Slashdot Mirror
The Emergency Internet Bunkers
Barence writes "Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict. If it could, then a handful of datacenters dotted around the world would likely be all that remains of the multi-billion-dollar hosting industry. These secretive, high-security sites, tunneled out of mountains or housed behind the blast-proof doors of one-time NATO bunkers, are home to the planet's most secure hosting providers. This article profiles the emergency internet bunkers."
In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and they pushed the clock to 23:57. A year later, the US did the same – so the clock ticked on to 23:58.
Uh, I thought the US tested their first atomic bomb in 1945?
No it wouldn't the EMP of nuclear warheads isn't much greater than the blast area.
That is incorrect. The US conducted a large high altitude detonation, Starfish Prime a 1.4 megaton blast which caused notable electrical problems 1500 km away in Hawaii.
The relatively small magnitude of the Starfish Prime EMP in Hawaii (about 5600 volts/metre) and the relatively small amount of damage done (for example, only 1 to 3 percent of streetlights extinguished)[10] led some scientists to believe, in the early days of EMP research, that the problem might not be as significant as was later realized. Newer calculations[9] showed that if the Starfish Prime warhead had been detonated over the northern continental United States, the magnitude of the EMP would have been much larger (22 to 30 kilovolts/metre) because of the greater strength of the Earth's magnetic field over the United States, as well as the different orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at high latitudes. These new calculations, combined with the accelerating reliance on EMP-sensitive microelectronics, heightened awareness that the EMP threat could be a very significant problem.