re: EMP: Is the Threat Real?

I finished One Second After last week (aftermath of an EMP). It was absolutely terrifying. I highly recommend it to anyone with even a slight interest in the subject.
We'd be so fricked.

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I was under the impression that cars would be fine, same with planes etc, it is non-protected electronics that are hooked up to the electrical grid would get fried, wich would still be really bad...

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Apparently it would fry anything electronic in use at the time of the attack.

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Didn't the funding for protecting military equipment from EMPs get wiped out several years ago?

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There were some cutbacks to the uparmoring aspects of modernization, but all the new stuff comes off the assembly line hardened.

Global Security recently did an excellent piece on the subject. I'd post a link but you'd have to be a subscriber to access it and the damn site has a right click block on their pages.

Bottom line is that our military, while we have to get back on track where we were pre-Obama, we're still a lot further along than we were under Clinton and with the new $26 billion increase in our defense budget a lot of that is going to go towards getting back to uparmoring and upgrading our current assets.

I still believe our Sun poses a far greater threat than any nuclear capable rogue nation. Although, it's been said that both China's and Russia's offensive doctrine is to high altitude airburst us first, and then see where it would go from there. We would probably do the same. But in all three cases it would be a massive EMP strike ... and both China and Russia figure their general population would survive such an attack far better than ours.

I would have to agree. We are a completely different sort of society - our societal collapse with the loss of our grid would be far far far worse than would theirs. We would basically self destruct.

Sounds like that TV series revolution

Synopsis
"Fifteen years after an unknown event has caused all electricity to stop working, plunging the world into another dark age, people have adjusted to life without planes, high-tech communication, and electricity. In small farming communities, life seems sweeter at this slower pace, but danger and mystery lurk in the shadows. After the militia kills a man who -- supposedly -- had something to do with the blackout, his daughter teams with unlikely allies to determine the truth about the cataclysm in order to reclaim the future."

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Shouldn't airlines be putting manual overrides onto airplanes so that the pilots could take over control of the planes rather than have them "fall from the sky"?

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Many planes are now "fly by wire" which means it is fully electronic. Any older Boeing jets still have stock and rudder controls which means even without power you can fly the plane. Problem is that commercial jets have horrible glide slope (how far you can glide) not to mention you couldn't get the gear down electronically.

Totally off subject but, Sully would have been screwed and even what he did was incredibly aided by the airbus' flight systems.

The US has non-nuclear EMP assets that can knock out small areas as small as a building


U.S. Air Force confirms Boeing’s electromagnetic pulse weapon

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The project has been in the works for a few years now, and has met with significant success in preliminary trials. In 2012, it was reported that a CHAMP mission in Utah managed to hit and subsequently disable seven separate targets in one mission, demonstrating its accuracy and precision. Indeed, it is this capacity to target individual buildings and not cities at large that makes the new weapon so effective, as it would allow military members to cut off electricity supplies to enemy parties while keeping civilians out of the melee.

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Faraday cage



I have one over my house. I suggest you do too.

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It would be much easier to shut down electrical grids and microchips with malware

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They've been hitting us off and on with various attacks over the last eight years. The government, under Obama, covered-up many of the more egregious attacks .... especially the ones in the Pacific Time Zone and including the big one on the Silcon Valley substation.

There was another cyber attack on D.C. just last year that they explained-away as human error and, not until this most recent nationwide attack a couple of weeks ago, has the public been advised ... those that are paying attention at least.

It's coming.

And one thing that most are ignorant of is that our modern grid is symbiotically tied into the Internet. One cannot function without the other for very long. So our enemies know this, and while ours is a very efficient system when buzzing correctly, if disrupted on either side it causes the dominoes to start falling fairly quickly.

Conversely, that's one of the major concerns some have with the new streaming model for all of our future communications.

Super stations on the AM and FM bandwidth are an integral part of our Civil Defense system yet we are fast giving-up our ability to pull information from the airwaves the old fashioned way ... even though super stations are government subsidized to be hardened against an EMP attack.

I'm about to go super nerd or geek or whatever ... a few buddies and I are going for our HAM operator's licenses in June. I've been studying for awhile but what really amazes me is how many people are doing this these days ... to hear their motivations and find that this is a growing undercurrent sweeping much of the nation.

A lot of people feel that something is going to happen - no one is sure just what that something is going to be.

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entire electrical grid.

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I'm skeptical that a single blast could knock out even close to that much.

What is HAM op license?