Posted on 09/03/2017 9:12:20 PM PDT by bigbob
The EMP Commission was established pursuant to title XIV of the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (as enacted into law by Public Law 106-398; 114 Stat. 1654A-345). Duties of the EMP Commission include assessing:
- the nature and magnitude of potential high-altitude EMP threats to the United States from all potentially hostile states or non-state actors that have or could acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles enabling them to perform a high-altitude EMP attack against the United States within the next 15 years;
- the vulnerability of United States military and especially civilian systems to an EMP attack, giving special attention to vulnerability of the civilian infrastructure as a matter of emergency preparedness; the capability of the United States to repair and recover from damage inflicted on United States military and civilian systems by an EMP attack; and
- the feasibility and cost of hardening select military and civilian systems against EMP attack. The Commission is charged with identifying any steps it believes should be taken by the United States to better protect its military and civilian systems from EMP attack.
Multiple reports and briefings associated with this effort have been produced by the EMP Commission including an Executive Report (PDF, 578KB) and a Critical National Infrastructures Report (PDF, 7MB) describing findings and recommendations.
The EMP Commission was reestablished via the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 to continue its efforts to monitor, investigate, make recommendations, and report to Congress on the evolving threat to the United States from electromagnetic pulse attack resulting from the detonation of a nuclear weapon or weapons at high altitude.
EMP Commission = t*ts on a boar.
“Our life is very vulnerable. And recovery wont be a week or two but months and years.”
Your life won’t hardly be interrupted by an EMP burst over the US. Worst case is you reboot your computer, but your computer won’t be destroyed. Neither will your car, nor your local transformers, no much of anything else.
Lightening has far more EMP behind it than a nuclear EMP device. Far more. I live high in the Rocky Mountains and have hundreds of lightening strikes every year strike all around me. My trees are scarred from it all. I and my electronics are still here.
So many offshoots to this scenario. None of them good.
ROFL! Thanks for the much needed humor on what is a very serious thread. Well played!
And yes, a well designed EMP device may not be visible.
I have worked extensively EMC (Electro Compatibility Testing). That means emissions compliance testing and immunity testing.
ALL of the electromagnetic sources that make electronics vulnerable are not visible (not in the visible spectrum). No doubt, weapons experts designing an EMP device will know this and target ALL of the energy (amplitude and wavelength) into destroying the electronic devices.
BTW, a lot of military equipment IS SHIELDED. I saw a test facility. Interesting. But there is still a limit to the shielding.
A optimal attack would be a one-two punch — first, with an emp device, second after millions of people are trapped in a city, an actual thermo-nuke that kills.
“What most people fail to remember is that most of our electrical power transformers are no longer manufactured in quantity in this country.”
Not only is the transformer manufacturing base limited in the US; but they are built to order for size requirements, and take forever to get manufactured, shipped, and installed.
ESD (Lightening) is a different wavelength than an EMP.
EMP is broadband and include frequencies and wavelengths that are tuned to the electronics. ESD is brute force, a tuned frequency attack is targeted.
Also, the entry method for ESD/lightening is well known and easily controlled. It is usually conducted but it can be induced (secondary affect). Induced is less intense. Of course, shunt devices like a MOV works well or cap. Devices are designed with some level of immunity to ESD. Likewise, a system that includes the device electronics will also include some immunity. But it is not perfect. It all depends on cost — a more immunity, more cost (and weight).
EM noise sources are different and is designed to couple into the electronics circuit. The goal is to destroy the PN junction of an electronic device and it only takes the destruction of one element within the chip to make it and the whole system non-functional.
If you are lucky to be far enough away, it may result in a reset and recovery of your equipment, if you are too close, it will destroy the PN junction and your device will be unrepairable. And that includes the whole infrastructure that makes all of the gadgets work. So, even though your car might be working, if the stoplights are not working then there is chaos.
No, we don’t want to colonize either nation (would love to visit, though, Siberia and Yangshuo) but the Chinese are proliferating. Just sayin.
Have you posted how they do work?
“LARGE POWER TRANSFORMERS AND THE U.S. ELECTRIC GRID”
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transformer%20Study%20-%20June%202012_0.pdf
Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration
Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability
U.S. Department of Energy
“this lead time could extend beyond 20 months and up to five years in extreme cases if the manufacturer has difficulties obtaining any key inputs, such as bushings and other key raw materials, or if considerable new engineering is needed.”
“And yes, a well designed EMP device may not be visible.”
Wow, our education system is really dumbed you down, hasn’t it? A non-visible nuclear detonation?? OK, if you say so. *snicker*
Apparently you have never worked with wifi — ever notice that wifi drops out when you talk on your wireless phone?
No, those EM waves are not visible but they exist. Our eyes are tuned to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The band of frequencies that affect electronics are outside the visible spectrum.
It is the stuff that you can't see that can hurt you or at least the electronics. Actually, the old neutron bomb is a similar device only it ejects particles vs em waves.
There is a whole science dedicated to making electronics less susceptible to the noise sources. Especially for the military.
Interesting: apparently a nuke device frequency band is between 10 to 250MHz which is not super high. However, as the device geometries get smaller and smaller it makes you wonder if modern electronics is less susceptible. However, a tuned device that is specifically designed for EMP effect will take this into account.
Another thing, as frequencies increase, the propagation path through the system is less predictable. That is probably both good and bad. Anyway, high frequency shielding might be easier. Who knows.
There is a book out there called “The Knowledge”, that is basically a how-to book for bring a society from the stone-age to roughly mid-1940’s-level technology, within a single generation. I highly recommend it for anyone concerned about the aftermath of an EMP attack.
For that matter, the information it contains is handy for building, repairing, or designing things, even without an EMP. And it’s kind of a fun read.
Making sure she doesn't reproduce is an important goal to be sure.
I'm glad you have so much faith in our authorities to keep us safe. They can't track all nuclear materials. They say they can. Just like every test of TSA airport security at preventing test smuggling of weapons has failed, dramatically.
https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Detecting_Nuclear_Material_in_Shipping_Containers.pdf
"... from a systems perspective, the permissible failure rate for commercial inspection systems falls short of a tolerable threshold for securitysome losses due to crime are accepted as part of the cost of doing business.
That's from measures adopted voluntarily by commercial operators to assist authorities.
"No single technology can detect illicit nuclear weapons and materials with 100 percent reliability."
All it takes is a single failure in detection. Currently, all detection procedures are experimental and take cooperation with commercial operators. I'm glad you sleep well at night thinking our government is doing a perfect job. I'm not so sure.
Yes, and no. You're correct for the most part, in that an EMP burst over the USA is not going to kill a lot of personal electronics and stuff. But it will travel over power transmission lines and destroy transformers, which will take months to manufacture due to low inventory stocks. In the meantime, power will be disrupted and cause some panics. Most people's stuff in homes will be safe and not overloaded due to an EMP burst.
That sounds like a very interesting book, on a lot of levels. Thanks for posting!
What do you actually know of the Soviet K-tests?
But everything else is so interconnected (no electricity to pump water or fuel, nuclear power plants and chemical processing plants going down, sometimes as catastrophically as Monica Lewinsky, generators at hospitals running out of fuel) that we'd be in for a *LOT* of fun even after the feral yutes were all dead after turning on each other or being sniped at one-by-one in the second ring of bedroom communities.
The interesting speculative part, would be (heh heh heh) what would happen -- societally -- to the Zuckerbergs and Gates and so forth, after they'd fled for their New Zealand redoubts: I doubt they'd be welcome back anytime soon.
Do you know what mean free path is?
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