Replies

The Electromagnetic Pulse strategy to knock out the U.S. infrastructure may have been viable in 1980, but since then the military-industrial complex has developed "hardened" chips that can withstand such an attack.

Speaking from as someone with knowledge of chip usage in the military-industrial complex... Sure we HAVE chips like that but we don't USE them for systems on the ground. Wall-street does not run on them. Defense research agencies do not run on them. In short, just about everything that would be really bad to lose in the military industrial complex is susceptible to EMP. I can't speak for power plant controls or the strategic missile command but most of our stuff does not use hardened chips or any kind.

Short lecture on rad hardening, there are many kinds of rad hardness. Most of what is developed and used is designed around cosmic radiation. This is because the primary use for rad hard chips and electronics is aircraft. Anything at high altitude is is subject to the random effect of or having it's data corrupted by stray cosmic radiation. At ground level that risk is low (although it does happen), low enough that steps not rarely taken to counter act it (except is uber critical systems). This kind of radiation hardening would NOT protect from a nuclear blast. Cosmic radiation at high altitude and even in space is a statistical event and is mostly one single 'bit' of data getting randomly changed. The chance of two bits changing at once is very low and only sometimes taken into account. The risk of more than two usually is not protected against. The cost of protecting against such things is rather high. In addition the speed and capability of chips which have such protection lags behind the faster unprotected chips but a significant margin. The performance lag and the cost increase is why almost nothing on the surface of the planet uses such chips. Note that even systems that DO use such things are not protected from a nuclear blast. Such a blast would cause must more data corruption than those systems are designed to take. Also those only compensate for the radiation effects and not what we call an EMP. The ONLY thing deigned to take and EMP is something designed to take a direct nuclear hit. Sorry to break it to you but we design almost nothing to do that. Most electronics is designed and developed in the commercial market. The so called military industrial complex has lots of cool toys up it's sleeve but does use most of them. Even at a company developing such devices all that data and work for day to day operations is stored on normal off-the-shelf computing equipment.

All that aside it is still debatable how much damage and EMP would really cause. Testing with EMPs is mostly based on non nuclear EMP weapons development. So there is not really good data on just how much damage one of those could do. I suspect it is far less than this kind of doom-saying article leads us to think. Desktop computers are surrounded by a grounded metal shell (FCC rules) and protected by fused power supplies and often surge suppressing power bars. Now I am not well versed in the effects of a nuclear EMP but this kind of design is at least th basics of what is needed to protect against one.

As the article does say the biggest risk is damaged power distribution equipment. So what we are facing is really some damaged computers and some size of blackout that might last a while. Bad but hardly the end of life as we know it.

So what we are facing is really some damaged computers and some size of blackout that might last a while. Bad but hardly the end of life as we know it.

No major city is more than a few days from starvation. If the trucks and the trains aren't moving, it will get mighty hungry in those cities mighty fast. Even military vehicles would likely be affected, because logistics support equipment is generally not hardened the way weapons systems are. Even Air Force transports aren't as hardened as bombers, fighters and tankers.

I can't speak for power plant controls or the strategic missile command but most of our stuff does not use hardened chips or any kind.

Strategic systems, including the command control, are generally designed with EMP in mind, for obvious reasons. However the MAD philosphy, as opposed to war winning, generally meant that only the actual warfighting equipment was hardened, which includes C4I, but not logistics, R&D, etc.