McAfee is an unusual guy, and that’s an understatement.
But, the Carrington EMP effect is real. A solar flare in the 1870’s fried the telegraph system and railroad ties caught fire from the solar current running through the rails.
Two well placed relatively low yield nukes at 60,000 feet, one over Ohio, and one over a western Nebraska would destroy our electric grid and all unprotected electronics.
Korea, Iran, or any other technical rogue attack would send us back to the stone age, and not do any major property destruction.
It’s real, but it’s not effective as a weapon. The range is too small and the altitudes are too tough. 60,000 feet is a lot higher up than it sounds, and actually unless it’s really big nukes you wouldn’t actually destroy much of anything.
No, they don’t. The whole “back to the stone age” thing is quite simply a fiction. Would not happen. A lie from fear mongers.
“A solar flare in the 1870’s fried the telegraph system and railroad ties caught fire from the solar current running through the rails.”
Two totally different events. Carrington was charged particles saturating exposed, bare electrical circuits such as telegraph lines. This weapon is a high dosage of microwaves which will fry devices as if they were inside a microwave oven. It’s basically a small-scale, long burn of one of the elements of a nuclear EMP.
1 = particles, the other = directed energy.
“But, the Carrington EMP effect is real. A solar flare in the 1870’s fried the telegraph system and railroad ties caught fire from the solar current running through the rails.”
1859. Otherwise, spot-on.
A nuke designed to enhance the EMP effects (not hard to design for a nation-state) would reek incredible damage. A super large explosion is not necessary and, incredibly, an atomic bomb produces more than a hydrogen bomb as a percentage of its yield. Perfect for Iran or the Norks. Deploy one over California, one over Texas and one about mid-way up the East Coast, and you will have 1/10 of our population in less than a year. You can’t produce or transport food or fuel - so if you don’t starve to death, the marauding gangs looking for food (which may include you and your family), or disease, will. Civilization is a very thin veneer, and we are dependent on a complex system of complex systems for that which we take for granted every day. Knock out a key component like electricity, and the whole thing comes tumbling down, and it does so very quickly.