much greater dependence on information technologies. The ability to generate raw data, process it into usable form, and communicate information to the right people and systems is critical to military success, yet the sensors, computers and communications assets essential to this revolution could be vulnerable.
For example, 95 percent of our military communications go through commercial channels. Are we confident that EMP will not disable or disrupt these commercial communications systems? How confident are we that the military could continue to communicate effectively if commercial systems were disrupted or completely disabled by EMP? How thoroughly do we protect our weapons systems from EMP? Are we confident they will continue to function?
At the same time our vulnerabilities may be increasing, the subcommittee is worried about complacency in this area. It is true the cold war is over and the threat of a deliberate nuclear attack by Russia is much lower. That does not necessarily mean we have nothing to worry about. The proliferation of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles continues. If we come into contact with a rogue nation in possession of just a very few nuclear weapons, perhaps just one, our adversary may or threaten to use one of those weapons to blind our military or to damage our economy or that of an ally.
Yesterday we invited the intelligence community to provide us with their most up-to-date material on EMP threats. We received documents that were 10 years old, interestingly enough, written at that time by a member of our staff, who now is an expert with us, Peter Pry, who at that time was with the agency and the expert on EMP.
We understand that no NIE has been issued on EMP since the 1980's, and this is 1997. We also understand that some of our EMP testing sets have been dismantled or are in disrepair.
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Dr. SMITH. Thank you very much. The laboratory that I represent is located in Howard County, MD. Before I begin, Mr. Chairman, I would request permission to insert my full testimony into the record and to confine my remarks this morning to just a brief summary.
The Applied Physics Lab operates under about a dozen task order contracts with a number of major sponsors, covering between 200 and 300 separate tasks in any given year. All of our funding is derived from programs. We have no line-item support. About 80 percent of our funding comes from sponsors within the Department of Defense, and about 15 percent from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The rest of the funding comes from various Government departments and agencies.
Recently, as you know, Mr. Chairman, Congressman Bartlett asked me to advise him on the subject of this particular hearing, the electromagnetic pulse produced by a high-altitude nuclear explosion, and the implications for defense systems and capabilities and for the civilian infrastructure. My staff has completed a limited assessment based on a review of the literature, an examination of the basic tenets and interviews with responsible and knowledgeable professionals in the field. I am prepared today to present the results of that assessment.
In short, we have found that the phenomenon is very real, as you have already stated, and is well understood by the nuclear weapons effects community; that our strategic systems and their command, control and communications infrastructure have been designed and built to survive and operate effectively in such an environment; that there would likely be pronounced effects on the civilian infrastructure from such a pulse; that the magnitude and extent of these effects is difficult even to estimate; and that it is probably not feasible to completely protect the entire infrastructure from the effects of such a pulse.
In this testimony, I will first consider electromagnetic pulse—or EMP, as it is called—phenomenology, and I will identify specific EMP-related vulnerabilities for ground system components of the civilian infrastructure. My full testimony discusses protection against EMP as well as nuclear threats to space-based elements of the infrastructure. It specifically reviews threat environments and the effects of prompt and delayed radiation exposure on satellite systems.
Due to the limitations of time this morning, I will not address those aspects in these remarks.
To begin with, electromagnetic energy is really invisible energy traveling in waves which is capable of doing useful work. Such energy exists throughout our environment, and the basic property allows such things as radio and television to work in a useful manner. But electromagnetic energy, even at low levels, can disrupt our lives if we are not careful.
For example, if we put a wristwatch too close to an electric motor, it may cause the watch to become magnetized and run erratically. Everyone also knows that computer floppy disks have to be kept away from magnetic fields or they can be erased or damaged.
Figure 1, which my colleague, Mr. Ron Wiltsie, is illustrating, and which is also on page 2 of your copy, shows the basic phenomenology of an EMP event. The detonation of a nuclear weapon produces high energy gamma radiation that travels radially away from the burst center. When the detonation occurs at high altitudes, greater than about 40 kilometers, the gamma rays directed toward the Earth encounter the atmosphere, where they interact with air molecules to produce positive ions and recoil electrons called Compton electrons, after the man who discovered the effect.
The gamma radiation, interacting with the air molecules, produces charge separation as the Compton recoil electrons are ejected and leave behind the more massive positive ions. The Earth's magnetic field interacts with the Compton recoil electrons and causes charge acceleration, which further radiates electromagnetic energy. EMP is produced by these charge separation and charge acceleration phenomena, which occur in the atmosphere in a layer about 20 kilometers thick and about 30 kilometers above the Earth's surface.
The area of the Earth's surface directly illuminated by EMP is determined entirely by the height of burst. All points on the Earth's surface within the horizon, as seen from the burst point, will experience EMP effects as depicted in figure 2, which is on page 3 of your handout. Note that a burst on the order of 500 kilometers in altitude can cover the entire continental United States.
