Experts assess the risks of an electromagnetic pulse attack on the U.S.

• The Soviet tests included a series of high altitude nuclear detonations over South Central Asia.
• EMP from these tests damaged overhead (and even underground) electrical cables at a range of 375 miles, causing surge arrestor burnout, blown fuses, and blackouts.
• The consequences of an EMP attack would of course be far more significant today, with so much of our infrastructure (civilian as well as military) dependent on electricity and electronics.
• In that event, a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our nation.
• An EMP attack potentially represents a high tech means for terrorists to kill millions of Americans the old fashioned way, through starvation and disease.
• Although the direct physical effects of EMP are harmless to people, a well designed and well-executed EMP attack could kill --- indirectly --- far more Americans than a nuclear weapon detonated in our most populous city.
• Dr. Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a member of the EMP Threat Commission, has warned in testimony before Congress that an EMP attack could reduce the United States to a pre-Industrial Age capacity, in terms of its ability to provide vital food and water to its population.
• Concerned members of congress received help from an unlikely quarter in May 1999, when Russia explicitly invoked the specter of an EMP attack on the United States.
• The commission survey found that the following nations were knowledgeable about EMP: China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia.
• The commission also learned that some foreign military experts regard EMP attack as a form of electronic or information warfare, not primarily as a form of nuclear war.