The annexation of Taiwan remains a central component of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) goal of national rejuvenation by 2049. The PRC regards Taiwan as a breakaway province and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve “reunification.” The risk of conflict is escalating as the PRC rapidly expands its military capabilities and U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan’s future continue to intensify.
If the PRC were to use force against Taiwan, the electromagnetic spectrum would be a critical domain in any such conflict. Attacks in this domain aim to jam, disable, and destroy electronic devices through electromagnetic pulses (EMP) that can disrupt signals or generate intense electric charges. With increasing reliance on electronics in critical infrastructures, EMP attacks present an opportunity to quickly paralyze modern militaries and societies.
Advanced militaries have recognized the potential of these EMP systems and are investing heavily in their research and development. The PRC is no exception, fielding a range of EMP weapons, with increasing power and utilization. EMPs are critical for the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) informatized warfare strategy, where they aim to paralyze modernized adversaries by targeting their electronically saturated infrastructure through “cyber-electromagnetic-space” attacks.
This threat is particularly concerning for Taiwan, which the PRC views as an illegitimate run-away province that they seek to annex, by force if necessary. At the beginning of 2025, as a Visiting Scholar at Taiwan’s National Defense University, I undertook research on this growing domain. This article aims to summarize my research findings by emphasizing the threat China’s EMP weapons pose to Taiwan’s national security.
China’s Capabilities & Strategy:
The PRC possesses two main types of EMP weapons: high-powered microwave (HPM) devices and high-altitude EMPs (HEMPs). The PRC is the global leader in HPM development, with PRC-affiliated organizations holding 90% of the world’s HPM-related patents. Moreover, open-source journals from PRC research institutions suggest that the PLA is rapidly enhancing the strength and precision of its HPMs, which can produce high frequency and intensity EMPs. Particularly concerning is that some of these systems are reportedly compact enough to be mounted on missile platforms. This raises the possibility of the PRC developing strike-capable HPM weapons similar to the U.S. “High-Powered Joint Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike” (HiJENKS) missile program.
HEMPs are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting pulses of electromagnetic radiation across a wide radius, inducing electric charges capable of destroying systems. China possesses 600 nuclear warheads, each a potential HEMP, with plans for 1,000 by 2035. To deliver these HEMPs, the PRC has invested in a greater number of nuclear-capable missile systems, most notably the DF-26s.
These weapons align with the PLA’s informatized warfare doctrine, which calls for attacks on an adversary’s technological nodes to paralyze military forces and critical civilian infrastructures. Combined with the PLA’s doctrine of active defense, which increasingly embraces preemptive strikes to deliver a decisive blow at the outset of a conflict, I argue that EMP weapons, particularly HEMPs, represent a modern-day “Assassin’s Mace” capability. A few well-placed, low-yield HEMPs across the spine of Taiwan, along with precision HPM-missile borne strikes against more hardened facilities, enable the PLA to achieve strategic surprise and paralyze the electronic infrastructures that Taiwan relies on so intensely.
Taiwan’s Defense:
Under President Lai Ching-te’s whole-of-society defense resilience strategy, asymmetric threats, such as EMP attacks, have garnered increased attention. This initiative aims to strengthen civil-military defense cooperation to ensure a more holistic defense policy, which is particularly important for EMP defense due to the dual-use nature of electronic infrastructure.
A large-scale EMP attack against Taiwan would be devastating. It has the potential to initiate cascading failures across Taiwan’s military and civil society through a combination of targeted HPM attacks against critical nodes and broad-based HEMP attacks encompassing the entire country.
EMP attacks can quickly disable military command and control infrastructure, leaving forces paralyzed. Key defense systems—such as the Patriot and Tien Kung surface-to-air missile batteries—are also at risk, as they depend on electronic sensors and radar vulnerable to EMPs. Recognizing this threat, many of Taiwan’s most critical military installations are hardened to withstand HEMP-grade attacks according to U.S. military standards. That said, this level of protection remains vulnerable to higher-frequency HPM attacks, whose frequency can be a hundred times greater than HEMPs.
The civilian sector faces even greater risks. Utilities such as telecommunications, water treatment facilities, transportation, and emergency response all depend on electronics to function, which are vulnerable to EMPs. Taiwan’s Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection currently enforces the International Electro-technical Commission EMP hardening standards for commercial electronic infrastructure. However, these standards are primarily designed to mitigate naturally occurring EMP events, such as lightning or solar storms, and do not offer sufficient protection against the far more intense pulses generated by HEMPs or HPMs.
Therefore, critical civilian infrastructure, such as the energy grid, is almost entirely vulnerable to even lower-intensity HEMP attacks. As a result, EMP attacks present Taiwan with a significant risk of experiencing a nationwide blackout, which could lead to the paralysis of critical utilities and place millions of lives at risk. Military operations, which rely heavily on dual-use civilian infrastructure, would also be significantly degraded under such conditions.
A State of Unreadiness
Taiwan is vulnerable to EMP attacks and needs to take additional measures to defend itself. When initiating defense reforms, one of the most challenging barriers is the intense normalcy bias one encounters. In my discussions with military and policy leaders in Taiwan, a common argument repeatedly surfaced: given limited resources, investments must prioritize immediate and probable threats, such as conventional missile strikes and drone incursions, that the PLA is certain to employ in a conflict. As a result, allocating funds to counter a low-probability threat like EMP attacks is often seen as an inefficient use of limited defense funds.
However, this rationale ignores the PLA’s strategic doctrine, with electromagnetic weapons serving as one of the pillars of its informatized warfare strategy whereby they seek to paralyze the electronic systems that connect and power advanced command and control systems. From Beijing’s perspective, EMPs offer a highly attractive means of paralyzing an adversary’s critical systems. Additionally, even if we assume EMP attacks have a low likelihood of being utilized, the potential risk of a large-scale EMP attack across Taiwan presents such existential risks that to ignore even the slightest of possibilities that it could occur would be strategic hubris.
If Taiwan is serious about building a resilient whole-of-society defense framework, hardening its electronic infrastructure against EMP attacks must be a strategic priority. As the foundation of both civil society and military operations, any major disruption to Taiwan’s electronic systems would pave the way for a PLA invasion. While the PLA’s offensive EMP capabilities are not yet fully developed, its significant investments in HPM technology and its expanding HEMP arsenal signal a clear shift toward these asymmetric weapon systems. At the current pace, these capabilities could reach operational maturity by the PLA’s 2035 modernization deadline.
Therefore, the time to act is shrinking. Taiwan must not base its defense investments solely on the threats the PRC poses today, but on the threats it will pose in a decade. This includes EMP weapons, which the PRC has made rapid advancements in. I hope that through my research, Taiwan will take the first step towards EMP resilience, which simply involves acknowledging the threat.
