EMP threat to U.S. should be kept in perspective

spent little time contemplating such scenarios in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The cost of remedying the situation, especially retrofitting older systems rather than simply regulating that new systems be better hardened, is immense. “As with any issue involving massive amounts of money, the debate over guarding against EMP has become quite politicized in recent years,” they write.

Stewart and Hughes note that they have long avoided writing on this topic for precisely that reason. As the debate over the EMP threat has continued, however, a great deal of discussion about the threat has appeared in the media. Many STRATFOR readers have the two experts for their take on the threat, and they say they thought it might be helpful dispassionately to discuss the tactical elements involved in such an attack and the various actors that could conduct one.

HSNW readers should read Stewart’s and Hughes’s lucid and useful analysis. After going through the various scenarios of an EMP attack, the two conclude that we should think long and hard before spending billions of dollars on addressing that threat. They write that the importance of the EMP threat should not be understated. There is no doubt that the impact of a HEMP attack would be significant. Any actor plotting such an attack, however, would be dealing with immense uncertainties — not only about the ideal altitude at which to detonate the device based on its design and yield in order to maximize its effect, but also about the nature of those effects and just how devastating they could be. They add:

The world is a dangerous place, full of potential threats. Some things are more likely to occur than others, and there is only a limited amount of funding to monitor, harden against, and try to prevent, prepare for and manage them all. When one attempts to defend against everything, the practical result is that one defends against nothing. Clear-sighted, well-grounded and rational prioritization of threats is essential to the effective defense of the homeland.

Hardening national infrastructure against EMP and HPM is undoubtedly important, and there are very real weaknesses and critical vulnerabilities in America’s critical infrastructure — not to mention civil society. But each dollar spent on these efforts must be balanced against a dollar not spent on, for example, port security, which we believe is a far more likely and far more consequential vector for nuclear attack by a rogue state or non-state actor.