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The EMP Threat: Sending America Back To The 1800s
Previously, Elliott Management's Paul Singer has explained that he believes "there is one risk that stands way above the rest in terms of the scope of potential damage adjusted for the likelihood of occurrence" - an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Today we dig deeper into that risk...
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Our entire way of life can be ended in a single day. And it wouldn’t even take a nuclear war to do it. All it would take for a rogue nation or terror organization to bring us to our knees is the explosion of a couple well-placed nuclear devices high up in our atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulses would fry electronics from coast to coast. Of course this could also be accomplished without any attack. Scientists tell us that massive solar storms have hit our planet before, and that it is inevitable that there will be more in the future. As you will read about below, the most recent example of this was “the Carrington Event” in 1859. If a similar burst from the sun hit us today, experts tell us that life in America could suddenly resemble life in the 1800s, and the economic damage caused could potentially be in the trillions of dollars. This is one of the greatest potential threats that we are facing as a nation, and yet Barack Obama has essentially done nothing to get us prepared.
The technology necessary to conduct such an electromagnetic pulse attack against the United States has become much more accessible in recent years. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, even rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran either already have or will soon have the capability to hurt us in this way…
Rogue nations such as North Korea (and possibly Iran) will soon match Russia and China and have the primary ingredients for an EMP attack: simple ballistic missiles such as Scuds that could be launched from a freighter near our shores; space-launch vehicles able to loft low-earth-orbit satellites; and simple low-yield nuclear weapons that can generate gamma rays and fireballs.
If a successful, large scale EMP attack ever did take place, it would be a catastrophe beyond anything that the United States has ever seen before. The EMP Commission, which was established by Congress, says that it is likely that most of us would end up dead…
What would a successful EMP attack look like? The EMP Commission, in 2008, estimated that within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown.
In 2009 the congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, whose co-chairmen were former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and James Schlesinger, concurred with the findings of the EMP Commission and urged immediate action to protect the electric grid. Studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Intelligence Council reached similar conclusions.
If you are a terrorist, a dictator or a fanatic that is looking for a “killshot” for the United States, those kinds of numbers would certainly get your attention.
And it was recently reported by WND that the Iranian military has already been playing around with such a scenario…
Peter Vincent Pry, who is executive director of a congressional advisory group called the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, raised the alarm as the agreement is about to be finalized.
He said U.S. military officials have confirmed such an Iranian plan.
“Iranian military documents describe such a scenario – including a recently translated Iranian military textbook that endorses nuclear EMP attack against the United States,” Pry wrote in a recent column in Israel’s main online media network, Aruz Sheva.
“Iran with a small number of nuclear missiles can by EMP attack threaten the existence of modernity and be the death knell of Western principles of international law, humanism and freedom,” he said.
Very chilling stuff.
And of course there are many, many others out there that would love to see the U.S. taken down other than just the Iranians.
Meanwhile, our power grid is far more vulnerable than most Americans would dare to imagine.
In previous articles, I discussed a recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report which stated the following…
“Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.”
Are you starting to get the picture?
Our entire way of life depends upon electricity. If you take away that electricity, our society is transformed literally overnight.
A successful EMP would be an utter nightmare for this nation. Just consider what U.S. Representative Scott Perry had to say about a potential attack last year…
“The consequences of such an attack could be catastrophic; all electronics, power systems, and information systems could be shut down,” Rep. Scott Perry said in prepared remarks during an EMP hearing in May held by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. “This could then cascade into interdependent infrastructures such as water, gas, and telecommunications.
While we understand this is an extreme case, we must always be prepared in case a rogue state decides to utilize this technology.”
In essence, suddenly nothing would work and just about everything that we take for granted would suddenly be gone.
In a previous article, I spelled out some of the implications of such an event…
-There would be no heat for your home.
-Water would no longer be pumped into most homes.
-Your computer would not work.
-There would be no Internet.
-Your phones would not work.
-There would be no television.
-There would be no radio.
-ATM machines would be shut down.
-There would be no banking.
-Your debit cards and credit cards would not work.
-Without electricity, most gas stations would not be functioning.
-Most people would be unable to do their jobs without electricity and employment would collapse.
-Commerce would be brought to a standstill.
-Hospitals would not be able to function normally.
-You would quickly start running out of medicine.
-All refrigeration would shut down and frozen foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.
And as I mentioned above, all of this can happen even without an attack.
A direct hit from a major solar storm can cause the exact same thing.
In fact, NASA says that there is a 12 percent chance that such a storm will hit us during the next ten years…
NASA is warning that there’s a 12 percent chance an extreme solar storm will hit Earth in the next decade, sending out massive shock waves that would knock out grids across the world.
The economic impact of this doomsday scenario could exceed $2 trillion — or 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, we have been really lucky.
There was a close call in 2012 and another one in 2013.
The following is an excerpt from an upcoming book that I have co-authored with Barbara Fix that will soon be published entitled “Get Prepared Now”…
Most people have absolutely no idea that the Earth barely missed being fried by a massive EMP burst from the sun in 2012 and in 2013. And earlier in 2014 there was another huge solar storm which would have caused tremendous damage if it had been directed at our planet. If any of those storms would have directly hit us, the result would have been catastrophic. Electrical transformers would have burst into flames, power grids would have gone down and much of our technology would have been fried. In essence, life as we know it would have ceased to exist – at least for a time. These kinds of solar storms have hit the Earth many times before, and experts tell us that it is inevitable that it will happen again. The most famous one happened in 1859, and was known as the Carrington Event. But other than the telegraph, humanity had very little dependence on technology at the time. If another Carrington Event happened today, it would be a complete and utter nightmare. A study by Lloyd’s of London has concluded that it would have taken a $2,600,000,000,000 chunk out of the global economy, and it would take up to a decade to repair the damage. Unfortunately, scientists insist that it is going to happen at some point. The only question is when.
So keep an eye on the sun.
The giant ball of fire that we revolve around has started to behave very erratically, and it has the power to end our way of life at any time.
In fact, scientists tell us that we are about to get hit with a “glancing blow” on April 7th…
A filament of magnetism stretching halfway across the sun erupted during the late hours of April 4th (22:00-23:00 UT). The eruption split the sun’s atmosphere, hurling a CME into space and creating a “canyon of fire,” shown in a movie recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory: The glowing walls of the canyon trace the original channel where the filament was suspended by magnetic forces above the sun’s surface. From end to end, the structure stretches more than 300,000 km–a real Grand Canyon.
Fragments of the exploding filament formed the core of a CME that raced away from the sun at approximately 900 km/s (2 million mph): image. Most of the CME will miss Earth, but not all. The cloud is expected to deliver a a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field could on April 7th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
The event of April 7th is not going to cause us major problems. But someday there will be a solar storm that will.
Personally, I cannot even imagine what life would be like without electricity.
Because we have become so deeply dependent on technology, most of us would have absolutely no idea how to live without it.
An electromagnetic pulse attack would be one of the fastest ways to cripple America and end the dominance of the United States in world affairs. And in this day and age, there are hundreds of millions of people around the planet that would love to see that happen.
So to not take steps to protect our power grid from such an attack is very foolish. But that is precisely what Barack Obama (and presidents before him) have chosen to do. We have technology which would mitigate the damage from an electromagnetic pulse, but rather than spend the money Obama has decided to just hope that it will never happen.
Up to this point, we have been fortunate.
But someday, our luck may run out.
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Nature's law will be obeyed...........winter's comin'
First comment? DAFUQ ?!
I shudder to think of all the Apple FanBoys in their skinny jeans running around looking for somewhere to
charge their iPhones so they can call the power company to report the outage.
Counter party risk is a bitch in this scenario
On a more positive note... you will be able to read a newspaper outside during what used to be night and the "Global Warming" crowd will be celibrating the planet's escape from thermageddon...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110302-solar-flares-sun-...
"In the world I see – you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway."
Heck... we're going to get there soon anyway... EMP or no EMP...
We're not as vulnerable to EMP as you might think. Our transmission system takes 100K joule lightning strikes tens of thousands of times each year and is back in less than a cycle. Most industrial systems are built to withstand nearby lightning strikes. Mind you, lightning still causes billions of dollars in damage each year.
Everybody has been so hyped about security these past 13 years.
