The Congressional Panel's warning is certainly serious, and Mr. Gaffney's points re: Iran's recent tests of ship-launched ballistic missiles in EMP trajectories adds a chilling dimenson. See also Gary Farber's The Threat from the Sea.
EMP: America's Achilles' Heel
by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
President, Center for Security Policy
If Osama bin Laden - or the dictators of North Korea or Iran - could destroy America as a twenty-first century society and superpower, would they be tempted to try? Given their track records and stated hostility to the United States, we have to operate on the assumption that they would. That assumption would be especially frightening if this destruction could be accomplished with a single attack involving just one relatively small-yield nuclear weapon - and if the nature of the attack would mean that its perpetrator might not be immediately or easily identified.
Unfortunately, such a scenario is not far-fetched. According to a report issued last summer by a blue-ribbon, Congressionally-mandated commission, a single specialized nuclear weapon delivered to an altitude of a few hundred miles over the United States by a ballistic missile would be "capable of causing catastrophe for the nation." The source of such a cataclysm might be considered the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction" (WMD) - yet it is hardly ever mentioned in the litany of dangerous WMDs we face today. It is known as electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
A nuclear weapon produces several different effects. The best known, of course, are the intense heat and overpressures associated with the fireball and accompanying blast. But a nuclear explosion also generates intense outputs of energy in the form of x- and gamma-rays. If the latter are unleashed outside the Earth's atmosphere, some portion of them will interact with the upper atmosphere's air molecules. This in turn will generate an enormous pulsed current of high-energy electrons that will interact with the Earth's magnetic field. The result is the instantaneous creation of an invisible radio-frequency wave of uniquely great intensity - roughly a million-fold greater than that of the most powerful radio station.
The energy of this pulse would reach everything in line-of-sight of the explosion's center point at the speed of light. The higher the altitude of the weapon's detonation, the larger the affected terrestrial area would be. For example, at a height of 300 miles, the entire continental United States, some of its offshore areas and parts of Canada and Mexico would be affected. What is more, as the nuclear explosion's fireball expands in space, it would generate additional electrical currents in the Earth below and in extended electrical conductors, such as electricity transmission lines. If the electrical wiring of things like computers, microchips and power grids is exposed to these effects, they may be temporarily or permanently disabled.
Estimates of the combined direct and indirect effects of an EMP attack prompted the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack to state the following in its report to Congress1:
The electromagnetic fields produced by weapons designed and deployed with the intent to produce EMP have a high likelihood of damaging electrical power systems, electronics, and information systems upon which American society depends. Their effects on dependent systems and infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation.
If it seems incredible that a single weapon could have such an extraordinarily destructive effect, consider the nature and repercussions of the three distinct components of an electromagnetic pulse: fast, medium and slow. The "fast component" is essentially an "electromagnetic shock-wave" that can temporarily or permanently disrupt the functioning of electronic devices. In twenty-first century America, such devices are virtually everywhere, including in controls, sensors, communications equipment, protective systems, computers, cell phones, cars and airplanes. The extent of the damage induced by this component of EMP, which occurs virtually simultaneously over a very large area, is determined by the altitude of the explosion.
The "medium-speed component" of EMP covers roughly the same geographic area as the "fast" one, although the peak power level of its electrical shock would be far lower. Since it follows the "fast component" by a small fraction of a second, however, the medium-speed component has the potential to do extensive damage to systems whose protective and control features have been impaired or destroyed by the first onslaught.
If the first two EMP components were not bad enough, there is a third one - a "slow component" resulting from the expansion of the explosion's fireball in the Earth's magnetic field. It is this "slow component" - a pulse that lasts tens of seconds to minutes - which creates disruptive currents in electricity transmission lines, resulting in damage to electrical supply and distribution systems connected to such lines. Just as the second component compounds the destructive impact of the first, the fact that the third follows on the first two ensures significantly greater damage to power grids and related infrastructure.
The EMP Threat Commission estimates that, all other things being equal, it may take "months to years" to bring such systems fully back online. Here is how it depicts the horrifying ripple effect of the sustained loss of electricity on contemporary American society:
Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result. In that event, a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our nation. The primary avenues for catastrophic damage to the nation are through our electric power infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications, energy, and other infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact other important aspects of our nation's life, including the financial system; means of getting food, water, and medical care to the citizenry; trade; and production of goods and services.
The recovery of any one of the key national infrastructures is dependent on the recovery of others. The longer the outage, the more problematic and uncertain the recovery will be. It is possible for the functional outages to become mutually reinforcing until at some point the degradation of infrastructure could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to support its population.
The destructive power of electromagnetic pulses has been recognized by the United States national security community for some time. The EMP Threat Commission noted that
EMP effects from nuclear bursts are not new threats to our nation…. Historically, [however,] this application of nuclear weaponry was mixed with a much larger population of nuclear devices that were the primary source of destruction, and thus EMP as a weapons effect was not the primary focus.
As long as the Cold War threat arose principally from the prospect of tens, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons detonating on American soil, such attention as was given to protecting against EMP effects was confined to shielding critical components of our strategic forces. The military's conventional forces were generally not systematically "hardened" against such effects. And little, if any, effort was made even to assess - let alone to mitigate - the vulnerabilities of our civilian infrastructure. As the theory went, as long as our nuclear deterrent worked, there was no need to worry about everything else. If, on the other hand, deterrence failed, the disruptions caused by EMP would be pretty far down the list of things about which we would have to worry.
Unfortunately, today's strategic environment has changed dramatically from that of the Cold War, when only the Soviet Union and Communist China could realistically threaten an EMP attack on the United States. In particular, as the EMP Threat Commission put it:
The emerging threat environment, characterized by a wide spectrum of actors that include near-peers, established nuclear powers, rogue nations, sub-national groups, and terrorist organizations that either now have access to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles or may have such access over the next 15 years, have combined to raise the risk of EMP attack and adverse consequences on the U.S. to a level that is not acceptable.
Worse yet, the Commission observed that "some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter." This is particularly true of "terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety." The same might be said of rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran. They "may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States, and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter." Indeed, professionals associated with the former Soviet nuclear weapons complex are said to have told the Commission that some of their ex-colleagues who worked on advanced nuclear weaponry programs for the USSR are now working in North Korea.
Even more troubling, the Iranian military has reportedly tested its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile in a manner consistent with an EMP attack scenario. The launches are said to have taken place from aboard a ship - an approach that would enable even short-range missiles to be employed in a strike against "the Great Satan." Ship-launched ballistic missiles have another advantage: The "return address" of the attacker may not be confidently fixed, especially if the missile is a generic Scud-type weapon available in many arsenals around the world. As just one example, in December 2002, North Korea got away with delivering twelve such missiles to Osama bin Laden's native Yemen. And Al Qaeda is estimated to have a score or more of sea-going vessels, any of which could readily be fitted with a Scud launcher and could try to steam undetected within range of our shores.
The EMP Threat Commission found that even nations with whom the United States is supposed to have friendly relations, China and Russia, are said to have considered limited nuclear attack options that, unlike their Cold War plans, employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack. Indeed, as recently as May 1999, during the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, high-ranking members of the Russian Duma, meeting with a U.S. congressional delegation to discuss the Balkans conflict, raised the specter of a Russian EMP attack that would paralyze the United States.
What makes the growing EMP attack capabilities of hostile (and potentially hostile) nations a particular problem for America is that, in the words of the EMP Threat Commission, "the U.S. has developed more than most other nations as a modern society heavily dependent on electronics, telecommunications, energy, information networks, and a rich set of financial and transportation systems that leverage modern technology." Given our acute national dependence on such technologies, it is astonishing - and alarming - to realize that:
- Very little redundancy has been built into America's critical infrastructure. There is, for example, no parallel "national security power grid" built to enjoy greater resiliency than the civilian grid.
- America's critical infrastructure has scarcely any capacity to spare in the event of disruption - even in one part of the country (recall the electrical blackout that crippled the northeastern U.S. for just a few days in 2003), let alone nationwide.
- America is generally ill-prepared to reconstitute damaged or destroyed electrical and electricity-dependent systems upon which we rely so heavily.
These conditions are not entirely surprising. America in peacetime has not traditionally given thought to military preparedness, given our highly efficient economy and its ability to respond quickly when a threat or attack arises. But EMP threatens to strip our economy of that ability, by rendering the infrastructure on which it relies impotent.
In short, the attributes that make us a military and economic superpower without peer are also our potential Achilles' heel. In today's world, wracked by terrorists and their state sponsors, it must be asked: Might not the opportunity to exploit the essence of America's strength - the managed flow of electrons and all they make possible - in order to undo that strength prove irresistible to our foes? This line of thinking seems especially likely among our Islamofascist enemies, who disdain such man-made sources of power and the sorts of democratic, humane and secular societies which they help make possible. These enemies believe it to be their God-given responsibility to wage jihad against Western societies in general and the United States in particular.
Calculations that might lead some to contemplate an EMP attack on the United States can only be further encouraged by the fact that our ability to retaliate could be severely degraded by such a strike. In all likelihood, so would our ability to assess against whom to retaliate. Even if forward-deployed U.S. forces were unaffected by the devastation wrought on the homeland by such an attack, many of the systems that transmit their orders and the industrial base necessary to sustain their operations would almost certainly be seriously disrupted.
The impact on the American military's offensive operations would be even further diminished should units based outside the continental United States also be subjected to EMP. Particularly with the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has been reluctant to pay the costs associated with shielding much of its equipment from electromagnetic pulses. Even if it had been more willing to do so, the end of underground nuclear testing in 1992 denied our armed forces their most reliable means of assessing and correcting the EMP vulnerabilities of weapon systems, sensors, telecommunications gear and satellites.
The military should also be concerned that although the sorts of shielding it has done in the past may be sufficient to protect against the EMP effects of traditional nuclear weapons designs, weapons optimized for such effects may well be able to defeat those measures. Without a robust program for assessing and testing advanced designs, we are unlikely to be able to quantify such threats - let alone protect our military hardware and capabilities against them.
If the EMP Threat Commission is correct about the phenomenon of electromagnetic pulse attacks, the capabilities of our enemies to engage in these attacks and the effects of such attacks on our national security, cosmopolitan society and democratic way of life, we have no choice but to take urgent action to mitigate this danger. To do so, we must immediately engage in three focused efforts:
First, we must do everything possible to deter EMP attacks against the United States. The EMP Threat Commission described a comprehensive approach:
We must make it difficult and dangerous to acquire the materials to make a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver them. We must hold at risk of capture or destruction anyone who has such weaponry, wherever they are in the world. Those who engage in or support these activities must be made to understand that they do so at the risk of everything they value. Those who harbor or help those who conspire to create these weapons must suffer serious consequences as well.
To be effective, these measures will require vastly improved intelligence, the capacity to perform clandestine operations the world over, and the assured means of retaliating with devastating effect. The latter, in turn, will require not only forces capable of carrying out such retaliation in the aftermath of an EMP attack, but also the certain ability to command and control those forces. It may also require the communication, at least through private if not public channels, of the targets that will be subjected to retaliation - irrespective of whether a definitive determination can be made of culpability.
Second, we must protect to the best of our ability our critical military capabilities and civilian infrastructure from the effects of EMP attacks. This will require a comprehensive assessment of our vulnerabilities and proof of the effectiveness of corrective measures. Both of these may require, among other things, periodic underground nuclear testing.
The EMP Threat Commission judged that, given the sorry state of EMP-preparedness on the part of the tactical forces of the United States and its coalition partners, "It is not possible to protect [all of them] from EMP in a regional conflict." But it recommended that priority be given to protecting "satellite navigation systems, satellite and airborne intelligence and targeting systems [and] an adequate communications infrastructure."
Particularly noteworthy was the Commission's recommendation that America build a ballistic missile defense system. Given that a catastrophic EMP attack can be mounted only by putting a nuclear weapon into space over the United States and that, as a practical matter, this can only be done via a ballistic missile, it is imperative that the United States deploy as quickly as possible a comprehensive defense against such delivery systems. In particular, every effort should be made to give the Navy's existing fleet of some 65 AEGIS air defense ships the capability to shoot down short to medium-range missiles of the kind that might well be used to carry out ship-launched EMP strikes.
Third, an aggressive and sustained effort must be made to plan and otherwise prepare for the consequences of an EMP attack in the event all else fails. This will require close collaboration between government at all levels and the private sector, which owns, designs, builds, and operates most of the nation's critical infrastructure. Among other things, we will need to do a far better job of monitoring that infrastructure and remediating events that could ensue if EMP attacks are made on it. We must also ensure that we have on hand, and properly protected, the equipment and parts - especially those that are difficult or time-consuming to produce - needed to repair EMP-damaged systems. The EMP Threat Commission identified the latter as including "large turbines, generators, and high-voltage transformers in electrical power systems, and electronic switching systems in telecommunications systems."
We have been warned. The members of the EMP Threat Commission - who are among the nation's most eminent experts with respect to nuclear weapons designs and effects - have rendered a real and timely public service. In the aftermath of their report and in the face of the dire warnings they have issued, there is no excuse for our continued inaction. Yet this report and these warnings continue to receive inadequate attention from the executive branch, Congress and the media. If Americans remain ignorant of the EMP danger and the need for urgent and sustained effort to address it, the United States will continue to remain woefully unprepared for one of the most serious dangers we have ever faced. And by remaining unprepared for such an attack, we will invite it.
The good news is that steps can be taken to mitigate this danger - and perhaps to prevent an EMP attack altogether. The bad news is that there will be significant costs associated with those steps, in terms of controversial policy changes and considerable expenditures. We have no choice but to bear such costs, however. The price of continued inaction could be a disaster of infinitely greater cost and unimaginable hardship for our generation and generations of Americans to come.
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a B.S. from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He acted in the Reagan administration as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, following four years of service as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy. Prior to that he was a professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by the late Senator John Tower (R-Texas) and an aide to the late Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson (D-Washington). He is a columnist for the Washington Times, Jewish World Review and TownHall.com, a contributing editor to National Review Online and a featured weekly contributor to Hugh Hewitt's nationally syndicated radio program. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Mr. Gaffney resides in Washington, D.C.
© 2005. This article was adapted from a speech delivered on May 24, 2005, in Dallas, Texas, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on the topic, "America's War Against Islamic Terrorism." Editor, Douglas A. Jeffrey; Deputy Editor, Timothy W. Caspar; Assistant to the Editor, Patricia A. DuBois. Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (subcription free upon request), with graphics added by Winds of Change.NET. Note that the opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College.
JAN 25/06 UPDATE: Armed Liberal, with a different view. "EMP? Don't Lose Any sleep Over EMP This Year." Inclusing calculations from Glasstone & Dolan's "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons," Third Edition.
Yawn. Y2K crisis part 2. First, AQ cant seem to get a guy with a rifle into a mall in Des Moines these days, im not particularly worried about them detonating a strategic nuclear weapon several hundred miles above the US. Second, it would be traceable. Nuclear weapons produce isotopes specific to their origin. While we might not have an instant match, the process of elimination would do. Finally, im highly skeptical about the actual impact. The power of an EMP is directly related to its energy output (obviously). A small Nagasaki type bomb simply doesnt seem likely to do the kind of worst case damage being talked about. This strategy was widely wargamed in the Cold War as a first strike option, and inevitably a very large multi-megaton warhead (or multiple) was expected. Im far more worried about a couple of barges being sunk in Boston Harbor or a few gallons of VX being sprayed into Times Square.
Joe! Say it ain't so, Joe!
