Posted on 04/07/2015 7:40:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Our entire way of life can be ended in a single day. And it wouldn’t even take a nuclear war to do it. All it would take for a rogue nation or terror organization to bring us to our knees is the explosion of a couple well-placed nuclear devices high up in our atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulses would fry electronics from coast to coast. Of course this could also be accomplished without any attack. Scientists tell us that massive solar storms have hit our planet before, and that it is inevitable that there will be more in the future. As you will read about below, the most recent example of this was “the Carrington Event” in 1859. If a similar burst from the sun hit us today, experts tell us that life in America could suddenly resemble life in the 1800s, and the economic damage caused could potentially be in the trillions of dollars. This is one of the greatest potential threats that we are facing as a nation, and yet Barack Obama has essentially done nothing to get us prepared.
The technology necessary to conduct such an electromagnetic pulse attack against the United States has become much more accessible in recent years. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, even rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran either already have or will soon have the capability to hurt us in this way…
Rogue nations such as North Korea (and possibly Iran) will soon match Russia and China and have the primary ingredients for an EMP attack: simple ballistic missiles such as Scuds that could be launched from a freighter near our shores; space-launch vehicles able to loft low-earth-orbit satellites; and simple low-yield nuclear weapons that can generate gamma rays and fireballs.
If a successful, large scale EMP attack ever did take place, it would be a catastrophe beyond anything that the United States has ever seen before. The EMP Commission, which was established by Congress, says that it is likely that most of us would end up dead…
What would a successful EMP attack look like? The EMP Commission, in 2008, estimated that within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown.
In 2009 the congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, whose co-chairmen were former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and James Schlesinger, concurred with the findings of the EMP Commission and urged immediate action to protect the electric grid. Studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Intelligence Council reached similar conclusions.
If you are a terrorist, a dictator or a fanatic that is looking for a “killshot” for the United States, those kinds of numbers would certainly get your attention.
And it was recently reported by WND that the Iranian military has already been playing around with such a scenario…
Peter Vincent Pry, who is executive director of a congressional advisory group called the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, raised the alarm as the agreement is about to be finalized.
He said U.S. military officials have confirmed such an Iranian plan.
“Iranian military documents describe such a scenario – including a recently translated Iranian military textbook that endorses nuclear EMP attack against the United States,” Pry wrote in a recent column in Israel’s main online media network, Aruz Sheva.
“Iran with a small number of nuclear missiles can by EMP attack threaten the existence of modernity and be the death knell of Western principles of international law, humanism and freedom,” he said.
Very chilling stuff.
And of course there are many, many others out there that would love to see the U.S. taken down other than just the Iranians.
Meanwhile, our power grid is far more vulnerable than most Americans would dare to imagine.
In previous articles, I discussed a recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report which stated the following…
“Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.”
Are you starting to get the picture?
Our entire way of life depends upon electricity. If you take away that electricity, our society is transformed literally overnight.
A successful EMP would be an utter nightmare for this nation. Just consider what U.S. Representative Scott Perry had to say about a potential attack last year…
“The consequences of such an attack could be catastrophic; all electronics, power systems, and information systems could be shut down,” Rep. Scott Perry said in prepared remarks during an EMP hearing in May held by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. “This could then cascade into interdependent infrastructures such as water, gas, and telecommunications. While we understand this is an extreme case, we must always be prepared in case a rogue state decides to utilize this technology.”
In essence, suddenly nothing would work and just about everything that we take for granted would suddenly be gone.
In a previous article, I spelled out some of the implications of such an event…
-There would be no heat for your home.
-Water would no longer be pumped into most homes.
-Your computer would not work.
-There would be no Internet.
-Your phones would not work.
-There would be no television.
-There would be no radio.
-ATM machines would be shut down.
-There would be no banking.
-Your debit cards and credit cards would not work.
-Without electricity, most gas stations would not be functioning.
-Most people would be unable to do their jobs without electricity and employment would collapse.
-Commerce would be brought to a standstill.
-Hospitals would not be able to function normally.
-You would quickly start running out of medicine.
-All refrigeration would shut down and frozen foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.
