NYT Smears Gingrich Over EMP Threat Comment

PJ Media ^ | December 14, 2011 | Bob Owens

[Kaslin]

Gingrich's opinion on electromagnetic pulse events is well-informed. The Times' is not.

Writing in the New York Times, William J. Broad portrays GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich as a loon for his view that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is one of the most dangerous threats we face as a nation:

Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential hopeful, wants you to know that as commander in chief he is ready to confront one of the most nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the nation into a dark age.

In debates and speeches, interviews and a popular book, he is ringing alarm bells over what experts call the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP — a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age.

The idea is that if a nuclear weapon, lofted by a missile, were detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, it would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity. Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones. Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out.

“Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States. A number of scientists say they consider Mr. Gingrich’s alarms far-fetched.

The sci-fi thriller that Broad alludes to is William Forstchen’s One Second After, a book similar to others in apocalyptic fiction genre, such as David Crawford’s Lights Out, James Howard’s What So Proudly We Hailed, or Michael Turnlund’s The Raggedy Edge. All of these novels focus on what would happen after the collapse of the power grid in the United States.

I’ve seen the power grid up close, having mapped a fraction of it with a GPS and ATV in the mountains and bogs of upstate New York as part of a crew working for CH Energy Group. I’ve seen firsthand how something as simple as ice, a fallen tree, or even a scared bear can shut down power for hundreds of thousands.

You would be amazed at how poorly defended this hemisphere’s power grid is to physical attacks on key installations such as substations and transmission lines. Not to mention the network attacks noted in the Grey Goose Report, and the electromagnetic pulse events the bi-partisan EMP Commission Reports detailed to the House Armed Services Committee in 2008.

I’ve read the work of Yousaf Butt that Broad cites in his article, and like Dr. William Radasky and Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, I find him frankly unqualified to speak on the subject authoritatively:

Although Dr. Butt holds a Ph.D. in physics, served in NASA, belongs to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and obviously did a quick study of EMP for his article, Dr. Butt is professionally unqualified to offer competent opinions about EMP, nuclear weapon designs, and the other specialized national security issues in his article. Unlike the EMP Commissioners, Dr. Butt never worked professionally in the Department of Defense or the Intelligence Community on the subject matter addressed in his article, nor has he had access to classified information indispensable to forming competent judgments about the EMP threat. Because Harvard University’s prestigious The Space Review published Dr. Butt’s article, we are concerned that the article will misinform the public and scientific community on a vitally important issue of national security policy, and so seek to correct the record with this rebuttal. The rebuttal offered here is ours and is not an official response from the EMP Commission.

As one example of the quality of Dr. Butt’s research, he asserts that, “The methodology and conclusions of the EMP commission have already been criticized a few years ago.” To substantiate his claim, Dr. Butt references articles such as “The Newt Bomb” in The New Republic — none are serious scientific studies but merely political cartoons, authored by persons who have no competence to judge the EMP Commission’s work, and who obviously never even read the EMP Commission reports. For example, these articles condemn the EMP Commission for advocating National Missile Defense and preemptive war against Iran. Yet the EMP Commission never made any such recommendations.

Board and his sources admit the fact that China, North Korea, and Iran are perfecting EMP-optimized nuclear weapons, but are so short-sighted as to think they would have to be launched from those countries.

The Missile Defense Agency has every reason to claim that the scenario of an ICBM launched from halfway around the world would be an easy target for them to destroy. Unfortunately, the most likely avenues of attacks are locally launched missiles from submarines or freighters in the Gulf of Mexico or off either coast, where distance to detonation from launch is measured in seconds, and which are not the focus of our outward-facing early warning and detection systems. Such vessels could be easily scuttled after launch, and the rogue agent responsible for the attack may not be found until well after the attack is over, rendering our nuclear counterstrike abilities utterly moot.

And then there is the far more mundane, but every bit as real possibility of the threat our own sun offers to our fragile electrical grid.