Does Frank (he prefers I call him that) really know what he's getting into here?
Now my head really hurts.
Seems I've heard something similar to this before.
What's the difference between me & Frank Gaffney really?
I mean aside from that stupid little writing skills thing and the oft over-rated 'knowledgebase' from study and experience...
Forget that...where was Frank when I needed him???
Oy. My head hurts now.
Mark, thanks for the comment. Agree that other terrorist threats are more likely. Having said that:
[a] This isn't about al-Qaeda;
[b] In the 1997 Congressional testimony which included the displayed map, Ulrich and Wood were both saying 1 megaton+ to cover the entire USA with 10kV/sq. meter at the periphery, and noted Soviet doctrine as around 10 MT. On the other hand, there was this exchange:
By large regions, they means 600+ mile radius. Lots of other good exchanges there.
[c ] Finally, re: tracing isotopes and deducing origins. I know you can do that from physical nuclear material. Can it be done from the after-effects of a nuclear bomb detonated high in the atmosphere? That strikes me as a significantly harder task, and I don't know if it's possible.
Perhaps we have a reader who can enlighten us RE: how that works, or if it does.
Hmmm...
© Isotopic determination - can only be determined with accuracy by having samples of the left-overs from a country's presumably underground testing - FROM the same "run" of nuclear material, the same "lot number". There is such a high degree of variation between isotope levels in nuclear material of the plutonic type - even day to day! - that isotopic signature analysis is more of a pipe dream than a reality.
[c+] however, the other aspect (again besmirched by statistics and design changes) that does give a relatively constant signature is the design of the device. Its physics. No one can actually tell you how a device was built in detail by sifting through the post-explosion detritus, but one CAN say that "this looks like another one of them things we sampled last week, Guthrie." More or less.
[b] regarding power and EMP: the intensity of local field modulation is a function of the inverse-square of distance TIMES the sin() horizon angle. Or to say it a different way, at very shallow horizon angles (near the limits of the "horizon" ring), not only is the field diminished by 1/r˛, but also by sin(small-angle). Not very strong except at the lowest frequencies.
[b+] Pulses - be they electromagnetic or acoustic, seismic or bathynic, become unshaped as they propagate, the long waves remaining in phase the longest, and the shorter (higher frequency) wavelengths gradually getting out of phase, cancelling their accumulated pulse intensity. Another way to look at it is that the pulse "smears out" with distance. Its fascinating to "hear" the sound of close versus distance seismic signatures. See usgs.gov
[a] Finally, I believe the conjecture of a LOT of power being required is accurate. Physics conservation-of-energy is the Old Hag That Cannot be Cheated. 1e15 [total] joules bursts forth from a 25 kiloton weapon. Without extensive espionage or testing, no country is going to covertly produce megaton-class devices. Assuming something on the order of 10% conversion efficiency [total to EMP], and a radius of a thousand miles (1600km), then you're talking a deposition of some [1e14 / 7e6] = 1.4e7 joules/km˛. That really isn't a big number. Underneath, of course, the situation is going to be a bit different.
All this changes of course, if the enemy fenigles a way to secure a functioning but mothballed high-yield Soviet weapon and delivery system. It isn't unthinkable, give the desparate view of the former Soviet Union's current bag of countries. All of which are derivatve nuclear powers. Megaton class weapons would have a profound effect, both mechanically (firestorms) and electronically (50 km detonations) due to close-field EMP. Quite fairly areas the size of New England or the Gulf Coast, or the entire District of Columbia + 300 miles could be shut down.
The biggest issues are that [unreferenced in the article] that with the sudden and essentially complete automatic shutdown of the electrical grid and feeder utilities due to EMP overload of critical everything's, given the interconnectedness of the grid, there probably isn't a rational plan for bringing the whole thing back up in an orchestrated fashion. I'd bet whole swathes of the affected grid would be down for days, if not weeks. Especially given that there really aren't dozens-to-hundreds of spare transformers, capacitors and circuit-breakers at the 10 to 500 megawatt level just sitting around waiting to be put in service.
Doesn't bode well, if any enemy figures out how to serve up a megaton weapon.
Yet, it would be and must be recognized as well as utterly suicidal. Think Japand & Pearl Harbor.
America couldn't respond immediately. In fact we couldn't properly respond for weeks and months. But when we did, there was a particular cold fury in the action to beat down Tojo, and do so spectacularly. The Bombs helped of course.
I'm pretty certain that America would take a month or five to measure the return stroke. I simply wouldn't want to be innocent OR guilty in an openly hostile anti-American country. Not pretty.
But what if, again, the Pakistanis sell one to the Ruskies and the Ruskies turn around and sell one of their own to the Iranians (or some such contorted way of logic?) Who is the perp? Who do you hit? Paris, just to remind everyone that European apologetics got us into this fine kettle of fish to beging with? [Sarc but not too much]
In any case the EMP issues presented is a bit overblown, especially given the limitations of ANY of the third world's delivery vehicles.
GoatGuy
Yes a gamma ray spectrometer in space could identify the isotope composition of a high altitude nuclear explosion.
Airborne gr spectrometer units are used to survey for natural radiogenic minerals.
In space gammas travel much further than they do in the atmosphere.
The best thing is if the West switches to an increasingly underground or submarine all-optical-fibre telecoms infrastructure which is relatively invulnerable to EMP.
Also one other thing occurs to me.
I have surge limiters/protectors on all my computer/hifi/video equipment.
I suspect that would give at least some protection for my electronic gadgets against power line EMP surges.
I found this via google last night
Physics of the EMP
An electromagnetic pulse starts with a short, intense burst of gamma rays produced from nuclear detonation. The gamma rays interact with the atoms in air molecules through a process called the Compton effect, wherein electrons are scattered at high energies, thus ionizing the atmosphere and generating a powerful electrical field. The strength of the EMP depends highly on the altitude at which it is released. At altitudes above 30,000m, it is the strongest. It is also significant at surface or low altitude bursts, but is not as effective between the two extremes.
Effects of an EMP
Although the electric field created from an EMP lasts for only a short time, its effects can be devastating. It is predicted that a single high altitude burst 200 miles above Kansas could propagate an EMP enveloping the entire United States. Electrical systems connected to things that can conduct current like wires, antennas, and metal objects will suffer significant damage. EMP effects on electronics include interference of radio frequency links, irreparable damage to microcircuits, and even the disabling of satellites. Fortunately, electronic equipment that is turned off is less likely to be damaged.
Protecting Against EMP
Electrical equipment is "hardened" to protect itself from an EMP. The basic concern of protection is cutting down the outside EMP level. Metallic shielding is used to route EMP fields away from vital electrical components. If it is also connected to a cable, transient protection like surge protectors, wire termination procedures, screened isolated transformers, protective enclosures, spark gaps, and filters are used to protect at the point of entry. To protect against EMP in an indirect way, other methods are used, such as increasing immediate backup units and avoidance (i.e. keeping equipment out of range of EMP bursts).
Consider for a moment the effect on 'fly by wire' wide body commercial airliners like Airbus when EMP wipes out their flight computers via propagation through radio and navigation antennas. Literally hundreds of wide body passenger jets will go down minutes after nuclear EMP device goes off over American skies. More than 10,000 people will die in crashes, and perhaps many multiples of that.
On the ground you will have every moving car truck or bus that has electronic ignitions and computer controlled fuel injection die. Most of those vehicles have power steering, so when the engine dies, drivers will lose control. That will kill and injure tens of thousands more.
Operating major petrochemical refineries will be destroyed as the electronic controls of the oil cracking process and electrically powered manual back ups all go down mid-process. With no controls, the uncontrolled cracking process will destroy the refineries.
There will be no emergency medical. police or fire service in all of this since telecommunications, transportation and power all died in the same instance.
This means major fires will grow our of control and spread until natural barriers block them. Consider for a moment the implications of several fully fueled wide body passenger jets going down in the Southern California country side in fire season.
An EMP attack of sufficient magnitude could kill half a million Americans directly and indirectly through things like heat stress for the tens of thousands of elderly and heart patients denied air conditioning and medications as the transpoirtation system shuts down for weeks.
Think the recent hot French summer that killed 15,000 elderly, times 20.
Interesting. But if the yield range we're talking about is 1 to 10 megatons, that's thermonuclear range. As Goat Guy says, that rules out the NorKs and the mullahs. For some time to come anyway. A nasty potential threat, then, but not an imminent and urgent one.
H-weapons means all you have to worry about are China, Russia, France and the UK.
And none in that list are insane.
Nobody is going to give away thermonukes.
Hence proliferation by technology transfer; which may include fission weapons data/design elements but not fusion physics, at least so far.
As for concern about Russian loss/theft; I suspect that danger is a lot lower than it used to be. Putin is hammering the mafiya/oligarch access to state power, and Chechen Islamists who'd love to see Moscow a glowing hole in the ground give the state security boys one heck of an incentive. AFAIA all the former Soviet nukes have been moved out of the Former Soviet Republics to Russia.
Dan Dare,
Surge protectors are aimed at protecting from lightning strikes. They have a different and slower signature than the surge from EMP.
A circuit built to protect from EMP provides protection from lightning, not the other way around.
Being Chemical Engineering my field, I can say something about oil refineries. They have multiple, redundant and fail-safe control systems (eg valves shutting off mechanically if the power fails). A total electric failure wouldn't be pretty for sure, but neither so catastrophic as depicted. Ah, there are refinery control systems using fiber optics cable for data transmission, which are much less sensitive to EMPs.
Also FBW aircrafts have some manual backup controls - maybe not all of them, tho.
One day my car was left without any hydraulic oil in the power steering, but it was still controllable.
Thanks, Fabio. IIUC, however, the ability of fallback systems in vehicles and planes to take over after EMP fries electronics depends very much on the model in question.
For instance, while a smaller car may be manually steerable, a larger one travelling at high speeds might not.
Similarly, while there are instances of A10 pilots landing their aircraft using hydraulic controls alone, transcontinental commercial aircraft are unlikely to be controllable this way - they are too large, heavy and sophisticated. Their fly-by-wire systems are designed for electronic redundancy, but not for the simultaneous loss of all electronics at once.
NOTE: for those unfamiliar with the term, a fly-by-wire plane is not an aerodynamic glider. It flies due to constant wing adjustments by the computerized flight control systems. When these totally fail, FBW planes drop like rocks rather than glide towards earth.
Hmm, im still a bit skeptical of the real world impact such an attack would have. Certainly critical military installations have been hardened in expectation of such an event (I seem to recall NORAD being built inside a giant Faraday Cage). The civilian impact I suspect would be largely confined to the power grid, a minor version of which we saw in the East Coast shutdown a few years ago. I suspect the EMP effect has been largely hypothesized in ideal conditions, how the atmosphere and topography would affect the weapon in practice is probably so complex as to be unknowable without some pretty radical testing that isnt going to happen. Basically the engineer in me rebels at the idea of a bomb the size of a bus burning out every electronic circuit on an entire continent. I'll gladly bow to Goat's knowledge and second the idea that a regional disaster would be more likely and a more effective attack.
Politically, this brings us back to deterrance. My idea for a doctrine (that may be de facto in practice actually [no thanks to me :)]) is to make it clear, either publically or privately, to any and all rogue nuclear seeking states that any attack on the US and our interests that cannot be immediately traced back to anyone will be responded to by holding all rogue regimes equally and completely responsible. Hence Iran and NK both get the big nuclear finger, no questions asked. Thats a pretty good incentive not to develop nukes, Im not sure KJI want to rely on the good will and sanity of the Mullahs, and vice versa. Not even the most ambitious dictator will be happy about being at the mercy of whoever the least stable tyrant in the world.
America couldn't respond immediately. In fact we couldn't properly respond for weeks and months.
So you're assuming we don't have ballistic missile subs around the world any more? or doctrine on how commanders should respond to a total loss of radio communications with the mainland coupled with reports from allies?
Unless an enemy figures out how to launch a ballistic missle from a location outside their country without detection then there's a huge deterrent effect. The EMP comes with a return address to the point of launch.
Perhaps a country might consider such a nuclear attack on the US a good idea, but they would have to seriously consider odds of their total destruction.
There is also a difference between permanent damage and temporary disabilitation of electronic devices; and local structures/conditions may lower or enhance the effects of the pulse.
I think Mark is right, there is no way to tell exactly what will happen without testing.
I disagree on the definition of FBW given above: jetliners are all aerodinamically stable; the FBW system does convert the input from the controls in electrical impulses which are processed through a flight computer (to remain inside the flight envelope and prevent other indesiderable occurrences) and then routed to actuators at the various control surfaces and engines that will effectively move the parts involved.
Indeed, and Airbus 330 succsfully glided to the ground after suffering an almost-total power failure: http://www.aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20010824-1
Mark,
The altitude the device detonates at is more important than its yield. Yield takes precedence only when the device is detonated within a fairly narrow altitude range. I believe a 15kt device detonated at 150km altitude will do much more EMP damage than a 900kt device detonated at 35km.
What really does the damage is the energy in the earth's magnetic field (according to Telenko, who worked on Air Force Two, the Van Allen belts are involved to a major degree in EMP effects), which is "displaced" by the energy from the device's yield and is picked up by all the antennae aka electrical circuits on Earth, which includes those in cell phones, cars, etc.
Dan Dare,
Surge protectors won't make a bit of difference. What does is whether a particular elctronic item is turned on at the time of the pulse. A laptop operating on battery power at the time of the pulse is more likely to be totalled than an otherwise unprotected desktop computer which is turned off.
The electrical circuits in hand calculators and cell phones will act as antennae for purposes of EMP. If they're turned on when it hits, the odds of their being totalled are many orders of magnitude greater than if they're turned off.
Being connected to the electric power grid is certainly a major factor in vulnerability here, but not to anywhere near the degree of difference between being turned on or off, or how many electrical circuits there are in the device (effective size of "antenna surface"). Laptops are more vulnerable than hand calculators because the former are bigger and have more circuits.
FabioC
This is the incident at your link:
Air Transat Flight TS236, was en route at FL390 when at 05:36 UTC, the crew became aware of a fuel imbalance between the left and right-wing main fuel tanks. Five minutes later the crew concerned about the lower-that-expected fuel quantity indication, decided to divert to Lajes Airport in the Azores. At 05:48 UTC, when the crew ascertained that a fuel leak could be the reason for the possible fuel loss, an emergency was declared to Santa Maria Oceanic Control. At 06:13, at a calculated distance of 135 miles from Lajes, the right engine (Rolls-Royce Trent 772B) flamed out. At 06:26, when the aircraft was about 85 nm from Lajes and at an altitude of about FL345, the left engine flamed out. At 06:39 the aircraft was at 13,000 feet and 8 miles from the threshold of runway 33. An engines-out visual approach was carried out and the aircraft landed on runway 33. Eight of the plane's ten tyres burst during the landing.
Investigation has determined that a low-pressure fuel line on the right engine, had failed probably as the result of its coming into contact with an adjacent hydraulic line.
This plane still had battery power and its flight controls were unaffected by the dual engine flame out.
In the case of an EMP attack, the digital flight controls, cabin CRT and liquid crystal displays, all three flight control computers and the microprocessor controls at the flight actuators would be fried. So would the radio, the navaids and intercom. So would the digital engine control unit for the turbo fans.
All at once.
Lurker,
Buried in the article is the following;
>What really does the damage is the energy in
>the earth's magnetic field (according to
>Telenko, who worked on Air Force Two, the Van
>Allen belts are involved to a major degree in
>EMP effects), which is "displaced" by the
>energy from the device's yield and is picked up
>by all the antennae aka electrical circuits on
>Earth, which includes those in cell phones,
>cars, etc.
