Roscoe Bartlett: “among many priorities that the country and the Congress face, our national security is probably preeminent today in the…”

“among many priorities that the country and the Congress face, our national security is probably preeminent today in the minds of many people and in the Congress and in our administration. And today I would like to talk about one aspect of national security that will probably be unknown to a great many Americans, and to those few who know about and have studied it, this will remind them of the potential for this threat to our country, indeed, to our whole society. Our first glimpse of the possibility of this threat occurred in 1961. It was in the Pacific and we were then doing a series of nuclear tests, and this was our first and last high altitude test. It was over Johnston Island, and the weapon was detonated above the atmosphere the first time that we had done that. No one knew what was going to happen as a result of that test, and the consequences were unexpected and really quite striking. Hawaii was about 800 miles away. If you think back to 1961, we did not have all of the electronics that we have today. We were more in an electrical infrastructure then than we were in an electronic infrastructure, and the electrical infrastructures are very much more robust than an electronic infrastructure because you are dealing with big structures and heavy wires and so forth. Even so, the effects of this detonation above the atmosphere resulted in the shutdown of electrical circuits.…”