The 1859 Carrington event, were it to happen today, could be even more destructive than a nuclear weapon, frying power grids worldwide.

Broad and the Times have gone out of their way to fabricate a “warmonger” theme. The article portrays Gingrich as someone angling for preemptive military strikes based off of one off-the-cuff comment by Gingrich. Gingrich has primarily advocated for nothing more than cost-effective hardening of critical infrastructure components so that our grid has a better chance of surviving any sort of electromagnetic surge that strikes our grid, be it man-made or natural in origin.

Gingrich may be the only adult in the room when it comes to discussing the steps our nation needs to take to harden an electrical grid that is showing its age, piecemeal construction, and fragility, and at a fraction of cost of the present administration’s abortive and wasteful spending binges.

Gingrich makes sense. No wonder the Times was to smear him.

[NELSON111]

Didn't say from a single blast. Most experts on the subject (from the briefings I have attended...check your freepmail) have said any EMP attack would most likley be at least 3 devices detonated 300 miles above the surface.

Consider the graphic produced by the Army regarding Nuclear Survivability (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/EMP_mechanism.GIF). Now multiply that and include Canada. You have millions of square miles.

As far as info on the 2003 storm, Google is helpful, or Bing. Also consider though that the storm in 1989 left 6 million without power. BUt regarding 2003, here is a summary from "The Sun Today:"

On this day in 2003 (October 28), the Sun unleashed one of the largest and most geoeffective solar storms of the modern age (and consequently, one of the most studied). The eruption was part of what became known as the Halloween storms; two weeks in October and November of that year when two massive sunspot groups produced unprecedented solar activity. The SOHO satellite watched the events unfold. On October 26th, Active Region 10486 had grown to over 10 times the diameter of the Earth and could be seen with the naked eye from Earth. Two days later the region was directly inline with our planet when it released a flare with the energy of fifty billion atomic bombs. The accompanying coronal mass ejection (CME) raced past SOHO at a phenomenal 2300 kilometers per second! Most CMEs take 2 to 3 days to cross the 150 million kilometers between the Sun and the Earth. This one made it in less than 18 hours. The impending cloud of charged particles would have been too much for even the SOHO spacecraft, a satellite which was designed to study the Sun. The operators put many of the instruments (including the one I was using for my PhD research!) into safe-mode rather that risk them getting damaged. Systems on Earth were not so fortunate. Many satellites in earth orbit began behaving erratically. Airlines redirected polar flights to below the Arctic circle, resulting in major delays across the US. Additionally, planes were instructed to fly at much lower altitudes (25,000 ft instead of 35,000 ft) where the thicker atmosphere protected the passengers and crew from harmful radiation, but also resulted in millions of dollars of additional fuel being used.

In other parts of the world, the situation wasn’t much better. Power grids in Sweden were overloaded resulting in prolonged blackouts. Power consumption at two nuclear stations in New Jersey had to be reduced to prevent similar disruption.

[wxgesr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_generator

Here is a way to make a small field EMP....

[Pessimist]

“As far as info on the 2003 storm, Google is helpful...”

I see this, for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection

No mention of 2003, nor power outages. Nor do I remember anything like that in ‘03 myself.

You said millions of people were without power in N.E US and Canada.

Seems like I’d remember that.

So I tried “2003 solar storm” and found this on CNN:

“Airline navigation systems and satellite phones are feeling the effects of unexpectedly turbulent solar weather, but no widespread problems were reported Friday when a cloud of superheated gases reached Earth’s upper atmosphere”

Anything else?

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Kaslin.

[NELSON111]

My bad...it was Sweden who lost a large part of their grid in 2003. It was millions without power in 1989 in Canada and the NE US. I got my storms mixed up. I wasn’t working space weather back then and it wasn’t on my scope of interest. It is now and is a topic of special interest at DHS and NORTHCOM. They know the grid vulnerabilities...and I will trust the experts they have had speak to us about it.

