Renowned Physicists Cast Doubt on Gingrich’s Far-Fetched Scenario about EMP weapons

Larry Kummer, Editor

12 years ago

Summary: With Newt Gingrich leading in the Republican presidential polls, many of the hobby horses of the far right surge into view again. They’ve invested considerable resources convincing Americans about things to hate or fear. One such is EMP, a civilization-ending strike from the sky. Today’s guest article by Nick Schwellenbach explains the reality behind the stories. This is a follow-up to Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons, generating waves of fear in America for 20 years.

Renowned Physicists Doubt Gingrich’s Far-Fetched EMP Scenario

By guest author Nick Schwellenbach

Introduction
Experts evaluate the EMP threat
Congress blind on science issues
Conclusion
About the author
For more information

(1) Introduction

Newt Gingrich has been trying to scare the wits out of Americans with a scenario many experts say is out of a Batman movie and not plausible at all. The threat being pushed by Republican presidential hopeful Gingrich is that of a terrorist attack or a so-called “rogue” nation involving electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, a secondary effect caused by nuclear weapons.

EMP is real, but several key details about the threat of an EMP attack—including the difficulty in pulling it and the amount of damage it would cause — remain in serious dispute. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to Gingrich, who claims that a band of terrorists with a relatively small nuclear warhead could optimize that warhead to produce EMP (something the U.S. has not mastered), attach that warhead to a Scud missile, launch the Scud from a freighter off the coast of the U.S. to a point halfway across the continent, detonate it several miles up in the atmosphere, and end modern civilization as we know it on North America.

Needless to say, many experts view this scenario as far-fetched.

(2) Experts evaluate the EMP threat

One of those experts is Nobel prize-winning physicist Jack Steinberger. Several years ago, he provided me with a draft paper that casts serious doubt on Gingrich’s hype around EMP, which has rested on the findings of a little-known congressionally mandated panel called the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, or the EMP Commission. Steinberger’s paper was never published until now. In it, Steinberger wrote,, “It is not clear that spending billions, as some propose to [C]ongress, on hardening of telecommunication, electric power networks, and public microelectronics to ‘protect’ against a possible HEMP [High-altitude EMP], is in the public interest.”

I originally planned on writing a freelance article years ago on Steinberger’s paper. I even contacted several experts familiar with Steinberger’s work and, at the invitation of the late Carl Baum, an electrical engineer and EMP expert, visited the Trestle, an EMP testing platform at Kirtland Air Force Base outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. However, I lost steam on writing the article due to other obligations. But in light of The New York Times’ critical report on Gingrich’s EMP propaganda, I figured it’s time to make this stuff public.

In my preliminary reporting, it was clear that some of the world’s most renowned minds in the field of physics thought highly of Steinberger’s understanding of EMP. “A cursory reading shows that [Steinberger’s paper] is thoughtful, independent, and sound,” emailed physicist and nuclear weapons guru Richard Garwin, who has advised the U.S. government for decades. “I have not reproduced the calculations, but I have no reason to doubt them.”

What also came out was the surprise by some that EMP was being discussed as some sort of existential threat to society. “I am not an expert on the subject of EMP, but I am generally familiar with the relevant physics,” stated renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, in an email to me. “I was surprised when I heard that Jack was working on the problem, because I had the impression that nobody who was technically competent believed the scare stories about EMP. I thought that Jack was flogging a dead horse. But it is possible that the horse is not as dead as I thought it was.”

Baum, the EMP expert and former Kirtland Air Force Base senior scientist, told me that he thought the effects of EMP are still a huge unknown and needed further study.

There is, however, a related and far more plausible threat from solar flare-fueled geomagnetic storms to the electrical power grid, as The Space Review wrote about last year {for more information see this post}. The Review’s Yousaf M. Butt wrote that the U.S. should “kill two birds with one stone. However, the prioritization of our responses should emphasize the threat posed by geomagnetic storms,” such as hardening key parts of the electrical power infrastructure and “stockpiling large electrical transformers so they could be moved into place in an emergency.”

This response, according to The Space Review’s report, should not involve national missile defense, which has been one of the solutions pushed vigorously by some members of the EMP Commission, as well as Gingrich. As Butt wrote:

An incidental benefit of hardening our infrastructure is that it would also obviate the need for such an expensive (and, as argued by many experts, an ineffective) missile defense. Once the grid is hardened, and this fact has been made public, there is no further need for NMD [National Missile Defense]: it would be a particularly stupid enemy that would try their hand at a EMP strike against a known EMP-hardened infrastructure, with backups and contingency plans in place.

The sad tale of EMP scare-mongering illustrates two huge problems: how politicians use fear to drive policy, and the dismantlement of objective, institutional expertise. These two problems are intertwined. By sidelining objective expertise and utilizing biased experts who are quick to offer distorted, exaggerated pictures of the threat, politicians remove the checks built into the system.

This happened with EMP.

