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Expert Warns: Civilian World Not Ready For Massive EMP-Caused Blackout
schwit1 (797399) writes "An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of electromagnetic energy strong enough to disable, and even destroy, nearby electronic devices. In the first few minutes of an EMP, nearly half a million people would die. That's the worst-case scenario that author William R. Forstchen estimated would be the result of an EMP on the electric grid. 'If you do a smart plan — the Congressional EMP Commission estimated that you could protect the whole country for about $2 billion,' Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, told Watchdog.org. 'That's what we give away in foreign aid to Pakistan every year.' He said the more officials plan, the lower the estimated cost gets. 'The problem is not the technology,' Pry said. 'We know how to protect against it. It's not the money, it doesn't cost that much. The problem is the politics. It always seems to be the politics that gets in the way.'"
Reading summary: this seems pretty stupid and a little fear-mongery for slashdot.
Click link: Fox news, figures. Usual shit reporting and lack of detail. Obamacare not mentioned anywhere in article.
Click link in article to watchdog.org: not much more detail, more zomg fear crap, still no mention of obamacare.
Read comments on watchdog.org: ok, I’m out
Not saying there isn’t something to talk about here, but linking to fox news for this kind of topic is like linking to a local news report on heartbleed. We aren’t the audience for this level of reporting.
That's what we give away in foreign aid to Pakistan every year.
...Is he implying America is giving that aid from the kindness of their heart?
Well, to be fair, at this point a link to the onion would enhance the credibility of the article.
...
I just happen to sell asteroid repellent and giant lizard repellent. If you order before midnight, you can get some ginsu knives too.
I like the statement that, in the worst case scenario, 500,000 people would die in the first half hour.
That amazes me. I would think that even in 2014, it would take a couple of hours before people went into a terminal heart rhythm because they couldn't log on to Facebook. Maybe I'm just old and slow...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
FUD? I didn't even know we had a Congressional EMP Commission. I feel much better now. I think we should all vote to re-elect all our congressmen so they can continue their great work. What do the rest of you dumbasses think? Wait for the next election, to get the punchline.
I know it would vary based on the yield of the nuke and the relative shielding of the device, but let's say...
1) "Rogue" small-yield nuke detonated at ground-level (eg, snuck onto a shipping container or other similar delivery).
2) Standard-size ICBM delivered to target intended for ground destruction.
3) Standard sized ICBM delivered for maximum EMP yield.
Can you use a single nuke to EMP the entire continental US?
What kind of shielding is necessary to block EMPs? Is my TV in the top floor of my house junk but maybe my PC in the basement likely unaffected? Is there a shared risk from the electric grid?
Yeah... considering *everything* has a processor in it and it not protected against EMP... Yeah. It would be a shit show.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This will be the epitaph of our civilization.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The people who die in the first few minutes are going to be those who's lives are dependent on technology. That's list contains almost exclusively those in planes and those dependent on medical devices. How's a power grid update going to protect those people? Hospitals already have backup generators and you can't do anything about fried equipment.
TFA is kinda small on any details, but what do you expect from Fox News. How exactly does 2 Billion "protect" everyone from an EMP weapon? Have we found something as good a what we currently use, but won't break? Old Vacuum tubes are a nice protection against a system that could go down, but you never want it to go down. You can't really use the good vacuum tubes ether so you're stuck in 1940's tech for a lot of stuff. How exactly does this 2 Billion stop the pace makers from breaking, the planes from falling, and every hospital patient from dying in those few initial hours. That money might help for long term protection by setting up a process to recover from such an event, but I don't really see anything that says it will protect us from the massive initial death toll.
...whether Cold War-flavored (so very 1980s) or terrorist-flavored (so very 9/11), wouldn't these relatively straightforward precautions LIKEWISE buffer us against the effects of the sorts of solar activity that randomly seems to popup every 100 years or so?
It seems that as our society becomes more and more DEPENDENT on the interwebs, we'd want to invest a little to protect that.
(Then again, one might assume that because our entire economy runs on the roadways, we'd want to invest in them too...)
Yet the Republicans are too wedded to utter prohibition on taxation, and the Democrats are too busy taking the tax revenues we do get and pouring great gobs of cash onto various interest groups for either of them give a shit about the ACTUAL public weal.
-Styopa
It's only a pole about solar flares, but it is related:
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
My favorite: "The moon never pulls shit like this.”
BlameBillCosby.com
Don't forget the people living on a... um... "government income", who suddenly won't be able to watch Jerry Springer or Dr. Oz or other fine examples of daytime television programming. Once their big-screen TV set shuts down, you know the first thing they're going to do is grab a large kitchen knife and go on a rampage killing everyone in the neighborhood.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
And why would trucks stop coming into the city?
Oh, right becasue idiots think an EMP would stop most vehicles from running.
Next time you tin foil hat friends mention it, be sure to inform them that only 3% would ahve any effect at all, and only a smalle number of those would lead to a situation where a crash could occur.
So, basically, we would be in 1910 for about a month, then 1920, within a year everyone would have power again.
Would people die? yes/ Would civilization collapse? no. The internet would be running at some capacity through the whole thing.
