One EMP device wipes out entire world seems a tiny bit over the top. Two or Three over N.Y. would be nasty. I get so tired of these Doomsday post that seem to get a mite bit over the top. Sort of like “Mad man with automatic could take out entire Pentagon and send U.S. defenses back to Bows and Arrows.” Any one with a serious knowledge just how many of these devices it would take to destroy ALL electronics, including the hardened equipment the military has, world wide?
“Two or Three over N.Y. “
EMP doesn’t work like that. EMP is line-of-sight. Sufficiently powerful and high-enough, the EMP pulses ‘zap’ everything below it.
re: serious knowledge ... knowledgeable people will tell you that ONE DEVICE could knock out half the North American continent.
You can read One Second After in about three evenings. It’ll change your mind. It does slightly overstate the ability of EMP to fry hardened assets to set up a particular political leadership scenario, but otherwise, particularly sociologically, it’s spot on.
It doesn’t wipe out the entire world, just our part.
Look the Starfish nuclear test in 1962 knocked out power in Hawaii a thousand miles away. Later analysis showed the same blast over the Continental US would have been much stronger due to the strength of the magnetic field over the continental US. So draw a couple of circle on a map with a 0ne thousand mile radius over the US and you get an idea of how few weapons it would take to knock out huge areas of the US. The military takes this VERY seriously. They’ve been studying it and hardening equipment and facilities since the 80’s.
I’m sure Obama would gladly tell anyone who would like to know just how many is enough.
By the way we have 5,113 nukes.
“One EMP device wipes out entire world seems a tiny bit over the top”
It is. As for electronics - it is more likely to be a statistical thing - some percentage of “things” fail to work, depending on how much energy they couple into sensitive elements.
The power grid is another matter. Critical node transformers and generators can be destroyed by the coupled energy disturbance to the geomagnetic field (examples of this from soviet-era testing) The problem is not so much that, as it is that making repairs/replacements for these big transformers is not something we do in this country anymore - and they aren’t something you can buy at home depot.
I would guess that after some period of blackout, we’d manage at least some power delivery each day to most places - gradually increasing until we rebuilt major electrical nodes completely.