OK. Let's get rid of 'the grid'.
EMP? Devastating? You better believe it...
And how much you wanna bet it will be the Obozo-enabled Iranians who eventually do it to us!
All it takes is a boat (surface or just under water) off our coast as a launch platform.
No long-range missile needed - what they already have will do...
Just reach a hundred miles or so inland and reach the proper altitude. And then BOOM!
So simple!
EMP? A much more devastating and simple attack would be to disable EBT long term. Imagine 50 million starving, pissed off, and entitled mother fuckers raping an pillaging. Seriously, taking down EBT systems nationally would create way more chaos than leaving everyone equally in the dark.
Domestic EBT vs EMP: Less Radiation, More MAYHEM!!!!
So whaddya think, a major EMP would be good for a 1,000 point increase on the Dow? That's what I'm thinking.
Zombie apocalypse. The zombies will be all the mush-heads wandering around holding their iphones looking for a charging-station/signal. They will wander until the expire.
Calling William Banzai7
I call out a micro aggressive attack, leaving both left coasts intact in the Graphic associated with this article.
Where cans I still gets my EBT cards refilled, Yo?
Iran? I assume this is yet another example of the hysterical shrieking of the war party that Stockman alluded to?
"...And how much you wanna bet it will be the Obozo-enabled Iranians who eventually do it to us!..."
The Iranians? Do you mean the Iranians with the imaginary useable nuclear weapon in six months for the last fifteen years? I'll take that bet. The Mossad is even on my side - Iran is nowhere near building a useable weapon.
And that imaginary weapon if and when it existed would be a low-yield single-stage fission bomb at best. Sorry, but you need 100 kT or better for a decent, widespread EMP. That would be a multi-stage hydrogen fusion bomb. Iran would be at that point about fifteen or twenty years AFTER they perfected their imaginary single-stage fission weapons.
"...All it takes is a boat (surface or just under water) off our coast as a launch platform..."
Nope. Sorry, but that's not how an EMP nuke works. It needs to be at least 120,000 ft. or so for a state-sized effect and at least 300,000 ft. up for a regional effect like the one shown in the diagram in this article. You need a rocket to get that high. That's for a full-effect, true three wave EMP. It depends on properties of the upper atmospheric layers to produce the full EMP effect. The E3 or MHD wave is the one that penetrates the ground and induces current in buried cables and pipeline. That's the wave that would take out the electrical grid, and it can only be produced by an upper-atmosphere shot.
An EMP from a ship-borne weapon or a ship-launched SCUD would only be single-wave (E1 - the one that fries chips, processors and memory) and the effect is only at the city-level - like tens of miles. It does not need to be nuclear - in fact, that would be a waste of a nuclear weapon. Most people effected would all ready be dead from the blast and radiation, including everyone on the ship. Conventional explosives can be used just fine to create that type of an localized EMP weapon. Since Iran would be destroyed if they tried this, I'm guessing they're not going to try. If it ever did happen, it would be an Israeli ship painted like an Iranian one and we would find pristine Iranian passports, an Iranian flag and Iranian EMP schematics washed up on the shoreline immediately afterwards.
"...Just reach a hundred miles or so inland and reach the proper altitude. And then BOOM!..."
Which would still require a decent-sized sub-orbital nuclear ballistic missile to get that high. The only nations that have a powerful enough nuclear warhead and appropriate missiles are the big six. Iran isn't in the club and will most likely NEVER be in either of our lifetimes.
"...So simple!..."
The big six can pretty much launch them from their own countries since they're intercontinental. Which would result in a retalitory strike by the U.S. before anyone's missiles ever got near U.S. territory. Which means the initial EMP attack would be by a country going full-retard and would necessarily involve a launch of their entire fleet of nuclear missiles because any that were not launched would be destroyed in the U.S. counter-attack. The 'simple' part is that mutually-assured destruction has been an effective deterrent so far.
Yeah but what about the sun? What do you have to say about that?
Well, the neocons, led by Johnie & Lindsay Baby, will want to declare war on the sun and do at least a partial land-based nuke launch to destroy it.
We're overdue now for a once-in-a-century Carrington. If the quadrant of the earth hit by it has nuclear power plants, then everyone in the Northern Hemisphere will have a lot more to piss their pants about then their bricked iPhone.
