A Call For a Presidential Commission On EMP

Interview with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, the Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum. Dr. Pry also served on the Congressional EMP Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and as an analyst in the Central Intelligence Agency.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. I have come to admire greatly the intelligence as well as the commitment to public service as our first guest. He is Dr. Peter Vincent Pry; he has been for many years involved with intelligence, analysis and policy application in successive roles in the U.S. Congress and he was also before that an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. Pry has been perhaps best known however for his long and dedicated service to a commission that Congress established to provide a second opinion a detailed understanding of the threat arising to our nation from electro-magnetic pulse. This EMP threat commission is now, I am devastated to report, about to expire and with it an end of some 17 years of warnings and profoundly important recommendations about the threat we are facing to our electric grid most especially. We are delighted to have Dr. Pry with us to talk a bit about the nature of this EMP threat and what must be done about it at this moment. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, thank you so much for joining us again. It’s good to talk to you.

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

Thank you for having me Frank.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So very quickly Peter, just a 101 introduction to our audience, though I think most of them are pretty familiar with this phenomenon. But what is electro-magnetic pulse? How could it be inflicted upon this country and with what effects?

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

Yeah, an EMP can be caused by nature, a solar storm from the sun, which could generate an EMP which is akin to a super-energetic radio wave with enough energy in it to destroy electronics within the EMP field. In the case of a true magnetic superstorm like the 1859 solar event, it would affect the whole world and would cause the collapse of electric grid and electronics everywhere in the world. In the case of a nuclear weapon from terrorists or a rogue state like North Korea, that has just recently tested a hydrogen bomb that they describe as a low-yield type weapon which has a setting for a super EMP, you know you could affect all of North America with a single such weapon. With the collapse of our electric grid, which is our biggest concern, because if we had a blackout which lasted a year or even months could lose millions of Americans, the EMP Commission has estimated up to 9 out of 10 Americans could die in a nationwide blackout that lasted one year, starvation and societal collapse.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It’s just unimaginably awful. But Peter Pry, when you look at what has been warned about by the Commission for these 17 or so years, what has been the response of the federal government and the electric utilities to these warnings?  Have your recommendations as a Commission been adopted and if so are we now better equipped to contend with this sort of threat?

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

There’s a real dichotomy here, Frank. You know the Department of Defense takes the EMP threat seriously. Even the Obama Administration spent nearly a billion dollars further hardening headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain and other commanding patrol links against the possibility of a nuclear EMP threat from North Korea. But when it comes to the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, those organizations responsible for protecting the electric grid and our civilian critical infrastructures, they act as though EMP is merely a theoretical threat, that it isn’t proven, that we need to do more studies on it to see whether it’s a threat; as if all that data with over 50 years of experience testing, from the Department of Defense doesn’t exist. In part, the DoD is to be blamed for this because Dr. Graham, the Chairman of the Commission has criticized them yesterday for sitting on and keeping classified a lot of the data on EMP. But there should be no excuse to apply a little common sense from the Department of Homeland security, because they can know just from newspaper report that the Department of Defense does harden systems against EMP. They know it’s a real threat, we wouldn’t be spending billions of dollars on EMP protection of our military system if it wasn’t a real threat

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Peter, you’ve mentioned that particularly there is a present danger from North Korea. You and often times your colleague and my good friend Jim Woolsey have been writing about the capabilities the North Koreans may have not just to lobby nuclear weapon over our country via ballistic missile, but perhaps to use satellites too of which they have orbiting the earth as we speak to unleash this kind of Electro-Magnetic devastation of our country. Talk quickly about the danger you and the commission have been particularly seized with from that country.

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

Yeah, we are very concerned. More concerned with the satellite threat than we are with North Koreans possession of intercontinental ballistic missiles. You know the satelittes are currently in orbit, they could two of them, the KMS2 and the KMS3, that are orbiting on an optimum trajectory to evade our national missile defenses coming up from the south and put an EMP field over North America if they were nuclear-armed. We don’t know if they’re nuclear-armed or not but it’s strange they are on that particular trajectory. A trajectory the Soviet Union had planned during the Cold War to make a surprise nuclear EMP attack and at the right altitude for doing that and at the right trajectory for doing that. And we know the North Koreans know about EMP they incorporate it into their war plans. It’s really the only way for them to possibly win a war with the United States through an EMP attack because if they were to blast a city or something like that we would turn them into a plate of glass. But EMP, we might not even though they did it if they did it by satellite you know because one of the first things it does is take out the radars and our other national technical means for ascertaining, well where did that blast come from? 

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Including satellites.

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

Yeah, and there are hundreds of satellites in lower orbit you know.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Peter Pry, let me just ask you specifically on this question of what the commission has learned about collaboration between the old Soviet Union’s weaponries and those that are now building those types of threats you talk about in North Korea. This is as they say in the old Soviet Union “No accident comrade,” is that right?

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

That’s absolutely right. In 2004 the commission was informed by two Russian generals and EMP experts, a couple of their top EMP experts to warn us, supposedly the visit was for a friendly warning that the design information for a super EMP nuclear weapon had accidentaly leaked from Russia to North Korea and that there are Russian scientists working on the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. But it wasn’t because the Russian government wanted them to, it was because it was brain drain because the economy was bad and they had to find work somewhere.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Another accident, it seems unlikely. Peter against this backdrop where there is clearly a great and growing danger to this country from a threat that you and your colleges led by Dr. William Graham have been warning of for almost 2 decades, the commission is being dismantled. This is simply unimaginable to me, there’s talk about having a new one created that will be like all the other politically developed commissioned to presumably come up with political judgements rather than technical ones. I have been championing, as I think you have, the idea of having President Trump create this commission as a Presidential Commission. Talk very quickly if you would about the need for doing that.

DR. PETER VINCENT PRY:

I think it’s a vital need for there to be an executive level, something in the White House close to the President, because the problem is big it cuts across all of the critical infrastructures including military and there’s no single department of agency that can manage it. It’s an executive level White house kind of a job. And indeed, President Reagan understood that, because he had originally set up in the White House something called the National Communications System which was to harden across all government communications for federal and executive levels. This would basically be the same thing, bring back what Ronald Reagan had originally envisioned which by the way was canceled by President Obama by executive order.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Surprise, surprise. Part of the wrecking operation. Peter Pry, I just want to say personally and I think on behalf of certainly our audience and many others besides, thank you to you and to your colleagues on the EMP commission for your service. I hope it will continue but I want you to know that your leadership, your clarity about this threat and all you have striven to do to enable us to defend ourselves against it is of the utmost importance. I hope you keep it up and I hope you come back to us to talk about it more in the near future. Next up Peter Huessy joins us we will talk about regime change in North Korea, whether that may be the answer in part to the threat we are now facing from that quarter. That and more straight ahead.