Last night, I went out with a friend & somehow we got into the conversation of Armageddon. He was talking about how he wouldn't have to worry about it with nukes hitting all of the USA. Then I told him: We only need to be hit with ONE nuke. Right above Kansas. Near space. You won't see it. You won't hear it. The EMP will fry all the cars & the whole power grid. Take down all the Intel satellites AND our enemies already know it! He damn near shit his pants...Everybody should know this. And perhaps if enough know it, somebody will do something about it, if possible, like EMP hardening the Grid at least. This is what makes North Korea such a threat. They don't have to build a ton of nukes. They just have to get one inside the country or off the coast, launch it over Kansas so the satellites can't figure out where it came from (aka the Return to Sender of a retaliatory nuclear strike). Obviously, the USA won't fire nukes as a counterstrike. What would be the point? So what are the results? One fairly cheap nuclear weapon, in return trillions of dollars in damage to the US infrastructure, fried grid & transportation. Rolling back the USA by 150 years in time. Even if we had a war with North Korea & we "won", nobody in the US would know about it! Nor would they care! They would be worrying about where their next meal was coming from. The young, the old, & the sick would pay the ultimate price.
What's really disturbing is that I mind-blocked the whole thing & only thought to bring it up when he brought up the now obsolete total nuke war scenario. Everyone needs to know about the Kansas Vulnerability. 'nuff said.
EMP and You.
I've only bashed the Reps once & SeriouslyNow has been
on the opposite side of my table in EVERY stinking thing
I put on these forums so why should I believe or agree with
anything he has to say?
Look at this:
See for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Post-Cold_War_nuclear_EMP_attack_scenarios
Look at this:
" It has long been known that there are many ways to protect against nuclear EMP (or to quickly begin repairs where protection is not practical); but the United States EMP Commission determined that such protections are almost completely absent in the civilian infrastructure of the United States, and that even large sectors of the United States military services were no longer protected against EMP to the level that they were during the Cold War. "
Why should I take some guy who antagonizes me every
chance he gets over "notable scientists & technologists"??
If they're wrong, he should be correcting Wikipedia, not
telling me that I'm wrong.
A high-altitude nuclear detonation produces an immediate flux of gamma rays from the nuclear reactions within the device. These photons in turn produce high energy free electrons by Compton scattering at altitudes between (roughly) 20 and 40 km. These electrons are then trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, giving rise to an oscillating electric current. This current is asymmetric in general and gives rise to a rapidly rising radiated electromagnetic field called an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Because the electrons are trapped essentially simultaneously, a very large electromagnetic source radiates coherently.
The pulse can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. The first recorded EMP incident accompanied a high-altitude nuclear test over the South Pacific and resulted in power system failures as far away as Hawaii. A large device detonated at 400–500 km (250 to 312 miles) over Kansas would affect all of the continental U.S. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point.
- Federation of American Scientists
Typical nuclear weapon yields used during Cold War planning for EMP attacks were in the range of 1 to 10 megatons (4.2 to 42 PJ) This is roughly 50 to 500 times the sizes of the weapons the United States used in Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Physicists have testified at United States Congressional hearings, however, that weapons with yields of 10 kilotons (42 TJ) or less can produce a very large EMP.
The EMP at a fixed distance from a nuclear weapon does not depend directly on the yield but at most only increases as the square root of the yield (see the illustration below). This means that although a 10 kiloton weapon has only 0.7% of the total energy release of the 1.44-megaton Starfish Prime test, the EMP will be at least 8% as powerful. Since the E1 component of nuclear EMP depends on the prompt gamma ray output, which was only 0.1% of yield in Starfish Prime but can be 0.5% of yield in pure fission weapons of low yield, a 10 kiloton bomb can easily be 5 x 8% = 40% as powerful as the 1.44 megaton Starfish Prime at producing EMP.
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