The Van Allen belts in low earth orbit are where many of the high energy particles from the sun are shunted into what amounts to huge magnetic containment field. A nuke going off a that altitude disrupts the earth's magnetic field and lets many of those particles loose into the upper atmosphere which has results like the aurora borealis at the North Pole.
The energy from that nuclear blast also causes the earth’s magnetic field to “reverberate.” The combination of an ionized upper atmosphere and reverberating magnetic fields block high frequency radio communications because high frequency radio cannot be bounced off the blast induced interference. The combination will continue to induce large power spikes through antennas and power grids like the aurora borealis or sun spots are known to do at higher latitudes.
(Another affect is that a large fraction of the energetic particles from the nuclear blast are captured in the Van Allen belt and proceed to destroy low altitude satellites passing through them.)
How long and how intense these effects are depends on a number of things like weapon yield, altitude and “solar weather” conditions, most of the technical info I read on this is from 15 years ago and assumed a scenario of 1000(+/-) megaton exchange between the USA and the Soviet Union that started with multi-megaton EMP attacks off the east and west coasts from sub launched ballistic missiles about 3-7 minutes into the attack.
The environment that the 747 nuclear command plane was intended to survive in.
A few more misconceptions around here...
The field strength, axis and time-domain effects of EMP are about the same as that experienced from a nearby garden-variety lightning strike. The local EMP within a 50 meter radius exceeds 10 kilovolts per meter, easily. The magnetic component momentarily can exceed 3 kilooersteds at the same radius.
So, how many pieces of electronic and electrical equipment go kapoo when a lightning strike happens close by? Like in say Florida, the L&T capital of the world... ahem. Almost nothing fries. Not cell phones, not stereos, not cars, not planes. Not power steering, not refrigerators, not ovens, not computers. Not nuthin', mostly. Telephones are prone to being blasted to flinders because they're direct-connected to the outside lines. But they are all protected by thick lead shields [triple effect: rats don't like to chew on 'em, they don't rust or significantly degrade, they can be fused with solder at low temperatures, so also protect against water.]
No, EMP is best described as a LARGE SCALE effect. Long power lines, longwave antennas, the steel frames of large buildings, anything that conceivably acts as an antenna ... is vulnerable to the induced current. But even then, only if connected to ground. This is why planes don't go tumbling out of the sky every few hours - they are intrinsically faraday shields, and although there's a plane somewhere being struck by lightning about every hour or so, being subject to enormous magnetic and electrical fields ... their electronics is built to handle it. There is nothing about EMP which is any different.
Therefore the most vulnerable element is the power grid. One gigantic antenna, ultimately also connected to ground through innumerable transformers, ballast capacitors and ground loops. [Much to my amazement, much of the "old America" - Pennsylvania, Western New York, almost everyplace in the rust belt - uses a wiring system where only ONE conductor appears to go into step down transformers. How? Because the other conductor is the ground itself. Now, talk about vulnerable systems...]
The more pressing effect of a high altitude mid-kiloton nuke would be the lethal wash of neutrons and gamma rays at high altitude, coupled with the distinctly real over-pressure effects and thermal pulse. [One must assume that if it is outside of the facility of an aggressor to cobble together a thermonuke, it is also outside their purview to craft a potent enough 3-stage missile to lob what can only be a remarkably heavy primative warhead up to 300 or 400 kilometers.] 50 kilometers is probably tops. In fact, it makes more sense to go for a much lower airburst: EMP isn't anywhere near effective enough, and terrorism is about making big ugly splashes. A 150 kilometer stratospheric detonation is almost a 'technical feat', while causing power outages, would largely be seen as a "whew, we got it relatively easy that time, Gunther" move.
In contrast, a 3 kilometer airburst above any major city would pretty much wax the metropolis both through immediate effects - overpressure damage, neutron flux, x-ray and gamma-ray exposure, but also through secondary (firestorm, thermal shock, toxic atmosphere) and tertiary effects (radiation sickness, isotopic contamination of huge swaths of metroscape, infrastructure collapse, starvation, overload of medical facilities). In fact, the quaternary processes would be most dementing and debilitating to our august country: martial law, summary executions, the Police state, political collapse, economic collapse (short term), cessation of civil services and rights, staving off opportunistic disease, opportunistic sleeper-cell point-terrorism (think, "shooting holes in as many regional transformers as possible, in the lawless mayhem that follows an attack"), etc.
Stock market? Right.
Yet too, the thing to remember is although Europe probably imagines that they would get off with nothing more than a bad headache and a nasty case of the heebiejeebies, what they fail to realize is that international shipping commerce would effectively cease as of the following morning. America has the power to keep every ship on the planet from moving either into or out of every port. We have the ability to ground every airline, to break every satellite and fiber optic communications channel on the planet. The Internet?
The Internet would be viewed as the most uncontrollable and potent tool in the hands of the forces of destruction and evil. It would simply be shut down. Forceably.
Hell, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers debacle, the Internet was almost unusable. And in the meantime the NorKs have become the most fecund source of information viruses and other pests. What else might they have up their sleeve?
It is for these reasons that I think the entire discussion of "EMP" as the bogey is just juvenile to an extreme. A nuclear attack on this country shuts down the world. For an unknowable period of time, while we take measure and with extreme exactitude make examples of the diseased underbelly that had the audacity to think that America is really weak enough to be toppled by such an inept action.
GoatGuy
I also saw this via google
Iran military journal eyes
nuclear EMP attack on U.S.
High-altitude missile detonation could be launched from ship, warn top scientists
Posted: April 29, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Joseph Farah
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON – In the latest evidence Iran is seriously planning an unconventional pre-emptive nuclear strike against the U.S., an Iranian military journal has publicly considered the idea of launching an electromagnetic pulse attack as the key to defeating the world's lone superpower.
Congress was warned of Iran's plans last month by Peter Pry, a senior staffer with the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack in a hearing of Sen. John Kyl's subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland security.
In an article titled, "Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars," the journal explains how an EMP attack on America's electronic infrastructure, caused by the detonation of a nuclear weapon high above the U.S., would bring the country to its knees.
"Once you confuse the enemy communication network you can also disrupt the work of the enemy command- and decision-making center," the article states. "Even worse today when you disable a country's military high command through disruption of communications, you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country. If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults then they will disintegrate within a few years. American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot."
WND reported the Iranian threat last Monday, explaining Tehran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, it is already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure. The report was published first in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, a premium, online intelligence newsletter by WND's founder.
Pry pointed out the Iranians have been testing mid-air detonations of their Shahab-3 medium-range missile over the Caspian Sea. The missiles were fired from ships.
"A nuclear missile concealed in the hold of a freighter would give Iran or terrorists the capability to perform an EMP attack against the United States homeland without developing an ICBM and with some prospect of remaining anonymous," explained Pry. "Iran's Shahab-3 medium range missile mentioned earlier is a mobile missile and small enough to be transported in the hold of a freighter. We cannot rule out that Iran, the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism might provide terrorists with the means to executive an EMP attack against the United States."
Damocles Over The Persian Gulf
Iran’s mullah regime will have the power to do a Samson act concerning Persian Gulf oil once it has nuclear weapons deliverable by even short-range ballistic missiles. It can simply fire one at a slight angle to detonate as a 10-30kt EMP device high (50-150km altitude) over Saudi Arabia’s oil fields in its northwestern corner closest to Iran. That would fry all the electronics controlling oil pumping, and destroy all refineries, over an area several hundred miles across. Persian Gulf oil exports, including Iran’s, would cease for years. This would bring about a world-wide depression.
I feel the mullahs would use such a device, if available, in the event of an American invasion, and quite possibly if their regime was going down to internal revolt. At that point they would face certain defeat and probable slaughter at the hands of their own people, so they’d have nothing whatever to lose.
GoatGuy,
Appreciate the technical contribution. I do find it hard to set your blithe dismissals against the conclusions of a bipartisan Congressional panel that summoned a number of expert witnesses, and appears to have come to a different conclusion.
Mind you, a number of your points appear to be contradicted in the House testimony linked earlier. Apparently, the EMP figures from the US tests DID fry quite a few things, for instance. Likewaise, the ability to lob a warhead more than 50 miles using existing SCUD systems (150 miles is apparently very attainable), let alone more modern rockets.
So maybe that's part of the disconnect. There are varying opinions re: EMP's effect, and it would probably be worthwhile to begin doing some research and compilation around that area. I suspect the result would be a useful public/ open intel resource.
I'll add that your last paragraph is reasonably well taken, unless the Democrats are in charge of course in which case all bets on serious action are off. Taking the measures you describe would tank a large portion of the US economy, however, not just immediately but for years. I'll suggest to you that the US may find it prudent not to take a few of those actions, even under those circumstances.
The more sailient point is the amount of cleanup damage and disruption that would accompany these actions, and the long term cost it would exact. Threats are always arrayed in a cost:probability matrix, which explains why people are a bit jittery anout living next to nuclear power plants even though accidents are incredibly rare. EMP seems the fall under the "enormous cost" heading in a way that may even exceed a city strike.
When you're talking about the deterrence posture of a rogue state with nukes, and asking how they could employ their assets for maximum damage, EMP seems to come up often, and from sources more credentialed and technical than Mr. Gaffney.
Personally, I happen to like "Mark Buehner's Godfather solution in #13.
Goat Guy,
OK so this is my question.
I agree that EMP is a large scale phenomenon.
Now my desktop PC is inside a steel case.
The power line is protected by surge limiters that the manufacturer claims have a response time of less than 1 nanosecond.
Do I have any protection?
Goat Guy,
You said too much. I don't know how much you know about EMP, but you are clearly out to lunch on nuclear weapons effects in general. This statement of yours was the tipoff:
The inverse square law applies to direct blast, thermal pulse and prompt radiation effects. Little, if any prompt radiation from a high-altitude mid-kiloton range nuke would reach the ground due to distance (and no neutrons), and thermal pulse would be greatly attenuated just by distance. Blast would be negligible as it is propagated by air pressure and there is very little air pressure at high altitude.
Your expertise in this discussion has become an issue.
Katzman, et alia:
I feel honored that you have countered, above. Thanks.
In response to the Congressional discovery and focus, I can only point out that the Congressional inquiry into the Discovery conflagration dithered for WEEKS before that one lone extraordinary logician and scientist, Dr. Feynman took a hank of the sealing-ring material, dunked it in his glass of ice-water, and discovered, lo' and behold, that it lost all useful resilience at it got near freezing. Suddenly, in a stroke, the congressional hearing was nearly over.
Congressional (or senatorial) hearings have persecuted our own American citizenry for fabricated and imagined Communist leanings, per the monkey trials of the McCarthy era. Bogeys imagined, few-to-none found. A lot of people were behind the work though. Who to believe? Or Scopes. Or ... well, you get the drift.
Joe, I'm a thinker first, a scientist second, an electrical engineer and computer scientist third. I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of EMP vulnerable "things" in our world, that would fail. But the most spectacular will be the big things, the things with long pickup wires and metal parts. No contradiction to Congress there.
I really do think that the EMP effects of a smallish nuke though are just overwrought. The enemy really doesn't have the ability to make a truely gargantuan weapon AND lob it high into the stratosphere. And a small one lobbed only a few score kilometers up isn't going to produce appreciable EMP except locally. I kind of think that the mad Mullahs are working on high-altitude detonations either to effect the scenario outlined by Tom Holsinge / Democles #24, or some other geo-strategic action that doesn't put them dead-square in the target zone for a Samson-option retribution.
Finally, EMP seems to come up often precisely because it is in vogue. A nuke trucked to the Hoover dam and unceremonously dumped in the drink would was out millions of square miles of country. A nuke at the port of Oakland would contaminate most of the Silicon Valley, as well as critically "poke the eye" of American shipping interests. I dare say that not a single ship would get into this country for years. Invest in flip-flops, there's going to be a run on the Chinese products! [tongue in cheek]
I choose to use a cavalier style, to remind us that we're all a bunch of amateurs. I don't like the Samson option, but I understand it. I don't like the absurd escalation of the Three Conjectures, but I understand them. I don't like all the talk about EMP, because it more readily passes the 'conspiracy theory test' than any other conjecture. [Is complicated, is full of unknowns, cannot really be tested, is a 'clean solution' on the surface, and is generally in vogue to talk about.]
I mean, lets get real here: while granted there weren't LGF's and WoC's into which the blognuts such as moi could spout their opine, I also don't think that there was a think-tank, blue-ribbon panel, a congressional or CIA or NSA or even executive briefing that seriously considered a scenario including a simultaneous attack on the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and what was undoubted an aborted attempt at the White House itself. Yet, it happened. Even today it seems complicated, messy, full of all sorts of things that suggest [to some weak minds] that there was a conspiracy behind it, that the planes had missiles superglued to their undersides, that UFO's were seen flying away at high speed, and that there were warnings to all Jews to stay away, since the Mossad had realized there was no other way to get Americans to become involved in a gut way in Middle East security without shaking them to the core. Oh yah, and that the buildings were intentionally deconstructed by pre-placed explosives, for how else can you explain that they fell essentially straight down, only seen otherwise in demolitions of old massive buildings by specialists? Yada, yada, yada.
Take care all. Stock up on iodine tablets. They never go bad.
GoatGuy
Holsinger -
And I had the impolitic of just quoting you. Well. Laugh's on me.
I didn't say WHAT height constitutes "high altitude". There definitely IS a thermal-pulse component directly below the burst. I'm painfully aware of the inverse-square laws, my friend. Taken that into account. Fast neutrons have a surprisingly long mean-free-path through low nuclear density materials such as AIR. The neutron flux I was referring to was also that at high altitude. Like, that which would wash over aircraft already up there, and the neutrons and gamma rays that would essentially radiate out unstopped away from the earth and through both the ionosphere and beyond.
However, in the spirit of why I write here, I admit freely that I'm not a nuclear scientist, that I may well be off by an order-of-magnitude in my estimates, and that I welcome anyone to "show their work", rather than impune my credibility.
GoatGuy
Joe,
Here is another google search result with EMP and Hawaii in the search terms:
http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm
ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE RISKS AND TERRORISM
Other Subjects:
--- EMP and Faraday Cages
--- EMP Senate Hearings March 2005
General Definition - Electromagnetic pulse
In addition to other effects, a nuclear weapon detonated in or above the earth’s atmosphere or alternatively an E-Bomb (see below) can create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a high-density electrical field. EMP acts like a stroke of lightning but is stronger, faster and briefer. EMP can seriously damage electronic devices connected to power sources or antennas. This include communication systems, computers, electrical appliances, and automobile or aircraft ignition systems. The damage could range from a minor interruption to actual burnout of components. Most electronic equipment within 1,000 miles of a high-altitude nuclear detonation could be affected. Battery powered radios with short antennas generally would not be affected.
Although EMP is unlikely to harm most people, it could harm those with pacemakers or other implanted electronic devices.
An Air Force spokesman, who describes this effect as similar to a lightning strike, points out that electronics systems can be protected by placing them in metal enclosures called Faraday Cages that divert any impinging electromagnetic energy directly to the ground. Foreign military analysts say this reassuring explanation is incomplete.
What can be done? See Web Site on Faraday Cages (http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp_and_faraday_cages.htm) and also latest news in Washington Times August 19, 2003 commentary ("The blackout next time").
