Posted on 04/07/2015 9:26:37 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Exploding A Nuclear Bomb In The Sky Creates An Interesting Phenomenon
In 1962, during the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear weapon high above an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed Operation Starfish, this exercise was part of a larger project to evaluate the impacts of nuclear explosions in space. The missile, launched from Johnson Island, 900 miles from Hawaii, was armed with a 1.4 megaton warhead, programmed to explode at 240 miles above the earth. It detonated as expected. What was not entirely expected was the magnitude of the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
The EMP was powerful enough to affect the electric grid in Hawaii, blowing out streetlights, and resulting in telephone outages and radio blackouts.
Dr. William Graham was active in the follow-up to the project, working out of the Air Force weapons lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After the blast, it was his job to understand the data collected, find out just what had happened in Hawaii, and what the defense implications were of this phenomenon. In a recent interview, Graham commented,
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
An oldie but a goodie.
PING!
Well, we failed to embrace desalination, which allows for massive water shortages sometime in the near future, and now, without EMP protection, something unfortunate is bound to happen.
240 miles is a long way up. That’s where the ISS orbits and max altitude for modern ICBMs.
Unfortunately, it's not hard to do.
PING!
So the EMP threat from Iran, North Korea and others finally got some real media exposure. Low-techs will someday rule.
An EMP would not just take down the power grid. It would destroy the transformers essential to the grid’s operation. Probably at least a year to begin a fix, years to get things back to normal. Although “normal” would never be normal as we think of it.
Estimates I have seen say 90% of the US population would not survive. Most deaths would be from starvation.
PrepperPING!!
Looks like a lot of people have EMP on their minds.
Also this post:
The EMP Threat: All It Would Take Is A Couple Of Explosions To Send America Back To The 1800s
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3276590/posts?page=62
Most people can’t function without their cell phones. And cell phones are high up on the food chain of vulnerability as far as what technology is needed for them to work.
If it takes out cell phones the millennials will commit suicide.
a hackSAW could do what hackers can do to the power grid, because it is a redundant distributed network with multiple points of control that make a cyber attack more difficult, just as it does for the internet. EMP however could instantly wipe out multiple control systems, making it difficult for the grid to self-heal. For example, hackers could target a specific power generating plant with something like Stuxnet but they could not target them all. In contrast, EMP could destroy the communications between dozens of power generating plants making it impossible for them to load-balance and thus causing damage to occur at all of them.
The US and world economies are so tied together thru the ‘Net that any significant disruption could be a catastrophe for weeks or months....................years, even..............
As always, it will take a major EMP strike against us or one of our allies to make the government get serious about hardening our infrastructure against EMP.
Probably a conservative estimate. Consider that panic will begin within hours after the ATM network fails, and people are not able to access cash, or purchase gasoline, food, or medicine. Those who live on EBT cards are not known to big preppers ;-) The cities will go first of course, but as “One Second After” describes, even rural and small towns will not be far behind. I can’t predict the future any better than anyone else here can, but I do believe this is how it will end. Hopefully no time soon.
As a young relative might say...
ALL THE DERPS!!!!
KYPD (and optics with batteries removed.....)
You just have to take out 9 specific HV transformers during peak usage to cause a coast to coast blackout. These are not guarded. All it takes are 9 sleeper agents to act at the same time. I'd be suspicious of some of these 30 year old "college students" at universities near these transformers.
Here is a Congressional Research study done on the security of the power grid back in 2014 :
Physical Security of the U.S. Power Grid: High-Voltage Transformer Substations
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