The biggest risk is that all these ignorant survivalist cause people to panic becasue of all the FUD that have been spreading.
http://www.empcommission.org/d...
Of course, this also mean it would need to be strong enough to impact that entire continent; which one could be, coming form the Sun.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Politics" in this case means that they haven't convinced the government that this money needs to be spent on them. Given that in these cases the government tends to have a bias towards spending money, I would regard that as telling.
Fox News hysteria, now available on slashdot!
Starfish prime is interesting, though.
Yes, the article is sensationalist. While EMP could be a real problem, a bigger problem is that any attack that could generate a big enough EMP to knock out the electronics over half a continent would likely cause much worse problems, like World War III and Nuclear Winter. Even if it only costs a little bit, is it worth the effort to guard against EMP? Computer security is another area that you have to constantly ask if it's worth the trouble, and will proposed measures actually help? Yes, we've had many embarrassing security breaches, but that could be better if the alternative is to spend so much on security that it's cheaper to suffer the occasional breach. However I think the consensus is that we would spend less if we invested a little more in security.
Also, we have a lot of other, worse problems we're not doing much about either. Climate Disruption. Asteroid impact. And as for healthcare, how about the AIDS denial in South Africa?
We have also noted for some time that we have a lot of infrastructure that's vulnerable to terrorism. Terrorists could blow up a few critical bridges (or maybe just close a couple of lanes), poison water supplies (maybe by peeing in them), bomb stadiums when a big game is on, torch oil refineries and terminals, and no doubt many other things. Why hasn't this happened? Is it that they're trying but our security services are unsung heroes who have already foiled dozens of plots we never heard about? Or more like that the threat isn't that big, as the effort it takes to pull off something like that is more than is appreciated?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
If NBCCBSABCCNN are busy abusing their "Breaking News" banners and fauning over Michelle Obama's dress, then the alternatives are where you're going to hear about this stuff. In fact, The Blaze and Drudge have been linking to this stuff for a long time because for the people who actually care about this stuff this isn't news.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Anybody requiring electronic medical devices to survive would be in danger, pacemakers (1 million Americans), insulin pumps (20 thousand Americans), dialysis machines (500 thousand Americans), respirators,... then there is medication that requires refrigeration. Commercial airplanes are built to withstand lighting strikes so they would probably survive the control tower's comms and tracking equipment may not work so there is an increased risk of crashes.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The 1859 solar flare resulted in anaurora visible at the equator. It damaged telegraph lines and lighning rods. If it happened today it would be expected to fry most power line transformers and cell phone towers. there are only 5% enough spare transformers at most. Plus industrial production could have come to a halt.
This extra radiation appears to have created extra C14 from atmospheric nitrogen) at that time. Scientist have exampled tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments for other such super storms. There is a hint of one in 774 AD . The historical records and istopes have not been studied enough to determine the recurrance of large storms.
Because, you know: If somebody could produce a massive EMP blackout in the US, he could just as well nuke Los Angeles. So it's best to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear shelters now. And constructing a doomsday world destruction device might also be a good idea, because this would act as a deterrent against the terrorists ...
Fundamentally I agree with you about the imbecilic quality of the fear for, and utter lack of real knowledge about, the boogeyman, EMP.
But there are also real dangers on account of the hair's edge on which is balanced the life support system of the civilized world. If the North American electric power grid were to go down for more than a day, dislocation starts. More than a handful of days, the machine stops. The ENTIRE machine. I'll tell you why trucks stop coming to the city (and every place else) to keep up the stock of of groceries and home heating oil. Put very simply, because their individual fuel tanks only hold a few hours' worth of fuel before hitting empty. All of the "gas" (actually mostly diesel) stations rely on the grid to pump fuel from their below-ground tanks. I'll wager you that the percentage of fueling stations with backup generators installed which would last more than a few hours is a fraction of one percent approaching zero.
Meanwhile, liquid and gas delivery pipelines have lost power too. All the refineries have stopped refining. Nobody can run the pumps to refuel the constant stream of supertankers and LNG carriers which are absolutely required to sustain the system. The supply of well water to individual rural homes, that is to say proper sanitation, stops immediately. Water in the cities isn't much better. It still has to be pumped to water towers so it can flow from there to individual use sites. That flow would stop pretty quickly.
We don't have a world of little houses on the prairie which are all sited near natural available surface water out of necessity, with carriages pulled by horses "fueled" by large quantities of locally stored grain. We ouldn't even recreate that world on demand if we wanted to at anywhere near the present level of population.
So I read the book that guy wrote and while it was entertaining and probably accurate, it still came off as advocating giving billions to defense contractors for some unspecified fix. The forward by Newt Gingrich kinda tipped me off.
Because of metal shielding and short wires, basic electronics 101 stuff here.
The EMP power required to take out a modern car's Ignition system and ECM would be so high that you would DIE from the radiation. Cars also are the single most noisy power environment so the ECM is already hardened from the 2000 mini EMPs per minute that are being created under the hood of the car as it drives down the road.
