Concerns over US grid security rise as North Korea threatens EMP attack
(FoxNews.com) - For
more than 15 years, security and intelligence officials — including former CIA
Director James Woolsey — have been raising the alarm bells about the
vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
Only now as tensions with North Korea quickly escalate — with the rogue nation
refusing to back down from its nuclear testing and threats of such an onslaught
— is the matter really generating attention.
But according to U.S.
defense and security officials, while there are players purporting to protect
the nation’s critical infrastructure given millions of American lives on the
line, the reality is that no one really knows what will happen and what can be
done.
“We recognize that an
EMP event would have extremely dire consequences for the entire country, but
where the challenge comes is in attempting to quantify those impacts,” one
high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official, who requested anonymity,
told Fox News. “This is not something we have had a lot of real world
experience with.”
Earlier this month,
state news agencies in the Kim Jong Un-dictated country explicitly cautioned
that it could hit the U.S. with an EMP offensive. A hydrogen bomb detonated at
a high altitude would create an EMP that potentially could abolish prominent
parts of the electrical grid. The higher the bomb’s detonation, the wider the
scope of destruction. And given that high-altitude nuclear tests were
prohibited as per a 1963 treaty, from the U.S. side, there is little scientific
data to understand the devastation of a detonation on modern infrastructure.
But the potential
fallout from such an event is monstrous. In 2001, Congress enacted the
since-disbanded Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. with regards to an
EMP event, with commissioners testifying that up to 90 percent of Americans
could die within a year of such an attack. All the functions communities rely
upon — hospitals, water, waste, transport, telecommunications, air control,
medical care — could potentially be decimated for not days or weeks, but months
or years.
“Our ability to know
what would happen in the aftermath is highly uncertain. That being said, we are
doing several things to deepen our understanding. There is a lot of information
sharing,” noted the official. “We are looking at mitigation strategies and
developing planning tools. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is involved
too as there have been exercises and workshops related to catastrophic planning
and EMP events. But DHS does not have authority to compel power operators to do
anything, we do not have regulatory authority over grid operators.”
The U.S. electrical
grid, which is deemed one of the most vital pieces of infrastructure in the
country and serves more than 300 million, does not have one singular oversight
body responsible for its safeguarding — hence authorities have cautioned that
the magnitude of threat has fallen between the cracks.
“The military doesn’t
think it is their job to make the grid resilient, even though 99 percent of
their missions in continental United States rely on the civilian grid. The
utilities don’t think it is their job because it is a national security
problem. Besides, they don’t want to come up with the money, face more
regulatory burdens or fool with making over parts of the grid with uncertain
technical consequences,” lamented Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy
President and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy
under President Reagan, who has long warned of EMP’s efficiency to bring down
America. “And because of the sweetheart regulatory arrangement they have at the
federal level, they have been able to avoid it.”
Rather, individual
utilities are ultimately responsible for grid security but there is no standard
mandate in place. The private nonprofit North American Energy Reliability
Company (NERC) makes voluntary “best practices” recommendations to the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) while the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) and the Department of Energy (DOE) counterpart on security and
preparedness efforts.
According to the DHS,
financing grid security — given that it doesn’t fall under the responsibility
of one particular office — could have been done through slight rate increases,
but efforts are typically bound by red tape.
“If utilities want to
increase their customer rates by one cent a kilowatt hour to help invest in a
new effort for counter-terrorism or EMP they have to go to a public utility
commission and convince them that these rate increases are beneficial and meet
certain cost/benefit conditions,” said the official. “Frankly, public utility
commissions are there to protect consumers and they tend to be skeptical and
tend to really push utilities to think very hard about the times they come in
and push for rate increases to help support these kinds of efforts. Unlike some
other industries where they can immediately pass off costs to consumers, this
is not the case with power companies. They are slower to move due to the
regulatory environment they have to deal with.”
Risk analyst and
policy expert Dennis Santiago observed that any effort to harden the U.S. power
grid — including the oldest and most interconnected portions of it in the
eastern United States, which are especially exposed to disruption due to their
age and design — have fallen short at the public utilities level because of
“more pressing threats like physical attack security and cybersecurity.”
“In the end, this
process has left the U.S. with antiquated and vulnerable infrastructure,” he
said. “There is no unified or specified commander charged with specifically
marshalling America’s resources from the government and private sector into an
active defense of the power grid. There are civil services and regulatory
bodies mostly focused on energy as utilities but nothing looks like an energy version
of a military defense command.”
However, DHS
authorities, in conjunction with the Department of Energy, claim that even
before North Korea’s provocations they started ramping up efforts — around a
year ago — to make grid vulnerability higher on the priority list. The issue
was always secondary to threats considered to be more acute by the intelligence
community such as counter-terrorism post 9/11 and later cybersecurity and “more
destructive type natural hazards.”
“If something happens
in two weeks, we wouldn’t be able to close all the gaps of vulnerability,”
pointed out the official. “But having looked at this issue for a number of
years, we are taking appropriate action given our set of responsibilities and
authorities.”
A spokesperson for the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) additionally told Fox News that
they are “constantly working with federal partners to identify threats and
vulnerabilities that could impact the power grid” and, in coordination with the
federal partners, are working to “mitigate threats and where appropriate work
with the private sector.”
But beyond the North
Korea threat, experts also bemoan that Iran, Russia and China too have
assimilated EMP attack into their military creeds, posing a significant peril
to the United States.
“The very existence of
the nation is at stake,” Gaffney added. “We are facing explicit threats to use
EMP against us from the North Koreans — and there is a lot of capability to
execute such an attack in the hands of other enemies.”