Overblown; the paranoia hucksters have gotten to you once again ...Excerpted from www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Falls/1984/newfact.htm
NEW FACTS ABOUT EMP
BY R. KENNETH MITCHELL, KA6FRDThe National Communications System (NCS), a governmental entity made up from 22 different Federal agencies, wants ham radio operators and their gear to survive an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) generated "nuclear event." NCS engineers have simulated the EMP phenomenon in the laboratory and have subjected various pieces of current amateur radio gear to its effect.
The people at NCS came to some rather surprising conclusions.
In their report they say, "It was concluded that modern solid-state amateur radio equipment was more survivable in an EMP transient environment than had been previously anticipated."
"Overblown; the paranoia hucksters have gotten to you once again "
Thank you for bringing documented reason to the conversation. Lightning protection will essentially double as EMP protection. However, it is important to note that if this report was circa 1984, the solid state electronics of that era is probably much more survivable than todays electronics -- IF the voltages make it into the electronics -- and that's a big if.
The stone age scenario with EMP is strictly a construct of hollywood.
The NCS is responsible for assessing and addressing threats to our national communications infrastructure. I would suspect that that particular group would be less than eager to admit that America has developed an Achilles heal in regards to any major threat to our communications systems. That would be like asking a corporate CFO to comment on the accuracy and honesty of his company’s numbers.
Combining that obvious observation with the fact that you chose to prove your ‘paranoia’ allegation by linking to an evaluation of the EMP threat that was written more than twenty years ago kind of dilutes your argument, don’t you think?
Even though we would still be contending with a ‘corporate CFO/company numbers’ type issue, let’s look at a much more recent statement by Dr. Peter Fonash, the current acting director of the NCS, presented just a few months ago in an address before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security:
Just last year [2004] the NCS actively participated in the congressionally-chartered ‘Commission to Assess the Threat from High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse’ that examined and evaluated the state of the EMP threat at present and looking fifteen years into the foreseeable future. The Commission’s report, delivered last July, concludes that EMP presents a less significant direct threat to telecommunications than it does to the National Power Grid, but would nevertheless disrupt or damage a functionally significant fraction of the electronic circuits in the nation’s telecommunications systems in the region exposed to EMP (which could include most of the United States). The NCS concurs with this assessment.
He then goes on in great detail describing future plans to harden our communications infrastructure.
Kinda like a CFO saying that only a small percentage of the books are cooked, and that small percentage, in turn, affects most of the bottom-line figures … but that’s okay … we’re working really hard to find the broken calculator.
Your comment ‘… those gamma rays traveling toward the earth’s atmosphere are stopped by collisions with atmospheric molecules at altitudes between 20 and 40 kilometers. These collision generate Compton recoil elections which interact with the earth’s magnetic field to produce a downward traveling electromagnetic wave’ is also included in an essay by Major M. Cajohn, USMC, entitled ‘EMP: From Chaos to a Manageable Solution’.
Not only was this essay also written nearly twenty years ago (when our EMP hardening was far more widespread and reliable than it is today), but its purpose was to awaken our national leadership to the fact that manageable solutions to the EMP threat do indeed exist. The essay served as an exhortation to focus on those solutions before it is too late. When Maj. Cajohn penned it, the Reagan administration was indeed in agreement with him and was funneling finances and manpower into doing just that. In the sixteen years since, as last year’s report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack concluded, The end of the Cold War relaxed the discipline for achieving EMP survivability within the Department of Defense, and gave rise to the perception that an erosion of EMP survivability of military forces was an acceptable risk.
That you are citing two twenty-year-old documents, the first of which was written by anything but unbiased authors, and the second of which is taken from an essay which warns of our unpreparedness for an EMP attack doesn’t exactly make for an air-tight argument that there is nothing to fear.
As for your references to Starfish, a fairly recent article written by Dr. Michael Bernardin of the Theoretical Institute for Thermonuclear and Nuclear Studies at Los Alamos, stated:
It is clear that EMP is a real effect and that damage is virtually certain. To establish that the problem is well understood, one must begin with a model of, say, Starfish, and demonstrate that the predicted EMP environments, EMP coupling, and effects match observation. Then, one must be able to establish that the model retains its fidelity when the warhead model is changed, when the burst location is moved over land and changed in elevation, when the electromagnetic coupling paths change, when the vintage of electronics changes, and with the incorporation of EMP test simulator data, that the results are reliable.
Using what you perceive as the implications of Starfish as an infallible model amounts to a refusal to consider the affects of a number of variables, the instances and numbers of which have multiplied dramatically in the forty-plus years since that relatively small nuclear experiment.
Try moving out of the sixties/eighties. It might provide you a better perspective from which to view both the science and the politics involved.
~ joanie