And as I mentioned above, all of this can happen even without an attack.
A direct hit from a major solar storm can cause the exact same thing.
In fact, NASA says that there is a 12 percent chance that such a storm will hit us during the next ten years…
NASA is warning that there’s a 12 percent chance an extreme solar storm will hit Earth in the next decade, sending out massive shock waves that would knock out grids across the world.
The economic impact of this doomsday scenario could exceed $2 trillion — or 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, we have been really lucky.
There was a close call in 2012 and another one in 2013.
The following is an excerpt from an upcoming book that I have co-authored with Barbara Fix that will soon be published entitled “Get Prepared Now”…
Most people have absolutely no idea that the Earth barely missed being fried by a massive EMP burst from the sun in 2012 and in 2013. And earlier in 2014 there was another huge solar storm which would have caused tremendous damage if it had been directed at our planet. If any of those storms would have directly hit us, the result would have been catastrophic. Electrical transformers would have burst into flames, power grids would have gone down and much of our technology would have been fried. In essence, life as we know it would have ceased to exist – at least for a time. These kinds of solar storms have hit the Earth many times before, and experts tell us that it is inevitable that it will happen again. The most famous one happened in 1859, and was known as the Carrington Event. But other than the telegraph, humanity had very little dependence on technology at the time. If another Carrington Event happened today, it would be a complete and utter nightmare. A study by Lloyd’s of London has concluded that it would have taken a $2,600,000,000,000 chunk out of the global economy, and it would take up to a decade to repair the damage. Unfortunately, scientists insist that it is going to happen at some point. The only question is when.
So keep an eye on the sun.
The giant ball of fire that we revolve around has started to behave very erratically, and it has the power to end our way of life at any time.
In fact, scientists tell us that we are about to get hit with a “glancing blow” on April 7th…
A filament of magnetism stretching halfway across the sun erupted during the late hours of April 4th (22:00-23:00 UT). The eruption split the sun’s atmosphere, hurling a CME into space and creating a “canyon of fire,” shown in a movie recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory: The glowing walls of the canyon trace the original channel where the filament was suspended by magnetic forces above the sun’s surface. From end to end, the structure stretches more than 300,000 km–a real Grand Canyon.
Fragments of the exploding filament formed the core of a CME that raced away from the sun at approximately 900 km/s (2 million mph): image. Most of the CME will miss Earth, but not all. The cloud is expected to deliver a a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field could on April 7th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
The event of April 7th is not going to cause us major problems. But someday there will be a solar storm that will.
Personally, I cannot even imagine what life would be like without electricity.
Because we have become so deeply dependent on technology, most of us would have absolutely no idea how to live without it.
An electromagnetic pulse attack would be one of the fastest ways to cripple America and end the dominance of the United States in world affairs. And in this day and age, there are hundreds of millions of people around the planet that would love to see that happen.
So to not take steps to protect our power grid from such an attack is very foolish. But that is precisely what Barack Obama (and presidents before him) have chosen to do. We have technology which would mitigate the damage from an electromagnetic pulse, but rather than spend the money Obama has decided to just hope that it will never happen.
Up to this point, we have been fortunate.
But someday, our luck may run out.
You don't do it at all, I wish you could, but you never do, you don't seem to know anything about it at all, at least not that we can see through your posts.
“We know NEAR the blast is a strong EMP”
We know that a source-region EMP effect is very strong (near a ground burst, for instance) But we also know that a high-altitude EMP is also very strong. So just look up MIL-STD-188-125-1, will you? It’s not a perfect document, but it’s pretty good. You will see what the military does, and probably be able to figure out why.
“Which begs the question of why that wasn’t our plan in the event of nuclear war.”
You didn’t even look it up on “wikipedia”! I just checked and they actually have a fairly comprehensive and accurate article. They go into military use of EMP.
You refuse to learn, my friend - as I have pointed out previously.
You do have a good working understanding of logical fallacies and how to misapply them.
This alone would cause mass hysteria, imagine kids who couldn't text or update facebook every two minutes.
“Was the data that was collected in the past pre IC integration? Are there subsequent studies on how an EMP would affect our current electronics with IC integration?”