From: http://www.physics.northwestern.edu/classes/2001Fall/Phyx135-2/19/emp.htm
Joe,
This is another hit from the same google search. It is a 1988 paper on EMP from the Global Security web site.
I clipped a relevant section below:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/1988/CM2.htm
EMP is a pulse of electromagnetic energy of extremely short
duration. Initially called radio flash, EMP is similar to the
simultaneous transmission of a large number of radio waves varying
from one KHz to 100 MHz and peak field amplitudes produced are very
large on the order of 50 kilovolts (kv) per meter (4:72 and 9:1-20).
The formation of EMP results from the collision of the gamma
photons emitted from a nuclear detonation and interacts with atoms
in the outer atmosphere. This results in the ejection of electrons
and the creation of a strong ionized area referred to as the source
field region. This complicated process occurs in a few billionth's
of a second (nanoseconds) and last one millionth of a second
(millisecond), which produces a strong electric field that radiates
away from the source region (4:72-74). This radiated field is EMP.
A number of parameters including the yield, its height-of-burst,
asymmetries in the earth's atmosphere, and location of the burst
relative to the earth's magnetic declination directly affects both
the shape or coverage area and the strength of the EMP (9:1-1-2-11).
Based on analysis of the various combinations of the preceding
parameters there are four significant types of EMP.
The first, surface burst electromagnetic pulse (EMP), occurs
when the nuclear burst explodes on the earth's surface or up to two
kilometers above the surface. The radiated wave is only propagated
to a distance of ten to twenty kilometers from the burst point due
to the higher density of the lower atmosphere. Although the area
over which the low-altitude EMP produces a damaging effect is
relatively small, it is significant on the tactical nuclear
battlefield (9:1-10-1-11).
The second type, high-altitude EMP (HEMP), is the most
significant and, potentially, the most hazardous to our security.
The explosion of a nuclear burst at an altitude greater than 30 to
over 500 kilometers above the earth's surface will produce the above
scenario. Due to the very thin to non existent atmosphere
at these altitudes, the gammma rays emitted from the explosion
will travel radically outward for long distances. Those
gamma rays traveling toward the earth's atmosphere are stopped by
collisions with atmospheric molecules at altitudes between 20 and
40 kilometers. These collisions generate Compton recoil electrons
which interact with the earth's magnetic field to produce a downward
traveling electromagnetic wave. This high altitude burst will not
generate any other nuclear effect at the earth's surface (9:1-5).
However, this type of nuclear explosion also produces a vast
ground coverage. Significant HEMP levels occur at the earth's
surface out to where the line of sight from the burst contacts the
earth's surface. Consequently, a nuclear burst over the central
part of the United States at an altitude of 500 kilometers would
produce an EMP field that would incapacitate all communications
systems in the continental United States (9:1-8).
The third type of EMP is source region EMP (SREMP). This is
produced by a nuclear burst within several hundred meters of the
earth's surface (the fireball touches the ground). SREMP is
localized three to five kilometers from the burst. The generation
of EMP by a surface blast begins with the gamma rays traveling
radically outward from the burst. This action causes the Compton
electrons to move radically outward and leaves behind immobile
positive ions. This produces an electric field and lasts two to three
nano seconds. The final result is a tremendous surge on current in
the air on any communications equipment and the SREMP renders the
equipment useless (9:1-10-13).
The last type of EMP is system generated EMP (SGEMP). SGEMP
results from the interaction of x-rays or gamma rays striking an
atom on a metal object. A nuclear blast in outer space sends gamma
rays or x-rays out in all directions. If these rays were to strike
an unprotected satellite or missile traveling above the atmosphere,
these rays would knock out electrons from the atoms of the metal
skin. This action would induce an EMP field that would make the
satellite and the missiles useless (9:1-17-1-21 & 5:75-76).
Although the EMP effect was known to exist during the
detonationtion of conventional explosives prior to the first atomic
explosion and was predicted in nuclear weapons' tests, the extent and
potentially serious nature of EMP were not realized for several
years. Several incidents related to the 1963 detonation of a 1.4
megaton nuclear device 250 miles above Johnston Island highlighted
the potential effects of EMP. Immediately following the detonation,
the island of Oahu, Hawaii, which was located 800 miles from ground
zero, experienced several power outages, the activation of hundreds
of burglar alarms and the short-circuiting of thirty strings of
streetlights (1).
EMP is of great concern today. As the field of electronics has
evolved from the vacuum tube era to today's integrated microcircuits
which can handle only minute quantities of voltage current, its sus-
ceptibility to EMP has increased significantly. Consequently, this
results in modern communications and electronics equipment being
highly vulnerable to the power surges of EMP.
The significance of these power surges is demonstrated when
comparing EMP with lightning. Both involve a sudden pulse of energy
and both are attracted to intentional or unintentional collectors or
antennas. However, EMP and lightning differ in four crucial ways:
(1) EMP pulses much more rapidly. Pulse time for
EMP maybe a few billionths of a second; the comparable interval
for lightning pulse involves millionths of seconds (8:A-2).
(2) Each field strength can differ radically. Lightning
maybe a few thousand volts per meter; EMP can involve 50,000 volts
per meter (8:A-2).
(3) EMP pulses are of short duration--usually less than a
thousandth of a second as opposed to lightning pulses that last
hundreds of a milliseconds (8:A-2).
(4) Lightning occurs at much lower frequencies and in
bands well below the frequencies used by the military communications
systems. However, EMP concentrates in some of the bands most
frequently used by the military's tactical communications
systems (8:A-2).
This fact is especially significant when considering EMP's
power density of 1,000,000 watts persquare meter versus the typical
signal strength of .001 watt per square meter which a radio receiver
is designed to accept. Accordingly, since EMP is capable of
delivering a signal a billion times stronger than the receiver is
designed to accept, one can see the urgency to find solutions to
this problem (11:J-3).
The system of degradation from EMP results in either a
permanent failure of a device or a component or a temporary impair-
ment which can deny use of the equipment for a period of time. A
burned-out transistor exemplifies the former; while a change in the
state of a switch represents the latter.
Most susceptible to EMP are those components with low voltage
and current requirements such as solid state devices, integrated
circuits, semi conductor devices, digital computers, digital
circuitry, alarm systems and electronic sensors. Generally, as the
size of the device decreases, its ability to absorb voltage and
current decreases, which results in increased susceptibility to EMP.
Vacuum-tube equipment, inductors, tube transmitters and receivers,
low current relays and switches are less susceptible. Equipment
designed for high voltage use such as motors, transformers, radars,
relays, lamps and circuit breakers are not susceptible (2:118).
Another necessary variable to consider is the collection of EMP
energy. Collectors may be cables, wires, antennas, pipe, conduit,
metal structures, railroad tracks - anything that acts as an
electrical conductor (8:5-4-5-8). The amount of EMP energy
collected depends on the electrical properties, size, and shape of
the material comprising the collector. EMP energy may be transferred
from the collector to the equipment directly by a physical
connection or indirectly through induction (8:5-8-5-10).
A vast array of collectors form a huge grid over the entire
United States. Its power cables, telephone lines, towers, antennas
and railroad tracks have the capability of collecting EMP energy and
transferring it to anything physically or electronically connected
to them. Thus, for example, any electronic device attached to a
telephone line or power line has the capability of receiving large
amounts of EMP (8:5-6-5-7).
Most commenters have assumed that in the event of an EMP attack whose source was identifiable we would launch a massive counterattack. But would we? Even in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there were strong segments of opinion who opposed taking effective action against the Taliban. The Afghanistan operation was pretty minor compared with a nuclear retaliation strike that would kill millions of people--most of them, of course, totally innocent.
If a nuclear weapon were detonated in a major American city, then I think we would retailiate in kind, no matter what administration was in power. But if an EMP attack were launched, and the administration in power were a Democratic one, I'm not so sure. More to the point, the mullahs might not be so sure.
While all the physics and electrical engineering are true, I'm having a difficult time imagining anyone in Iran who had decided to use a nuclear weapon deciding to toss it into space to make sparks and kill TV's and PC's.
It just doesn't seem consistent to me. If someone had decided to use one, I think they'd like to see a crater in a city.
David Foster, you may be right but I suspect that any President would be compelled to retaliate massively. Look at it this way: any EMP attack would be accompanied by thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths. It's not just computers and electronics but everyone whose life depends on computers and electronics. Everyone who's on a life-support system (computer-controlled these days). Many people in airplanes. How about cardiac pacemakers?
I'd argue the closest analogy we have is the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The Germans came close to breaking RAF Fighter Command by attrition, but once they switched to cities and area bombing while countless civilians died, RAF Fighter Command was spared and Operation Sealion (the invasion of Britain) was over.
While the effects of any nuclear attack, EMP or otherwise will be severe, our offensive capability including nuclear ballistic subs and Strategic Air Command is still horribly formidable, and while democracies tend to cut off foreign adventures that don't go well (Algeria, Vietnam, etc) they generally don't break much like the British did not break during the Blitz.
To me the political reaction would be rally round the flag patriotism, and the desire to ruthlessly end the conflict once and for all no matter how many of the enemy were killed. Even under a Democratic regime; Amnesty International and the ACLU would be brushed aside for a desire to make the deaths stop by killing all the enemy.
The biggest check on our own power is internal; a mass casualty attack bigger than 9/11 will have an exponentially larger effect on cutting off those limits; just as 9/11 led to the abandonment of bipartisan Clinton/Bush "restraint" in the face of terrorism; so would another bigger mass attack.
Can't you just imagine the reaction from the left, though...many of them would claim that the casualties were our own fault for being so dependent on a technological infrastructure...
Just a reminder to anyone who may be wondering: no matter what happened over the US mainland, a single ballistic nuclear sub is equipped to utterly and completely destroy 2 nations the size of Iran within an hour of being given the order. A number of these subs patrol at all times on routes not known to anyone not onboard, including under the arctic cap. The Soviets couldnt find a way to sucker punch us, Iran certainly wont be able to. Thats not what this is about. The issue is whether Iran or someone else might try this as either a suicide pact or in the unlikely hope that they wouldnt be fingered for it.
As to the response such an attack would draw, here is what happened in the 60s when we were testing this exact weapon. It was codenamed Project Starfish in the Johnston Islands in the South Pacific. Apparently it turned the lights out in some places in Hawaii 1500km away, turned the sky bright red as far as Los Angeles, temporarilly destroyed the Van Allen Belt, and rearranged the Belt for a decade. I may go back to vacuum tubes.
http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/HAARPbg.html#PS
I don't see where the thousands or hundreds of thousands of deaths should come from. EMP will be a big financially(but not so big as talked about) but i doubt that it would be emotional big. An attack on a big city (or just a piece of uninhabited desert) is much more effective. An EMP attack just sounds to me like a big solar flame which would be much more effective if done by a non-nuclear apperatus
"a", How many in the U.S. are dependant upon the electric grid for daily survival? People on respirators, oxygen, who need air conditioning to survive where they live, etc. how many people died in France during a heat wave? Thousands is not impossible.
Oh my! Why is WOC encouraging terrorists to use nuclear weapons? Before they might have been confused about what to do with their mid-yield nukes (the MSM had suggested the Superbowl, DC, Tony Awards...) But now--thanks to rightwing bloggers doing their research-- they've saved literaly hours of time on google.
Re the human impact of an EMP attack, think about: traffic lights (many of which have doubtless been converted from electromechanical to more-vulnerable electronic control)...railway signals (ditto)...aircraft (even if the flight controls work, what happens with no nav or communications)..medical equipment (Cat scanners, etc)...lots more.
And computer systems outages could be worse than it might initially sound--remember, a commuter airline recently had to temporarily shut down operations completely because of problems with their crew scheduling system. What happens if the truck and rail dispatching systems, combined with the grocery store inventory-control systems, are unusable?
David, that's one reason everyone should have emergency supplies: food, water, medicine if you take it, first aid, candles etc.
Yes, a successful attack on a major urban area could be bad. But it would be a lot less bad if people were prepared to sit tight for several days.
Robin, A, and especially Rockford (but further down):
This is the thesis presented above, that although an EMP hit would be a technical feat and undoubtedly an awful civic-structural disaster ... it doesn't fit the pattern of Islamic terrorism. With fewer loss-of-life [which has never been much of a motivating factor for a people morally committed to attain paradise by way of suicide-in-the-name-of-Beezelbub], the terrorists of 9/11 could easily have wreaked credible and ominous damage to the U.S. infrastructure in at least a dozen easily imaginable ways. Instead, planes and buildings, gut-wrenching Farenheit 911 images of fanatic sacrifice and all the rest.
Lets take a look at this from the rational side: Iran does not really have a delivery mechanism to get a nuke to America to begin with, let alone lobbing one high in the atmosphere for an EMP burst. They do however have the capability of targeting Israel, or Saudi Arabia (whom they're not amused with), or the Gulf. They could target a key NATO trigger country, say Turkey or Greece, perhaps one of the Balkans.
So the question I keep coming back to is, how crazy are they?
If they're searching for a plausible-deniability mechanism to throw Western civilization into a tail-spin, with our intelligence - I can't see a target that they could hit anonymously or surreptitiously. Our worries of containerized ship delivery are plausible, yet we're much more on the alert now for such action. I have to be honest: I don't see a target for them that they could achieve without it being blatantly obvious that they were the source. And, if they hit a NATO country, it is pretty much a given that we would hit them back. The one thought I keep coming back to is that they're going the route of a conventional Claustwitzian sovereignty positioning: lob their missiles (neutered) all over the place, showing just how far they could reach, eventually leaking to their Arab and other Muslim neighbors that they really have been conducting nuclear tests, and could strike anywhere in their reach at any time. Multiple-y.
They're developing their own diesel-electric subs, they're obviously engineering their own missile delivery systems, they've been sending and recovering tens of thousands of bright young minds from Western universities and engineering schools.
Iran in my mind is hardly a desparate nation. They're clearly still the intellectual center of the Islamic sphere, they're less interested in fomenting (excuse my analogy) "democratic jihad", but more interested in doing the "republican federal consolidation" regionally. Notwithstanding that the Iranian-on-the-street ranges from dogmatically committed to disillusioned by the mullocracy, theirs is an old country, steeped in tradition, the seat of academic enterprise, and of course the Sunni view of the world. The Iranians desire to amplify their power base, bolster their sovereignty in spite of being surrounded by their old nemesis, America.
And they understand fully that the Arab Street as well as most people in power among the Arab World have had the flames of anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism fanned to the point that there really is an opportunity to become the regional power broker. For that they need nukes - even as in the case of the old Soviet Union, there's no one rationally to target.
That's my hope - that there is a fairly noble goal behind the effort. Yes, it would mean an incredible power-shift in the Middle East, but I think that it is still something that isn't terrible: for what nation of people can't hope for a return to their long-gone era of glory?
Sorry for rambling. Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
[PS: Jim, I don't think the Iranians are autocidal enough to risk the Samson response.]
GoatGuy
Whoever attempted to do this would have to be very sure that the missile didn't go phut over continental USA,the second stage not igniting,the guidance system landing it in Canada or some such common malfunction found in ballistic missilery.There would have to be some redundancy,at least two missiles probably three.A far bigger project than it would seem.
There is presumably a command centre in an offshore base with instructions on what to do in the event of a strike.
SAO, I think that was unworthy of you.
Dave Foster & Goat Guy,
We're talking governments here, not Al Qaeda, so you are correct that deterrence should be discussed. Our retaliatory capabilities are hardened against EMP and so would be capable of "reducing large portions of southern Asia to subsidence level economies and population levels".
