Iran has carried out missile tests for what could be a plan for
a nuclear strike on the United States, the head of a national security
panel has warned.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee and in
remarks to a private conference on missile defense over the weekend
hosted by the Claremont Institute, Dr. William Graham warned that the
U.S. intelligence community “doesn’t have a story” to explain the
recent Iranian tests.
One group of tests that troubled Graham, the former White House
science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts
to launch a Scud missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea.
“They’ve got [test] ranges in Iran which are more than long
enough to handle Scud launches and even Shahab-3 launches,” Dr. Graham
said. “Why would they be launching from the surface of the Caspian Sea?
They obviously have not explained that to us.”
Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches
where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the
target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude,”
Graham said. “Why would they do that?”
Graham chairs the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United
States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, a blue-ribbon panel
established by Congress in 2001.
The commission examined the Iranian tests “and without too much
effort connected the dots,” even though the U.S. intelligence community
previously had failed to do so, Graham said.
“The only plausible explanation we can find is that the Iranians
are figuring out how to launch a missile from a ship and get it up to
altitude and then detonate it,” he said. “And that’s exactly what you
would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other
missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”
The commission warned in a report issued in April that the
United States was at risk of a sneak nuclear attack by a rogue nation
or a terrorist group designed to take out our nation’s critical
infrastructure.
"If even a crude nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere between
40 kilometers to 400 kilometers above the earth, in a split-second it
would generate an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] that would cripple
military and civilian communications, power, transportation, water,
food, and other infrastructure," the report warned.
While not causing immediate civilian casualties, the near-term
impact on U.S. society would dwarf the damage of a direct nuclear
strike on a U.S. city.
“The first indication [of such an attack] would be that the
power would go out, and some, but not all, the telecommunications would
go out. We would not physically feel anything in our bodies,” Graham
said.
As electric power, water and gas delivery systems failed, there
would be “truly massive traffic jams,” Graham added, since modern
automobiles and signaling systems all depend on sophisticated
electronics that would be disabled by the EMP wave.
“So you would be walking. You wouldn’t be driving at that
point,” Graham said. “And it wouldn’t do any good to call the
maintenance or repair people because they wouldn’t be able to get
there, even if you could get through to them.”
The food distribution system also would grind to a halt as
cold-storage warehouses stockpiling perishables went offline. Even
warehouses equipped with backup diesel generators would fail, because
“we wouldn’t be able to pump the fuel into the trucks and get the
trucks to the warehouses,” Graham said.
The United States “would quickly revert to an early 19th century
type of country.” except that we would have 10 times as many people
with ten times fewer resources, he said.
“Most of the things we depend upon would be gone, and we would
literally be depending on our own assets and those we could reach by
walking to them,” Graham said.
America would begin to resemble the 2002 TV series, “Jeremiah,” which depicts a world bereft of law, infrastructure, and memory.
In the TV series, an unspecified virus wipes out the entire
adult population of the planet. In an EMP attack, the casualties would
be caused by our almost total dependence on technology for everything
from food and water, to hospital care.
Within a week or two of the attack, people would start dying, Graham says.
“People in hospitals would be dying faster than that, because
they depend on power to stay alive. But then it would go to water,
food, civil authority, emergency services. And we would end up with a
country with many, many people not surviving the event.”
Asked just how many Americans would die if Iran were to launch
the EMP attack it appears to be preparing, Graham gave a chilling
reply.
“You have to go back into the 1800s to look at the size of
population” that could survive in a nation deprived of mechanized
agriculture, transportation, power, water, and communication.
“I’d have to say that 70 to 90 percent of the population would not be sustainable after this kind of attack,” he said.
America would be reduced to a core of around 30 million people —
about the number that existed in the decades after America’s
independence from Great Britain.
The modern electronic economy would shut down, and America would
most likely revert to “an earlier economy based on barter,” the EMP
commission’s report on Critical National Infrastructure concluded
earlier this year.
In his recent congressional testimony, Graham revealed that
Iranian military journals, translated by the CIA at his commission’s
request, “explicitly discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely
harm the United States.”
Furthermore, if Iran launched its attack from a cargo ship
plying the commercial sea lanes off the East coast — a scenario that
appears to have been tested during the Caspian Sea tests — U.S.
investigators might never determine who was behind the attack. Because
of the limits of nuclear forensic technology, it could take months. And
to disguise their traces, the Iranians could simply decide to sink the
ship that had been used to launch it, Graham said.