Yes. So we don’t have a good understanding (at least that is unclassified) of how modern electronics is impacted.
But we do know this: Electronics get faster over time, and one way they do that is to get dimensionally smaller - and the smaller semiconductor dimensions make the junction more vulnerable.
The conclusion is that if you DO NOTHING about EMP you are getting more vulnerable over time as you replace electronics with subsequent more capable generations.
alternet article from 2005?
Did you read MIL STD-188-125-1 or the Wikipedia page? Come on man, quit being stupid.
” you don’t seem to know anything about it at all,”
Yet you are afraid to private message me to find out for sure.
More ad hominems. Really, you’ve lost. Time to man up. Admit you don’t have facts, or just stop posting. Your next post is your last shot. If there’s no facts there we will all know you’re full of it, and no more of your fact free stuff will be read. Make it count.
You are in the bottom quartile of cognition - amongst your peers - even when provided the materials to learn, you are too ignorant to know what you do not know.
This is an actual study, by the way. You are classically bottom quartile.
Incredible. So you claim to actually be the expert that you pretend to be, but that you just can’t think of anything on threads, you can only sound knowledgeable in secret, in private.
What a whack case.
Thanks for your answer. It is my understanding that it is the IC's that are what is vulnerable to EMP and being that they are in about 100% of everything electronics these days, seems to me there is a logical cause for concern.
IIRC correctly congress tried to pass a bill to have critical infrastructure hardened but it was never passed due to a lib congress critter...can't recall her name though or the specifics other then it was about five or so years ago and the cost would be a couple of billion.
” It is my understanding that it is the IC’s that are what is vulnerable to EMP and being that they are in about 100% of everything electronics these days, seems to me there is a logical cause for concern.”
You’re correct. There are also non-electronic elements that are vulnerable - some transformer windings, motor windings for instance. But semiconductor junctions are the most problematic. Virtually every semiconductor technology is vulnerable in some way.
It IS possible to protect them - but this sort of protection costs money - and in an era of cost minimization it’s easy to overlook something that adds cost.
“IIRC correctly congress tried to pass a bill to have critical infrastructure hardened but it was never passed due to a lib congress critter.”
It was called the “shield act”. It’s sort of still percolating out there - but like anything government there are problems with that approach. My opinion is it would take much more than a couple billion. That figure might be adequate for hardening against a solar storm.
I did a quick Google for “emp affect on ic” and found a whole lot of info. This is one of the first articles to come up: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1549/2
Yep, read that. It’s very smart and very NOT the end of the world.
Power just went out in the DC area.
“What a whack case.”
I could be. I think you mean “whack job” though. You won’t know for sure though because you are afraid to message me. I’m really quite approachable, albeit, annoying when I am refuting misinformation - I admit that much.
As for knowledge - You, too, could read the sources I posted on the thread if you want basic sourced knowledge. You should go back thread and find those if you really want to learn something.
You gotta admit though, I just might be the “expert” that you say I pretend to be.
Thanks....my Dad is an engineer who specialized in mostly power supplies and high power conversion and has well over 50 years experience. He’s done a lot of military work as well as in the space field.
Suffice it to say, he has great concern over EMP and the effect it would have on our grid and other vulnerable electronics. Given that I know of his history and accomplishments in his field, if he says there is a problem, I’ll believe what he has to say.
I know that article and already had it, I have been interested in EMPs for decades, even back in the military when it was a hassle for us because it increased the weight of our radios and gear, while some of our allies carried lighter, and even unit self designed radios, that were not EMP protected.
I’m surprised at how little agreement there is on it’s effects, the arguments just go back and forth.
I did read it and don’t know if it would be the end of the world. I did note that they however pointed out several times that they were relying on unclassified information so there seems to be much we don’t know, I think it is an issue that should cause some concern though.
The “money quote” from your good article:
“The effects of prompt, E1 EMP on ICs cannot be calculated directly without knowledge of the details of the particular electronic system set-up. “
That’s the point I’ve been trying to make on this thread to the chagrin of some - it’s a problem - we just don’t know how bad it’s going to be. That’s where the research effort should be expended, in my opinion.
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