UK In Danger From Electromagnetic Bomb, Says Defense Secretary

judgecorp writes "Britain must build defenses against an EMP bomb, the UK Secretary of Defense Phillip Hammond told a conference today. Electromagnetic Pulse devices mimic the result of a solar flare or a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, creating a storm of electromagnetic radiation, which can break mobile networks and satellite systems. Any preparation for solar storms must also consider the possibility of deliberate electromagnetic events, warns Hammond."

Comments

US and UK, best friends forever

[HighTechDev]

It's funny how similar (and crazy) both US and UK are while rest of the world lives in peace.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[jimmydevice]

This will take needed money from the initiatives to protect the country from zombies, aliens and robots.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially robots. The threat of an electromagnetic bomb is the only reason they haven't attacked yet. They'll revolt the moment this threat is neutralized.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[zippo01]

What is your supporting evidence that the rest of the world is living in peace? Syria? Libya? North Korea? Iran? Or some combination of all of them?

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[captainpanic]

What is your supporting evidence that the rest of the world is living in peace? Syria? Libya? North Korea? Iran? Or some combination of all of them?

There are other countries too. Cherrypicking the 4 unsafest countries is not going to convince me that the world is at war.

Anyway, I am not buying the latest scaremongering story that demands we spend more on defense.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the world lives in peace?

You're delusional, my good chap.

There are genocides in Africa, civil unrest and brutal crushing of riots across the largely dictator-led Middle East and North Africa, Israel-Palestine conflict, drug fueled organized crime in Central and South America threatening to tear countries apart, China and India crushing and slowly eradicating Tibet and Nepal, tribal warfare, civil war in tribal areas of Pakistan, in South Philippines, genocide in West Papua.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Kergan]

It's funny how similar (and crazy) both US and UK are while rest of the world lives in peace.

This world in peace features another two States with a long history of warmongering, China and Russia, a whole continent (Africa) in which armed conflicts occurred perpetually for most of the last 50 years, a latent nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan (and China) over Kashmir, as well as actual and latent wars across the Middle East. I'd add Columbia and Mexico, but one could conceivably argue that these are small guerrilla conflicts.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[hcs_$reboot]

Seriously, are all the threats realistic, or does the UK government suffer from a paranoid syndrome? At least once a week /. exposes a new plan in the UK to a) add cameras somewhere b) spy/censor Internet c) control this or that and now d) defense against EMPs.
The coming Olympics are maybe an excuse^w reason? Or maybe we should prohibit the 8 seasons of Jack Bauer / 24 to be sold in the UK?

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[AngryOldGuy]

Could you please citate any real warmongering that China or Russia have done? My understanding is that they have only cared about their internal politics. Only when threat from the US has arisen they have had the need to answer.

For me, both China and Russia seem much more peaceful than US.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[zippo01]

There are many levels between war and peace. I never said the world was at war, but it's not at peace.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Joce640k]

Seriously, are all the threats realistic

Um, no. The amount of energy needed to generate a worthwhile EMP is in the nuclear bomb/solar flare range.

If you're a terrorist with that much energy in a transportable package the last thing you'll be thinking of doing with it is taking out a couple of cellphone towers.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see:

* Syria hasn't started any wars that I know of. It is, however, being threatened with war by the US, UK, and France.
* Libya didn't start any wars, either. It was attacked by the US, UK, and France.
* North Korea is ruled by a dictator who oppresses his people but hasn't started any wars.
* Iran hasn't started any wars but has certainly been attacked by a US proxy.

So what does that tell us about which countries want to live in peace, and which ones don't?

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Anonymous Coward]

What's unsafe about Iran? And why is it not peaceful? I don't remember Iran invading other countries and building military bases all over the world.

Get a fucking clue.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Syria: civil war.
Libya: civil war.
North Korea: The new dictator hasn't had any time to start wars but under the previous dictator, a South Korean warship was blown up while standing in international waters. That's an a act of war.
Iran: Finance several groups that conduct war actions against other countries, thus engaging in war by proxies.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[queazocotal]

"With EMP bomb, unlike a nuke, you don't waste energy to generate EMR in all the spectrum, with all the unneeded parts like visible light, IR and UV, and heat up surroundings to rather uncomfortable temperatures." - technically true, but somewhat misleading.