At last, some one who actually has a clue about what they write. The problem with facts, data, and science is it never wins when it faces 'core beliefs'. The nay-sayers with pan you and they will be the ones believed to be smarter and better informed, while you stand frustrated that the masses can be so damn stupid.
As far as a solar EMP is concerned, the one from 1800 went 3 miles into the earth. No bunker is that deep, so no electronics will survive. The blast was so strong that it blew up the batteries on trains, it burnt telegraph wires in half. We are comforted by facts that are not told to us...nothing to see here...move on. No man made blast could do that, at least from what is know right now.
That Zombie research paper, well may be it has some teeth after all.
To the idiot that said that a solar EMP is no big deal, you are a complete fool. Sure, lightning strikes our power grid everyday but imagine our grid being hit by a thousand years worth of lightning all at once. That is what the power of a solar EMP would be like and yes it would totally and completely destroy everything electrical no matter where it is located. There is no surviving this w/o decending into a zombie apocalypse. The only thing it wouldn't fry would be hand pump wells, shotgun shells, paper books and anything old school in terms of technology.
What, big 6, your smarter than that. Pakistan could laucnh a 3 stage emp attack tomorrow, N. horea assuming they have worked out a warhead sufficiently the next day...
http://fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/missile/td-2.htm
You might want to look up your physics book. Particularly the chapter about electromagnetic fields and self-inductance. A lightning strike has didly squat to do with that...
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I vaguely recall during my EE days looking into the physics of an EMP and thinking, "Huh.. seems overblown. If an electronic device is turned off during a pulse, then no harm to the device." But it's been almost two decades, and I honestly can't speak even semi-intelligently about the subject.
Edumicate and knowledgerize yourself here.
yeah, ok, good one, linking to an article written by "Yousaf M. Butt"
do you have any source references by "Rod W. Longjohnson"? because i find his writings more credible.
Yousaf Butt
I'm sure he's heard plenty of clever comments like yours... back in the sixth grade. My reply was to Excursionist - an intelligent poster that I'll assume is interested in the article's more technical EMP details and isn't distracted in the least by the author's 'funny' name.
getting all defensive and feeling the need to list the guy's official "qualifications"?
well, fuck, some people just can't take a joke :P
That is a very different problem, lightning, in power systems. EMP induces enormous currents over quite a lot longer time spans. Also, go check out the break down voltage of the field oxide in CMOS integrated circuits and get back to me. EMP hits every EMF frequency with energy, and so hits vulblnerable resonant frequencies of nearly any circuit. Poof. Lighting arrestors notwithstanding.
They should remake "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" as "The Boy in the Copper Faraday Cage".
The former Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Woolsey, Jr, lives in a home that is built to survive -off the grid. Near DC, he has solar power ect and says we could lose power for a year, and 90 percent would die. He is planning with that in mind.
At least there's some small comfort in knowing that Woolsey will die a slow, agonizing death from the clouds of radiation released by the dozens of melted-down nuclear reactors just like us little people ON the grid when it goes down. And this doesn't have to be in the U.S. If a dozen European or Russian or Chinese reactors are taken out by an EMP, the entire Northern Hemisphere touched by the jet stream will be subject to radioactive rain washouts for months and months, and you will lose AT LEAST two seasons of crops, livestock and poultry in regions affected by the EMP, and anything that does live will be contaminated.
EMPs - natural or man-made - are a 'beyond design basis event'. Nuclear plants are designed to survive a loss of off-site power, but are not designed to survive a loss of off-site power AND simultaneously have most of the plant's internal electrical system or digital controls destroyed, including the backup generators and switching systems. Of course, with no power, TV, internet or radios post-EMP, you'll have no idea of the catastrophy unfolding a few hundred miles upwind and the government won't bother telling you. You'll have to resort to direct observation of acute radiation exposure to determine if there was a nuclear accident. That means unstoppable nosebleeds, coughing up blood or noticing when clumps of hair start falling off of you and your kids' heads. No need to worry about the exact dose you got - by that point you're toast.
Now that everyone knows the party is going to be at Woolsey's house, he's got to share his beer with everyone.