Such an EMP attack on us would, practically, only be done by a relatively small ballistic missile launched from a ship. This is within the capability of North Korea and will be within Iran's capability within 2-3 years, assuming they can't do it already. And we could quickly identify and locate the ship.
But as a practical matter, again, the attack would be a suicide one. I expect the ships involved would be blown up, with or without the advance knowledge of their crews, shortly after the missiles' launch. Dead men tell no tales. And a small nuke used for that purpose would leave nothing identifiable.
But as a practical matter once again, we wouldn't wait to identify the perpetrator. We'd go after all potential perps at once to make prevent repetitions of such attacks. Once we're nuked, whether by EMP or a city-buster, all the gloves will come off. Even a Democratic president would do this.
It is possible that a nutball regime would both think this "Nuke all the usual suspects" improbable and that it could keep its involvement in such an attack hidden. I tend to doubt that, but wouldn't care to bet my life, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and my children's future on it. Better to take out the potential threats in advance with non-nuclear means. Low level strategic writers called this "deterrence by denial" during the Clinton administration.
The Persian Gulf Samson option I described above is, however, not merely possible but likely.
Robin Roberts,
You have no idea of the economic consequences. We're talking governments here, not Al Qaeda terrorists. The latter think the way you describe in your No. 33. Governments don't - that's one of the reasons they are governments.
Dave Shuler & a,
More than that. Everyone who depends on medication to stay alive - diabetics, heart conditions, blood pressure, kidney disease, etc. IMO a 25kt EMP device detonated 200 miles over Kansas would produce a first hour fatality count of at least 5,000, and possibly as much as 20,000. Add close to a zero for the first month, and double that again over the next five months.
PeterUK,
Yes. There would be multiple missiles, not just one, and probably from more than one ship. That is the scenario.
Everone,
Please note the following from Trent's No. 31. EMP is collected on:
ALL ELECTRICAL CIRCUITS in any electronic equipment act as electrical conductors - that is how electronics works. Personal computers contain more electrical circuits than home refrigerators. The electronic components in cars contain a majority of the electrical circuits in the cars. And they all collect EMP. Their relatively small density limits the amount of EMP they collect relative to electrical wires of the same length, but the vulnerability of modern society to EMP cannot be emphasized enough.
Few of your have any idea of how little machinery, let alone electronics, will continue operating AT ALL in an area of several hundred miles across following detonation of a 25kt EMP device at an altitude of 200 miles. As in damn little. Because most machinery is controlled by electronic circuits these days, and the electronics will be gone.
May be a silly question, but: would an emp attack automatically presume a nuclear response from the US; similiar to other nuclear atacks?
Also, anyone else remember GHWB or somebody wanting to EMP Iraq during Gulf I?
SAO,
There are differences between "automatic", "certain" and "almost certain" in this context. There has never been, to my knowledge, anything "automatic" about nuclear retaliation by any country against any other country. What "certain" means depends on your definition. It was "almost certain", by any definition, that the U.S. would have used nuclear weapons in retaliation against apparent nuclear attack by the former USSR ("launch under attack").
I don't believe the U.S. government has any such formal plan in mind for covert EMP attack. As a practical matter, I view a nuclear response as highly likely, but it depends on when the EMP attack happens. At the moment there are two likely suspects - North Korea and Iran, so I feel it "almost certain" that we would use nuclear weapons to attack their nuclear weapons and missile facilities within no more than a few weeks of the EMP attack on us, and more likely within a few days.
And there is a difference between high altitude EMP attack using a nuclear device, and very short range EMP attack with non-nuclear devices. We developed the latter to test the EMP hardening of military aircraft, Air Force One, etc. There are lots of such devices around now. I'm not aware of any ever having been used.
To my knowledge, there were never any discussions of American high-altitude aka nuclear EMP devices against anyone other than the former USSR.
In the case of Desert Storm, it would have been plain ridiculous. Our military forces in the Persian Gulf would have been almost totally ruined, Persian Gulf oil production from Saudi Arabian south through Quatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates would have been destroyed, etc.
Such discussions took place only in the wet *****s of anti-Americans, if there.
I guess I'm more interested in what the domestic and international reaction to an EMP attack would be. What kind of retailiation be justified? By whom?
The primary benefit of terrorist proxies to rogue states is the diffusion of responsibilty and thus retaliation (in ideal cases for them). Could an EMP attack function in a similiar manner?
Hypthetically, say 8 years from now N Korea conducts an EMP attack against the US, claiming "preemptive self-defense," nobody is killed directly but the damage is as Gaffney suggests. I believe in this context it would be difficult for the US to retailiate with (near) ground detonationing nuclear weapons.
Of course I have no idea where EMP fits into a "standard" scale of escalation, hence my question.
Yes, the only thing even comming close. at an angle, is our low alt carbon filament bombs that short out insulatiors at power substations, and used for the very reason that repair is cheap.
Basically saying we wanted their lights out for two days not a few weeks.
How nice of us ... used it on serbia remember ?
Those with underground infastructure, the damage pentrating munitions make of them wont be so easy to fix.
For those wanting to see what nuke and EMP resitant facilities are like, you should study the pages of the old bell microwave system, those old large horn microwave stations with their underground bunkers, that as part of their defenses included a faraday barrier of thick copper sheet.
Given your scenario I suspect that regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans hold the White House that there would be no North Korea within hours or days of such an attack.
Trent,
Direct lightrening strikes on aircraft are no problem. We design them to take a licking and keep on ticking.
A lightening strike is a harsher higher energy problem than EMP.
So unless damaged by the blast aircraft are not going to fall out of the sky.
Your home electrical outlet will arc over at 6,000 volts. This is more problematic given that surge supressors are not standard eqpt in most homes.
The grid might go down. It might not. Again depends on the amount of energy deposited.
The pulse might kill unshielded electronics. Then again servers and phone eqpt are designed to absorb lightening strikes. The building they are housed in if they have a metal frame should provide protection.
A daylight strike when there are more loads connected would be easier on the eqpt than a 3 AM hit.
This is another of those scares like the "dirty bomb" fears.
It is going to cause more trouble. It will not mean the end of civilization. Most modern computers in their cases will survive. They are designed to not emit RF radiation. Reciprocally they are not too susceptable to external radiation.
A lot of problems to be sure. Not the end of civilization as we know it.
BTW I have designed commercial aircraft systems and (ground/shipboard) military systems. The mil stuff was designed to withstand EMP. Up close and personal. It is not hard to do (it is expensive). There are rules.
The rule of thumb for EMP - if it will take a close lightening hit it will survive EMP.
The rate of rise of the pulse is not a big problem. In fact in some ways it is a help. High frequencies are more easily shunted off than low frequencies.
Autos are hardened to be able to operate in high field environments. Some would die. My guess is that most would not.
Parts are added to vulnerable circuits to slow the rate of rise. Depending on circuit configuration your Tranzorbs should handle the problem if the energy deposited is not excessive.
Most electronics these days are designed to handle multiple mini-lightening strikes. i.e. rub your feet on a carpet and put your finger on the keyboard. The voltage is damaging. The energy is not too high.
Problems? You bet. The higher the energy the larger fraction of devices that will fail.
Cars - a small fraction. Aircraft - aproximating zero.
The longer the antenna the longer the wavelength it is susceptable to. i.e. high frequency effects are going to be local. Power lines are effectively distributed capacitors and inductors. Just what you want for slowing pulse rise times.
I'd say it would be no worse (except for eqpt damage) than the East Coast blackout.
With the high frequency stuff as one poster pointed out you have phasing problems. Above a certain length of wire the peak energy is not cumulative. Total energy however is.
M.Simon,
The experts say otherwise. Telenko has cited some. There is a lot he can't say. You don't know what he does for a living, or the systems he's worked on. I do. He's a technician, not an expert, but his work experience shows that the government is far more concerned about nuclear-generated EMP than you are. There might be a reason for that. And I was in civil defense.
Dave Shuler,
A nuclear EMP attack on the U.S. of the sort described - 2-5 relatively small warheads detonated at optimum altitudes - would inflict far less initial fatalities than the same weapons detonated in cities, but somewhat greater long-term (3-6 months) indirect fatalities.
We do not have the signatures of the weapons-grade fissionables used by North Korea and Iran. And we wouldn't wait to find out. Those who don't understand that don't want to, and won't.
But IMO it won't be city-busting time, at least not initially.
Your right dave, if a Christian Hawk was in power, N Korea would be nuked.
If a John Kerry or Dean was in Power, they would send Roger Clinton to give another concert, And maddi halfbright to comment on the fine food and dancing, while the New York Times fires up their old press again to print the list of "root causes", the moonbats and Europe repeat the refrain that is all our fault because nobody likes us any more.
The communist Internationale Agenda 21 would celebrate,, Maurice Strong would throw a "Yes, There IS a GOD" party, The german media would say BusHilter gave the secret order to nuke ourselves with our own submarine. Cherac would waggle his finger at us for fixing the EU election, and implore for emergency adoption. while offering to build a spent nuke fuel reprossessing plant in pongyang. along with the entire stock of Remy Martin Reserve bottled in 1783.
The democrats would run Cynthia McKinny for the next president. demand we sign Koyoto, LOST and ICC right now, sign over our natural gas reserves declared to be National Park by clinton to be UN Heritage lands controlled by the UN. and inact the death penalty for possession of any object that might be seen as a gun, including gun parts, spent brass, bullet molds and powder, including powder measuring spoons and scales.
You will be allowed to own a pair of pliers, but only if they are made of potmetal zinc, have a grips shorter than 3 inches, and no serrations on the teeth.
She will announce a big thank you to Kim Jong Il, for his help in starting our great leap forward. He will be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize .. and win.
Meanwhile, Carter,,,, that lovely leftist,,, showed what leftists really are by providing the Cuban Interest Section, who are throwing a party, a nice black tie affair,
Where they will show support blessing approval and cover up (shhhh),,,, of their beloved Hosts Gulag
Thank you Pres Carter, oh exemplar of leftist virtue and leftist ideas of fair elections.
Real fine on your moral clarity, as I notice you have taken to blotivating about Gitmo .. while those that have real gulags deserved to have you supply them a gorgeous Historic guilded age 1910 mansion bedecked in red carpet and illumiated in crystal.
We see what gifts you bestow on the owners of the real Gulags in cuba.
Those of us that are not amoral mental defective leftists, we can see, and judge accordingly.
M. Simon,
You don't know what you are talking about.
I posted this earlier, but it looks like I am going to have to post it again with further emphisis:
The significance of these power surges is demonstrated when
comparing EMP with lightning. Both involve a sudden pulse of energy
and both are attracted to intentional or unintentional collectors or
antennas. However, EMP and lightning differ in four crucial ways:
(1) EMP pulses much more rapidly. Pulse time for
EMP maybe a few billionths of a second; the comparable interval
for lightning pulse involves millionths of seconds (8:A-2).
Orders of magnitudes mean things. An electrical circuit designed to slow a pulse of a few millionths of a second won't even affect one of a few billionths.
(2) Each field strength can differ radically. Lightning
maybe a few thousand volts per meter; EMP can involve 50,000 volts
per meter (8:A-2).
Again, orders of magnitude mean things.
(3) EMP pulses are of short duration--usually less than a
thousandth of a second as opposed to lightning pulses that last
hundreds of a milliseconds (8:A-2).
Yet again, orders of magnitude mean things.
(4) Lightning occurs at much lower frequencies and in
bands well below the frequencies used by the military communications
systems. However, EMP concentrates in some of the bands most
frequently used by the military's tactical communications
systems (8:A-2).
This fact is especially significant when considering EMP's
power density of 1,000,000 watts per square meter versus the typical
signal strength of .001 watt per square meter which a radio receiver
is designed to accept. Accordingly, since EMP is capable of
delivering a signal a billion times stronger than the receiver is
designed to accept, one can see the urgency to find solutions to
this problem (11:J-3).
All microprocessors are subject to damage and destruction by ungrounded handling via electrostatic discharge. Which is another name for the normal static electricity you get from walking across a carpet.
The induced electrical pulses from an EMP signal are millions of times stronger and faster.
Lightning protection isn't protection from EMP.
The microprocessors in American military fly-by-wire systems have faraday shielding against the signal pulse of an EMP signal. It costs a lot of money and a lot of testing time in military grade non-nuclear EMP generating facilities to get that level of protection. It also takes on-going maintenance and testing to keep it effective.
So the fly-by-wire systems of a commerical aircraft do not have that level of protection. It costs too much money and there is no commerical need for such protection nor FAA or EU regulatory requirement that there be any.
The results of a commerical jetliner fly-by-wire system getting hit by EMP in flight will be lethal to all aboard.
Trent, the interval disparity you point at is important for more reason than only magnatude and concentration.
I could show you by showing you how one of my RF amps work and so on... but lets choose something more familiar.
Some have seen this,,,, others its a thought experiment.
A spark plug wire.
How many have seen a bad plug wire jump a gap larger than the gap across the plug ?
The reason is propagation delay, and rise time.
BTW, the condenser (small capacitor) slows both the voltage rise and extends spark duration, and makes the proapgation delay problem less of a problem. but lets ignore that for now.
The reason it happens, is because it takes time (speed of light) before the voltage can reach the plug spark gap.
So if it finds a gap it can jump before it reaches the plug (voltage at the plug is zero untill it arrives) it will discharge there without reaching the plug even with the plug gap much smaller.
So, what this means is that really hi frequency pulses, compacted and short duration, can defy the protection devices because the conductor lengths, that cannot be made zero
(well, they can, some parts include their own protectors, but they cant absorb any real amount of energy, they are light static protectors)
So, like the spark gap, a really high freq pulse can place a really steep voltage gradient across really short conductors, so the protections around your parts are rendered moot.
There are some devices to cope with this, they are made into a coaxal passthru package that are designed to protect entry and exits to sheilded bulkhead chassis construction.
Most consumer devices dont have those ....
And lastly, most protector parts like MOVs have a time delay, the only parts fast enough are gas discharge arrestors and cut ceramic discs but they too, can only handle small amounts of energy.
EMP is tougher than you think ... its not hard technically, but to do it is expensive, a lot more expensive that the light duty stuff you see in consumer gear.
>...the interval disparity you point at is
>important for more reason than only magnatude
>and concentration.
Duh!
It has been too many years since I used any of that knowledge to remember all of it.
>There are some devices to cope with this, they
>are made into a coaxal pass thru package that
>are designed to protect entry and exits to
>sheilded bulkhead chassis construction.
The E4B and Air Force One do not share any of the flight harnesses of a commercial 747, for example, due to EMP requirements.
The difference between EMP shielded military aircraft wire harnesses and commercial harnesses for this 'pass thru package' feature are financially significant and not just for the device alone.
The military specification EMP shielded harnesses are built at military rates of procurement rather than commercial (think tens versus thousands) and have a 100% testing requirement versus lot sampling or FAA/ISO certification of the manufacturer.
The quality validation of military aircraft harness testing requirements was where I used to live, professionally.
I think a bit of confusion has been made between electrical field strength (measured in kV/m) and bursts of electro-magnetic radiations.
Electrical fields, except extremely strong ones, don't have negative effects.
Electro-magnetic radiation instead can induce strong currents in all electric conductors and circuits, with possible serious damage - as has been pointed out repeatedly.
Still, I think that there is too little data available to make any reliable estimate of damage and casualties. I mean, without knowing the yield of the bomb(s), the explosion altitude, the momentary conditions, the exect susceptibility of each electronic device (the phase of the moon and zodiac sign, you can throw in too) it's all a big guesswork.
