Posted on 02/29/2012 7:54:36 PM PST by U-238
EMPs!!! You know, the big electronics-frying pulses that accompany nuclear blasts. We’re back to worrying about them again. In particular how does the military protect its electrical infrastructure from an EMP attack.
“Yeah, we have issues there [with the EMP threat] and we have to look at those and we seriously have to understand that in the Army in particular, because we have an awful lot of bases that we look at,” said Marilyn Freeman assistant secretary of the Army for research and technology during a House Armed Services emerging threats subcomittee hearing today. “I work very closely and the folks in my office and accross the laboratory system of the Army work very close with the installations folks as we assess what our vulnerabilities are to power and energy issues and one of the things we’re trying to do is actually set up the ability for our various bases to be more energy self sufficient, more energy secure and to have the ability, not only to be more efficient and effective, but also to be safe and not vulnerable” to attacks from EMPs that would shut down a bases power systems.
If you think it’s easy to harden a base connected to the civilian power grid from an EMP blast, think again, one of Freeman’s fellow Pentagon science officials said in when a lawmaker asked how soon the nation can protect its bases and power infrastructure from EMP attack.
(Excerpt) Read more at defensetech.org ...
I am more concerned we will be blasted back to the stone age(technologically wise) with an EMP attack
I thought by now it was common knowledge that it briefly reproduces temperatures as hot as the sun, and therefore shines as brightly. At the test site the people were not warned not to look at the bomb???
Remember,the rocket strayed off course and they were not expecting that
Anyhow unless you were really desperate you would have no need to cook up your own lead sulfide. You’d have some on hand already. Besides you might come up with the wrong valence compound if you didn’t weigh your ingredients exactly enough, and it might fail to work as well as galena, if at all.
There were some interesting “liquid diode” designs used in the early detector days of radio before the vacuum tube came along. They involved things like brass wire dipped in nitric acid and proved reliable enough that they supplanted cat whiskers.
“I am more concerned we will be blasted back to the stone age(technologically wise) with an EMP attack”
I guess that’s another effect, but like some others here, I will make fun of it, to show that I’m superior to you...
...Hmmm - it did look like people did quite well on the Flintstones - so what’s the worry?
Whatever — like a seeming dud firework, you don’t want to treat it as a dud until doused. It burst, but low. Still you don’t look at it...?
I cannot explain the reasons why they did that.
Curiousity
blinded the cat
Besides, I've made a crystal radio with the old blue finished single razor blades.
I'll bet I can figure out a junction diode of some kind.
/johnny
How does the razor blade diode work. Rest a wire across its sharp edge?
What would be really surprising is if you could make a transistor.
Ain't gonna happen. For one thing, we've got loads of scrap steel laying around, so that and a hot fire puts you to late iron age.
And there are enough geeks around that we'll be back to the late 1800s, early 1920s in a few days.
/johnny
How are you going to accomplish this when our lives directly or indirectly done with a computer?
Equipment that is purely vacuum tube based and shielded in some sort of chassis would be unlikely to fail. Even its capacitors would be kept mostly out of harm’s way. If the capacitors are of some materials like mica, they will puncture but not short out when overvoltaged.
/johnny
Industries today are connected by computer. Just how is this giant leap going to be done?
Someone needs to port Linux to the ENIAC....
Vacuum tubes are affected by EMP
I take that back. Vacuum tubes might work.Vacuum tubes are far more resistant to EMP
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