For some reason nuclear threats seem to be on my radar of late. (Could it be that I've watched every asteroid disaster movie ever made and need to find another category?)
Got some followup email from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, whose documentary I watched a while back. I read One Second After, a(n annoyingly patriotically American) novel about the aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse attack created using nukes. I read Alas Babylon, a late 1950s novel about the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear attack on the US. (And I read Tim (and Kathy) Keller's latest - which perhaps in my case also belongs in the disaster camp; perhaps even the nuclear disaster camp given that it deals with the formation of nuclear families).
Of those the EMP strikes me as one of the most troubling. To quote a a US government commission's report on this:
What is significant about an EMP attack is that one or a few high-altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMP effects that can potentially disrupt or damage electronic and electrical systems over much of the United States, virtually simultaneously, at a time determined by an adversary.
Of course, the question is whether this is a threat likely enough to materialize to justify spending significant resources on. That same report mentions that control systems in new infrastructure "can be EMP-hardened for a very small fraction of the cost of the non-hardened item, e.g., 1% to 3% of cost, if hardening is done at the time the unit is designed and manufactured" which seems to me to be a justifiable expense, at least for critical systems. As the report notes:
All of the critical functions of US society and related infrastructures—electric power, telecommunications, energy, financial, transportation, emergency services, water, food, etc.—have electronic devices embedded in most aspects of their systems, often providing critical controls. Electric power has thus emerged as an essential service underlying US society and all of its other critical infrastructures.
It's been a few years since that report was released - who knows if any action has been taken. Apparently it was released at roughly the same time as the 9/11 Commission Report; it seems easier to gather public support for measures intended to stop an attack that already happened (or at least to implement security theatre to give the impression of protecting from a recurrence) rather than to prevent an attack that might happen in the future.