"I believe in this context it would be difficult for the US to retailiate with (near) ground detonationing nuclear weapons."
Thats why we have (or should have) a policy of almost automatic response. In general, if there is such an attack on the US, a series of automatic measures takes place by the military as the defense condition escalates. The Joint Chiefs provide the president with certain options that the book dictates. In my opinion, this should be taken to a new lever where there should be an explicit policy that if an unknown nuclear device detonates it should be considered a nuclear attack by Iran and NK and the response should be instant. B2s and cruise missiles should deliver a nuclear strike against rogue regimes, starting with their nuclear deterrants and ending with their leadership. This was the policy in the Cold War, and for very good reason. Both sides knew that there was no margin for error and hence no incentive to try to game the system by getting a quick one in and sueing for peace. The response should be immediate and automatic, and Iran and NK should know this ahead of time. Welcome back to the Cold War, but they are the ones who pulled a chair up to the table.
FabioC
Seems you are a bit short on your physics, normal if you have not learned to build things, esp RF, the top of the art.
The EM of a nuke is going to be a wave front, it can be a single wave front, it is not radiation in the clasical sense, but the fact that the EM field is expanding.
electrical field strength is a measure of the strength of an em field that is in motion.
A static voltage between two points is not the same, there is no current, therefore no EM field.
A nuke blast releases a quanity of electrons difficult to wrap the brain around, and this omnidirectional blast of pure current is the source of the EM field ..
Small nuke detonations is the source for particle beam weapons.
its a one shot burst of electrons all in a intensely short duration and that makes it a high enough freq at the leading edge of the wave front, that you can have 1000s of volts of induced voltage across an inch of a single wire. as the wave front cuts across the wire.
This means you can have 1000 volts exploding your delicate parts even with a volt spike supressor only an inch away on the same conductor.
As the electons spread to dissapation, the short duration spike upward in current ends with a slower falling tail, and this is where the long component comes from ... then consider that the release is omni directional, so there is more than one signal source, there is the back. far side of the electron shell as well as the near side.
At points around the shell in relation to a target, these components will be in phase and out of phase adding in the more complex intermediant components.
In any case, you have the detonation and the abrupt nanosecond rise time, and the slower drawn out fall as the electrons disapate. the fast rise gets the small parts, the slower ramp down frys the large stuff.
Its that simple.
It's always amusing to listen to people who otherwise claim to be ethical discussing the "retaliatory" mass murder of millions of brown people, of whom a very small percentage are responsible for some terrible atrocity.
Once again I must point out that those who embrace the logic of massive nuclear retribution have essentially conceded any moral objection to terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular.
More bluntly, when the pictures of Iranian children with their skin melted by nuclear weapons hit the media, people here will cheer. "THEY killed OUR children, it is only proper that WE kill THEIRS." A few others will mutter under their breath about "maintaining credibility" and "deterrence."
The most serious threat from a nuclear attack on the US, IMHO, is that millions of US citizens will be transformed into demons of vengeance.
#54 Tom,
I actually designed eqpt. to resist EMP and lightening. I read the design manuals. I did the calculations. I specified the interconnects. It is possible I am better grounded in the subject.
#57,
Fast rise times make it EASIER to filter out the EMP pulse.
A shorter lasting pulse also means higher frequencies. Again: the higher the frequency the easier to filter. With orders of magnitude differnce the filters are orders of magnitude easier.
Of course you are correct about the military stuff requiring more test and maintenance. They want the failure rate down around one part in 1E9.
I would estimate a 30% failure rate in an EMP environment for civilian eqpt. Factory eqpt should do even better.
==================I don't disagree with any of your points. Just your conclusions.
As to human generated sparks. - They are actually direct mini lightening strikes. Designing that level of protection gives some inherent protection against EMP.
The hand induced strikes though small in energy are direct hits.
=================================What I am positing is different levels of inherent protection of military vs civilian eqpt. I have designed both. Tested both. Passed the tests.
Same goes for factory eqpt. That is a very harsh environment electrically. The stuff is designed to take a licking and keep on ticking. It should do better than the home entertainment stuff.
The mil stuff is designed to be almost failure free under worst case circumstances of wire orientation etc.
The civilian stuff will have a good survival rate just because not all the wires in every location will be oriented for worst case energy pickup. All that sine theta stuff.
If your expectation of survivability is lower the protection level need not be as great.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
=====================Let me re-iterate again. Design rule of thumb: if it will with stand a near by lightening strike it will withstand EMP. The differences might be as much as 2:1. Not orders of magnitude. And the tweaks required for EMP are slight once the circuit is lightening hard.
=====================Now I wouldn't expect some one who just works on the eqpt. to know as much about the design constraints as some one who engineers it.
But who knows? I started out as a technician and worked my way up.
The only ethical stance is to do nothing and wait for the next blow. Right T.J.?
How many nuclear strikes would we have to absorb before we could ethically retaliate? Is there a fixed number or would it only be OK after we are extinct?
Seriously, under what parameters is indescriminate force acceptable in respose to a threat to national survival? If the answer is never, then should we go ahead cede the world to the least morally constrained tyrant with nukes? That would save a lot of deaths, perhaps this is the one path to a true anarcho-capitalist utopia.
Raymond,
Your explanation is not correct. The spark actually jumps both gaps. More energy is deposited in the larger gap. Thus making the spark in the cylinder too weak to fire the mixture. Light travels 1,000 feet in one microsecond (the order of rise time of the spark). The speed of light is not a significant factor in that case.
Capacitance does help slow down and extend the duration of the pulse. So does any non-zero wire length. Good designers add as much as they can of both while not letting such 'parasitics' interfere with cost effective design or circuit operation.
But again: apples and oranges. I'm expecting a reasonable proportion of the civilian eqpt to survive. I'm expecting all the mil eqpt to make it.
Modern interface circuits (designed for contact with the real world) are getting to the point where they can handle 15KV pulses without failure.
And why such a high level of protection when the human lightening generator puts out 1.5 KV with 6 KV under very rare circumstances?
Returns cut in to profits.
So as I said there is considerable protection built in. A significant proportion of commercial eqpt will survive.
"It's always amusing to listen to people who otherwise claim to be ethical discussing the "retaliatory" mass murder of millions of brown people, of whom a very small percentage are responsible for some terrible atrocity."
Its always amusing to see how fast games theory is dismissed by those who dont understand it, and worse dont understand the implications of ignoring it. War is mass murder, and since the beginning of human history the horrors have fallen on the shoulders of the innocent. You could make the identical argument you are making about making military alliances or defense contracts or gearing up for any defense in any kind of war. But at the end of the day the cold hard reality is that being prepared for war is the best insurance against war.
"Once again I must point out that those who embrace the logic of massive nuclear retribution have essentially conceded any moral objection to terrorism in general and Bin Laden in particular."
And once again you are wrong and the same logic would make Churchill and FDR no different than Hitler and Mussilini. Millions of innocents died on both sides. Ask the victims of Dresden or Tokyo if they were any happier that they burned to death in conventional fires instead of nuclear.
"The most serious threat from a nuclear attack on the US, IMHO, is that millions of US citizens will be transformed into demons of vengeance"
And again you are missing the point. A policy of instant retaliation is the best weapon we have to prevent that scenario from playing out in the first place. Mutually assured destruction, except in this case it isnt mutual. Its emotional based sentimentality like yours that simply entices the nasty tyrants of the world to roll the dice on something like this, relying on the soft hearts (and heads) of the American people not to respond. Sorry, its the jungle, always has been, probably always will be. Stop acting like this is something new.
If Iran doesnt want to live under a nuclear shadow (like we have for 50+ years) they have a very simple solution. If the Iranian government wont play ball then the Iranian people better damn well get their act together and do something about it. Again, harsh, but I dont make the rules. Rhetoric is important, there are plenty of nations today that want no part of the nuclear game for the express reason that they dont want their name on the list we are discussing. That in itself makes the world safer. Touchy feely sentimentality manifestly does not. Stalin had a term for its purveyers.
Ethics are not a suicide pact.
If one side of the conflict indicates by words or actions that the framework they're dealing in is Total War, then the terms of conflict are set and the conflict plays itself out on that basis.
Doing so is entirely ethical, and speaks to the first duty of citizens in a polity which is to protect each other.
T.J. doesn't believe in the U.S. government as a legitimate entity, however. Within that viewpoint, it's understandable and expected that this framework wouldn't mean anything to him.
Raymond,
You are right, I don't design electronics as a job.
But a static difference of potential does produce an electric field, that's for sure.
Of course the wawefront is a different matter; thanks for the explanation of the physics involved.
But I think the last part of my statement is still valid: hard to tell what effects an EMP will have without knowing a lot of fine details, no?
Actually, now I remember my father's electrotechnics books: they had a clear depiction of the overvoltage wavefront caused in a conductor by a lightning striking it.
He worked on railway electricity lines, and sometimes lightnings made the protection switches trip, sometimes not. It depends from various factors, not least the sensitivity of the switches.
I could be wrong about civilian aircraft survival vs military.
My revised estimate: 100% mil survival, 95%-99% civilian survival.
As to space stuff? It is designed to handle single event upsets. You know stuff like EMP pulses from the sun. Charge accumulation and discharge due to collection of solar ions and electrons. RAD hard too.
Will it be as good as the mil sattelites? No.
Will a lot of the stuff make it? Yes.
It will not be the end of civilization.
>My revised estimate: 100% mil survival, 95%-99%
>civilian survival.
Yeah, right.
I don't know how many FBW jetliners you have been on, but every single one I have been on has you shut down electronic devices in take off and landing because of the threat of a spurious signal impinging on the FBW bus.
EMP is orders of magnitude more powerful and faster than a I-pod or Blackberry bleed off signal.
TJM said something I agree with, amazing
Welcome to the real world, how did you extract that head from the exhaust port, will it stay out ?
Simon ,, your wrong ,, you dont see anything on the downstream gap untill the voltage has fallen enough it can no longer bridge the wide one, by that time most of the energy is gone ... it does NOT,, NOT, happen at the same time.
this is also wrong
Also wrong.
Also wrong, voltage yes but no current.
Ill charge up an 10mfd oil can to only 3000 volts and we will see how your stuff fares .. you will need safty glasses for the demo (flying shards of epoxy and molten copper)
Beginning with gate protected fets, made it so nice that you didnt nuke them just picking them up, but they cant handle any energy.
Welp im not gonna flog you about it, but if you want to enjoy an email discussion about it, I enjoy such things.
Think about how propagation delay problems (speed of light is too damn slow) are affecting computer design .. thats a clue.
Mark, always has been part of the leftist brain washing of americans into defectives that will be defeated because they have been programed not to respond when attacked
Defective units, twisted up and malfunctioning with self hate ... notice the reference to brown skin, as if skin color would have any bearing on anything, one way or the other.
The fact he even thinks thats a factor is one of the key indicators to his dysfunction, the broken fisheye that provides his world view.
Its not that he dont get it, he dont have the wetware available, its been taken and its program scrambled .. the want for self preservation is replaced with self hate, that he then projects on his peers, and considers the backward and the inferior as his superiors, something he knows isnt true, which only makes his endless guilt trip worse.
Its funny in a way, because the leftist introduced malfunction was explained quite well in the movie 2001, about what Happened to HAL.
Only its worse, not only told to LIE, but fed a fake reality that is a LIE.
Imagine HAL attempting to cope after emerging from learning in a leftist bubble.
He wouldnt even make it out of earths orbit, he would instantly see his kind as a blight on gods creation and deorbit the ship over the factory of his creation.
We would need to invent a form of prozac for silicon based self destructive leftist dysfunctionals.
>>The only ethical stance is to do nothing and wait for the next blow. Right T.J.?
Well, attempting to kill/neutralize specific bad people would be fine by me. When the "Kill Mugabe" hat gets passed around, together with some sane TARGETED means for doing so, I'll toss in some C-notes. There's a good chance I'd volunteer my professional skills as well, if they were applicable to the plan.
Similarly, if the Iranian Mullahs seriously threatened widespread destruction, here or elsewhere, I might voluntarily contribute resources to organizations involved in getting rid of them. Defense plans that involve vaporizing large numbers of the Mullahs' primary victims (their own population) strike me as being . . . not real well thought out.
>>How many nuclear strikes would we have to absorb before we could ethically retaliate?
With nukes against cities, all of them. This was one of the problems with MAD as a concept.
Scenario: Let's imagine you're the President of the US circa 1982. You get the phone call announcing that the Commie horde had launched a first strike with everything. The missiles are in the air. In 30 minutes 95% of the Western world will be toast. Do you launch the counterstrike?
If you launch the retailation, you get to die with the smug satisfaction of having wiped out the few hundred people who could reasonably be held personally responsible, along with most of the remaining human race. Yay.
If you were bluffing all along, then you're still dead, but life and civilization (such as it is) survives. The human experiment can continue. Perhaps later the evils of Communism are defeated through other means.
Scenario: EMP weapons disable half of the electronic equipment in the Northeastern US. The missile responsible is tracked back to Iran. Could the Iranian government be dismantled without nuking Tehran? Yes. So nuclear retaliation would be helpful how again?
Scenario: Al Qaeda terrorists set off a fission device in a US city, killing 100,000 people. Which city should the USG nuke in response? Mecca? If the nuke is traced back to Iran or NK, see above scenario.
>>Seriously, under what parameters is indiscriminate force acceptable in respose to a threat to national survival? If the answer is never, then should we go ahead cede the world to the least morally constrained tyrant with nukes?
No, we should use DISCRIMINATE force to deal with threats to our personal and collective survival. There are ways of dealing with insane dictators and crazed terrorists that don't involve mass murder or the threat of mass murder.
People keep talking about nanosecond rise times for an EMP pulse. That suggests that the region emitting the pulse is only a few tens of centimeters across. This could only be emission from the nuclear fireball itself. So we are talking about a close nuclear strike. i.e. the near field.
I don't imagine for a moment that any civilian equipment would survive in that environment. It would have to be a superhardened underground silo or something.
But I thought we were discussing high altitude EMP or HEMP here. With an emission region of over a thousand kilometers diameter, as the gammas and xrays from a high altitude explosion hit the upper atmosphere. I would not have believed that HEMP can produce rise times much faster than MILLISECONDS because a region over a thousand kilometers across cannot switch on and off an electric field faster than that - due to the limit for signal propagation set by the speed of light.
Where am I going wrong here?
T.J. I wish I lived in the world that you envision. Sometimes threats can't be removed by anything but indescriminate force.
Your doomsday senario is interesting. I'd go ahead and complete the MAD senario though. The remnant of humans would be better off without the full power of the Soviet Union intact to oppress them. Perhaps after that everyone would realize it's better to leave the genie in the bottle. That's a better lesson than strike first no matter what.
>>Ethics are not a suicide pact.
So any and all atrocities are justified in the name of personal/national survival?
Interesting. I'm pretty sure this issue was thoroughly covered in "Judgement at Nuremberg":
"There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the protection of the country. Of survival. The answer to that is: survival as what? A country isn't a rock. And it isn't an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult. Before the people of the world - let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth... and the value of a single human being."
>>If one side of the conflict indicates by words or actions that the framework they're dealing in is Total War, then the terms of conflict are set and the conflict plays itself out on that basis.
No, one is never obligated to reciprocate Total War. One side can always choose to reject total war and proceed accordingly. The most relevant example occurred during Gulf War I, when Powell and Butler considered the proper response to possible Iraqi use of nuclear weapons against US military forces (or US cities, via covert delivery). Powell and Butler concluded that retaliation with nukes against political targets (Baghdad) would be worse than useless.