[zot]

Thanks for the ping. Newt Gingrich is right=right, and the New Yawk Slimes is left=wrong, as usual.

[kcvl]

http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/373618_214746948558668_1902399411_n.jpg

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www.nytimes.com

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11 Dec

[aruanan]

In debates and speeches, interviews and a popular book, he is ringing alarm bells over what experts call the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP — a poorly understood phenomenon of the nuclear age.

Here's what happened back in 1962 (link to PDF)(emphasis added):

ON July 9, 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear device in the atmosphere 400 km above Johnston Island. The event produced a plasma whose initial spherical shape striated within a few minutes as the plasma electrons and ions streamed along the Earth’s magnetic field to produce an artificial aurora. Fig. 1 shows a photograph of the artificial aurora three minutes after detonation as recorded from a KC-135 aircraft.

Concomitant with the artificial aurora was a degradation of radio communications over wide areas of the Pacific, lightning discharges, destruction of electronics in monitoring satellites, and an electromagnetic pulse that affected some power circuitry as far away as Hawaii.

The event was recorded worldwide as the plasma formed at least two intense equatorial tubes, artificial Van Allen belts, around the Earth [1], [2]. These tubes, or plasma toroids, contained relativistic electrons bound by magnetic fields; the source of intense amounts of synchrotron radiation. The radiation lasted far longer than expected; the decay constant was of the order of 100 days. (Mankind, unknowing, has viewed synchrotron radiation from the Crab nebula for centuries. The only known mechanism that produces synchrotron radiation are electrons spiraling about a magnetic field at nearly the speed of light).

Thus, the shape of the phenomena as recorded at radio, visible, and high frequencies was that of plasma “donuts” encircling the Earth, which mimicked the Van Allen belts.

The artificial aurora shown in Fig. 1 also shows plasma striations that arise from instabilities. This paper describes characteristic features of laboratory plasma experiments and simulations, especially for high-current Z-pinch conditions, and compares these features with petroglyphs and other ancient writings, which may have been associated with auroral observations.

As in the natural aurorae at the northern and southern magnetic poles, the streaming charged particle electrical currents, Birkeland currents, are of the order of megaamperes [3].

Figure 1 legend:

Fig. 1. Starfish thermonuclear detonation July 9, 1962, 400 km above Johnston Island. The photograph was taken from a Los Alamos KC-135 aircraft three minutes after initiation time. An artificial striated aurora has already formed from the plasma particles, spreading along the earth’s magnetic field. The brightest background object (mark) at the top, left-hand corner, is the star antares, while the right-most object is [theta]-Centauri. The burst point is two-thirds of the way up from the lowest plasma striation.

[aruanan]

There’s a lot of uninformed speculation throughout both sides of this article.

Uh huh. Ping to #48 for informed non-speculation.

[aruanan]

Politics aside, the EMP stuff is largely BS.

Ping to #48, non-BS.

[kcvl]

Yousaf Butt that Broad cites in his article

Yousaf M. Butt is at the National Centre for Physics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

Rebuttal To
Yousaf M. Butt’s
“The EMP Threat: Fact, Fiction, and Response”
by
Dr. William Radasky
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry

http://www.survive-emp.com/fileadmin/White-Papers/EMP-Resources/articlebuttrebuttal.pdf

[discostu]

Sadly they’re right and he’s wrong. The EMP threat is grossly overplayed. The big thing the people who worry about this forget is how much longer vertical distances are than horizontal. They see the cute little map that says a burst 300 miles up could blanket the country and think “my car can go 300 miles on a tank, holy crap”, but straight up that’s LEO, that’s where the space shuttle used to hang out. Yeah within line of site EMP is bad, yeah a few countries could pop one in territory that would really mess us up, but given the difficulty of taking out more than a couple of blocks with one blast it really isn’t that high on the threat list.

[aruanan]

Millions of sq miles, huh?

From a single blast?

BS.

