E-bomb – The real doomsday weapon

Electromagnetic pulse weapons that can paralyse a country in a nanosecond are already in the possession of several states. By 2015, North Korea is likely to acquire one. If you are not sweating, check your pulse.

Click to link to the article.

A nuclear weapon explodes 300 km above Nebraska, the geographical centre of the United States. The blast is far too high to kill people by heat or radioactivity. But it does something far worse – it sends the world’s most advanced country into the Stone Age.

This isn’t science fiction. The technology for launching this version of Armageddon exists and is ridiculously low tech. Even an ordinary, low-yield nuclear bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere by terrorists, with help from dysfunctional nuclear powers such as North Korea or Pakistan, would unleash a deadly electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that will take only a nanosecond to knock out an entire country’s electrical grid.

Now of course this is not news, the threat of EMP has been around for a long while, but it seems it is easier and easier for States or rogue States to acquire the technology to put another country under threat.

Be aware that whilst I have no doubt that there will be the usual AFY posters who consider the US to be invincible, having hardened military installations is not actually what it is all about.

You can harden your military installations, but if the civilian population is in complete disarray then on the ground in your own country the military would be in effective. Why? Because only systems are hardened and much of the military communication and logistics depends on non-hardened systems, but that aside the sheer chaos would get in the way.

Sheer chaos? Yes indeed. Also in the article was this interesting bit which caught my attention to say the least.

On October 22, 1962, during one of their ABM tests, the Russians detonated a 300 kiloton hydrogen warhead (20 times more powerful than Hiroshima) at an altitude of 300 km over Kazakhstan.

The blast deliberately targeted two cable lines. The first one was the 550 km East-West telephone line – all the fuses in the line which was 7.5 m above the ground were destroyed. The second, the 1,000 km Aqmola-Almaty power line, carried electricity from a power station in the city of Karaganda. It was a lead-shielded cable protected against mechanical damage by spiral-wound steel tape, and was buried at a depth of 90 cm. This cable succumbed completely to the EMP within seconds of the blast, overheating and setting the power station on fire.

The United States military realised EMP’s potential as a weapon the same year, in the Starfish Prime test of a much larger 1.44 megaton warhead at a height of 400 km over the Pacific Ocean. The pulse knocked out street lights and damaged telephones in Hawaii. Four days after the explosion the UK satellite Ariel was unable to generate sufficient electricity to function properly.

Note that a steel wound cable - which, if my science serves me right is a Faraday cage in effect - was knocked out. Not very deep I grant at 90 cm but them most cables of that nature are around that depth.

Military Infrastructure Damage
Command, Control, Communications (C3)
Weapons Systems
Logistics
Supply

Civilian Infrastructure
Urban services will be severely crippled.
Health services will fail.
Jails and Prisons will be thrown open.

Electricity Grid
Power lines will collect EM Energy, wrecking generation, substations, distribution; anything tied to the power grid, including highrise buildings and individual homes, all will suffer catastrophic failures--including the power lines that collected the EM Energy.

Communications
Telephone and CATV cables will be fused, with repeaters and central offices rendered unusable. Cell phones: towers and handheld units will be damaged beyond repair.

Information
Computers, main frame and personal, will be damaged beyond repair, and Data loss will be massive and permanent.

Transportation
All transportation will cease, cars, trucks, buses, will stop dead, planes will fall from the sky, subways, trains, will be damaged and cease to run.

Energy
Oil and gas pipelines will collect massive amounts of EM Energy, causing catastrophic failures in pumping stations and distribution; as well as refineries and storage will be destroyed.

Utilities
Water mains will collect EM Energy, causing water filtration plants to cease to function, triggering a water crises. Sewers and power lines will collect EM Energy, damaging Waste Treatment Plants, stopping their operation.

Satellites
A less known effect of high altitude bursts, is the artificial "pumping" of the Van Allen belt with large numbers of electrons, which will remain trapped in these belts for periods exceeding one year. All unhardened satellites traversing these belts in low earth orbit could fail in a matter of days to weeks.

Casualties, secondary: Starvation will be the real killer. Food relies almost solely on automation, large-scale, industrialized, vertically integrated food production. From the fields to the table, the one common denominator is automation technology. From the microelectronics in the tractor pulling harrows in the field, to the trucks carrying produce to the processors, and the automated inventory tracking in the food store, the vulnerable links in the chain, are the humble silicon based transistors.

Aircraft will fall from the sky. At any given time, there are an estimated 90,000 people in the air over the U.S. It is believed that most of those would become casualties. This does not take into account the collateral casualties on the ground.

There are millions upon millions of people driving automobiles at any given time. EMP will suddenly and totally disable most vehicles, especially modern vehicles that every function is under electronic control. The number of casualties that would occur would be in the millions--a number impossible to comprehend, let alone take care of.