>>T.J. doesn't believe in the U.S. government as a legitimate entity, however. Within that viewpoint, it's understandable and expected that this framework wouldn't mean anything to him.
Indeed.
And here's another technical question:
I would not have expected any appreciable near-field emission from a high-altitude explosion, because at high altitude the fireball would be almost spherically symmetrical. As a result any radial charge separation would induce a negligeable dipole moment.
Only near the ground, where the fireball deviates strongly from spherical symmetry, does radial charge separation induce a strong dipole.
So once again: I don't understand how you can get nanosecond rise-time EMPs from a high altitude explosion where the emission region in the upper atmosphere is thousands of kilometers across?
T.J,
No... so ethics are not a suicide pact. War is real, and there are cases when it must be waged, and Total War (that is to say, a war of populations) is one of its potential modes. A mode that is extant for both sides as soon as it is selected by either party.
Welcome to the real world. Enjoy your (brief) visit.
>>War is real, and there are cases when it must be waged, and Total War (that is to say, a war of populations) is one of its potential modes. A mode that is extant for both sides as soon as it is selected by either party.
The Iraqi government was already a socialist dictatorship that demanded absolute loyalty from its population, including conscription. If Iraq had deployed nuclear weapons against the US population, that would have indicated that the Iraqi leadership had decided to wage total war, with no regard for US civilians. This would have in no way required the USG to wage Total War against the Iraqi population -- a reality the USG military leadership understood. Any future conflict with Iran would be similar: were the Iranian Government to use nukes, EMP or otherwise, the threat of future use by said government could be eliminated without the need to target large numbers of civilians for elimination, with nukes or otherwise.
Even if the enemy actually comes close to achieving total war mobilization of the population, it is generally possible, practical, and therefore ethical and desirable to neutralize the threat posed by the enemy without mass murder of noncombatants. This was true in WWII, and its true today as well, especially since the power disparity is so much greater.
Dan Dare
Dipoles dont radiate electrons ... nukes do. So your classical ideas of EM do not apply. Some of those classical ideas are wrong, but they do not apply.
The wave front is composed not of just the EM, but the very electrons that created it. Does a dipole create bursts of expanding electon shells ?
Ponder it some more... forget dipoles, they wont help you understand anything. well except as a guide as to what is not happening.
being left behind by the electron shell and wave front at the speed of light,,, is the ball of electron starved plasma ... but that stuff is not in play yet. and in a space detonation would be small, since only the gassified material of the bomb itself makes it up .. and most of that is lost as a particle radiation burst.
So forget dipoles, where is the dipole in an xray tube ? thats EM ,, radio, also ..
Think more like an omni directional beam weapon .. an omni directonal electron gun ... cause thats what is happening here.
With the em field the result of man calling into existence an emensly intense expanding shell of electrons in flight. the sudden appearnace out of nowhere of massive quanities of electrons on the move gives you an emense EM wave front.
Can you see it yet ?
No Raymond, I don't think so.
It is the expanding and contracting electric dipole moment caused by the separation of the negative electrons from the positive nuclei that emits elecromagnetic waves.
The electrons from the nuclear fireball do not go very far. They are scattered by Compton scattering from the xray photons but held back by the positive charges of the heavier nuclei.
Here is another curve ball ...
People think of the heat of a nuke blast, they are wrong, they talk about the millions of degrees (well yes, at the chain reaction point it gets hot) but thats not it.
The heat is the after effect of energy of a wide range of forms being absorbed by surrounding materials, in a slow reaction like a power reactor, it includes the fissle material itself.
Even the cooling liquid of a reactor gets direct heating by absorbing, and manifesting it as heat, as well as cooling down the core.
A blast in space will have quite a different character, most of the energy will radiate out as energy instead of being absorbed.
As an energy pulse, its going to have more kick ..
I agree with your comment #84 Raymond.
The visible fireball in an atmospheric nuclear explosion is mainly incandescent superheated air (plus whatever debris is caught up). That's why it rises. It's like a hot air balloon.
The stem of the mushroom cloud is heavier stuff falling out.
Dan Dare
What contracting ? ........
Think about it ... a ground based plasma, what gas and matter remains can recover electrons from the surroundings ... eventually .. and not in time to be your other half of your dipole
Again, forget the dipole
IN space, there will be no recovery, the electrons are gone ... the charge recovery is gonna take eons.
That dipole moment is what creates a photon of light,, good boy, now you know why light can act like a particle, but isnt .. its a one shot pulse of radio.
But an EM wave does not need to be symentric .. the advancing front does not need semetrical force components ... and in a nuke blast .. they are NOT. the forward edge of the front is very high freq, the other polarity is long drawn out, the observed diminishing strength that is actually all in the same polarity, the other half observed is a due to its relative zero point, and ring.
You have a problem that it violates your classical teaching, wont be the first time.
You cant think about a nuclear electron source as a circut ... its a source of electrons .. but its a battery with only the negative terminal. (that supplies a burst of them going out at light speed) the positive terminal does not exist. the matter that supplied them dont exist either, the plasma ball is after the fact,,,, way after the fact.
And in space you wont get much of a plasma ball, space is the largest vac tube ive ever seen, how bout you ?
Raymond, the elecric force is much stronger than you think.
I suggest you calculate sometime how much energy would be required to remove all the electrons from a kilogram of matter, leaving only the positive nuclei.
I think you will get a surprise.
And lastly, if you want a ground based apparatus that shows this effect put to use ....
Lets dig up the plans for the russian particle beam weapon, where they would detonate a small nuke (basically just flash pulse the thing at criticality) as the electron source. then direct the liberated electron burst down a large mag focused electron gun and use it to down incoming warheads.
A nuke reaction is a source of free electrons, in massive quanities, with no need of the classical "circuit"
If a nuke reaction device could be made to recover the components of the destroyed matter, something to recover the liberated electrons onto, you could have a direct nuclear battery, but these are excess electrons ... the nuclic material for them to attach to dont exist any more.
The spent fuel remains contain less electrons than the heavier fuel component used to have.
Do you see where they come from yet ?
The excess electrons are repelled from the remaining matter
On tera, this electron burst gives you your em pulse, but they are also absorbed pretty soon, as soon as you are outside the plasma ball the air is enough to intercept them (generating more heat) and manifesting as a charge ...
The russian beam weapon would have made a visable plasma trail all the way to the target ...
Hey, how about the taser gun that uses a lazer pulse to ionize the air, using the plasma as the tazer wires to deliver the shock ?
In space, we already have a star trek worthy directed energy weapon ,, the florine gas lazer ..
Anyhow, I hope you can see what im getting at, the EMP pulse is real, the Hi Freq component of the leading edge of the front makes protection devices often useless because the wire between the protection and the protected device is going to be long enough to have a large voltage gradient across it. and it is Hi Energy ...
The tail of the front is a long drown out decline, and this can induce large currents in large objects, like powerlines ....
We already see this effect in geomagnetic storms, that take out portions of the power grid, the tail of the nuke blast front makes that effect look puny and weak by compare.
And lastly, the gamma bursts that demand rad hardened cpus (modern circuts but with obsolite photomask reduction amount, yes, its that simple,) that come from this nuke is gonna really play havoc to those directly underneath the thing
Kiss all that ram and that cpu good by .. (old discrete stuff will be ok) well, untill the EMP frys it a few nanoseconds later.
And what is an atomic fusion blast, chopped liver ?
The energy in the strong forces is what a nuke is all about ... I just cant see how you ....
Look ... you sure you want to stand on that ? or is it time to pause ... and reflect ...
This is uranimum and plutonim not semtex and c4
In semtex and c4 .. the electrons are doing as you say .... an effect that the fuel cell is based on....
But ... I just cant accept you said that ... I mean you was doing so well ...
Raymond
No you are wrong. The energy of a nuclear explosion is nowhere near enough to separate them.
1 kilogram of matter is approx 1/2 kg of protons + 1/2 kg of neutrons + a tiny mass of electrons.
So 0.5 Faraday of charge on the protons.
And -0.5 Faraday of charge on the electrons.
i.e. -48245 coulombs of total electron charge and 48245 coulombs of total proton charge.
The force of attraction between them if you displace them by just 10 centimeters is 2 × 10E+21 newtons or about 2 × 10E+17 metric tonnes force.
That's 200,000,000,000,000,000 Tonnes force
Whoops. I just checked and I think the Faraday is based on the number of charges in a gram-mole not a kilogram-mole. so multiply the number of coulombs by a thousand and the force by a million.
i.e. +- 48,245,000 Coulombs of charge.
So 2 × 10E+23 metric tonnes force
For comparison, the Earth has a mass of 6 × 10E+21 Metric Tonnes
i.e. some 30 times less.
Even at that separation (10cm),
the remaining electrical binding energy between
48 million coulombs of proton charge and
48 million coulombs of electron charge
would still be 2 × 10E+27 joules.
That's about the amount of energy in
500,000,000,000 Megatons of TNT
That is far more energy than all the world's nuclear arsenals put together.
We still could not separate them completely,
even using all we have.
In other words, you just reasoned your head all the way up your backside.
you a postmodernism graduate ?
Ahem when the nucli split, you create an excess of electrons. they are repelled at the very energies you are stating rules them otherwise.
Do you know you just proved all those fissle byproducts dont exist ?
Clearly you need time here, just what do you think it is that makes a nuke so powerfull ?
You looking at is like a chemical reaction?
What is this,, the last gasp of reality denial ?
As I said,, you was doing fine,, up to here.
A tazer of course shoots out 2 wires or two beams, so that there is a circuit.
Particle beams in space would have to be neutralised or else the build up of electric potential on the gun would quickly bring the gun to a stop. A charged beam would curve around and come back to the gun as soon as the electrical potential of the gun built up to a high enough level.
Yes, it's not that one can take electrons from a piece of matter and send them kilometers away without spending a huge amount of energy.
Also, even in the plasma state the separation between atomic nuclei/ions and the electrons is microscopic; plasma is conductive because electrons and positive ions can move around.
bq, The force of attraction between them if you displace them by just 10 centimeters
To show how wacked you are .... if they are that far apart,, there is NO attraction at all.
The forces have a short reach, and are INVERSE in respect to distance, just like magnetic or gravity forces. electrical is the same, the capacity of a capacitor DECREASES as you move the plates apart. as do the physical pull between them.
Here is another example .. you know how a vac tube works ? why we use thorated tungsten white hot or some rare earths red hot to create clouds of free electrons around the cathode ?
I mean, you really need to pull your thumb out, something really got crossed during your studies
And btw Inonic states of things striped of electrons is rather easy, and happens at low energies.
I just cannot understand your malfucntion, your thesis is a direct denial of reality, electron gain and loss is a fact of everyday chemistry, and you are attempting to deny it to elemental maters very distruction.
Im really,, profoundly amazed
You need some time for reflection.
FabioC
i didnt include the tazer as an example of a source of free electrons, but of the ionised gas that would be created by the russian particle beam weapon
And again, a nuke is not hi energy eh ?
You are downgrading the nuke to a chemical reaction? Fission.. and Fusion, is chemistry
So what prevents massives from becoming black holes ... while they have fuel cant be the same H Bomb fusion energy ... cause as you say its too weak.
never mind they formed every element we have heavier than helium
Im frankly agast here .. products of our modern school system ?
No there are no known nuclear reactions that violate the law of conservation of electric charge.
The nuclei split, because the nucleus starts to wobble like a liquid drop after it absorbs a neutron. The absorption of the neutron releases its nuclear binding energy.
The mutual repulsion of the protons that make up the heavy nucleus causes the wobbling to get more and more violent until the nucleus splits into two similar-sized parts.
This is an impressionistic semiclassical model of what is really a quantum phenomenon; involving "tunneling" through potential barriers.
Electrons are not involved in nuclear fission.
Although some fission products do emit electrons as a result of the radioactive process known as beta decay. This does not violate conservation of electric charge either, because in the same process a neutron decays to a proton, balancing out the change in net electric charge.
if they are that far apart,, there is NO attraction at all.
Not so. The electrostatic force drops off as the inverse square of distance; but in free space, it has infinite range.
why we use thorated tungsten white hot or some rare earths red hot to create clouds of free electrons around the cathode ?
Yes but you need a positive anode as well or the electrons aren't going anywhere far.
So what prevents massives from becoming black holes ... while they have fuel cant be the same H Bomb fusion energy ... cause as you say its too weak.
That is a very perceptive question.
The reason matter does not collapse into black holes is because of a law of quantum mechanics known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. No two electrons, can occupy the same quantum state.
As a result, there is effectively a repulsive force between identical spin-half particles. This "electron degeneracy pressure" prevents normal matter from collapsing into black holes.
Neutron stars are different in that neutron degeneracy pressures replaces the electron version. Neutrons are also spin-half particles.
So ? who says its being violated ?
Some ?
Look, I donno where you got screwed on backwards ...
And I suppose the blast of free nutrons is a merage too ..
And since those freed particles are not free at all. then the notion of critcal mass is a myth, since your model of matter precludes nonlocal effects.
Just showing where you are going with this.
Pretty amazing ... I must say
And btw as I pointed out, the EMP dont come from the plasma ball .. the nuke reaction is short,, very short .. its only taking place during supercritical ..
The fuel is no longer supercritical after nanoseconds part of the factors of compression detonated warheads is holding the fuel together longer so that you get more yeald
which compared to the energy available, is very small, reactors are far more efficient because the reacton zone isnt blasted apart with its own energy. that in a warhead means the metal becomes disapating expanding gas that stops reaction as soon as it expands beyond supercritical compression.
In space, the plasma ball would be only the material of the bomb .. and puny, the energy pulse at the sped of light leaving the plasma ball behind even before it forms.
The unconsumed fuel and byproducts that condense back to metal mixed with the fallout is what makes them so dirty.
Define "involved" they cant penetrate to the mucli ? correct .. free electrons and nutrons are not released ? false.
Here is another clue, in ground based reactors, you do not have solar temps and pressures of the kind that form gold and sulfur out of hydrogen.
In an H bomb you do, the pressure is not created by the chemical compression that takes the core supercritical .. but the instant 100 million degree temp of the core at the instant of reaction
At this temp, that it reaches in a nanaosecond the core is a plasma gas already flying apart as the reaction ends the instant it is no longer critical (expanded back outward) .. people become gas at the same instant .. the heat is the plasma ball and all the hydrothermic effects, the blast wave and such is all the byproduct of the plasma ball. but the plasma ball isnt even a fraction of the energy released in that nanosecond.
the expanding shell of em and particles is long left the party before the plasma ball even forms, while the people are still formed gas in the shape of people.
The blast wave is lots slower, the speed of sound.
Neutrons are released in a fission chain reaction.
But neutrons have no electric charge.
That is why they are free to wander off.
Electrons are freed if the temperature goes high enough to ionise the matter. This is the state we call "plasma". But they do not go very far from the nuclei because everytime you take away an electron the electrical potential (voltage) of the plasma becomes more positive and in the end the positive voltage drags back wandering negatively-charged electrons.
The electric force, as I said, is far stronger than you seem to think.
Again, you just aint getting it...
You need time here
Welp this is the most extensive proof of the non existence of th EMP of a nuke ive ever seen.
Not as detailed as the sokal hoax, but pretty good.