Do a little math. The 1.4 megaton blast 400 miles above Johnston Island in 1962 damaged electronic circuitry in Hawaii 860 miles away. An area with a radius of 860 miles is over 2,300,000 square miles. So, damage 860 miles away. If that's the periphery of the effects, then everything within that periphery is getting at least that much energy and as one travels toward the center of the area even more.

[Quix]

In the last several years, I once read much of a rather scientific paper—I think it was more than 18 pages long . . . maybe 20 something pages long.

IIRC there’s a lot of factors. My understanding was it’s not quite as automatically across the board 100% devastating as some assume.

Yet, it’s a lot more concerning than many think.

What’s your somewhat elaborated summary of the real degree and nature of the hazard?

Are transformers on power poles going to be zapped to dysfunction?

I’d think that most computer chipped cars would be zonked.

???

[Pessimist]

“damaged electronic circuitry in Hawaii 860 miles away”

What kind of damage? Can I look this up somewhere?

The other guy is claiming “not semicodocutor stuff, but transformers getting cooked”.

I’ll stick with my claim: BS.

[Pessimist]

Still you bad.

The web tells me Sweden had a single outtage for 1 hour.

That’s not really “a large part of their grid” now, is it?

As for “trusting the experts”, that’s fine. But then can I assume you trust Henson (not to mention Nobel Laureate Al Gore) re AGW as well?

If not, why not?

[aruanan]

The other guy is claiming “not semicodocutor stuff, but transformers getting cooked”.

I’ll stick with my claim: BS.

Follow back to my original post to the link provided about the 1.4 megaton test in space above Johnston Atoll in 1962. There have been recent solar storms that have shut down power grids affecting many millions of customers. The last couple solar storms were minor in comparison to what the EMP of a modern nuclear weapon would produce. From this link you can read about what appears to have been a zeta pinch aurora in antiquity that would have made the Carrington Event look minor. The author is Anthony Peratt, a physicist at Los Alamos working on near earth plasma phenomena. He is not some pseudo-scientific kook. In some of those papers are references to the Carrington Super Flare.

[aruanan]

The other guy is claiming “not semicodocutor stuff, but transformers getting cooked”.

I’ll stick with my claim: BS.

From the link in the previous post.

[RonBush]

“damaged electronic circuitry in Hawaii 860 miles away” What kind of damage? Can I look this up somewhere?

This is the link from the wikipedia article: http://www.ece.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf

Anything like this from wikipedia should generally be referenced. Click the number at the end of the sentence to find the reference link at the bottom of the page.

[Pessimist]

The link you provided is consistent with information I found myself online.

300 streetlights went out. Elsewhere, I found claims that one microwave conmmunications system was damaged (believable) and that many burglar alarms went off.

I’m kind of puzzled re the burglar alarm claim, since I’m somewhat familiar with what those circuits consisted of in the f69’s. But I’d be inclined to atttibute that to a shock wave if anything.

No mention anywhere of TVs or radios being actually damaged. Nor any mention of transformers getting fried.

I note the doc you cited attempts to be pretty rigorous, but only superficially. It raises and then discounts competing claims pretty off-handedly.

For instance: could the flash have caused the streetlights to all have gone out and came back on at the same time? The author talks to a utility guy who say “they won’t go off for a brief flash” and considers that “debunked”.

Have you never seen one go off due to lightening? I have. Many times.

See what I mean?

And what about the remainder of Hawaii’s grid? Why wasn’t it blown?

I get that you believe this. And I know some people do.

But I’m not one of them. And so far there really isn’t much reliable evidence regaring its efficacy as a strategic weapon.

And that’s ignoring the 800 lb elephant in the corner: If an enemy has the ability to put nukes over our heartland, would EMP really your biggest worry? Why wouldn’t he simply blow us to oblivion?

As we’ve seen in the mideast, left over people are a PITA anyway. And if he just wanted to preserve infrastructure, wouldn’t a neutron bomb be the ticket?