You might have the place all to yourself. Last time I checked Bob Woolsey lived in Palisades (northwest DC), and he's in no condition to swim the Potomac River to get to a bug out location. In the event of an EMP- even a working car will be no use to people on the wrong side of the bridge chokepoints in DC- because they will be impassable due all the disabled vehicles stalled on them.
Of course he is. The ability to protect yourself from this is so prohibitively expensive that only those who are planning to carry it out can afford to survive it.
Of course they always have their fallback plan of a nuclear war to kill of 7Billion people, but then that leaves so much land uninhabitable and "they" don't get to watch people tearing each other apart.
I do hope that Amurica's ravening, implacable foes take out NY and DC first, like, you know, as a warning.
But we already have the LBGTXYZ boys in the social justice bubble.
Stuck on Zero We're not as vulnerable to EMP as you might think. Our transmission system takes 100K joule lightning strikes tens of thousands of times each year and is back in less than a cycle. Most industrial systems are built to withstand nearby lightning strikes. Mind you, lightning still causes billions of dollars in damage each year.
----
What you miss is that while a transmission system might be able to handle it, your electric and electronic stuff at home won't. Did your GE or whatever product prepare for an EMP? I think not.
Thus your automobile will become dead. Your refrigator, oven, stove, clothes washer and dryer, dish washer, your home lighting, your heating and air conditioning all are dead.
You're actually correct! You knOw that the sat (Thanks to Al Gore and Elon Musk and the USAF and NASA) due to arrive this June at L1 will give us about an hours heads up on incoming, right? We still have a bit of resilience, right? + and a quasi-screensaver ; )
Now could we get back to AGW and The Sixth Mass Extinction please? TIA
sessinpojerkUfuKsays...?
^^^ And this is what the serfs who parrot the proposal of the oligarchs peddaling "EMP protection" snake oil fail to understand. Any solution that does not protect the "last mile" to citizens'/serfs' homes and workplaces merely reinforces the State's control mechanisms while still leaving hundreds of millions to starve in the dark of a zombie apocaplypse.
Back to the Future Part IV! Finally!
On a long enough timeline, the electricity bill for everyone drops to zero.
Only until HMOs mandate life support for eternity.
It's not the EMP that's the problem it s the power station melt down and the nuke auto launch sytem that s the real problem.
90% of Americans only have $20 in their bank account so there's 270 million gone in a week.
So peaceful
I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... www.globe-report.com
Being a Troll is what you do.......
Pity to think that you're going to be unemployed and lose all that dinero if an EMP does strike.
Then you'll really know what changing your life is all about.
The government, the IRS and millions of parasites thank you for your efforts.
Gas stations would be irrelevant, since most modern power plants (cars, generators, stoves) use electronic ignition. Long matches.
Then we have this bit of horseshit....
Not sure which is more frightening. EMP, or the author fucking implying that it is Barry's jawb to save us. Barry cannot even organize a community. Are you fucking shitting me? Any saving by Barry, or whoever comes after, regardless of fucking party, will likely involve a fucking camp. S'mores not included.
The best estimation I've seen (.GOV so tha's something to consider) suggest that car electronics will survive in most cases. If you're driving your engine will stop but you can restart it. I hope those pilots can reset their systems in time. They'll need one of those STAY CALM signs in each cockpit. Who knows but what the study is just another set of statistics from our most 'transparent' government ever.
Still. I am willing to stand corrected. One might consider a car to be a sort of faraday cage. Most of the electrical and electronics would have to be shielded, otherwise your radio would crackle with static, and hum when you hit the accelerator.
That's why your phone gets no signal at all inside your car. Oh, wait. As to shielding and protection of the circuitry, it is designed and tested not to emit too much EMF and to not be affected by other emissions, within reason. An EMP produces field strengths that are quite unreasonable, and at a very wide range of frequencies.
Plus a fast surge that strikes before such things as lightning arrestors can trip.
Any 'saving' by Barry will likely involve a new tax of some kind...
I'm glad the US would never consider testing or using an EMP weapon.
Or a cobalt bomb.
Crap almighty!
