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
mark 119
I have a personal connection as well, my father helped engineer some of the EMP hardening for milspec electronics on a number of systems, and I currently have family working for the DOE in Hannford.
No one in my family is going to pooh-pooh the EMP threat, particularly the non-nuclear one:
Schematics all over:
