@@ The Next Fake Threat @@
Arash
September 21, 2005
The Next Fake Threat
A congressionally-mandated commission with ties to the defense industry is pushing a
fake threat -- electromagnetic pulse attacks -- when the Pentagon can hardly conduct
one itself.
By Nick Schwellenbach
Cars won't start. The electricity and phone lines go out. Electronic devices have
their circuits fried. When the aliens first appear in this summer's remake of the
1950s sci-fi flick "War of the Worlds", they are accompanied by an intense electrical
storm that generates what is known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Of course, the
aliens then proceed to wreak further havoc slaughtering humans from their towering,
spider-like machines.
However, EMP itself is not science fiction. A congressionally-mandated commission
last summer went public with their unclassified executive summary that envisions
terrorists detonating a nuclear warhead above the continental United States,
unleashing an EMP of catastrophic proportions and thrusting our 21st century
information society into darkness. Their report's main recommendation is to spend
anywhere from $20-200 billion in the next twenty years to "harden" America's critical
infrastructure (e.g. the power industry, telecommunications) from EMP.
Another one of their recommendations is that the United States should "have vigorous
interdiction and interception efforts to thwart delivery". Acting Commission Chairman
physicist Lowell Wood confirmed that the recommendation included a national missile
defense. As the Commission argues, one missile could shut-down the entire United
States, which is a powerful argument for missile defense.
The members of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from
Electromagnetic Pulse Attack (EMP Commission) have impressive credentials, yet they
are also deeply tangled up with pro-missile defense organizations and the defense
industry. Given their conflicts of interest and the controversial assumptions behind
their report, questions about their credibility arise. Is the EMP Commission's
scenario realistic or is it scare mongering to rally support for a pro-missile
defense agenda?
According to Charles Ferguson (http://cns.miis.edu/cns/staff/cferg.htm), a nuclear
terrorism expert at the Satanic Council on Foreign Relations
(http://www.cfr.org/bios/bio.html?id=10786), terrorists would have trouble obtaining
a nuclear weapon or the fissile material needed. Moreover, terrorists would likely
use simple delivery means like a truck and just blow up a city to produce mass
casualties, rather than launching a warhead into the sky hoping to produce EMP. (The
EMP Commission vastly understates the price of a SCUD missile, which they tout as a
possible delivery means. They have publicly stated that SCUDs can be purchased for
$100,000. Steven Zaloga (http://www.tealgroup.com/analysts), a missile expert at the
Teal Corporation, a defense consulting firm, says for a working model it would cost
at least $1 million, and more for the launch system).
The Commission has also spotlighted Iran as contemplating an EMP attack on the United
States.
Before Congress, EMP Commission senior staff member and ex-CIA analyst Peter Pry
refers to an Iranian political military journal article translated by the CIA to
support this allegation.
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/Iranian_Journal_Examines_Electronic_Warfare.pdf
Goddamn Lying Bastards
http://bouphonia.blogspot.com/2005/04/goddamn-lying-bastards-critical.html
Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack
http://www.iwar.org.uk/iwar/resources/emp/04-07-22emp.pdf
Iran military journal eyes nuclear EMP attack on U.S.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44017
He employs ellipses in an artful, but deceitful way to weave together quotes from
this article. Problem is that this journal article doesn't mention EMP or nuclear
weapons at all. It discusses attacks on communications, but by computer attacks, not
by EMP -- a blatant misuse of documentation to support the EMP Commission's case.
Perhaps the most controversial of the EMP Commission's claims is their insistence
that a Hiroshima-sized nuclear detonation (10-20 kilotons) could produce enough EMP
to fry circuits across a continent. The EMP Commission points to one of the few case
studies available -- the Starfish Prime atmospheric nuclear test of 1962. A 1.4
megaton thermonuclear weapon detonated 400 kilometers above Johnston Island in the
Pacific affected street lamps, circuit breakers, cars and radio stations in Hawaiian,
1300 kilometers to the north. Still, even there the effect was far from
comprehensive. http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Dominic.html
Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Michael P. Bernardin said that "the 30
strings of failed streetlights [from Starfish Prime's EMP] represented only about one
percent of the streetlamps on Oahu at the time". And noted physicist Richard Garwin
said the Starfish detonation "had barely noticeable effects on military systems".
But Starfish Prime was a thermonuclear device with a yield over a hundred times that
of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Experts including Richard Garwin
(http://www.fas.org/rlg) and Philip Coyle, former Pentagon director of operational
test and evaluation, have expressed skepticism about the EMP Commission's claim that
a 10-20 kiloton nuclear device could produce EMP on par with that of a thermonuclear
weapon. Both have extensive experience studying EMP.
Philip Coyle
(http://www.cdi.org/staff/staffinfo.cfm?StaffID=60&&Orderby=LName&ProgramID=&Program=&Name=&Issue=&keywords=&from_page=index)
has written that even "the U.S. military does not know how to [create
thermonuclear-scale EMP from a Hiroshima-sized weapon] today, and has no way of
demonstrating the capability in the future without returning to nuclear testing", he
said by e-mail to Global Security Newswire.
When the United States does not have this ability, needless to say, it's unlikely
that terrorist or "rogue" states could easily accomplish such a technological feat.
Philip Coyle also wrote in July, 2004 that the Commission's report seems to
"extrapolate calculations of extreme weapons effects as if they were a proven fact,
and further to puff up rogue nations and terrorists with the capabilities of giants".
Commission member Lowell Wood refused to answer questions on whether rogue states or
terrorists could possibly build Super-EMP devices. "You seriously don't expect
answers in an unclassified [setting] to those sorts of questions?" he asked in the
Newswire e-mail. What isn't classified, however, are the numerous ties between the
EMP Commission, pro-missile defense groups and the defense industry. The
International Relations Center, a left-leaning organization that tracks the right
wing, has even gone as far as saying that EMP Commission chairman William R. Graham
"personifies the military-industrial complex."
William Graham (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/graham/graham.php) is the former
science advisor to and director of President Reagan's Office of Science and
Technology Policy.
Besides current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Graham was the only other person
to be involved in both Rumsfeld Commissions, which explored the threat to the United
States from ballistic missiles and in space.
Both EMP Commission reports have echoed the alarmism used to justify missile defense
and the proposed militarization of space supported by right-wing think tanks like the
Center for Security Policy. (CSP is funded, in part, by missile defense contractors
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, TRW, and others, according to a July 2002
report by the World Policy Institute.)
It also happens that William Graham and his supporters in Congress, Rep. Curt
Weldon, R-Pa. and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., are all members of the Center for Security
Policy's National Security Advisory Council. Last March, Kyl raised the specter of
EMP by holding a hearing and writing an eyebrow-raising op-ed for the Washington Post
on the subject. Although Curt Weldon didn't become chair of the House Homeland
Security Committee last week, he was touting a classified memo Rumsfeld wrote on
Weldon's efforts on EMP to try and support his campaign for the position, according
to The Hill newspaper.
Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/gaffney/gaffney.php) has been communicating the
EMP Commission's stance to papers such as the Dallas Morning News.
Other connections to Graham include Charles Kupperman
(http://www.fightingterror.org/members/index.cfm). Kupperman is Vice President of
Strategic Integration and Operations at Boeing's Missile Defense Systems division.
Charles Kupperman, William Graham and William Van Cleave
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/vancleave/vancleave.php) all taught at Southwest
Missouri State University's defense studies department. They are also on the CSP
National Security Advisory Council and the board of advisors to pro-missile defense
think tank the National Institute of Public Policy.
Charles Kupperman also worked for William Graham at Xsirius Superconductivity for the
Missile Defense Agency in the 1990s. Because he was chairman of the Strategic Defense
Initiative Organization (renamed the Ballistic Missle Defense Organization under
President Clinton) at the time, he faced questions about conflicts of interest. In
1991, Graham told the Los Angeles Business Journal that "We [at Xsirius] don't do any
SDI work, and I'm certainly excluded from any role, or from gaining any information
for us".
But this isn't the only time William Graham has been misleading about profiting from
policies he's helped craft. Aside from sitting on the board of directors of companies
like Swales Aerospace that have recently won Missile Defense Agency contracts, Graham
has been president and CEO of a small, but thriving company called National Security
Research, Inc. (NSR) since 1997.
In October 1999, William Graham testified before the House Armed Services Committee
on the threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack. In a statement, in accordance with
House rules, Graham said that he had "not received any Federal grants, subgrants
thereof, contracts, or subcontracts thereof during the current fiscal year or the two
previous fiscal years, and he does not represent any entity in his appearance today
before the House of Representatives". Yet, in National Security Research received
part of a $250 million GSA contract "to protect the nation's critical infrastructure
against physical and cyber attack," as reported by Federal Times in April 1999.
Intentionally or not, Graham violated a House rule.
But overall, NSR is not shy about advertising its tight connections with the Pentagon
and Congress. More recently, NSR has won missile defense contracts. On its website,
National Security Research announced "that it is part of the winning SPARTA Team to
provide Scientific Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) support to the Missile
Defense Agency's Battle Management/Command and Control Directorate (MDA/BC). ... The
task order started on July 1st 2005".
NSR was profiled in the March small business newsletter of the Missile Defense
Agency. It seems that Graham isn't just borrowed to work on congressional
commissions, but that he makes it his business as well. From the MDA newsletter:
NSR senior staff members under Dr. Graham's leadership continue to be involved
with seminal, high-level advisory groups and congressionally mandated commissions
influential in the development of missile defense policy and planning, architectures
and technical concepts, and threat and countermeasure assessments including:
* The Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States;
* The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and
Organization; and,
* The Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse
Attack.
It should be troubling that a private company with a profit motive is influencing
public policy on questions of scientific and technical complexity, while national
laboratories like Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore may have been left out. According
to a July 2004 news clip in the newsletter Space Security Update, published by the
non-partisan Center for Defense Information, "It is unclear, however, that the
commission's calculations of the nuclear design work behind the EMPs postulated in
their study have been properly scientifically peer reviewed -- for example, by the
nation's nuclear laboratories."
The EMP Commission is a case study in the revolving door between industry,
pro-industry non-profits and the Pentagon. Of course, incorporating persons with
niche expertise from industry can be a good thing; and experts' affiliations with
agenda-driven organizations do not have to affect their analysis. But at the very
least, questions can and should be raised about the integrity of their conclusions
and the analysis.
In a world where anything can be a threat, and where only limited resources are
available to us, the public needs its government to provide assessments and actions
unclouded by parochial interests.
* Nick Schwellenbach is an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight
(http://pogo.org).
http://www.alternet.org/story/25738