electromagnetic pulse [EMP] weapon

[jefferiestubes8]

I came across this article today which discusses a scary scenario:

It would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network.

One EMP weapon could wipe out the entire power grid of America
April 8, 2010

via Newsmax

"A nuclear device detonated at an altitude in excess of 40 miles generates High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP),

A nuclear weapons miles above U.S. soil, sending out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that fries the electronic guts of everything in America.

via Time magazine March 30 article
EMP: The Next Weapon of Mass Destruction?

No not the tiny one EMP machine used in the film Ocean's Eleven (2001) but

When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth’s surface.

Luckily during the cold war this did not happen.

Even if one of these were to happen you would have basically an area like the the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone's city of
Pripyat, an abandoned city near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (site of the 1986 worst nuclear power plant accident in history which resulted in a severe release of radioactivity) in the zone of alienation in northern Ukraine, Kiev Oblast, near the border with Belarus.
[edited from Wiki.] tens of hundreds of square miles would basically revert back to Mother Nature as even automobiles made after 1985 used electronics and would not start. You would have a scenario similar to the TV series "Jericho" (2006) and the film The Postman (1997) where survival is first and horses would be used as transportation.
It would be a touch of the Wild West of the United States in the 1800s-1900s. Oddly steam locomotives would work though...
There would be a period of time with no communications at all until satellite phones were brought in. Surely some underground bunkers and subbasements would keep the EMPs from reaching some electronics but few and far between.

Shall we discuss the HEMP and the power they have and the results?

 

[Lindley]

Don't worry, Pierce Brosnan will save us.

 

[Jadzia]

A Faraday cage would protect a delicate electronic object from this wouldn't it?

 

[JiNX-01]

I read about this several years ago.

 

[John Picard]

I came across this article today which discusses a scary scenario:

It would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network.

One EMP weapon could wipe out the entire power grid of America
April 8, 2010

via Newsmax

"A nuclear device detonated at an altitude in excess of 40 miles generates High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP),

A nuclear weapons miles above U.S. soil, sending out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that fries the electronic guts of everything in America.

via Time magazine March 30 article
EMP: The Next Weapon of Mass Destruction?

No not the tiny one EMP machine used in the film Ocean's Eleven (2001) but

When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth’s surface.

Luckily during the cold war this did not happen.

Even if one of these were to happen you would have basically an area like the the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone's city of
Pripyat, an abandoned city near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (site of the 1986 worst nuclear power plant accident in history which resulted in a severe release of radioactivity) in the zone of alienation in northern Ukraine, Kiev Oblast, near the border with Belarus.
[edited from Wiki.] tens of hundreds of square miles would basically revert back to Mother Nature as even automobiles made after 1985 used electronics and would not start. You would have a scenario similar to the TV series "Jericho" (2006) and the film The Postman (1997) where survival is first and horses would be used as transportation.
It would be a touch of the Wild West of the United States in the 1800s-1900s. Oddly steam locomotives would work though...
There would be a period of time with no communications at all until satellite phones were brought in. Surely some underground bunkers and subbasements would keep the EMPs from reaching some electronics but few and far between.

Shall we discuss the HEMP and the power they have and the results?

Why is the fact that a steam locomotive would still work seem odd to you? FWIW, any automobile built before any type of computer control will function, which is around 1990 and earlier.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Why is the fact that a steam locomotive would still work seem odd to you?

The commercial steam locomotives from 1830-1950s ruled the USA for long haul transportation before diesel locomotives came in during the 1950s.
Hence my mention of

It would be a touch of the Wild West of the United States in the 1800s-1900s. Oddly steam locomotives would work though...

Well since people would be using horses it is conceivable that instead of just replacing the electronics in diesel/electric locomotives that Steam locomotives would work in the mean time and would just have to be put on the right tracks to ferry freight back and forth in the days/weeks after an EMP. [If there were a supply of coal...] We are talking major catastrophe here and getting the right electronics in to fix the diesel/electric engines would really take weeks.

 

[SamuraiBlue]

Wouldn't sheet metal plating of a car act as a Faraday cage?

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Wouldn't sheet metal plating of a car act as a Faraday cage?

Granted they are Hollywood but....

From Wikipedia's page on the TV movie The Day After (1983)

The first salvo of the Soviet nuclear attack on the central United States (as shown from the point of view of the residents of Kansas and western Missouri) occurs at 3:38 pm, Central Daylight Time, when a large yield nuclear weapon is air burst at a high altitude over Kansas City, Missouri, in order to generate an electromagnetic pulse, disabling any defensive weapons covering nearby Minuteman III missile silos. Thirty seconds later, incoming Soviet ICBMs begin to impact military and population targets (including Kansas City)

Oakes' car is disabled by the Electromagnetic Pulse.

Also if you haven't seen "Jericho" (2006) most newer cars are useless.

 

[RobertVA]

Wouldn't sheet metal plating of a car act as a Faraday cage?

Many late model automobiles have plastic grills and plastic trim around the grill and headlights that might not offer much protection from electromagnetic radiation. The radiator might offer a little bit of shielding.

The area under the engine is usually completely open.

Glass windows and their tint would probably offer little resistance. After all, light itself is a extremely high frequency electromagnetic radiation. Sometimes those vulnerable computers are mounted under the front seats. The gaps in the seat springs are probably wide enough to let a pulse through.

