Common sense tells me no man made EMP can be as powerful as a jolt of lightning and yet most everything continues to function just fine. Heck even commercial airplanes get hit by lightning regularly and continue on without incident. That EMP fired from a satellite can take down an entire city — is pure science fiction.
I meant to say EMP generated by a jolt of lightning...which is yuuuge.
“Common sense tells me no man made EMP can be as powerful as a jolt of lightning “
Yep. Another goodie: If EMP can take out all things electronic and electrical, just how did we capture in video, sound, and electronic measurements EMP in the first place? Wouldn’t EMP have destroyed those things?
Yet, airplanes flew, ships sailed, and electronic measurements were recorded.
Common sense has nothing to do with it. The grid will disappear. Do research.
Not just “a city” - a region with a diameter of 1,000 to 1,550 miles. Read about project Starfish and the effect it had on Honolulu 1,500 miles away. Also read about the 1859 Carrington Event and its effect on global telegraphy. Lastly, keep whistling past the graveyard...it definitely keeps the spooks away.
What is known is that the EMP from Test 184, exploded about 180 miles over the populated area of Kazakhstan as a 1.45 megaton, knocked out a 600-mile underground power line (shielded) that was buried 3 feet underground. It caused fires to the power station that the line was connected to. It also damaged diesel generators. (Most of the details have not been released and/or have remained classified.)
As for the US, In 1962, the US government launched a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead about 250 miles into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. The pulse results were much stronger than expected. It damaged street lights and microwave links in Hawaii, 900 miles away. The EMP was so intense that it was not accurately measured because “it drove much of the instrumentation off scale”.
And to be sure these were experiments where the detonation was much smaller than the air burst that will be used in a nuclear attack. Hardening is great, but the intent of an EMP is not to destroy, but disrupt the initial efforts by the receiver to protect itself long enough to trap them into being a target where they are.
Besides, after the air burst, a whole bunch of ICBM’s will follow and we will retaliate to the point of making the earth uninhabitable for a few thousand years. I think you call that armageddon. That’s when the cock roaches are supposed to survive and take over. But I doubt it.
rwood
There are around 5 billion joules of energy in a lightning bolt. That’s about a millionth of a megaton of TNT. There are nuclear weapons in existence that are 20 megatons or more.
In 1962, the US detonated a 1.44 megaton bomb 250 miles above the mid-Pacific Ocean. The explosion caused electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles away.