The Next High-Tech Threat to U.S. Security [High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse]

FrontPageMag.com ^ | July 01, 2008 | Paul M. Weyrich

[sionnsar]

Hasn’t this been a known military threat for like....40 years?

Longer than that.

[Walmartian]

What I don’t understand is why China would attack it’s best customer?

[Smokin' Joe]

EMP was known and tested in the fities.

Vacumn tube technology is relatively impervious. Not so with solid state. Not many 'valves' in my PC, even if I do have a couple of old radios with them around.

[RightWhale]

Most cars would fail to run, but that wouldn’t matter in a nuclear war. Most PCs would not run due to lack of grid power, not even laptops after a couple hours, and the Internet would be down anyway. Wouldn’t be any news, and nobody would care beacuse everybody would be dead or up to their ankles in radioactive ash and about to run out of SPAM. That is the fifties scenario and anything less would be not nuclear war, not Armageddon, but a reason for FEMA to swing into action and spend another $ trillion on trivia.

[Smokin' Joe]

First, this is not all-out nuclear war, but an anti-electronics preemptive strike intended to create chaos by damaging electronic systems. Banking, shipping, power generation, transportation, navigation, are all heavily dependant on such devices now, more so than in the 50s, and the devices are physically different.

My point was that integrated circuit electronics are far more sensitive to EPM than the tube stuff around in the 50s.

Tests run on that older technology do not reveal the inherent weaknesses in more modern systems.

The reason many new cars would fail to operate is that their onboard computers would be fried, not the wiring. Similarly, the computers controlling the power grid, rail transportation, etc are the weak link.

A device aimed at creating a pulse need not be physically destructive in the sense of a near-ground airburst, the objective is to create a widespread pulse and damage/destroy unshielded electronics, much as the neutron bomb was to be aimed at living targets, selectively killing people without doing major damage to inanimate objects.

Note the detonation would take place at the upper margins of the atmosphere, and not near the ground, to get the widest coverage with the pulse.

This is far more surgical than the old MAD scenario.

[RightWhale]

Just because they don’t follow up doesn’t mean they will not be fried by return mail. They might as well shoot everything. The single shot attack is nothing but suicide.

[ETL]

Bogus article. EMP was known and tested in the fifties.

Forget the fact that the threat has been around for 50 years. There are a lot of people who aren't aware of it. Also, things have changed a bit in 50 years. The situation is now light years more complicated, particular with China and Russia both making major moves on the world stage and with all the modern (and vulnerable) technology we have around today.

[RightWhale]

Why forget that this phenomenon has been known for half a century? We know this and a lot of other even more useful stuff. It doesn’t really matter if the hordes of graduates of the Gummint schools don’t know this or anything else. They know about Global Warming, cucumbers, and that Republicans are the cause of all ills. So they’ll be surprised some day and will never know what happened. We’ll know. We’ll say, ‘hey we just got nuked and we are dead, but whoever we think did this is even deader.’

[Tijeras_Slim]

EMP testing is ongoing on a variety of fronts. There are fairly large simulators in use that can test currrent systems and technology. Also, unlike the 50’s, software and computing power allows for modeling of effects based on known empirical data.

[ETL]

Thanks for the sane response.

[Smokin' Joe]

Just because they don’t follow up doesn’t mean they will not be fried by return mail. They might as well shoot everything.

Maybe one is all they have.

The single shot attack is nothing but suicide.

So is flying a plane into a tall building.

In the case where we have groups being fed information by our old, cold war enemies, who have little to lose and paradise to gain, who might be nuked to ash in return, we still will have been spanked, to the benefit of those same old cold war enemies who would gladly take advantage of the mayhem to consolidate their power in other regions, if they did not decide to mess with us at home.

Hardening critical systems or even back-ups could conceiveably be done as part of upgrades to the power grid which should be done anyway.

[LukeL]

I have heard that the cost to upgrade would vastly outweigh the price to get new EMP proof devices.

This would be the best bet for terrorists as an EMP can miss by many many miles and still deliver a deadly blow, where as a traditional nuclear blast needs to be spot on.

[RightWhale]

If they have only one then they would be suicidal and their families should be concerned enough to turn them in so they don’t all get fried to the fifth relation.

WTC911 could have had a nuclear response, but after a couple days it would no longer have been anything but cold. In the heat of the moment the birds could have flown and those who would have been on the other end know that. Most of their leaders were quick to commiserate because they knew.

And, hardening of electronics has been a very active program since Sputnik, which happened to be the beginning of semiconductor electronics as well as ICBMs.