Free Republic

The EMP Commission was established pursuant to title XIV of the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (as enacted into law by Public Law 106-398; 114 Stat. 1654A-345). Duties of the EMP Commission include assessing: - the nature and magnitude of potential high-altitude EMP threats to the United States from all potentially hostile states or non-state actors that have or could acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles enabling them to perform a high-altitude EMP attack against the United States within the next 15 years; - the vulnerability of United States military and especially civilian systems...

Two weeks after North Korea threatened to launch nuclear strikes against the U.S., the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the federal government has still not implemented all of the recommendations made eight years ago to prevent catastrophic blackouts caused by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. The recommendations were made in 2008 by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electro-Magnetic Pulse Attack (EMP Commission). Although the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Energy (DOE) have taken actions to prepare against an EMP attack, they “have not established a coordinated approach to identifying...