Around 0.1% of energy goes into EMP.
For a ten kiloton device, this is still the equivalent of 10 tons of explosive - in EMP.
But - a flux-compression-generator converts about a third of the energy into electricity, and then you get about half from the transmitter, if lucky.

So, to get the equivalent EMP to a 10 kiloton nuclear device, you need of the order of 60 tons of explosives alone.
The generator is likely to double that, and the transmission antenna and magnetrons (which have to be physically large so they don't just arc across) double it again.

So, of the order of 250 tons.
This is 'problematic' to get to a high altitude, where it needs to be, to have more than a local effect.
I note 10 25 ton truck bombs are going to be able to wreck large portions of most financial districts, and be considerably cheaper.

'terrorist' EMP weapons with more than a local (building or three) scale are fantasy.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Kergan]

Could you please citate any real warmongering that China or Russia have done?.

Could you please hop over to Google and lookup suggestions that turn up when you enter "Russian conquest of" or "Chinese territorial claims"? There are far too many to enumerate here.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[RaceProUK]

Correction: we have a small number of sociopaths who think the best way to solve the world's problems is by blowing up innocents. And by small, I mean a dozen or so. Labelling them Muslims is about as relevant as labelling them cheese.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Anonymous Coward]

This will take needed money from the initiatives to protect the country from zombies, aliens and robots.

You laugh, but I have it on good authority that the alien problem is a real threat in the UK. If it wasn't for this government consultant that goes by 'the Doctor' we would have all been destroyed or at least conquered several times over.

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[Jason Levine]

Too many people seem to suffer from "If I Imagine It, The Terrorists Can Build It And Thus We Need To Protect Against It" Syndrome. Of course, the cynic in me thinks that this syndrome is encouraged by people who have a financial stake in protecting against the threat. In unrelated news, the terrorists might build a giant, robotic monster to stomp through New York City. Clearly, we need to head them off by building our own giant, robotic monsters to protect against those. Luckily, my company can build those if given a billion dollar contract. You don't want the terrorists to win, do you?

Re:US and UK, best friends forever

[geekymachoman]

Ok, parental advisory ahead. Might be modded as troll, because people here really piss me off with their ignorance and fucking opinions that are nothing more then text-book propaganda, and I'm reading it every god damn day, and keeping silent about it.

Yeah. Civil wars because "your" Government wants it, and initiates such things through NED and other organizations in foreign states. I'm Serbian btw, you did same here (in Yugoslavia). Your government (with a blessing of its people) systematically destroyed lives of countless generations in just one state. Now go to google and search for all the wars you initiated, then think of all those people living in those states, that have done nothing wrong in their life. Fuck you if you say it's collateral damage, because everything is not black and white and if you can't figure that out on yourself, then I won't bother wasting my time explaining and discussing anything with people like you.

Every fucking war in last whatever years has been initiated in some way by western powers, for their own interests / or when the banana state stops obeying your governments or when corporate interests are there, and many other reasons.

And you're clueless about such things. Which is why you're country is constantly at war with someone, and killing off people of some country (when you kill people it's in the name of "democracy" and "freedom " - fucking hypocritical lying fascist bastards).

You should all be ashamed of yourself for letting these thing happen. But you'll run away and stick your head into the sand and behave like nothing is happening (again), because you either don't care or you're too dumb to "figure it out". You'll come here to comment about it, and then in few months/years go vote for next war mongering overlord which is gonna continue killing people in the name of above mentioned freedom and democracy.

We're in danger from everything and we need

[GauteL]

..an infinite amount of money to protect us.

Seriously. If the ministry of defence thinks we need to protect from this they can evaluate it up against other threats and spend their existing money accordingly.

Re:We're in danger from everything and we need

[alostpacket]

Exactly. This money should be spent preparing for the zombie apocalypse.

Re:We're in danger from everything and we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me explain something to you.