(3) How Congress gouged out its own eyes on science issues

In the mid-1990s, when Gingrich was Speaker of the House, Congress dismantled its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a highly professional and objective organization that advised Congress on complex scientific and technical issues. Republican Roger Herdman, a medical doctor who was OTA’s last director, was quoted by journalist Chris Mooney in the September/October 2005 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as saying, “There are those who said the Speaker [Gingrich] didn’t want an internal congressional voice that had views on science and technology that might differ from his.”

In OTA’s place, certain members of Congress decided to rely on individual and often highly biased experts. The editor’s note in the September/October 2005 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stated that “most troubling of all is that absent a neutral arbiter of scientific facts, some members of Congress now surround themselves with their own handpicked ‘experts’ and allow the scientific consensus on vital issues to be defined by self-interested lobbyists and think tanks.”

Gingrich pushed this new practice of Congress cherry-picking scientific experts who provided views they favored — ideas which were not always the most scientifically sound.

To further quote Strauss’s editorial, “OTA would have likely raised a questioning eyebrow at the findings of the congressionally mandated panel, the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.” The membership of that Commission, upon which Gingrich relies heavily, is composed mostly of right-wing nuclear and missile defense hawks who exemplify the cherry-picked and ideologically-slanted approach to science expertise that Gingrich brought to fruition.

(4) Conclusion

As we move forward, we need to consider whether we should continue to spend billions of dollars on programs like national missile defense justified by fanciful threats like EMP, while we slash millions of dollars on experts who work for the public interest to prevent and stop boondoggles from starting in the first place.

—————— End of guest post ——————–

(5) About the author

Nick Schwellenbach is an investigator and blog editor at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), an investigative non-profit organization in Washington, DC. He rejoined POGO in 2010, and oversees POGO’s investigations. In addition, he conducts investigations into national security-related corruption, incompetence, and waste; transportation safety; government secrecy policies and practices; and the effectiveness of government oversight.

Prior to rejoining POGO, Mr. Schwellenbach was a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity from 2008 to 2010, where he wrote about congressional ethics and defense spending. He and the Center were finalists for the 2009 Scripps Howard Raymond Clapper Washington Reporting award for investigative work on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He also assisted in the direction of a Knight Foundation-funded News21 team of eleven graduate students from around the country working on an investigative series on transportation safety.

Previously, Mr. Schwellenbach was an investigator at POGO from 2004 through 2008. His work on lavish Air Force accommodations for generals was one of three POGO investigations cited by the Society of Professional Journalists when they awarded POGO its prestigious national Sunshine Award for improving government transparency. He has testified before Congress on the need for stronger whistleblower protections in order to improve congressional oversight. From August 2006 through February 2007, he was a reporter-researcher for the Nieman Watchdog, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, that seeks to improve the quality of American journalism.

Mr. Schwellenbach earned his M.A. in Journalism and Public Affairs from American University and his B.A. in History with a minor in Economics from the University of Texas-Austin.

His writings have been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the San Diego Union Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, the Houston Chronicle and other publications.

(6) For More Information

Articles about EMP:

Evaluation of Methodologies for Estimating Vulnerability to Electromagnetic Pulse Effects, National Academy of Sciences, 1984
“Effect of the Fast Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse on the Electric Power Grid Nationwide: A Different View“, Mario Rabinowitz (physicist, see Wikipedia), Power Engineering Review (IEEE), October 1987
“E-BOMB“, Jim Wilson, Popular Mechanics, September 2001 — A masterpiece of speculative fantasy. “In the blink of an eye, electromagnetic bombs could throw civilization back 200 years. And terrorists can build them for $400.”
“The Next Fake Threat“, Nick Schwellenbach, AlterNet, 21 September 2005 — “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.”
“EMPtyThreat?“, Nick Schwellenbach, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept/Oct 2005 — Subscription only. See a summary here. “The latest doomsday threat to emerge from Washington envisions terrorists unleashing an EMP to produce the mother of all blackouts. Don’t be afraid of the dark.”
Commission to Assess the Threat from High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), 2008
“Aircraft could be brought down by DIY ‘E-bombs’“, Paul Marks, New Scientist, 01 April 2009
Excellent summary: “An Endless Bounty of EMP Crazies”, George Smith (aka Dick Destiny), 6 April 2009 — Part One, Part Two.
“The Newt Bomb: How a pulp-fiction fantasy became a GOP weapons craze“, The New Republic, 3 June 2009
“Neocons Salivating Over Their Next Great Exaggerated ‘Threat’: Electromagnetic Pulse Attack“, Robert Farley, AlterNet, 22 October 2009 — “A diverse array of right-wing factions have united behind the effort to promote the EMP threat thesis.”
“Aircraft could be brought down by DIY ‘E-bombs’, Paul Marks, New Scientist, 1 April 2009
“The EMP threat: fact, fiction, and response”, Yousaf M. Butt (staff scientist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard), The Space Review, January 2010 — Part One, Part Two, Rebuttal
Nuclear Weapon EMP Effects, Federation of American Scientists
For more references see the Wikpedia entry