A US air base in Texas has taken the first steps to protect itself against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. But what exactly is an EMP and how big is the threat?
Officials at the San Antonio Joint Base in Lackland, Texas, have requested bids to conduct an investigation at a facility called the Petroleum, Oil and Lubrication Complex. The investigation will identify any equipment that could be vulnerable to an EMP, ahead of more detailed vulnerability testing, according to the request. After that, officials would figure out ways to keep that equipment safe in the event of an EMP attack.
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What is an EMP?
An EMP is a massive eruption of it electromagnetic energy that can occur naturally or be deliberately generated with nuclear weapons. While many experts don’t think EMPs are a major threat, some argue that these types of weapons can be used to cause widespread disruption to electricity-dependent societies.
“You can use a single weapon to collapse the entire North American electrical grid,” said defense analyst Peter Pry, who was a member of the Congressional EMP Commission set up to assess the threat of EMP attacks but retired in 2017. .
“As soon as the power grid goes out, everything would collapse,” Pry told Live Science. “Everything depends on electricity: telecommunications, transport, even water.”
According to the request, the tests at Lackland come in response to a 2019 executive order from then-President Donald Trump to the federal government to strengthen its infrastructure against EMPs. Pry, who consulted about the project, said the research and resulting upgrades are part of a broader US Air Force initiative to strengthen its defenses against these types of threats.
Why EMPs Are So Dangerous
An EMP releases huge waves of electromagnetic energy, which can act like a giant motion magnetSuch a changing magnetic field allows electrons to move in a nearby wire, generating a current. With such a massive burst of energy, an EMP can cause harmful power spikes in all electronics within range.
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These pulses can occur deliberately or naturally. Natural EMPs occur when the sun occasionally spews out huge streams of plasma, and if they come our way, Earth’s natural magnetic field can deflect them. But when the sun spits out enough plasma at once, the impact can cause the magnetic field to wobble and generate a powerful EMP. The last time this happened was in 1859 at the so-called Carrington event, and while electronics was still rare at the time, it shut down much of the recently built telegraph network.
Then there is the possibility of deliberate EMPs. If a nuclear weapon were to detonate high in the atmosphere, Pry said, the gamma rays it would release could strip electrons from air molecules and accelerate them at nearly the speed of light. These charge-carrying electrons would be compressed by those of the Earth magnetic field, and as they sniffed around, they would generate a powerful, fluctuating electrical current, which in turn would generate massive EMP. The explosion can also disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field, causing a slower pulse similar to a naturally occurring EMP.
Firing a nuclear weapon about 300 kilometers above the US could create an EMP that would cover most of North America, Pry said. The explosion and radiation from the bomb would disappear before it reached ground level, but the resulting EMP would be powerful enough to destroy electronics across the region, Pry said. “If you were on the ground directly under the blast, you wouldn’t even hear it go off,” Pry said. “The EMP would pass through your body harmlessly.”
A small EMP with a radius of less than a kilometer can also be generated by combining high voltage sources with antennas that release this energy as electromagnetic waves. The US military has a prototype cruise missile with an EMP generator. Called the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), it can be used to attack specific enemy facilities, and Pry said it would be within the capabilities of many military, or even terrorist groups, to launch a EMP generator.
“We have arrived at a place where a single individual can overthrow the technological pillars of civilization for a metropolitan area all by himself, armed with a device like this,” he said.
The technology needed to protect against EMPs is similar to what is already used to prevent damage from lightning surges, Pry said. These technologies would need to be adapted to deal with higher voltages, but devices such as surge protectors, which conduct excess voltage to ground, or Faraday cages, which protect devices from electromagnetic radiation, could do the job.
Pry said the EMP commission estimated it would cost $ 2 billion to $ 4 billion to protect the major appliances in the national power grid, but ideally he would like to see the standards changed so that EMP protection is built into appliances.
EMP: Should you be concerned?
However, the threat posed by EMPs is far from resolved. A Report 2019 The Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by utility companies, found that such an attack would likely cause regional outages, but not nationwide outages, and that recovery times would be comparable to other large-scale outages.
Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University’s McCraire Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, said that while an EMP attack would certainly be devastating, it is unlikely that the United States’ enemies would carry out such a brutal attack. .
“There are other ways for opponents to achieve some of the same results, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less noticeable,” Cilluffo told Live Science.
Such alternatives could be cyber attacks to shut down critical infrastructure, including the power grid, or even attempts to disrupt communications in space or the GPS system on which modern society is so dependent. Work to protect you from EMPs makes sense, especially given the possibility of another Carrington-esque event, but these upgrades shouldn’t detract from attempts to bolster defenses against more likely lines of attack, Cilluffo said.
Original article on Live Science.