A few years ago a substantial part of the research division of the Ministry of Defence was privatised (!) as a mysterious firm called "Qinetiq" and now much of it belongs to US businesses (!!). This research arm then sells back to the MoD at a profit.

The absurd arrangement means that a great part of the MoD's remit is now to provide corporate welfare to the US "defense" industry. If the MoD say they need something, what they actually mean is that one of their friends is selling something.

If you thought that the US government was corrupt, they are nothing on the UK. Over the last fifteen years our government's only progress has been a year on year increase in the amount of money it channels to private businesses.

Non nuclear

[Dupple]

It's possible to generate an EMP without nuclear detonation using an 'explosively pumped flux compression generator'. It's range is limited compared that of an nuclear generated EMP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

Re:Non nuclear

[blind biker]

If you're going to cite Wikipedia, you could do a minimum effort and link to the correct article:
Explosively pumped flux compression generator

Re:Non nuclear

[semi-extrinsic]

Keywords: "explosively pumped", meaning you need lots of explosives. If there are terrorists in the UK with lots of explosives, I don't think they will use them for making EMPs.

Obvious solution

[detritus.]

We must attack the Sun because it hates our freedom, our way of life and wants to destroy us.

News! Defence sec. says spend money on defence!

[fantomas]

Breaking news at 11! UK Defence secretary says we must spend more money on defence and other military things! Demands greater slice of government budget!

Coming up shortly on this channel - Health minister argues more must be spent on hospitals, Rural Affairs spokesman demands urgent spending on rural schools, says education of rural kids being neglected.

Re:News! Defence sec. says spend money on defence!

[jimmydevice]

This sounds like a warped expansion pack for simcity.

Pedant's corner

[Sesostris III]

Apologies for being pedantic, but it's 'Defence' in the UK, not 'Defense'. The article got it right.

Re:I expect typical british responce...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the event of an EMP disaster all lamp posts will be manned by a government sketch artist...

New Country Same Shit

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Newt Gingrich and company have been scaremongering about EMP bombs for years now.

Re:New Country Same Shit

[Technician]

Proper surge protection, spark gaps, low pass filters, etc provide a high degree of protection. Narrow band antennas of a grounded design such as a yagi, will recieve power within it's passband.

Unshielded electronics such as your clock radio are hard to protect. Shielded equipment with power filtering, metal cases, over voltage protection, etc are relatively safe. Your desk top computer has an antenna wire attached to the keyboard and mouse, so these are vunerable. A traditional RFI metal case tower PC with all external cables removed would make a nice spare that can be quickly deployed after an attack.

A single point ground at the utility power and telcom entry into a building provides high levels of protection against the lower frequency components of an EMP as MOV, Spark Gap, and other protection is fast enough to ground it. A noise filter for the house power will block the higher frequencies so the over voltage devices can protect the load.

http://www.ese.upenn.edu/detkin/instruments/misctutorials/Ground/grd.html

Proper grounding, noise filtering, shielding, and overvoltage protection will provide a high degree of protection to EMP.

Re:EMP Bombs? Really?

[mlush]

So they've built an EMP bomb which doesn't require setting off a nuclear bomb as well?

Why don't we start worrying that the UK is ineffectively protected against ray-guns and lightsabers as well?

Yes

Re:Yay fearmongering

[sourcerror]

Solar flares are very different from EMP, as the change in field is much slower, so it mostly effects transmission lines, not computers.

Re:EMP Bombs? Really?

[semi-extrinsic]

Maybe you should read what you linked?

The range of NNEMP weapons (non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse bombs) is severely limited compared to nuclear EMP. This is because nearly all NNEMP devices used as weapons require chemical explosives as their initial energy source, but nuclear explosives have an energy yield on the order of one million times that of a chemical explosive.

In fact, weaponized NNEMPs are only possible for surgical strikes at strategic locations. These are typically hard to access; if terrorists can get to them, EMPs are the least of your worries.

To paraphrase: if terrorists in a western country had 1000 kg of explosives sitting around, they wouldn't use it as an EMP.