Power Shortages Loom

William Forstchen’s latest New York Times bestseller, One Second After, is a cautionary tale that explores the consequences of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the United States. An EMP explosion over the continental United States would have devastating consequences for our country. According to General Eugene Habiger, Former Commander-in-Chief of the U. S. Strategic Command, “Our technologically-oriented society and its heavy dependence on advanced electronic systems could be brought to its knees with cascading failures of our critical infrastructure. Our vulnerability increases daily as our use and dependence on electronics continues to accelerate.” Under the right circumstances, an EMP makes every electronic device quit working. This is not the EMP that is glamorized in movies, which usually only temporarily knocks out electronic devices. “[Hollywood] always get it wrong,” Forstchen contends. An actual EMP short circuits electronic devices for good.

Our communication systems, including, televisions, cell phones, radios, and computers, would go out. Cars would halt. Airplanes would stop in mid-flight. The modern age of technology could be thrust back into the Middle Ages.

“Unlike a regional event, like Hurricane Katrina, where aid comes from North Carolina, Chicago etc. We are talking about a nation-wide event. It would be weeks, months before help comes,” contends Forstchen. We have learned from Katrina that you can’t wait for other people to come and help you. “I urge every family to have an emergency plan in place,” concludes Forstchen.

A Congressional study conducted in 2004 assessed the likeliness of such an attack. “Several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP)....

Yea, I know.

That’s why I collect Collins radios. Tube gear. Both A-line (eg, 75A1 and 75A4) and “S-line” radios.

For people who want an indestructible shortwave radio that is on par with some of the very best solid-state radios, go see if you can find a R-390A. They’re heavy (about 90lbs), but they are a mechanical and electrical wonder. They were designed for the military and CIA in the cold war, and they were designed to withstand EMP as well as be the very best receivers that tube technology could bring forth.

I have one R-390A. When I get more time and room, I’ll probably pick up another one.

Other tube-type radios worth collecting:

1. Hammarlund SP600 “Super Pro” receivers. You’ll have to study up on these radios, as there were about 20+ variants, but they are all built like brick outhouses.

2. Hallicrafters SX-28. Not the SX-28A, but the -28. Very good WWII era receiver.

3. Collins 51J-4. This is about like a 75A4 (one of Collins’ most famous and arguably one of the best tube ham receivers of all time), only it has general coverage.

4. Collins 51S-1. This is the general coverage version of the S-line radios.

There’s tons of older tube-type radios out there, and some of them are becoming *quite* valuable. It is worth the time of any “highly prepared” person or family to seek out at least one tube-type general coverage receiver for SHTF situations. There are lots of them out there, and some of them need a little TLC, but they’re often very fine radios.

It has been “proven” as a threat to comm and radio systems that use solid state components in the 70’s and 80’s. When I worked for a defense contractor in the radio business, it was a well known (and planned for) situation. Most consumer electronics that are solid state will not survive a competently executed EMP attack. Many military comm systems will, because they’ve been designed to “drain” off the EMP into grounding systems before reaching the sensitive components.

The way this was proven was with weapons “effects tests” in the Nevada Test Site. It isn’t widely known that there were two types of atomic/nuclear weapons tests: the “yield” tests (where you see a crater collapse into the ground - this is what the news media typically shows people when blabbering about nuke tests) and an “effects” test, wherein a tunnel is dug in a mesa, a small weapon placed at the end of a tunnel and instruments and guinea pig electronics are placed near the mouth of the tunnel. There are explosively activated blast doors along the tunnel. The idea in the effects tests was to see what happened to the instruments/electronics from the electrical wave impulses and subsequent wave of neutrons and EMP caused by the device before the physical shock of the bomb explosion reached the instruments. The intention was to trigger the blast doors to seal in the blast, but allow the unshielded neutron blast (which is traveling faster than the physical shock wave) out.

I knew someone who programmed PDP-11’s for these tests in the 70’s and 80’s — he liked to say that most people who yammered about “real time” programming were poseurs. His application was what he liked to call “really hard real-time programming” — because after ‘n’ so many clock cycles, the computer was going to be destroyed. He had to collect his data and get it shipped down a wire outside the hole before his computer was destroyed. He couldn’t talk much about the details of the application, but he had some really good ideas about “real” real-time operating systems and programming.

The net:net is that many solid state devices don’t do well in the face of EMP. We even had to worry about solid state devices maintaining proper state in the face of cosmic radiation on satellites.

NB - what another poster said above about a megaton weapon lofted high up - very true, if the attacker wants a one-shot kill of our electronics. Otherwise, it will take a bunch of much smaller weapons - and the idea that we’re going to sit still for weapons numbered 2 through ‘n’ is dubious indeed.

There are really three pulses of (relatively) high energy that come off a nuke blast: the first is very rapid, but very short in duration. The second is a tad more energetic, akin to a very bad burst of static electrical power - think of it as man-made lightening.

The EMP that everyone is worried about is the third wave, and it can last much longer - perhaps a tenth of a second to as much as a full second. This is a big magnetic field, whereas the first two pulses were electrical fields. Electrical fields are easy to defeat with shielding - of anything. Even wrapping something in aluminum foil will defeat an electrical field.

A magnetic field, however — now you need to encase stuff in a magnetic shield. This is not the same as an electrical shield. For example, aluminum isn’t such a hot magnetic shield, while it is just spiffy for electrical shielding.

Mere electrical conductivity is not enough. You need plate steel, or (if you really want protection), there’s something called “mu-metal” that is very effective magnetic shielding. You sometimes see mu-metal as the shielding around oscilloscope picture tubes to prevent distortion of the trace by any stray magnetics in an EE lab.

But just as no man is an island, there’s few electrical/electronic devices that are useful without some connection to something else - usually by wires. What do you get when you have wires exposed to a flux of magnetic field? You get electrical current. So there’s only two ways to prevent the EMP from burning up stuff on “the other end” of the wire:

1. Disconnectors, whether mechanical or sacrificial isolation.

2. Eliminate or shorten the wiring to reduce the amount of conductor in the magnetic field.

A third possibility is something like a surge suppressor, but most surge suppressors won’t handle a surge of the duration we might be talking about here. Most surge suppressors work by self-destructing to absorb the energy; once they’ve done their job during the first part of the pulse, they’re probably useless for the last part of a 500msec+ pulse.

That said, the power grid isn’t what I would be most worried about. The control systems for same, yes, but the generation and switchgear? No, not really. They already handle some hefty surges from lightening strikes quite successfully.

I’m more worried about what will happen one day when the sun really wakes up from this overly quiet period of low sunspot activity. When the sun really warps the dickens out of the earth’s geomagnetic field, we can see very large, powerful currents induced into the portions of the earth’s crust that have high iron contents in them. When there is an electrical grid that encompasses or traverses these regions of the earth, you can see the actual switchgear and transformers of the electrical grid blow up rather spectacularly.

This has happened already:

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/spaceweather/blackout.html

Now, if we want to make the grid really vulnerable, we’ll make it into a “smart grid,” whereby we festoon a network built to withstand lightening strikes (direct lightening strikes - repeatedly) with the whimpy consumer-grade electronics that won’t survive meddling by a 19 year old in his mother’s basement.

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