Are electromagnetic pulses terrorists next weapon of choice?
By Keith Rogers The list of weapons available to terrorists now ranges from passenger jets to atomic devices and biological and chemical agents. But the United States has made little progress in guarding against what might be its most devastating threat — widespread damage to domestic electronic systems from a powerful, split-second wave of energy from a nuclear bomb. Although some of the last full-scale nuclear weapons tests conducted in tunnels at the Nevada Test Site were designed to protect or ‘harden’ military systems against electronic failure in a nuclear exchange, little of that preventive technology has been transferred to civilian equipment, sources said Friday. ‘I don’t think there has been any significant effort to harden the private sector against electromagnetic pulse,’ said John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a defense and intelligence policy organization based near Washington, D.C. Twice in the past four years, and as recently as 1999, Congress was warned that a
