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The military hardened their equipment because they were going to go into a possible nuclear ground war in Europe. There are many small yield devices that could take out areas of communication and weapons if not hardened. Everything they do has to operate in a high dose environment, but it was thought to be a short time.

Surprisingly, spacecraft need to be hardened as well in certain orbits because radiation doses upset their circuits as well. We fly through these glitches everyday.

I do not believe batteries are succeptable. If I recall correctly anything turned off is fine after the
pulse.

With all that, the scenario you painted is very possible and people need to wake up to the fact ICBMs make WMDs reach out and touch us.

It sounds like there are scare holes everywhere…in space, science, the infrastructure, etc.

Are we returning to the “hide-under-desk-unitl-the-blast-passes” exercises kids did in school back in the ’50’s?

I don’t think there is enough scientific intelligence among the Evil Ones to carry out the missions which would create your scenario. Local strikes on gas/electic/utility structures seem more likely. Local mayhem.

The more I read about these people, the less likely the Doomsday scenario seems. There are thousands of Americans-turned-Islamists living in sleeper cells all over this country. They live off the fat of gummit entitlement and do their guerilla training and wait for orders from Pakistan. Are they a threat? Some. But nothing that could be nation-wide.

The irony? We produce our own enemies from within: they are recruited from prisons and find some spiritual meaningfulness in their channeled hatred of our evil ways.

Where will it lead? Who knows? Can we halt the cultural sink that produces these people who end up in prison? Maybe.

That’s one thing that is leading me to believe a way out is to declare the “War” on Drugs the Peace Settlement. Let’s legalize drugs and open up the prisons to free the non-violent drug offenders. It can’t be any worse than what we already have going. The bad thing, of course, is that people holding equity in private prison building will see their net worth fall…c’est la vie…

But that’s only one small change. Don’t want to take up your space with others…

Yes, there are a lot of reports of Iranians and North Korea improving their designs. North Korea hasn’t done much with it’s missiles lately because they are edging closer to national collapse. It’s doubtful they’ll get the technology to make a viable ICBM anytime soon. Iran is definitely interested in MRBM technology, but they still have a long way to go for ICBM’s. Both programs are still pretty much in the prototype stage, which means they have a lot of problems, require a lot of maintenance, and aren’t very reliable. That will slowly change though, especially for the Iranians.

The problem with missiles, of course, is that they leave a calling card, and we are working toward missile defense to address the Korean threat. We have a joint project with the Israeli’s for missile defense technology, and the Israeli’s have an operational system now. Considering that, it’s much more likely they’d put a nuke on ship, blow it in a port city, or bring it across from Mexico. That way they’d be assured of destruction and mayhem while still have some plausible deniability.

No they spent it to make sure that they survive near by explosions. The internet was developed so that a network of computers to route a message from A to B, but a very large number of route. All our electonics are hardened to survive , or be easily repairable, after Solar and atmospheric storms. These happen all the time, and were known about since the 60’s by the militaries in the US and USSR, but not by most civilian scientist. Given the large electical potentials generated in the upper atmosphere have little effect on our electical devices, models which postulate large consequences for similar, man made, potentials, should be taken with a grain of salt.
You probably know as much about milking a Yak, as do scientist know about the electical properties of the upper atmosphere. The physics and chemistry is funny there. Hard to get to and impossible to replicate in the lab. This is one of the reasons the US played with helium ballons so much in the 60’s and 70’s.

Thanks for the information. I would like to ask that any reader who can decipher Doc’s comment to please email me or leave a comment yourself. I can only write about what others are saying about this issue.

The fact that the military has spent billions in hardening their electronics makes me think that either Doc is wrong or that we have been flummoxed into wasting a lot of money.

Andrew:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the Iranians adding a third stage to the Shahab 3? And wouldn’t that give it enough to achieve a suborbital heighth of about 185 miles?

I read that in some Congressional testimony on Iranian military capabilities last spring. Similarly, the NoKo’s are restaging the taep-o-dong 2 that would give it a range capable of hitting the northwest US.

Whether that will fill the bill of an EMP weapon is beside the point. The NoKo’s especially are interested in building full blown ICBM’s capable of hitting anyone, anywhere. I’ve seen estimates that they could be as close of 5 years from achieving that goal.

One more thing to worry about…

Conversion of units.
1KT of TNT is 4.2 x 109 joules.

http://www.ieer.org/clssroom/unitconv.html

and

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci499008,00.html

Overview of electrical storms in the upper atmosphere.
“The global view of lightning activity offered by detectors in space has increased our appreciation of the importance of atmospheric electrical processes. There are between about 40 and 100 lightning discharges every second, each radiating electromagnetic pulses at up to 20 GW peak power and producing quasi-static electric fields up to 1 kV/m at 50–80 km altitude in the mesosphere. The electromagnetic energy couples with the plasma in the magnetosphere. Wave–particle interactions with radiation belt electrons (keV–MeV energies) result in scattering of some of the population out of the atmosphere. Intense lightning may also result in electrons being accelerated to relativistic energies in the upper atmosphere and injected into the magnetosphere. It is thought that thunderstorms provide a source of inner radiation belt electrons in this way. Electric processes within the troposphere then affect directly the atmospheric layers above, out to the near-Earth space environment.”

From Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 43 Issue 6 Page 6.09 - December 2002
“ The electric Earth Cosmic influences on the atmosphere” Neil Arnold and Torsten Neubert.

So an average ‘discharge” of lighting in the upper atmosphere releases at 20 GW peak power which is equal to 20*10^9 joules in a second, which is equal to 4.7 KT of TNT. We have between 40 and 100 events like this, every second, about 5% of the discharges are in the 50 KT range, that is 2-5 per second.

The energy density of an explosion falls with distance, the further away you are the better, here is the falloff of a 20 KT device.
Miles Meters km Joules Fractional of original Energy
0.0 1.0 0.001 8.4E+10 1
0.0 10.0 0.010 8.4E+08 1.E-02
0.1 100.0 0.100 8.4E+06 1.E-04
0.6 1000.0 1.000 8.4E+04 1.E-06
3.1 5000.0 5.000 3.4E+03 4.E-08
6.1 10000.0 10.000 8.4E+02 1.E-08
30.6 50000.0 50.000 3.4E+01 4.E-10
61.2 100000.0 100.000 8.4E+00 1.E-10
306.2 500000.0 500.000 3.4E-01 4.E-12
At 300 miles you get 1/4000000000000 of the energy output. This is only a real problem in electrical devices, if you have a long antenna, to collect a larger fraction of the energy in a long line. This can happen, as happened high-altitude nuclear testing in 1962 over Kazakhstan, (probably 300 KT and at 175 miles above the earth (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/tests/USSR-ntests1.html)) several system effects were noted due to the high altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP). In particular a 500-km long aerial communications line experienced a failure. This test was designed to see what happened if you used a 300 KT device, in emp mode. The question the Soviets wanted to know was, does a 300 KT device going off at 290 km above a city give me a better effect than if it goes off at 290 meters above a city. The answer is NO.

IEEE Transactions On Electromagnetic Compatibility, 40, 1998.
“Response of Long Lines to Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP)”
Vasily N. Greetsai, Andrey H. Kozlovsky, Vadim M. Kuvshinnikov, Vladimir M. Loborev, Yuri V. Parfenov, Oleg A. Tarasov, and Leonid N. Zdoukhov.
They concluded that the main problem is with the type of porcelain insulators used.

“The HEMP hazard to a line has clearly been shown through full-scale (atmospheric tests) experiments and has been corroborated by the results of further years of experimental investigation.
Particularly, it was found that for power lines with 5-kV operating voltage and below, line-isolation spark over occurs under the action of surges with amplitudes on the order of 100 kV. Then, under operating voltage conditions, the transition from spark overs to arcs occurred and created two and three-phase short circuits, and the porcelain insulator’s glaze failed and fused. Experiments have indicated, however, that glass and polymeric insulators have not shown the same problems. Additional experimental investigations on substation equipment protective devices have also shown that due to their voltage-time characteristics, they will conduct high-amplitude HEMP surges.”

So, don’t worry about emp.

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Normally, I would bow to superior knowledge but in this case, I think you’re talking through your hat.

This is an issue that people have been studying for 40 years. And yes, a device would have to be detonated 300 miles above Kansas - or didn’t you bother to read that?

As far as “hardened” electronics, I’m sorry but that is ludicrous. This is from a statement by Dr. Gary L. Smith, Director of Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins:

When EMP energy enters the interior of a potentially vulnerable system, it can cause a variety of adverse effects. These effects include transients, resettable or permanent upset of digital logic circuits, and performance degradation or burnout of electronic components. The collected EMP energy itself can cause malfunction or device failure directly, or it can trigger the system’s internal power sources in unintended ways, causing damage by the power sources within the system itself.

In summary, EMP introduces two collectively unique features to the overall picture of system susceptibility to nuclear effects. These features, taken together, distinguish EMP from all other forms, both natural and man-made, of electrical stress and response. First, stresses induced by EMP can significantly exceed those ordinarily encountered in system circuits and components and can thereby increase the probability of upset and burnout occurring in electrical and electronic systems. Second, EMP can cause this increase to occur nearly simultaneously over a large area, about one million square kilometers for a high-altitude burst.

There are so many interesting links on this site, take your pick.

http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm

If you could offer a some counter links that debunk the EMP effect described in the article, I would consider including them in an update.

It is however a good idea to persuade the Iranians and the North Koreans that a 20KT blast at 30,000 feet above the USA will bring its civilization to a halt. That way they would announce that they have crossed the nuclear Rubicon by causing 30 seconds of interference on our TV and mobile phones. Then we could nuke them properly.