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R. James Woolsey currently heads the consulting firm of Woolsey Partners LLC. He previously served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He presented this discussion of the nuclear EMP threat to American infrastructure on May 21, 2013 before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce as part of the hearing on Cyber Threats and Security Solutions.
I am going to talk about a dimension of the cyber threat that is not usually considered a cyber threat in Western doctrine, but is in the playbooks for an Information Warfare Operation of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. These potential adversaries in their military doctrines include as a dimension of cyber warfare a wide spectrum of operations beyond computer viruses, including sabotage and kinetic attacks, up to and including nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
It is vitally important that we understand that a nuclear EMP attack is part of cyber and information warfare operations as conceived by our potential adversaries. Our cyber doctrine must be designed to deter and defeat the cyber doctrines of our potential adversaries by anticipating how they plan to attack us--but our doctrine currently does not.
Our cyber and information warfare doctrines are dangerously blind to the likelihood that a potential adversary making an all-out information warfare campaign designed to cripple U.S. critical infrastructures would include an EMP attack.
The assessment that nuclear EMP attack is included in the cyber and information warfare doctrine of potential adversaries, and the effects of an EMP attack described here, are based on the work of the Congressional EMP Commission that analyzed this threat for nearly a decade (2001-2008). The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other major U.S. Government studies independently arrived at similar conclusions, and represent collectively a scientific and strategic consensus that nuclear EMP attack upon the United States is an existential threat.
What is EMP? A nuclear weapon detonated at high-altitude, above 30 kilometers, will generate an electromagnetic pulse that can be likened to a super-energetic radio wave, more powerful than lightning, that can destroy and disrupt electronics across a broad geographic area, from the line of sight from the high-altitude detonation to the horizon.
For example, a nuclear weapon detonated at an altitude of 30 kilometers would project an EMP field...