“I am afraid, Frank, that as you say, EMP—Electromagnetic Pulse—and its danger and potential ability to take down our grid represents probably the most significant short-term national security threat that faces our country today,” Congressman Trent Franks (AZ-8) told host Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio on Friday.
Congressman Franks, along with two other national security experts, warned on the November 8th episode that the threat of hostile governments launching Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks against the United States is growing, and yet the private sector is still reluctant to invest in measures that would help guard America’s electric grid.
Franks introduced the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act in the House of Representatives recently, and now he hopes that a letter to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) “will be a little wake-up call.”
It’s vital to convince NERC of the importance of protecting the electric grid, Franks explained, because “the law is written in such a way that it is unique to almost anything else in government, where they have almost more influence than the actual agencies that regulate the grid.”
That means, he said, that in order to strengthen the US’s electrical system, the private sector must be behind it. “For instance, the military has enormous protection throughout their critical systems against EMP. But they rely on the electric grid for about 99% of their electricity, and yet they have no control over the grid or even any influence…That means, unfortunately, when it comes to the national security considerations of the grid, that an industry that is more concerned about the economic status of the grid rather than the national security status of the grid is essentially in control.”
“Fundamentally, I’m afraid that this industry group NERC has kind of turned a blind eye almost deliberately to [EMP threats]… We’ve had seven major government studies. The question of EMP being a danger to our grid is not a question…This group should, because they care ostensibly about the industry, should be doing everything they could to ameliorate that danger. But instead there’s sort of a turf war going on here,” Franks said. “We need to be looking at this collectively as the national security threat that it is and doing the right thing, rather than focusing more on the turf war than the actual vulnerabilities that do in fact exist.”
Bill Gertz, senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon and reporter for the Washington Times, discussed one of the newer major government studies to confirm the vulnerability of America’s electrical system mentioned by Franks.
“You won’t be surprised to learn that our electrical grid is highly vulnerable to cyber attack, in a number of various areas,” Gertz said. “The most dangerous of which would be some kind of trusted insider who could get access to the network and would be able to send out certain computer commands that could trigger what’s known as a cascading power failure, which would result in widespread power outages.”
While Gertz agreed with the conclusions that the Department of Energy’s report came to, he admitted to Gaffney that “my first reaction to it was ‘why is this information out there?’ I mean, this was really a blueprint for hackers or nation-states that would like to attack the power grid and bring it down.”
One of the nation-states that proponents of electrical grid security are most worried about is North Korea. Bruce Bechtol, North Korea expert and author most recently of The Last Days of Kim Jong-Il, described how the EMP threat from North Korea is suddenly increasing dramatically due to Russia selling it the blueprints for EMP technology.
“As you know, there were rumors about [North Korea] getting EMP programs, both you and I saw that months ago and about a year ago. And now the South Korean Ministry of National Defense has actually confirmed it.” Bechtol predicted that “they’re probably planning on putting this kind of system on a long-range missile. In fact, I would assess that this would be the most likely warhead they would put on a long-range missile, as opposed to just a nuclear weapon, because they don’t really have the capability to stabilize a nuclear warhead on a long-range missile at this time.”
Bechtol pointed to the recent discovery of a North Korean ship smuggling Cuban military cargo as proof of the possibility that North Korea could launch an EMP attack from very close to US soil.
“We got lucky with the one coming out of Cuba, because we were able to track it leaving North Korea. But they could reflag their ships, they could use ships of other countries,” Bechtol said. “It’s certainly an ominous possibility, and we know the North Koreans think out of the box when they look at ways to attack the United States and South Korea.”
All three interviews can be listened to here.