Honolulu at night through heavy cloud cover and almost 1,000 miles away from the 1.4 megaton atmospheric explosion. I'd hate to see what a 50 megaton Tsar bomb would look like without welding goggles...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime#/media/File:Starfish_Prime_a...
.
we already really made a problem for ourselves because of nuke testing. how could they not have been more cautious about our planet...
Its easy. They simply figured that by the time any serious consequences showed up they would all be gone, and it would be somebody else's problem.
Really interesting! I found the part about the satellite destruction most fascinating. Did I read that right? 1/3 of the low earth orbit satellites were taken out? How many satellites were there in the 1960s? I'm calling DirectTV to see if they've hardened their satellites against EMP, if I can't watch the Kardashians I'm going to be pissed.
Yeah, wonder what that actually was... pretty neat special effects for the times.
The US Navy has been studying the defensive requirements with respect to EMP for over 30 years. Offensive programs are classified I'm sure.
Not entirely, they use a lot of euphemisms like "Anti-Radar Missiles"
The Sun could fry us in a matter of seconds. Man Made EMP? Not a wide spread, doomsday nuke scenario. The Russians did it in the early 60's to their own people. Not much happened.
A lot of this is doomsday prepper crap. It makes for fun reading. But it ain't gonna happen.
Being incinerated is more likely.
Vacuum tubes shrug off EMP. CMOS computer chips' microscopic transistors and thin field oxides on the other hand get zotted.
A high school friend joined the Air Force, was stationed in UK, ground crew for SR-71s. I recall him telling me back in the early 80's, "Ha - The Russians are so backwards, their ICBMS and aircraft still use TUBES!" Later I came across the info re: tubes & EMP shared above and had to smile. Russian armament design philosophy was remarkably consistent in emphasizing durability. Kind of makes me worry about the new "Armata" MBT, though it looks cool as hell, both visually and specs/concept.
fucking SCUDs only have an operational range of 620 miles at most... the idiots who write this shit need to get read some specs and get out a fucking map...
Just need to get an EMP enhanced nuke well above the atmosphere. Say, off the east coast, from a container ship. A SCUD sized missile ought to do given a compact enough physics package.
Good luck getting a nuclear power plant into a missile...
"can by EMP attack threaten the existence of modernity and be the death knell of Western principles of international law, humanism and freedom,” he said."
I was interested in this article but when I saw the above bullshit line I moved on. Is this about preventing damage to the infrastructure or some political claptrap?
garypaul - the key to that line is the preceding one:
Tempted I was, to post,
Manmade EMP? No. 0.000% Chance.
Solar CME? Yes. 12% chance within the next decade.
Maybe Snake Plisskin will do us all a favor and enter the world code...
Couple questions
1) Many devices and infrastructure have RF shielding....to keep RF noise going out
2) EMP would need to be line of sight, that means outside of the atmosphere....again, some shielding...plus you need an effective delivery mechanism and thats easier said than done
3) How much energy would said EMP need to have to hit everything....quite a bit which would be in essence a nuclear attack
Now the Sun, thats a different story
Karlus, to answer some of your questions:
Humans cannot AT THIS TIME create large EMPs. The largest currently has a range of ten city blocks.
They are line of sight, you are correct.
They require an explosive driver to "pump" the device. The most powerful explosives known to mankind, FAE/Thermobarics, are the wrong sort for this type of device. Which leaves old fashioned HE.
Getting a device into orbit would be useless, as the range of the device would be very small.
Smaller devices use capacitors, and have even more limited range.
That's physics.
Carrington Event/CME...VERY bad news. Depending on how bad the storm is (X-40 class or greater), it could have Earth-shattering consequences. A Z-class...well, good night Irene.
fear porn
Seems like a good excuse for the banksters to get out of their obligations. "You don't have a paper bank statement? Sorry, Kim wiped out our records."
Those mortgage records all gone? Darn!
Bingo
"All it would take for a rogue nation or terror organization to bring us to our knees"
ffs ~ STOPPED. READING. THERE.
Exactly:
"ISIS terrorists have been shown in these SOHO images to have set up bases on the Sun. It is believed they will try to cause a Coronal Mass Ejection to bring down the power grid!"
A part of me would not be surprised to see this on the "news." And another part would not be surprised if a large number of the ignorati believed it.