Source: Project Starfish

Oh phooey, no need to worry, that was decades ago. (Not really - most still applies) So up to the present (2012)

Congress told: U.S. life 'unsustainable' after EMP

WASHINGTON – Congress today was told that the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t identified an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, event as a serious national security threat to the nation’s grid system even though testimony revealed it could making living in the United States “unsustainable” for 70 to 90 percent of the population.

And the few billion dollars it would cost to harden systems against such an occurrence is hardly the tens of billions or hundreds of billions it could cost to repair the damage.

Source

My apologies for hitting the US with this but that is the drift of the articles. Of course this equally applies to Europe or ANY modernised country dependent upon electrical infrastructures.

The final paragraph of that first article is the most chilling................have a nice day!!!

Read another also

The next time a solar flare disrupts radio communications around the world for a few hours, or maybe a few days, recall that man with one nuclear device can outshine the damage old Sol creates by many fold.

How to protect yourself from electro magnetic pulse

This tends to ignore the fact that incoming systems would be destroyed both in the case of the military (99% dependence on external power) and civilians (100% dependence)

Do people ever get sick of the fear mongering?

Originally posted by zonetripper2065
Do people ever get sick of the fear mongering?

Short answer. No.

reply to post by zonetripper2065


There is a difference between fearmongering and awareness. If you don't wish to participate in what you consider to be fearmongering then you may find that there are alternatives that would suit you better than ATS. You might find soaps on the TV more to your liking.

I am not in the habit of fearmongering. I happen to find the potential effects of EMP interesting, and I also consider that most people should be interested as well in something that is becoming more possible and will affect their complete existence.

Not once have I said "OMG the sky is falling in". I have just made a presentation about EMP.

You would think though that defence systems would prevent this from occuring.

reply to post by magma


Indeed you would think so, but I wonder why it is that there seems to be some uncertainty of that? I don't know the answer to what seems to be a reasonable postulation. Could it be that the delivery system could be 'masked' until it was too late to prevent the strike?

nice info right there for those who wants the US down...

you are now also doing the maths for them

Any article that uses "all", "each" and "every" in any statement involving EMP is automatically false.

EMP is capricious as hell. And not every anything will be destroyed. You can do a lot of damage, and we could mitigate some percentage of that damage if we wanted to, but it's one of those head-in-the-sand things that you can't sell to the electorate.

However, by the time you can get your device up to a power level that ends up destroying most everything, it's ok, because at those levels the people will all fall dead too. You won't have to worry about it.

ps: you don't have to worry about trapped electrons in the inner magnetosphere frying up satellites anymore, that's dealt with. One set of problems down. Your dead body can enjoy television programming after the blast.

reply to post by heineken


Hi Heineken, long time no see.

Of course it is not ME that is providing the information or doing any maths, but I am curious as to what you are meaning. What maths?

reply to post by Bedlam

ps: you don't have to worry about trapped electrons in the inner magnetosphere frying up satellites anymore, that's dealt with.

? Dealt with? All satellites are hardened?

Perhaps you could amplify the statement as I am not sure I am understanding your meaning.

Originally posted by PuterMan
reply to post by Bedlam

 

ps: you don't have to worry about trapped electrons in the inner magnetosphere frying up satellites anymore, that's dealt with.

? Dealt with? All satellites are hardened?

Perhaps you could amplify the statement as I am not sure I am understanding your meaning.

We've been able to remove high velocity trapped electrons from the inner magnetosphere for quite some time. THAT started back with Dr Helliwell at Siple Station.

HAARP can do it right now, but they moved that function to a set of LEO satellites back in 2006, IIRC. It was tested on several STS missions as a classified payload. Worked really well. Once they got the test data back they made some tweaks to the model, put it on a satellite, ran it through its paces, and then popped up some more with slight improvements.

Now it's a done deal. The RFQ went around in 2002 or 2004 for the initial satellite design, we bid for it but it went to one of the major aerospace companies, we really didn't have a chance but we did want our names in the hat so we'd be considered for some second or third tier work on the thing.

I don't think it's unclassified yet. Hell, even HAARP being able to do that used to be classified but an AF General who will be unmentioned here dropped that particular shoe on a TV interview one day. Although the preliminary work is all in Geophysical Letters, so its secrecy is one of those things that's security by obscurity.

Originally posted by PuterMan
reply to post by heineken

 

Hi Heineken, long time no see.

Of course it is not ME that is providing the information or doing any maths, but I am curious as to what you are meaning. What maths?

edit on 6/5/2013 by PuterMan because: Green decoration was required.

HI dear frnd!!

what i meant lol..is that they are putting out the altitude needed, the ordinance strength , the best lat and long to make sure the whole US is hit..etc.

not that they can do otherwise..but still funny

One Second After is a very good book about this same type of scenario. Practically every facet of american life would be dramatically affected. Everything is computerized nowadays. In the book most people that were old and in nursing homes died off soon followed by diabetics and people with chronic illness. Something as simple as a scratch on your hand could get infected and people would be starving in droves. Even the folks that lived in the countryside were not safe because that is where everyone from the cities went thinking there would be abundant food there.

