by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
Steven Starr is an expert knowledgeable about high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP). His analysis leads him to the conclusion that an opponent doesn’t need large numbers of nuclear weapons to destroy the United States. Three will suffice.
Starr’s analysis will be considered controversial, because it shows EMP to be a grave risk to the safety of nuclear power plants. The Nuclear Regulator Commission (NRC), a captured agency, denies that EMP poses a threat because the nuclear utilities do not want to be forced to spend lots of money to correct design flaws in their plants.
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Trump was the only president who has showed some concerned with EMP. During his first term, directives were issued that indicated the US was finally going to act to protect its power grids, etc. But all that was shut down by Biden. A Grid Resilience bill has been introduced in the Texas legislature that requires the Texas power grid to be protected from EMP.
Perhaps the belief is that nuclear weapons are too deadly to be used and, therefore, the threat is not present. But humans have proven capable of disastrous mistakes, and the US government did have a plan for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. President John F. Kennedy would not go along with it, and this could have been one reason for his assassination.
Here is Starr’s analysis. For a more detailed explanation, see his recent book Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse: A Mortal Threat to the U.S. Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants.
An Analysis of an EMP Attack on the U.S. Power Grids and Critical National Infrastructure
by Steven Starr
There are 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world: 3 of them can destroy the U.S.
The first known photo of a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse produced by the detonation of a 1.44-megaton W49 nuclear warhead 250 miles above Johnston Island in 1958. The photo was taken 860 miles away in Hawaii, far enough away to prevent severe retinal burns in the eyes of observers in Honolulu (military officials had moved the site of the test from Bikini Atoll because the nuclear fireball could blind people up to 400 miles away).
Late one cold winter night, during a massive winter storm that covers most of the Central and Eastern United States, a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead suddenly explodes 100 miles above Dallas, Texas. Two minutes later, identical nuclear warheads explode over Las Vegas, Nevada, and Columbus, Ohio. Each nuclear high-altitude detonation produces an enormous electromagnetic pulse (EMP); the three EMPs together blanket most of the continental United States.
In a few billionths of a second, the initial EMP E1 waves induce massive voltages and currents into powerlines throughout the three U.S. power grids. Any unshielded modern electronic device plugged into the grid instantly has its circuits fried; this includes all the computers and devices that control the operation of most U.S. critical national infrastructure – including the Emergency Power Systems and active Emergency Core Cooling Systems of at least 26 commercial nuclear reactors. Huge surges of electricity created by the E1 waves wreck the control panels of High-Voltage Substations and destroy the computers at power plants and power distribution centers. The combined effects of this catastrophic damage cause all three U.S. power grids to suddenly collapse.
Figure 1: The three U.S. electric power grids.
A few seconds later, the following EMP E3B Heave Waves destroy most of the Extra High Voltage (EHV) Circuit Breakers and at least 1/3 of the Large Power Transformers (LPTs) that are required for the long-distance transmission of 90% of the electricity in the U.S. The damage and destruction of the EHV Circuit Breakers and LPTs will leave entire regions of the U.S. without electric power for a year or longer.
The Nuclear Strike
The nuclear warheads are “delivered” to their target areas by ballistic missiles launched from a submarine located 200 miles south of Pensacola in the Gulf of Mexico. The submarine requires less than one minute to fire the three missiles from a depth of 150 feet. The missiles are fired on depressed trajectories to reduce the time required for their warheads to reach their designated targets; their flight times last 5 to 7 minutes from launch to detonation. U.S. Early Warning systems spot the launches, but U.S. missile defense systems don’t have enough time to intercept the missiles or their nuclear warheads before they explode high over the U.S.
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