Reading that was 5 minutes of my life I wish I could have back.
You read Snyder sloooo....
Does this mean no moar Kardashians? When do we get this party started?
OMG!!! Booga booga!
Thank god I live outside the red arcs of doom.
Keep one of these puppy's in your Faraday cage as backup.
Practical Guide to Free-Energy Devices
http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/PJKBook.html
EMP = Lehman? Couldn't possibly be that bad right?
Cramer said EMP is well capitalized.......oh....wait....
Fully-capitalized?
Definitely clear the deck of some useless eaters....
I bet the NSA is shielded. Of course, with the 99.9% knocked off the grid, who would they be spying on afterwards? That is .gov level genius right there.
I'm surprised that Hillary didn't claim a Russian emp took out her server.
Would you settle for...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-07/russian-government-hacked-white...
During the cold war, I remember the notion of Continuity of Government. What good is government when there is nobody left to govern? Of course we now know that it is all about continuity of life for a tiny oligarchy....the "best" from among us.
When they get through with me , they'll come for you.
No doubt they will eat their own, for lack of anything better to do with their skill set.
Only a natural event can "knock us back to the 1800s". An EMP attack by any human action will not be an isolated event.
God would NEVER allow that to happen to this chaised, godly Nation. Puulleeeze.
"There would be no banking."
I thought you were pointing out bad things.
Fonestar will be peddling AbacusCoins, invading carrier pigeon based ZH bulletin board along with his buddy MillionTallySticks.
For your inner geek - http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/emp-radiation-from-nuclear-space.h...
Fuck
That was an awesome concert!!! I saw EMP back in the 1970s when they ... oh, wait. My bad it was ELO that I saw. Nevermind.
I would beg for an EMP, asteroid, terrorist attack or heart attack if I was forced to attend an ELO concert. I concede that I am a bit younger, but that spacey-ass music was never agreeable to me.
You're an evil woman. Eeeeeeeeeevil woman.
You ring?
Jeff Lynne -- the main man behind ELO has a lot of other impressive credits to his name. He merits some respect.
The fact that he has never once removed his sunglasses in the last 40 years or so, does make him seem a little, uh, spacey-ass as you put it.
You sure it wasn't ELP?
What really freaks me out is that in 5 billion years the Sun will go Red Giant and engulf the Earth.
Red giant first.
Various religions say the world will end in fire, and on a long enough timeline they're right.
Earth has already been engulfed by the Red Shield... Red Giant would be welcome at this point...
Another warmongering article focusing on Iran which seems to be the trend these days. There is no evidence that Iran has nuclear weapons and it is clear that the US, UK, France and Israel have nuclear weapons and the capability to induce massive EMP damage to Iran. But, of course, the West would never dream of such an attack despite constantly threatening to attack Iran.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
The Norks and Pakis do though, and ballistic missiles too.
Someday the government will shut off the power and watch us kill one another off from a distance. 12 months later they will send in a mop up crew with charts and diagrams and hungry man tv dinners to explain how an 'EMP' took away our remaining rights......
In other news, a giant meteor could wipe us out, yellowstone going off would kill millions, and the 'big one' in California would cause huge damage if it happens.
And guess what.... if you waste your time fapping to fear porn, you'll never really go out and enjoy the world as it was before a cataclysmic event. That in itself is a tragedy.
Pretty picture. You seem familiar. ;-D
I'd pick a solar EMP over a nuclear one any day.
Indeed
So this is the Fed's plan for when the proles stop using credit.
Yiiippppppeeeeeee. I'll know how to teach young woman to be virtuous.
Dude bad graphic. Bomb covered the area where nobody cares about the people that live there.
I'm sure the fly-over states would be the primary targets of any emp attack. For sure.
EMP's are real, Russia has very advanced EMP nukes, and they would be exploding over the eastern seaboard with a 1 minute transit time from an impossible to detect submarine sitting on the ocean floor 40 miles off the coast of virginia... all playing cards right now, making jokes about Obama in Russian while waiting for the launch order.
The Russians don't take a shit without a plan. /Fred Thompson admiral character voice.
does that mean no pr0n? Or only local red light districts i guess. wait, no food either? wtf...
Don't forget the toilets.