I have directly experienced an EMP that is 90,000 times greater than anything the SUN can create, it's called a direct lightning strike. several electronic systems were blown out like TV sets that were connected to an ANTENNA. but the car in the garage that was the closest to the EMP was just fine. Same with the motorcycle and the other car in the driveway. How close was the EMP? 8 feet from the garage, it split the tree in 1/2 and burned a track down the center of it.
But that is first hand experience, if you have any kind of electronics education you will also know that even a Nuclear bomb generated EMP will only affect systems that are interconnected by miles of wire. so yes, all the power grids will go down as well as all the telecommunications systems that are still wire based. There is a lot of bullshit floating around the internet about the EMP and how it is a super uber technology killer. it's not. and even if there was a chance of a really big one, it's trivial to protect equipment from them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It takes more than 4 days for someone to be willing to resort to cannibalism. Canned food, frozen food, etc will be plentiful enough. And plenty of Americans have enough fat stores that they could subsist on water for a while. Priority #1 when a big disaster strikes: immediately fill every bathtub, sink, and then containers with cold water. Shut off intake into your water heater. Do this before water pressure drops and/or the water gets poopy. Don't use the toilets for elimination of body waste. Do your business in a trench in the back yard if possible. Use the toilet tank water, and the toilet bowl water only if you can boil it. Set up large containers to collect rainwater (if you're in the western states, ignore the water collection laws).
The degeneration of society seems to be pretty plausible. Kind of ties in with the "post-apocalyptic skills" thread of a few weeks ago.
I hope people take the time to read EMP commission report. While there is no question it would suck and hard to predict aggregate effect on society there are some interesting and counter-intuitive tidbits. Some of my favorites:
Systems designed to protect against EMF also protect against EMP. When tested new cars were no worse off than old cars due to EMF tolerance requirements. I believe none of the cars tested actually broke down although some had to be turned off and started right back up.
Simple changes such as changing from wires with parallel to twisted conductors make wires significantly less visible to induced currents ... even using steel conduit is something like 10 times less effective than likes of twisted romex.
Ethernet is galvanically isolated and will tolerate surprising amounts of abuse - while long loops of cable will induce harmful current less likely for damage to propagate and crispify other components beyond PHY.
Electronic gizmos are primarily vulnerable by way of induction from interface wiring / antennas and stand a chance of not being directly crispified when unconnected/stored.
We're not ready for a massive EMP... or a 500 mile high Tsunami... or Giant radioactive lizards that breath fire. I love the quote though, "In the first few minutes of an EMP, nearly half a million people would die." Well, if we're talking about an EMP that could take out the entire US including airspace, that might be true of planes falling from the sky and trains running off the rails. But that scenario isn't even remotely plausible outside total nuclear annihilation. Further, Hurrican Katrina showed that even an EMP hitting a major city is really nothing more than a power outage. Flooding happens to be the most dangerous natural disaster in reach of major cities (short of Hawaii blowing up or California splitting in half). Unless the results of an EMP are dams breaking in some Superman: The Movie kind of way, we wouldn't even see a Katrina level disaster.
Frankly, I could care less about an EMP. Any number of computer viruses could disable more machines than an EMP. And a radioactive dirty bomb is a real threat to life for decades. Any terrorist that could cause an explosion capable of triggering a sufficiently large EMP would find that the bomb itself would be more useful against a soft civilian target. An EMP is just flat out impractical for a terrorist, who prefers simple and direct and terrifying.
On the other hand, if we're worried about a bad actor like North Korea, I believe such an EMP that could hit multiple US cities at once would trigger a nuclear response from the US. What are we going to do, waste resources wrapping electronics in shielding for... an unwarranted fear? And $2 Billion sounds desperately low. It's like the TSA, only even more incredibly useless.
I8-D
After all, you can never be too careful, right?
Do you realize what careful is? For example when living in earthquake country believing that three days of supplies as recommended by the government is optimistic. So you buy three cases (adjust for family size) of bottled water rather than one, and as you use one case through normal activity you replace it so you always have 2-3 on hand. For your cupboard you purchase six cans (adjust for family size) of a particular canned good you use, when you get down to three you purchase three more, that way you always have 3-6 on hand. Do so each for canned chile, soup, peaches ... whatever you normally use. Similar story with dry goods, 1-2 boxes on hand, snack foods, etc. 1-2 packages of toilet paper. 1-2 boxes of plastic garbage bags on hand, toilet liners if water is out. 1-2 packages of batteries for some LED flashlights. A basic first aid kit with antiseptic, gauzes, tape, bandaids, aspirin/tylenol, etc; no wilderness self-surgery kit necessary. If a disaster occurs eat what is in your refrigerator first, then your freezer, then your canned goods. You can have a week or two of food just by not letting your cupboard go bare. Nothing special or exotic needed, no freeze dried food good for years necessary. No special gear beyond what a boy scout might take on a weekend camping trip is necessary.
Pretty much all you need is the stuff you normally buy and use anyway. You just don't let inventories get to zero.
Why would we want someone able to deploy an EMP capable nuclear device to go instead with a dirty bomb or use it to cause more physical damage (i.e.: city-busting?)
Would defending against EMP like this also defend against a solar coronal mass ejection (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... ?) If it can't be justified for an event like that, I don't see the point.