Several participants in last weekend’s conference in Dearborn,
Mich., hosted by the conservative Claremont Institute argued that
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was thinking about an EMP attack
when he opined that “a world without America is conceivable.”
In May 2007, then Undersecretary of State John Rood told
Congress that the U.S. intelligence community estimates that Iran could
develop an ICBM capable of hitting the continental United States by
2015.
But Iran could put a Scud missile on board a cargo ship and
launch from the commercial sea lanes off America’s coasts well before
then. (As early as THIS year, see the following story from Israel. Bruce)
The only thing Iran is lacking for an effective EMP attack is a
nuclear warhead, and no one knows with any certainty when that will
occur. The latest U.S. intelligence estimate states that Iran could
acquire the fissile material for a nuclear weapon as early as 2009, or
as late as 2015, or possibly later.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first detailed the
“Scud-in-a-bucket” threat during a briefing in Huntsville, Ala., on
Aug. 18, 2004.
While not explicitly naming Iran, Rumsfeld revealed that “one of
the nations in the Middle East had launched a ballistic missile from a
cargo vessel. They had taken a short-range, probably Scud missile, put
it on a transporter-erector launcher, lowered it in, taken the vessel
out into the water, peeled back the top, erected it, fired it, lowered
it, and covered it up. And the ship that they used was using a radar
and electronic equipment that was no different than 50, 60, 100 other
ships operating in the immediate area.”
Iran’s first test of a ship-launched Scud missile occurred in
spring 1998, and was mentioned several months later in veiled terms by
the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United
States, a blue-ribbon panel also known as the Rumsfeld Commission.
I was the first reporter to mention the Iran sea-launched
missile test in an article appearing in the Washington Times in May
1999.
Intelligence reports on the launch were “well known to the White
House but have not been disseminated to the appropriate congressional
committees,” I wrote. Such a missile “could be used in a devastating
stealth attack against the United States or Israel for which the United
States has no known or planned defense.”
Few experts believe that Iran can be deterred from launching
such an attack by the threat of massive retaliation against Iran. They
point to a December 2001 statement by former Iranian President Ali
Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who mulled the possibility of Israeli
retaliation after an Iranian nuclear strike.
“The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel
completely, while [the same] against the Islamic only would cause
damages. Such a scenario is not inconceivable,” Rafsanjani said at the
time.
Rep. Trent Franks, R, Ariz., plans to introduce legislation next
week that would require the Pentagon to lay the groundwork for an
eventual military strike against Iran, to prevent Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons and EMP capability.
“An EMP attack on America would send us back to the horse and
buggy era — without the horse and buggy,” he told the Claremont
Institute conference on Saturday. “If you’re a terrorist, this is your
ultimate goal, your ultimate asymmetric weapon.”
Noting Iran’s recent sea-launched and mid-flight warhead
detonation tests, Rep. Franks concluded, “They could do it — either
directly or anonymously by putting some freighter out there on the
ocean.”
The only possible deterrent against Iran is the prospect of
failure, Dr. Graham and other experts agreed. And the only way the
United States could credibly threaten an Iranian missile strike would
be to deploy effective national missile defenses.
“It’s well known that people don’t go on a diet until they’ve
had a heart attack,” said Claremont Institute president Brian T.
Kennedy. “And we as a nation are having a heart attack” when it comes
to the threat of an EMP attack from Iran.
“As of today, we have no defense against such an attack. We need
space-based missile defenses to protect against an EMP attack,” he told
Newsmax.
Rep. Franks said he remains surprised at how partisan the
subject of space-based missile defenses remain. “Nuclear missiles don’t
discriminate on party lines when they land,” he said.
Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, a long-standing champion of
missile defense, told the Claremont conference on Friday that Sen.
Obama has opposed missile defense tooth and nail and as president would
cut funding for these programs dramatically.
“Senator Obama has been quoted as saying, ‘I don’t agree with a
missile defense system,’ and that we can cut $10 billion of the
research out — never mind, as I say, that the entire budget is $9.6
billion, or $9.3 billion,” Kyl said.
Like Franks, Kyl believes that the only way to eventually deter
Iran from launching an EMP attack on the United States is to deploy
robust missile defense systems, including space-based interceptors.
The United States “needs a missile defense that is so strong, in
all the different phases we need to defend against . . . that countries
will decide it’s not worth coming up against us,” Kyl said.
“That’s one of the things that defeated the Soviet Union. That’s
one of the ways we can deal with these rogue states . . . and also the
way that we can keep countries that are not enemies today, but are
potential enemies, from developing capabilities to challenge us. “
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