About the Author Daisy Luther
Please feel free to share any information from this site in part or in full, leaving all links intact, giving credit to the author and including a link to this website and the following bio. Daisy is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting, homeschooling blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. Daisy is the publisher of The Cheapskate's Guide to the Galaxy, a monthly frugality newsletter, and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. She is the best-selling author of 4 books and lives in the mountains of Virginia with her two daughters and an ever-growing menagerie. You can find Daisy on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
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Coincidentally I ran across this EMP article last night after posting an EMP article yesterday. More food for thought.
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This pretty much kills the credibility of anything that comes after.
Hoax. EMP is a real effect of nuclear devices, but its affect on electronic and electrical circuits is not the god-like destructive powers claimed on the Internet.
She forgot to add “Scientific Illiterate” and “Blog-Shite-Shoveller” to her not-the-least-impressive CV.
“Not only is EMP a scam, nuclear weapons are probably a scam. Certainly they were at the time of abhorrent and immoral destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both cities victimized by fire bombing like all the other Japanese cities.”
Is he saying nukes aren’t real? I’m pretty sure they are, but I am skeptical about the EMP thing. Lew Rockwell is banned on FR for some reason.
Stopped paying any attention right there............
So I’m going to refer to a few things I learned from a Ham Radio Club meeting I attended back in the early 80s while living in Santa Barbara. We had a speaker from the Air Force (Vandenberg AFB - maybe you’ve heard of it) - and this is a summary of what the guy said.
The physics of it are relatively easy to understand - a weapons burst at altitude sends high-energy particles through the ionosphere. The energy levels are varied across a wide range, i.e. fairly low energies to fairly high in an essentially even distribution. They interact with the ionosphere which turns some of the energy into radio waves. Because there is an even distribution of the energy spectra - the radio spectra is wide too, i.e. the frequencies represented start at DC to up to the GHz range. The energy levels - and this is from a 40 year old memory - are something like 30KV/m**2.
So - EMP effect is REAL. Why it occurs is straight-forward to understand.
The officer also said that an airburst could cover a range of 1500 miles and get this - Faraday cages wouldn’t help because the EMP step function is so big - that the internal E field of the Faraday cage would take a finite time to re-balance - so you see the effect within the Faraday cage... he suspected that any transistor circuit even within a sealed Faraday cage would go pop.
SPAM
As with so many other things... ...it’s not that simple.
It’s not EITHER a hoax or else a deadly threat.
Again, as with so many other things, Nature (and physics) sees a range — a wide spectrum of degree of effect — between civilization-destroying utter devastation, and “Look Mom, Nothing Happened.”
It depends on the strength of the field, and where the affected objects and systems are. And numerous other variables.
Yes, it’s Real. I spent a lot of years in EMI / RFI / TEMPEST / EMC / and EMP with a manufacturer of control and suppression devices.
So. Prep reasonably, by all means. Run in panicky cicles waving your arms in the air while hollering — probably not indicated.
Don’ worry: Be happy.
Doubters check out Starfish Prime and Soviet Project K nuclear tests
Operation Fishbowl provided the scientific evidence. The Soviets knew this before we did, or maybe were interested in it before we were. American scientists noticed the effects but saw it more as a nuisance.
I have a lot more to worry about than an EMP.....Like how i am going to survive after i turn 75 in 24 yrs without at least 2 mill in the bank....says the money guys on AM radio.
At the moment i’m about about .005% there.
THAT is what is worrying me..
EMP is BOTH an Elaborate Threat, as well as a Legitimate Hoax.
The ridiculous level of centralization of our power grid means that even if EMP is over-rated, it doesn’t have to be that much to throw the power grid into a tailspin.
I have a relative who has been with Duke Energy for many years. When he and I were talking he said the centralization of the power grid and the poor level of training and supervision of the people running it is frightening.
“Certainly they were at the time of abhorrent and immoral destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,“
Daisy is an idiot.
L
A very real threat which we are not taking anywhere near seriously enough.
Daisy Luther’s “great admiration” for Lew Rockwell is somewhat disturbing. That guy’s nuts are not all tightened to the Manufacturer’s specifications to his bolts.
That said (and being 100% opinion - mine), EMP is a very real scientific phenomenon - produced by the VERY REAL nukes that we, the Russians, the Chinese, etc. have in our respective national arsenals. The Russians, not exactly given to irrationality during the Cold War, constructed the Mig-25 Foxbat with vacuum tubes. It was designed that way ON PURPOSE, specifically because this Mach 3+ interceptor was designed to shoot down B-70 (and slower) bombers in a nuclear environment. There is simply no way, no how that EMP is a hoax if the Soviets - who were no slouches in technology - designed a critically important aircraft at very great expense around the concept of being essentially immune to EMP.
For those that do not know, we got ahold of a Mig-25 in 1976, when a Soviet pilot of one kindly defected to Japan with his aircraft. The Soviets loudly complained that we had to return their property (funny, that, coming from a bunch of Communists), which we did - months later, in a bunch of boxes and crates, dismantled down to the last screw and rivet. So we KNOW what made that aircraft tick...and had quite obviously “interviewed” the pilot for other details about its mission, etc.
EMP is real. How much effect it will have depend on MANY variables:
1) Whether the nuke in question is tuned to maximize the production of gamma rays (which sets off the EMP pulses);
2) The altitude of the detonation;
3) The strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at the point of detonation and within line-of-sight of same;
4) The strength of shielding of devices, lines and transformers exposed to the EMP; and
5) Others of which I am likely not aware...but suffice it to say that “it depends.”
It COULD be utterly devastating to our (or any other 1st World) economy, if done just right. Remember that we have, in the name of efficiency, eliminated any robustness from our system, courtesy of “Just in Time” inventories. There are no Cold War-like huge reserves of just about ANYTHING.
Note that the best producer of EMP would be a purely fission (Atomic) bomb with a thin casing, tuned to maximize the production of gamma radiation - NOT, NOT, NOT a huge, multi-megaton bomb the likes of which probably only the 5 primary nuclear powers (and maybe Israel) can produce. The big bombs are best for producing the E3 pulse, which is similar to a geomagnetic storm (like the Carrington event - look THAT one up to see if EMP means nothing). We are much more worried, for these purposes, about the E1 pulse, which is so fast that standard surge protectors will be useless to even ameliorate it AT ALL (and, in fact, they will likely be damaged by the E1 pulse such that they’ll be unable to function well enough to stop the E2 pulse, which is far more akin to a lightening strike). For more information (and we could ALL use that, right?), please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
I would caution against underestimating opponents - that is a classic mistake of the arrogant, and a US that has been on top of the world for the last 70-odd years, technologically and economically, fits that bill. Maybe North Korea cannot produce a maximally-effective, tuned EMP nuke and launch it to the correct coordinates 250 or so miles above Kansas...but they can certainly hire and/or threaten scientists who can (and there are a bunch of unemployed former Soviet nuclear scientists out there). Iran is, IMHO, far more capable of doing something like this without any outside help, but they’re also far more capable of hiring the help if they do need it.
In short, we don’t know for certain what the effects of an MEP strike would be. However, I’d rather overestimate the damage from an EMP strike against this country, and prepare for it, than the opposite. For those claiming that there’s some kind of an EMP-industrial complex, the amount necessary to substantially harden our electrical infrastructure is a pittance compared to what we spend on the military or education or environmental compliance each year - and the EMP expenditures would be over 5-10 years.