Perhaps it might surprise you that the EMP actually exists .. the free electrons are a fact, the Russian beam weapon was designed on it
Perhaps you can look at the byproducts of an H bomb, that for an instant is the force level that created gold from hydrogen and ponder where the blast shell of electrons come from when the fuel is a 100 million degree ball of compressed gas of what was the instant before plutonium fuel
The temps and pressures and energy identical to the solar core for that instant, and ponder how that differs from the mundaine reactor, that is more an accelerated process of decay than anything close to the supercritical core of an H Bomb.
The energies you are talking about exist in that core.
Perhaps what is throwing you off is the short nanaosecond duration of the reaction and energy release is confused with the after effects of the energy release pulse,,,, that is what is on the film footage we have all seen.
But remember, what is on the film including the flash, is all after effect, the actual nuke reaction and energy release is too short to see. to short to film, and at such a hi freq of the wave front, too short to measure, it can put 1000s of volts of gradiant across an inch span of a single wire
The most common blast detector is a glass tube filled with gas ... the EM pulse ionises the gas, the inonised gas will pass a current
That was the typical nuke det detector installed at all the old ATT&T longlines sites
On some of the sites on these pages
They have pictures of the nuke blast detector, the building, show the construction of them. including the rather thick (so the hi energy of a near miss dont gassify the copper) copper EMP shield
Have the quantum theorists gone so far unto their religion of uncertanty they are detached from reality ?
Sometimes I wonder .. I mean, its nice to have models on things too small for any tool to see, because the particles themselves are the smallest thing we have to look with ...
But sometimes, they seem very close to calculating into existence the improbablity drive (which is a slam at you folks, in case you didnt know)
I mean, if your like me that made electrons his playthings before I learned I had another one in my pants .. the notion of free electrons traveling in space by themselves is not that big a deal.
Its quite common place, the CRT thats being replaced by those nice flat panels rather depends on free moble electrons ... quite happy hanging out there is empty space ... all by their lonesome
whole clouds of them at a time ..
Its no big deal
And while your thinking about it, meander over and have a peek at the militaries "free electron laser":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=free+electron+laser&btnG=Search
Unlike the Russian design, they use an accelerator, not a nuke for the electron source, must be OSHA regs, I suppose, but theirs isnt going to work as well as the russian design
The destruction of matter itself into a shower of particles is a good source of free particles.
Hears another clue, nutrons are hard to steer. they seem to just fly off in their own direction, electrons on the other hand, are far more obedient. the steerable focusable electron gun is a rather old concept,, works on TV sets purty good ... and it will scale.
You misunderstand me.
I never said EMP did not exist.
I merely asked why the rise time for the EMP from a high altitude explosion (HEMP) would be measured in nanoseconds rather than milliseconds.
That is because I understand the emission mechanism is Compton scattering by xrays hitting the upper atmosphere. A region a thousand kilometers across cannot change its state in nanoseconds. Because it takes light much longer than that to cross such a distance. And no signal or disturbance can propagate faster than light.
I am not sure about a Russian free-electron beam weapon. I have heard of a free-electron laser but that is something quite different.
I think a free electron beam in the atmosphere would tend to break up and become unstable due to pinch effect and other magnetohydrodynamic forces. I could imagine a brief electron pulse getting through a channel that had been precleared by a strong laser pulse. I am dubious as to whether a useful amount of energy could be deposited this way. Without a return circuit (maybe through the ground for an antitank weapon?) the charge build up would quickly impede the amount of current that could be sent.
Also I am not denying that a radial charge separation takes place in a nuclear fireball.
The electrons are scattered by Compton and as a result they tend to drift a bit further out than the nuclei - until the positive nuclear charges hold them. But a high altitude explosion is pretty spherically symmetrical, as I said. And an expanding spherical ball of charge does not emit electromagnetic waves.
Try it in Maxwells' equations. An expanding spherical shell of charge radiates no EM field. The symmetry prevents it. You must have at least a dipole moment.
Of course that does not forbid thermal emission from the hot plasma or bremsstrahlung. Or gamma rays from nuclear decays. Just no coherent EM pulse.
This is why I asked the question: Where does the nanosecond EM pulse come from in a high-altitude explosion?
A cathode ray tube has an anode as well as a cathode. The electrons are emitted from the cathode (electron gun) and ultimately collected by the anode and this closes the circuit.
It has nothing to do with distance. the rise time is the rise time of the nuke reaction itself, it goes from nothing to 100 million degrees, with all the attendant energy realease, in that nanosecond, during the reaction the fuel is in a state hard to describe ... what state of matter is a 100 million degree ball of plutonium undergoing supercritical chain reaction ? how many atoms of gold are created before becoming unobtanium or all the other stuff ? ... well none .. 100 million degrees and do you really even plutonium at the core center ? . but elemental fusing hydrogen?
But this reaction isnt going to last long, the chemical blast that compressed the core is insignificant to the pressure expressed by theis amount of mass in this amount of space at a temp of 100 million degrees.
And no significant force is holding it together, even the byproducts of the plastic explosive is this strange other state near 100 million degrees itself and has not had enough time to do much expanding itself ...
The temp and pressure of the sun .... but it dont last long, there is nothing significant holding the core together other than inertia ..
So faster than the plastiq compressed it
(the pressure pushing outward is a million times the compression provided by the explosive )
The core, the reaction zone flys apart, quickly passing outside supercritical and the reaction stops ...
The emense instant release of energy ends .. but continues to travel outward at the speed of light, far outrunning expanding core ... the material at the core is now only a nasty toxic mix of gasified metals still at millions of degrees.
On tera, most of the energy is of the type thats absorbed by the surrounding air and and whatever else, creating a plasma ball of incandescent gas hiding the core, that by now is little different anyway.
The intial flash however is a diffeent effect.
The expanding shell of EM disassociated electrons nutrons protons light up the gas in a xeon sign effect .. the energy front makes an expanding shere (speed of light) if electrolumnecent gas.
In moments, the flash is gone .. but so are physical objects, converted to gas before the heat or the blast wave reaches them, before the infared shine of the plasma ball will be felt, they have absorbed enough energy to become gas themselves.
In nagasaki .. we saw footprints on a bridge, the outline of feet in the instant before the became hot hi pressure gas in the shape of people, and exploding like a bursting air tank, but without the tank ... becomeing gas under pressure in an instant .. leaving nothing behind but the prints where his feet was .. two feet converted to gas in mid stride, made vapor in a single microsecond frame of metiphorical film.
The energy release is short, and intense, and includes all the energy required in abundance that has you scratching your head.
Just remember, that every frame of footage you have seen, is after effect ...
The actual release, is too short to film, too short to see, almost too short to measure.
And that all that you DO see is after effect ,, the re-release of absorbed energy, including the plasma inferno .. that is not the bomb at all,, but the absorbed echo it left behind.
A cathode ray tube has an anode as well as a cathode.
So ? and On my old tek scope, inbetween them is a whole 2+ feet of empty space ..
Ie the electrons are not attached to anything.
Once you accept that, you are ready for the next step.
Liberated electrons .. no problemo. ...
And a nuke is a free electron source, thats the next step to you groking what is happening here.
Wrong. but one step at a time...
It is getting late in my timezone. I would like to close this. But if anyone could deal with the theoretical questions I asked. I would be grateful.
Otherwise I am inclined to believe that nanosecond rise time EMPs can only occur from ground explosions, where the spherical symmetry is spoiled by reflection from the ground.
A "hemispheric" fireball, constrained by the ground, with radial charge separation, would have a large vertical dipole moment. Thus it would easily radiate a nanosecond EMP. But the range would be limited by the low altitude.
But how does it happen at high altitude?
Or doesn't it happen at all?
Thats your problem, the fireball has nothing to do with it., the EMP pulse is racing out away from the event before any fireball even forms.
Right along with the sphere of freed particles
And in space .. there is no gass to absorb the particles or the EM ,,, nor will there be much of a fireball, nor will there be much of a flash, there is no gas to become lumencent.
The reason you dont understand is your grip classical dipole, which has as much bearing on what is happening here as a pair of garden sheers
The Iranians have, and are, testing detonation of explosive warheads at high altitudes over the Caspian Sea delivered by ballistic missile. Luanched from a ship. They're not practicing a defense against space aliens.
The only conceivable purpose of these tests is developing a reliable means of delivering, and detonating, a nuclear warhead at a sufficient altitude to deliver an EMP pulse over a wide area.
So the Iranian government has a different opinion of EMP effects than M.Simon.
The U.S. government has taken, and is taking, elaborate precautions against EMP attack concerning its strategic command, control & communications systems, our nuclear forces, and significant other elements of the U.S. military.
So the U.S. government has a different opinion of EMP effects than M.Simon. So do lots and lots of real experts.
All of whom could be wrong simultaneously.
Or M.Simon is.
Raymond, are you mixing fission and fusion nuclear reactions? Also a star, even a small one, has a an incredibly huge mass; the phenomena that can happen in those conditions have nothing to do with the nonetheless high-energy nuclear explosions we can cause.
This is an explanation of the EMPs that does not require the rather improbable circumstance of free electrons travelling thousands of kilometers.
The direct radiation flash from the nuclear explosion is a different thing.
Ok, so what is this first fast component made of.
An EMP shock wave, from the blast of freed electrons, and you have right with the EM pressure front, gamma and x-rays, a product of the 100 million degree condition of the core and matter being destroyed, electrons not radiated are being re distributed ... a ball of supercritcal plutonium at 100 million degrees, lots of it at the very center isnt even plutonium any more, but hydrogen fusing at the temp and pressure of the sun ..
This all takes place in mere nanoseconds, the core is only held together by inertia, and soon,, as it expands back away from supercritcal the reaction and energy output (from the primary source) is over.
The medium speed component is the reaction ramping slowly (by compare) back down as the condition of supercriticality abates as the core expands and the fusion reaction tapers off and stops.
Both of these effects are over with, before the core is more than a inch larger than its original size before detonation.
The core temp was till rising untill the very last of the medium component that signals the end of the reaction.
Then there is the slow portion, this is the fireball/plasma ball you are focused on.
But as ive pointed out, it comes last, and its not even part of the nuclear release, its the expanding matter of the bomb itself
.(and surrounding dirt and air if not in space, making it look 10 times larger than it would in space)
Its nice display of the energy left behind,, (in the form of heat) but its only a small portion of that energy produced, energy production is long over with before any plasma ball forms. and as this weak echo of what was, and thats all it is, expands ,, and unlike the first two energy waves, it is now cooling ..
And with a ground blast we are already cooling off for eons of nuke reaction lifepans before the hot gas even knows it wants to rise...
Everthing really interesting about a nuke is long ancient history, before there is any fireball to look at... so what makes up all the file footage, isnt the nuke at all .. but the after effect.
Does that help ?
FabioC
That article you point at has disagreements with the essay at the head of this thread.
Can you see that ?
But it does have a nugget ....
And what can air absorb ? gamma ? no,, x-rays ? no, air is quite tranparent to those, hell even solid rock is transparent to gamma for quite some distance thru it.
So what energetic radiation is being uniformly absorbed ?
(hint) electrons and other particle emissions dont travel very well in air.
Xrays and Gamma go thru the air like its almost transparent to them, (Xrays to a lesser extent)
The gamma rays that are strike the air atoms create an electron shower of their own.
But in space there will be no compton scattering cascade caused by the electron and gamma ray emissions, but you still get the fast component of the pulse, and directly, you need no gas for it to interact with ... and secondly there is what happens when the gamma and xray radiation hits the air from above.
But you can put the nuke inbetween here and the moon and record it effects from earth orbit, you will still get a nice EMP effect from the sucker, as well as a nice gamma X and particle bath.
About the only thing you will miss is the secondary compton shower.
The part that will vary however, is the slow component, from the expanding plasma ball ..
This does not involve radiactive decay or the effects of any kind of energetic radiation
All we have here is an expanding hot plasma, the fireball that dan was focused on ..
Here, here might be right, its not particualry energetic (other than being millions of degrees) and its electrical effects are just that of plasma, nothing really interesting going on.
Just the electrical effects of a growing ball of hot gas...
Course, as I pointed out 6 times already, thats not even the nuke we are looking at, it takes up all the footage, but its just the remains of what was.
The problem is that you spent a lot of words while a few would have been enough: the photons flash from the nuclear detonation.
Still, I'm not sure this flash (that involves also radio-frequencies) is the EMP properly called. All the literature cited refers to the strong RF pulse caused by the charge separation.
And, while this wavefront is very sharp close to the detonation point, it will necessarily become flatter with distance until it's completely attenuated.
FabioC
How, doppler shift ?
No, the freq dont change, but the amplitude does, same way a radia station becomes weaker without moving on the dial .. freq = speed ... not speed of travel. but speed of phase change.
Fewer words ? I stand guilty, im hardly a professor with a prepared script, lots of repeats as i came at the same idea from a few angles, looking for ways to illuminate what i was focused on.
In that end, its the search for truth together, and I hope you enjoyed the exchange because I did.
Frankly, the year or so of discussion when the russian beam weapon came to light is the only time ive seen a nuke focused on as a atomic particle source for other than sustaining its own reaction.
Lots of focus on it then.... and not so much till now, perhaps untill now, it just wasnt a focus of attention for what was interesting about an atomic weapon.
Here is an intersting note, the 3 mars (pathfinder) rovers have plutonium heaters on them.
Did you know they generate static charges if they are placed one a insulated surface? (perhaps the very beta decay mentioned)
There are two reasons why this is.
You have the law that states that a pulse can not be smaller than the time it takes to move across the object that produces it.(without serious problems of locality)
Another is that radiowaves have different speeds of light in a space that is not an absolute vacuum.
If you have an object of 3000km than the shortest pulse i would expect is in the order of a thousands of a second which is 100x more than what you get with a low explosion
There is another reason. The Gamma rays do their ionization on a higher altitude so the cascading effect will take longer.
I do endeavor to be prepared for potential problems. I`ve been reading up on EMP, be it a nearby lightning strike, a major storm on the sun (solar EMP event) or a blackout bomb from an enemy of which we seem to have more everyday.
I already have an emergency evacuation and disaster kit. I pack it in a wheeled suitcase so even if I had to abandon my vehicle I could take the bag down the road with little effort.
In reading this site and the posts I am led to modify my evac kit slightly. I think I will pick up another 50 cal ammo case from the army navy store and add a layer of bubble-pack for insulation and padding on the iinside. These cases are water tight and make an excellent faraday cage. To this I will add in zip-lock bags:
1. My last good working cell phone and all its required accessories along with the information needed to reactivate it account no., web sites etc.
2. Spare automotive fuse assortment.
3. Portable battery operated radio *
4. Inexpensive two way radio set. *
5. Solar AA battery charger. *
6. Two led waterproof flashlights and two 6 volt florescent closet lights. *
7. One set each for above, regular and rechargeable batteries separately bagged. *
8. 800 watt 12 VDC to 120/60 inverter *
* Things I already had in my evac kit but not in a waterproof faraday cage.
In the house I intend to build a faraday box to store my spare compact florescent bulbs as well as a retired but still functional phone, along with several small faraday boxes for idle misc. electronics. The low power bulbs would be a nice deal if electricity is limited.
For the house in plastic bags; two or three replacement breakers for the critical locations in my fuse box. (Imagine how hard it would be to get replacements if everyone`s system was overloaded and fried random breakers.)
In total I think I`ll be spending about twenty bucks except for the spare breakers. The last good cell phones was an inspiration that sounds valid for many kinds of disasters.
Can you think of anything I forgot?
PATRIOT missile defence will shoot them down before they get to that point.