I think this would be the best way for an enemy to destabilize the homeland as a prelude to any kind of attack or invasion. Detonate an EMP, wait a few months for the majority of people to starve/kill themselves off, then invade.

I am sure many people refuse to believe this can happen but history is is full of people and societies that thought, "It can't happen to us."

reply to post by PuterMan


Hi Puterman, ATS Readers, Writers,

Just wanted to comment on your statement about a twisted steel cable in essence being a faraday cage.

Actually it isn't.. but your thoughts were along the right lines.

A faraday cage is a structure built around something you want to protect, from an EMP, or Electrical induction.

The cage absorbs the inducted voltage and current and then usually shunts it to a ground, or earth ground. The cage "intercepts and absorbs" the electrical induction.

A twisted electrical cable, by itself will still pick up induced voltages and currents from an EMP. The only way to prevent it from getting into the cable would be to make it a SHIELDED cable, which is manufactured, but of course pretty expensive too.

The cables whilst in service, or energized even create their OWN fields which can be induced on any cables near them; as in a cable tray at a factory for example.

In these type of situations and applications, you will usually find that the different cables have different "twists per inch" so as not to induce a voltage or possibly a FALSE signal in an adjacent cable or wire that is sent to some relay on the other end of that wire. Weird I know, but how it is in like power plants or factories. These cables are also usually the shielded type variety, and every so many feet or metres of length, you tap into this shielding and run it to ground, so that if any induced voltages or currents try to get into the cable, they are "absorbed" by the shielding, and sent to ground.

What I did find a bit un nerving was that even though a cable was buried at a depth of 9/10 of a metre, it still got taken out by induction.

I would imagine, or think that would completely depend upon the depth of a cable, but even more so the conductivity of the soil and moisture content etc of the soil.. composition of the soil, etc.

For example, a soil that is deep red in color and that has perhaps a lot of ferrous oxide in it, (rust), would be a lot more conductive and susceptible to EMP penetration than say a more dialectric soil.. like CLAY maybe???

Just a thought.. and by the way I don't consider it fear mongering, it is just a fact and a known vulnerability. The more "advanced" a society is and uses mostly electronic stuff, will of course be more affected than say the tribes in the deep Sahara where there is little infrastructure in place.

Yes, it is an option that some rogue nation may use someday, (God forbid), to help defeat another nation, or put it back on its heels. Asymmetrical warfare at its cutting edge technology... It is actually most likely a strategy that non rogue nations would employ.. (But wouldn't using a weapon like this make that nation rogue as well??)

ANYHOW...lol... if that type of cat ever gets out of the bag, I would imagine it would require and instigate a full blown nuclear response of the more conventional nightmare scenario upon whoever did the EMP thing..SIGH..

It would most certainly create a very messy world all of a sudden too.

Gee, just think how much money the SOB's could make rebuilding a entire civilization after something like that!!!
(Dark, dark humor) Better hush, might give em an idea to make stocks climb...to 30,000 DOW...lol. OH wait, maybe that would get all fudged up too... BAD idea, scratch that one for the 1%..lol.

Pravdaseeker

reply to post by pravdaseeker


Thanks for that. Just one question, of interpretation. The original article said:

protected against mechanical damage by spiral-wound steel tape

That sounded to me like an outer wrapping and not the core of the cable. An outer wrapper of steel. Am I reading that wrong?

reply to post by PuterMan


Hi Puterman,

Took me a while here to suss it out...studying and hitting the books here, way late in OZ. 3 am, sorry.

It was referring to "mechanical damage", not electrical impulse damage.

All that about lead shield, and steel tape spiral wind stuff is about not getting messed up if hit with a shovel or a digging machine I think, like a backhoe.

At least that is how I take it... could be wrong..

To me, since an EMP is electrical in nature.. and nothing physical, or mechanical is/was involved in messing up this cable, is how I took it.

Thanks for the feedback, and making me take another look.. thought maybe I was way off base for a second there..

Pravdaseeker

And at any rate, geomagnetic heave induced currents will go through steel tape windings. It'll induce big currents in the tape as well, cooking the line's insulation.

reply to post by PuterMan


Yes, because I'm not a terrified little b*tch; I'm not worthy of ATS. My advice to you, go diesel.

Originally posted by zonetripper2065
reply to post by PuterMan

 

Yes, because I'm not a terrified little b*tch; I'm not worthy of ATS. My advice to you, go diesel.

I did not say you were not worthy, I said that if you are not into topics that could be considered as fearmongering, but are not, then perhaps you would be happier watching soaps. That confers no worthiness of ATS.

Since I have absolutely no idea what 'go diesel' means I shall ignore the remark and remind you that colloquialisms may not be understood by all on an international platform.