I don't see where anything offers much in the way of shielding unless the computer itself is enclosed in a metal box. Even then, the energy from the pulse might be conducted into the box through the wires that power the computer and allow it to communicate with the various sensors and servos it uses to operate.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

It wouldn't necessarily need to be the result of a nuke going off. We are entering a period of hyper intense solar activity that some theorize could cause a similar effect. Something similar happened around the turn of the 20th century, knocking out the entire telegraph system (the single largest electrical system of the day) for some time.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

Something similar happened around the turn of the 20th century, knocking out the entire telegraph system (the single largest electrical system of the day) for some time.

A quick search and...

Later, in 1859, a major failure of telegraph systems in New England and Europe coincided with a large solar flare called the “Carrington Event”, after astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the instigating flare. However, the real modern-era wakeup call to geomagnetic susceptibility of our infrastructure was the (moderate intensity) geomagnetic storm that shut down the entire Hydro Quebec grid in March 1989.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1553/1

Re:“Carrington Event”

In some telegraph offices, the currents induced into the telegraph system’s wiring caused fires. Telegraph systems are very robust compared to the electronics in use today.

http://global-green.info/tag/failure/

I hadn't heard of this before thanks darkwing_duck1.
shall we concentrate of the effects afterward of what would not work technology-wise and the days/weeks-after scenarios of rural, town, city/urban communities?

 

[darkwing_duck1]

][/U]
I hadn't heard of this before thanks darkwing_duck1.
shall we concentrate of the effects afterward of what would not work technology-wise and the days/weeks-after scenarios of rural, town, city/urban communities?

Cities in the effected area would pretty much collapse in every sense of the word. No power, no water, no communications...in short, complete infrastructure failure. Fires sparked by the power spikes and shorts from the storm would rage out of control. Millions of people left to fend for themselves as the government would be utterly incapable of governing.

Metropolitan areas are NOT self-sustainable environments. With power for refridgeration out and no means of importing more foodstuffs, medicines, etc, most cities would exhaust their existing stock of consumables in approximately a week. The smart people would take what they could carry and bug out as fast as they could travel (on foot).

Rural areas would be a mixed bag. Still no power or communications. Everything would depend on what kind of people you were. The best prepared would be groups like the Amish, the Mormons, etc and the "survivalist" fringe groups that had stockpiles of food, medicine, etc laid in and the means to defend them. Prospects for the others go down fast from there, again given the nature of modern living.

One other nightmare scenario would be if the affected area were someplace like NYC, the economic heart of the nation. The sudden, catastrophic loss of communications AND higher electronics would collapse the financial infrastructure. Without their records, no one would know who had what money where, and even if they DID know, there'd be no way to convey this information.

Banks EVERYWHERE, even outside the effected zone, would be beseiged by people desperate to get their money out. Since banks practice so-called "Fractional Reserve", they would not have the cash to pay out all their liabilities. So the chaos would spread.

As bas as that sounds, that's a moderate scenario. The worst case, the "Big One" as it were, would be a storm that blanketed most of the continent. The limited storm mentioned above, while a disaster of unimaginable scale, in theory COULD be recovered from with time and a lot of work.

A nationwide failue would literally put us back to the 1800s for all intents and purposes. Not only would the power grid go, along with telcomm and data networks. Not only would all the high end electronics go, but so would our ability to REPLACE those things, as the factories we have today are as high tech as the products they produce.

And no, the fact that pre-85 cars and such are still around would NOT save us. There's nowhere near enough to keep food production up and running, fuel distributed, goods shipped, etc.

It is truly frightening to contemplate just how precariously balanced modern societies are...

 

[T'Girl]

Luckily during the cold war this did not happen.

Actual it did.

The electrical power grid in Hawaii was knocked out by a high altitude nuclear weapons test in the pacific. Can't remember the date.

 

[FordSVT]

The only people who could detonate a device at a sufficiently high altitude with enough energy to fry a large portion of the USA would be other major nuclear powers. There is only one reason another state would take such an action, to start an invasion/nuclear war. I'd worry more about the nuclear holocaust that would follow such a strike than having your power out and deciding which horse to ride to work in the morning.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

NGC episode June 15 - “Electronic Armageddon" - EMP

“Electronic Armageddon,” a show airing Tuesday on the National Geographic Channel.

The National Geographic Channel filmed an episode of EXPLORER scheduled to air June 15th at 10pm. It covers causes and effects of EMP. It includes "reenactments" and EMP hardening

Electronic Armageddon - Nuclear Explosion in the Sky

Explore what could happen when a high altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) occurs and cripples our electrical grid.

http://www.tv.com/video/10468996/electronic-armageddon--nuclear-explosion-in-the-sky

Probably worth checking out.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Wasn't there a bunch of radiation from a starquake in the late '90's that knocked out satellite communications for a few days? I remember that the incident conclusively proved the existence of magnetars, which had only been speculation up to that point. I could be totally pulling it out of my ass, but I was living in Alaska at the time. TV only came in by satellite, and you couldn't get squat for a few days.

 

[Brandonv]

It is truly frightening to contemplate just how precariously balanced modern societies are...

Yep, and the scenario you described in your post could also be caused by the sun. The solar storm of 1859, known as the Carrington Event, was powerful enough to fry telegraph lines. If it happened today, it would be a doomsday event.

 

[SG-17]

Will an EMP still fry electronics even if there is no electricity running through them at all at the time of detonation?

 

[Santaman]

Will an EMP still fry electronics even if there is no electricity running through them at all at the time of detonation?

Anything other then electromagnic relais and very old vacuum tube bases equipment will be toast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

^^ neat article about EMP.

 

[Zachary Smith]

"He did it. He REALLY did it! He shut down the WHOLE WORLD!"