The Long War

I was reading Congressional Testimony this morning. Yeah. It was that bad .

The rain was coming down, pattering on the cement outside. It was cold and dark, and the immediate reason I was no awake was some idiot at the rental house across the street from Big Pink was making a statement about something with his car. The tires screeched against the dark wet asphalt, then came the lower-pitched squealing of the brakes, and then the roar of the engine and the sound of anger receded in the pre-dawn.

I rolled out of the down comforter and padded from the Murphy bed to the door. I unlocked it with a twist of my wrist and looked out. I saw red taillights swerve around the corner.

Must be love, I thought.

I tried to go back down, but the clock gleamed at me balefully in the dark. I gave up and made coffee. The New York Times was in the queue, but I already knew what was in it.

Hurricane Wilma is hitting the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico with 140-mile-an-hour winds. It will hit Florida early next week, but the weather-guessers can’t say what day. Three days after that it will dump rain on Big Pink. I think I am supposed to be on the West Coast then, but it is hard to remember.

I could not bring myself to open the story about the Syrian government’s complicity in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister. Of course young President Assad ordered it. He just was a little rash, and that is why his security chief had to “commit suicide.” These things take time. You don’t think you learn how to be a monster like his Daddy overnight, do you?

So instead, I went to the articles I had saved over the course of the week, and see if I could get the list of unread-but-saved messages down under a hundred. And that is how I came to be reading Testimony before five in the morning.

My pal Joe had forwarded the for-the-record transcript of former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s remarks to the House Terrorism/HUMINT, Analysis and Counterintelligence Subcommittee last Wednesday.

He was up on the Hill with Admiral Bill Studeman, who is retired again and very candid, and Zoe Baird, who has served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. She was the subject of a scandal four administrations ago, but Washington is a great place. We have a limited attention span.

Newt is a brilliant man, and a nice guy. Even when he was Speaker, he took time to come over to the War College to talk to the students, and after his scandal, I would see him in the corridors at Langley , taking stock of the Nation’s intelligence apparatus. I would greet him as “Mr. Speaker,” and he seemed to appreciate it.

Scandal or not, he had some serious misgivings about the Intelligence Commmunity, and they were all summarized in his Testimony.

He said the struggle with the terrorists had the wrong name, for openers, and I had to agree. He said it was a fight to the death against some ruthless and technically-savvy medievalists. He thought we ought to call a spade a spade. It is a Long War, he said. If it takes thirty years and a couple Supreme Court decisions to change our own high school curriculum, it is going to take the better part of a century to put the Wahabbis in their box.

He was right on.

He was blunt. He said the intelligence system failed in Iraq . It had failed consistently for sixty years to penetrate North Korea , and Iran for half that. The spooks have not a clue about what the Chinese are really up to.

His recommendations about what we had to do to fix the problem were so compelling and so lucid that I knew they would sink without a trace.

But even knowing that, I actually read the footnotes. He knows how this works. If you put lists in the footnotes, the staffers have something handy to use and they don’t have to think it up themselves. Buried in the laundry list of sundry unpleasantness was the threat of Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP.

That got my attention. I had completely missed it when it was a hot issue. Congress apparently had directed a commission be established to study the EMP threat in the Defense Authorization Act of 2001. That would have been passed the year before, in 2000, and that was before the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. That was when we thought it still took high-tech to destroy us.

A Commission of nine distinguished scientists and military experts was convened under the guidance of Dr. Lowell L. Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

They worked long and hard, and they came up with some great stuff. Unfortunately, their report was issued at the same time as the 9/11 Commission. The circus of blame from the death of thousands completely eclipsed the report about EMP. As I read it, I realized it was a lot scarier than the prospect of some religious zealots with box-cutters hi-jacking more commercial airplanes.

Here is the short version:

EMP is caused by the short, intense burst of gamma rays produced from nuclear detonation. The gamma rays interact with the atoms in air molecules through a process called the Compton Effect. Electrons are scattered at high speed, ionizing the atmosphere and generating a powerful electrical field. Maximum EMP is produced in detonations over 100,000 feet in altitude.

Think of it as a lightning strike everywhere at the same time, with no surge protector between the pulse and everything electronic.

This is not unknown. EMP was first discovered as a consequence of the atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific in the late 1950s. The overall series was called “Fishbowl,” and one test was named “Starfish Prime.” It caused an EMP event that disrupted radio stations and exploded street lights in Hawaii nearly a thousand miles away.

Atmospheric testing caused other problems, too. I remember the discussion about fall-out getting in our milk at the time, a substance called Strontium-90, if I recall properly, and the U.S. and the Russians signed the atmospheric test ban in 1963.

Our milk at school was safe, but the system didn’t forget about EMP. It was one of the things we had to account for when I was doing nuclear mission planning, since the pulse washes over the nuclear battlefield. The effect of the electric field created from an EMP is transient, and we even had a name for that, too. We called it the “Transient Effects of Radiologic Energy.” EMP and TRE were part of the equation of destruction.

The EMP Commission speculated in their report that a single high-altitude burst 200 miles above Kansas could propagate an EMP event that would envelope the entire United States and most of Canada .

That would fry everyone’s iPod, not to mention radios, computers, microcircuits, electric motors and anything else that relies on the orderly provision of electric power. It would kill the satellites in view at the time, too.

The consequences are so awful that it didn’t bear much discussion at the time. After all, who could put a nuclear weapon two hundred miles over Kansas ? I mean, except China and Russia and France and Britain and maybe South Africa , Israel , Pakistan , India and North Korea ?

Former DCI Jim Woolsey cheerfully added to the controversy. He is a feisty guy with a lively sense of humor, and I have always enjoyed hearing him speak. I think he is a pal of Newt’s. He was up on the Hill in July, testifying before the House International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Ed Royce, of Orange County .

Jim said it could work this way: A terrorist organization could purchase a short-range military rocket like the ones that Iraq possessed in Desert Storm. There are plenty of them around. The group gets an atomic device and mounts it on top of the rocket and puts the erector-launcher on the deck of a tramp steamer.

The ship positions itself within a few miles of the US coast, Left or Right, or maybe the Gulf Coast . Then they launch the rocket on a loft trajectory and command detonate at zenith. The EMP would sweep all before it, and with enough altitude, the whole country. Jim said the scenario was known well enough in the business to have a nick-name: “SCUD in a bucket.”

There are a couple issues with the theory. Like, could you launch it and would it go off? But it is not like you have to hit anything. Even North Korea can do that.

Jim Woolsey did not know about Hurricane Katrina when he testified, but it occurs to me that if a storm took out communications for a whole region, an EMP event would do the same thing to all 48 contiguous states. The practical effect would be the same, everywhere.

The Commission gave some pretty dire warnings, but I’m sure it probably won’t happen, at least not in the near term. But like Newt said, it is likely to be a long war.

It was probably just something to get us stirred up about Iran . Right?

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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