For the old lefty who doesn't believe it is real, he should read this Northwestern University Physics Dept. publication. He should note that Hawaii was over 880 miles away, and power went down. And that was with old mechanical and analogue circuits that are more resistent to EMP than fragile VLSI semiconductor circuitry in our chips.
He also needs to read the Executive Summary of the expert EMP Threat Commission, which the unclassified portion of their report can be foundhere.
And I would note the testimony and conclusions stressed by Frank Gaffney, of the Center For Security Policy, FROM JUST TWO DAYS AGO, should be taken seriously:
" Speaking of Energy
No testimony by me before this Committee would be complete without a word of thanks to you, Mr. Chairman and to your colleagues – especially Congressmen Bartlett and Weldon – for your work on the danger posed to our nation and way of life by the threat of electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attacks.
Thanks to your efforts, the expert EMP Threat Commission was established by law and charged with conducting a detailed assessment of the effects of a nuclear attack on the United States involving the detonation high above the Nation of a ballistic missile-delivered, EMP-optimized weapon. As you know, the panel concluded that the EMP effects of a detonation at altitudes between 40 and 400 miles above this country could so severely disrupt, both directly and indirectly, electronics and electrical systems as to create a "damage level…sufficient to be catastrophic to the Nation." Worse yet, the commission concluded that "our current vulnerability invites attack." (You have rendered a real public service by making the executive summary of this classified report available at http://armedservices.house.gov/openingstatementsandpressreleases/108thcongress/04- 07-22emp.pdf)
As China is one of the potential adversaries who understands our nation’s acute vulnerability to such attacks, I urge members of this Committee to ensure that the findings of the blue-ribbon Commission on the EMP Threat, that you did so much to make possible, are presented to the full House with a view to implementing as quickly as possible that Commission’s many important recommendations."
A somewhat related aside: Our son is a high school Physics teacher. About two weeks before the school year ended, he had completed all of his planned subject matter and was thinking about what to introduce to the students for the last two weeks of school (when, more than any other part of the year, high school students are not especially into learning, what with the summer looming just ahead. :)
I suggested doing something on nuclear energy, and maybe even the concept of EMPs (without being too negative or alarmist) -- concentrating more on the Physics aspect than the political.
He presented some of what I presented here (without focusing significantly on the China threat -- he wanted to allow them to draw their own conclusions) ... as well as more technical nuclear science material.
The students were so engrossed by the material that he ended the year by showing the movie, ‘Day One’ (which depicts events leading to the development of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos) -- and they were absolutely spellbound.
I worked in the fuel element development/design department at Westinghouse’s Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in the seventies, and I found that, on the rare occasions that I discussed anything work-related with a ‘non-scientific’ listener, it was amazing how interested they often were and how quickly they picked up on concepts that I would have thought to be not necessarily in their realm of interest.
That past experience, and our son’s recent one, convinces me that, if only we could get some of the information included on this thread to the average citizen, the citizen apathy might not be as pervasive as we might think.
Again, Paul, thank you for the informative link and your own particularly well-conceived insights.
~ joanie