Is it lights out for Trump’s EMP push?

Turnover in President Donald Trump's national security staff may be having a little-noticed side effect: Worries about nuclear weapons zapping America's electric grid will return to the fringe.

Warnings about electromagnetic pulse attacks have long inspired eye-rolls or outright guffaws among national security experts, but advocates of the issue briefly found a home on Trump's National Security Council, and the president himself issued an executive order on the topic in March. That respectability boom shows signs of fading, however, as those advocates leave the administration.

On Sept. 13, controversial physicist, self-declared climate skeptic and backer of the fight against EMPs William Happer left the White House. Three days earlier, Trump had ousted national security adviser John Bolton, who according to people close to the congressional EMP effort was also a backer of hardening power plants and the electric grid against the threat.

“With Bolton gone and some of the people he had brought in … this has disrupted the process,” said Peter Pry, executive director of the now-disbanded congressional advisory board that studied EMPs.

Trump's executive order on March 29 was meant to aid coordination between the departments of Homeland Security, Energy and Defense, as well as numerous other federal agencies, to address the long-debated risk. The utility industry has resisted hardening the grid to EMP attacks because of the high cost of addressing what it considers an unlikely threat.

“The bureaucracy does not want this executive order,” Pry added, referring to the president’s order on EMP resilience. “What they’re trying to do is lowball the EMP threat … to such a level that basically industry will have to do little or nothing.”

The difficulty that comes with shielding civilian infrastructure, which some experts predict could cost many billions of dollars, is one source of contention. Plus, those costs would probably fall unevenly among U.S. states, with residents in the highest energy-producing states paying more in taxes to fund EMP protection.

“I can’t see utilities spending a lot of money on" EMP protection, said Arthur House, the former chairman of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. "A state would certainly not put that money into it.”

Mainstream national security experts have dismissed the idea of such an atmospheric attack, which in some scenarios would involve a rogue nation exploding a small nuclear weapon to wipe out major parts of the power grid. Detonating a nuke over the U.S. would almost certainly trigger a devastating nuclear response, and the actual effect of such an attack is untested, they argue.

Talks of an EMP threat first came from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a 1983 report, over two decades after the first widely recognized EMP event occurred during the Cold War. Pry’s pre-Trump congressional EMP commission released its initial report with recommendations in 2004, and its last report was published in July 2017.

Before Trump took office, a small camp of the president's proponents had urged lawmakers and industry officials to address the threats to the power system from electromagnetic pulses and solar storms, including HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has a close relationship with Trump.

Pry said he introduced the idea of EMPs to then-candidate Trump before the Iowa caucuses in 2016. “He appreciated the magnitude of this threat,” he said. Pry recalled Trump promising, “Don’t worry, we’ll knock our heads together and solve this problem.” The now-disbanded commission Pry led on EMP issued recommendations that he said were baked into Trump’s executive order.

A consensus among most in the scientific community is that EMP attacks are nothing to worry about and even a laughable subject. But a smaller group of scientists has argued that the federal budget should make a priority of spending for preparing for EMPs — as do some political figures, such as Cruz, who reject the much greater scientific consensus about the perils of human-driven climate change.

A nuclear weapons expert at the Middlebury Institute told NPR in 2017: “This is the favorite nightmare scenario of a small group of very dedicated people.”

House, former chief cybersecurity risk officer for Connecticut, said it would make little sense for a nation to launch an EMP attack on the United States.

“The problem is it’s such a blunt instrument. An EMP just wreaks havoc without much precision. In that way, it’s like an unsmart bomb,” he said. And once the U.S. figures out who committed the attack, “it invites massive retaliation,” he added.

As a rift widens between government officials and experts who view EMP attacks as a credible threat and those who do not, the drive to devote more resources to EMP "resiliency" accelerated in the last few years within the administration. Some experts close to the government's EMP advocates worry that the effort will now start to slow.

Still, Happer said the National Security Council had been meeting and discussing the subject regularly before he came to the White House. Happer, a prominent Princeton-trained physicist who has drawn scrutiny for praising carbon dioxide emissions as beneficial to the planet, was a senior official on the NSC.

“[My] main contribution was to argue strongly for pilot plans that could serve as models,” Happer told POLITICO. “Even when I came, there were a number of people working on it,” including Charles Kupperman, Bolton’s deputy, and Mark Harvey, senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, he said.

The NSC declined to comment for this report.

“John Bolton, for example, knew about EMP,” Pry said. “There were a number of people on the NSC, on the staff, before Will Happer. Happer was one of the people assigned to implementation of it, but before he came along, there were other people who were cognizant of the EMP threat, and knew it was an existential threat to us.”

The effort also has backers in senior military ranks.

The Electromagnetic Defense Task Force is spearheaded by the Air Force's Air University, and advocates include Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, who is now at the State Department, and now-retired Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast. The group was formed last year to better understand the electromagnetic spectrum, and consists of more than 360 fellows, according to the task force’s August report on EMP.

Edwin Lyman, acting director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among hundreds of experts, including administration officials and industry executives, who gathered for an Electromagnetic Defense Task Force-led summit this spring. The group’s second annual report urges the government to take greater action on EMP, and advocates for the creation of a new position on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to address the issue.

Air University’s “war-gamers” say that “the EMP option is very attractive for the adversary to use," Lyman said.

He added that Happer was the only member of the NSC to attend the task force's meeting, and Happer also participated in a classified working group on spectrum warfare.

“I think it’s in very good hands,” Happer said when discussing the status of the executive order.

Thomas Popik, president of the Foundation for Resilient Societies, said the momentum for EMP protection is driven by the fact that nations such as North Korea are developing, and threatening, the U.S. with a nuclear attack. Iran, he said, has also conducted a ballistic missile test at a high altitude, characteristic of a practice run of an EMP attack.

“It’s a mistake to think if there’s a personnel change, the societal momentum for EMP protection will evaporate,” said Popik, who is also a member of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. EMP Task Force that arose from the executive order. “It’s really no accident that the executive order for EMP protection is coming at the same time,” as threats of nuclear attacks come from places like Pyongyang.

Popik pointed to two instances, one in North Korea and the other in Iran, when the government detonated missiles “characteristic of a practice run of EMP.”

However, major roadblocks remain to protecting against EMPs that could take many years for power utilities to flesh out.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is tasked with working with various agencies to address the executive order. It has faced criticism from experts who say the agency does not have adequate plans in place to protect U.S. nuclear power plants if an EMP attack causes an extended blackout.

“The NRC met its first deadline of providing the critical assets, networks, and systems under our purview to DHS on July 5,” an NRC spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO. After the second deadline passed on Sept. 26, he said the commission was “following the requirements of the Executive Order and working with the appropriate agencies.”

But Lyman said he is “shocked the NRC is so complacent.” He made the remark after the Electromagnetic Defense Task Force summit where NRC officials had met to discuss the group’s report, which sharply criticizes the agency.

“I don’t think the U.S. has this resilience to cope with the failure of the grid, beyond a certain time,” Lyman added.