No mention anywhere of TVs or radios being actually damaged. Remember this was in 1962, and I believe most TV and radio was still tubes. Transistor radio's existed, but they were a novelty.
I get that you believe this. And I know some people do.
Actually no. I am not sure, and I am curious. It is interesting to talk about something like this in these forums because you get all kinds of information from people with different knowledge and points of view. It is a learning experience for me at this point.
“damaged electronic circuitry in Hawaii 860 miles away” What kind of damage? Can I look this up somewhere?
This is the link from the wikipedia article:
http://www.ece.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf
Anything like this from wikipedia should generally be referenced. Click the number at the end of the sentence to find the reference link at the bottom of the page.
Don't assume that when person A quotes something that was posted by person B in Wikipedia that Wikipedia was the source for person A. Perhaps someone didn't read carefully enough because initially I posted the link to the Peratt paper and even noted in the link that it was to a PDF: A. L. Peratt, Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity,
Trans. Plasma Sci. v.31, n.6, 2003. It was accessed through the Los Alamos National Laboratory site (http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/TheUniverse.html). Having read this paper a few years ago, I happened to know of this 1.4 megaton detonation and the damage it had unexpectedly caused. I used an online atlas to see how far Hawaii was from Johnston Atoll and then used ordinary math (you know, area of a circle = pi*r squared?) to come up with the affected area with Hawaii at a distance of 860 miles.
You may also want to look at something on the subject I just found at
The Space Review called
The EMP threat: fact, fiction, and response, part 1*,
The EMP threat: fact, fiction, and response, part 2,
Rebuttal to "The EMP threat: fact, fiction, and response
EMP myths is interesting. And you may also want to look at the PDF
united-states-high-altitude-test-experiences.
My point was that there were effects 860 miles away. Couple this with the fact that today's microcircuitry is far more susceptible to disruption or destruction by an EMP than were the electronics in the early 1960s.
And who really cares whether someone is able to detonate a single large (and the 1.4 megaton Starfish blast was large, but out in the middle of the Pacific) in space over the middle of the U.S.? Anyone with the capability of doing that could just as easily set off a much smaller one over the east, west, or Gulf coasts where most of the U.S. government, population, education and business centers are located. How well is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange going to work if New York and Washington DC are knocked out?
An EMP weapon over any one of these three regions could have a severely crippling effect on the entire nation. These regions and their businesses are not autonomous. They all depend on many things from other regions; the disruption of any one of those regions could cause significant trouble for the others.
Also, with as many things as there are controlled by computers, even something that temporarily scrambles the computers and programs can have devastating effects on what they're controlling downstream, for instance, in power companies and other public utilities.
*Yousaf Butt is a staff scientist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, where he worked on NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory project from 1999–2004.
He was a research fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program from 2005–2007. He holds BSc degrees in physics and in mechanical engineering from MIT and a PhD in experimental nuclear astrophysics from Yale University.