Mr. WELDON. What strength burst would that be?
Dr. SMITH. It is not terribly burst-strength dependent; almost any burst will produce that kind of radiation. The strength of the field will change at the various radii from the burst point, but it will cover the same area regardless of the strength of the burst.
The amplitude, duration and polarization of the wave depend on the location of the burst, the type of weapon, the yield, and the relative position of the observer. The electric field resulting from a high-altitude nuclear detonation can be on the order of 50 kilovolts per meter with a rise time on the order of 10 nanoseconds and a decay time to half maximum of about 200 nanoseconds. It is very fast.
A localized lightning strike, by comparison, 10 meters away, has a higher peak amplitude by about an order of magnitude, but it rises more slowly than the EMP peak, and therefore it may be simpler to protect against.
It is important to point out, however, that the peak amplitude, signal rise rate, and duration of the EMP wave are not uniform over the illuminated area; the largest peak intensities of the EMP signal occur in that region of the illuminated area where the line of sight to the burst is perpendicular to the Earth's magnetic field. At the edge of the illuminated area, that is, farthest towards the horizon as seen from the burst, the peak field intensity will be about half of the maximum levels, and the EMP fields will be somewhat longer lasting than in the areas where the peak intensities are the largest.
The EMP threat is unique in two respects. First, its peak field amplitude and rise rate are high. These quantities depend upon the rate of rise and the energy of the gamma ray output of the weapon. These features of EMP will induce potentially damaging voltages and currents in unprotected electronic circuits and components.
Second, the area covered by an EMP signal can be immense. As a consequence, large portions of extended power and communications networks, for example, can simultaneously be put at risk. Such far-reaching effects are peculiar to EMP. Neither natural phenomena nor any other nuclear weapon effects are so widespread.
Much of what we depend on today would be susceptible to EMP effects, both in the military and civilian infrastructure. An electromagnetic field interacts with metallic conductors by inducing currents to flow through them. A television antenna, for example, is a collection of metal conductors arranged to facilitate the induced current flow in the frequency range allocated for television broadcasting and to transfer the signal to the receiver.
Other conducting structures, such as aircraft, ships, automobiles, railroad tracks, power lines, and communication lines connected to ground facilities, also effectively serve as receiving antennas for EMP coupling. If the resulting induced currents and voltages, which can be large, are allowed to interact with sensitive electronic circuit and components, they can induce an upset in digital logic circuits or cause damage to the components themselves.
Ground facilities, for example, those housing the large computers central to the functioning of our financial systems, are typically nodes in a larger network and are connected to overhead or buried cables for power and communication. They are also connected to buried pipes for water supply and waste disposal and are typically equipped with communication antennas and distributed security systems of various types. All of these features can direct EMP energy into the facility.
Analyses and simulated EMP testing have shown that currents carried to a facility by long overhead or buried conductors can reach thousands of amperes. Shorter penetrating conductors can carry hundreds of amperes into facilities. Direct EMP penetration through the walls and windows of an unshielded building can induce currents of tens of amperes on illuminated interior conductors.
When EMP energy enters the interior of a potentially vulnerable system, it can cause a variety of adverse effects. These effects include transients, resettable or permanent upset of digital logic circuits, and performance degradation or burnout of electronic components. The collected EMP energy itself can cause malfunction or device failure directly, or it can trigger the system's internal power sources in unintended ways, causing damage by the power sources within the system itself.
In summary, EMP introduces two collectively unique features to the overall picture of system susceptibility to nuclear effects. These features, taken together, distinguish EMP from all other forms, both natural and man-made, of electrical stress and response. First, stresses induced by EMP can significantly exceed those ordinarily encountered in system circuits and components and can thereby increase the probability of upset and burnout occurring in electrical and electronic systems. Second, EMP can cause this increase to occur nearly simultaneously over a large area, about one million square kilometers for a high-altitude burst.
These unique features, together with the lack of occurrence of EMP-like phenomena in the normal day-to-day environment, cause great difficulty in attempting to deal with EMP as a normal engineering problem. In particular, EMP can induce multiple, simultaneous upsets and failures over this wide area.
The coverage and levels that would ensue from an EMP attack are well understood. However, the overall effects on specific terrestrial systems are not as well understood. How much of the telecommunications systems would fail and for how long, how much of the power grid would be disrupted and for how long, how many cars would stop and/or would not start are things that are extremely difficult to predict.
However, just consider what would happen if even a small fraction of the cars on the beltway stopped, and expand that to all the roads throughout the country.
It is also clear that the infrastructure, in general, has become more vulnerable to EMP because of the solid state technology proliferation and the increase in more sensitive components.
I hope that I have been able to give you an idea of the phenomenology associated with EMP and the qualitative effects on our civilian infrastructure. This concludes my statement.