And just think, no Zero Hedge...
And Nobody For President. Or Vice President. Or House of Reps. Or Senate. Or even a Wall Street banker.
I could walk down the road and hang out with the ZH servers, but without the comments it would be kind of pointless.
We are so dead meat!
And there you have it folks. The scene has been set for the next false flag attack. The elites can pull the plug on Wall Street any time they like now, and vanish with all the gold... leaving Americans behind to deal with the $780 quinfuckingtillion of debt that they own Rotschild. Now the only questions are 'when', and 'who to blame it on'.
Why we'd all have to learn how to do something useful. And, for all the fearmongering, my safe deposit box will work fine, as will my cistern.. I don't think the deer or the tomatoes give a fuck about an EMP. We might have to entertain one another, as absurd as that sounds. No more tinder-flicking, facebooking, netflixing.. the horror.. the horror..
The off grid inverter for the solar system is safely in the metal trash can so I'll have enough lights to attract every starving EBT zombie for miles.
Heard William Colby made Privatization of Military a Priority and lead to Lobbying efforts for like 50 years. Which fits with what we know that Elites like the Dulles Brothers were behind the CIA from like the 1930s.
You privatize most of your military Posts, Airbases, Naval Bases it is just an other loss of Labor Skills, Infrastructure, Organic Facilities, etc.
Used to be in Vietnam Era that you had power plants, steam heating, water supplies, Civil Engineers, Pole Climbers, and fleets of workers that could help in Emergencies.
Now of course we pay 3 Times as much for the Service of Workers on Contracts and Tax payers probably chip in on Contractor Facilities, Upgrade of Equipment, Capital Equipment, or loan/lease government provided facilities and Infrastructure in Public-Private partnerships.
- National Stock Piles
- National Capabilities for Refining Oil, Gas, and Chemicals
- Water Sources
- Energy Sources
- Commodities to off set Shocks in Futures Markets
- Metal Stock Piles, Rare Earth, Minerals, Precious Metals
- Gold & Silver Reserves
Edit:
I'll go further. People like Dick Cheney are Raping the Nation with Privatization. Thousands of ZH Posters know that the USA Military was Privatized, but they don't know this includes Merchant Marine, Chartered Airlines, Express Air Shipping Services (why they want the US Postal Service), Logistics Computer Systems, Logistics Civil Services, Logistics Fast Food, Entertainment for Troops, Shopping, Commissary, Energy, Communications, Spying Services (thanks AT&T), computer servers, computer information management systems, computer analysis by think tanks, military services, mercenaries, etc.
Get a clue. The federal Government is half privatized at this point and they can hide the number of employee and fire wall their secrets by using private corporations. This is Fascism. Everything is secret, our history is secret, and our media is owned by some agents of the federal government.
But Fascism is good. fascism is Peace. War is Good. War is peace. taxes are good. taxes are peace. Zaibatsus are great.
Or, maybe, Dancing with the Stars will continue to grace our 60" plama TV's and we'll continue on with our happy, healthy lives. Good grief, the doom porn is getting all over my shoes in here.
Faraday cage.
over the entire country! take that russia and other rogue states.
But what if the canary in the Faraday cage is dead?
Cool. Then we could stop worrying about the market, debt and value of fiat currency.
If you think about it, any country dumb enough (and there are many) to employ an EMP attack has essentially sealed their own fate as well. Once the power goes off to infrastructure like a nuclear power plant, it is just a matter of time before it reaches a crticality and goes Fukushima. There would be dozens of power plants failing in short order, creating an uninhabitable Northern Hemisphere.
That's okay, they'll just fire up the back-up generators like they did at Fukushima, because that worked so well.
It's time for a shit storm against crazy civilization.
I am pretty sure I would really, really like lving in the 18th century.
Electricty and the modren society is vastly overrated.
The population density was a hundred times lower then, and most people were hardy dirt farmers. A whole lotta dyin' between 330 million and 4 or 5 or whatever it was.
EMP = Extra Money Printing
Good to have one of those old vacuum tube radios around. (Valve radios in the Old World).
A kinder, gentler noo-kyoo-ler war.
Untill all the power plants start going Fukushima.
This article reminds me of all the fearmongering ahead of Y2K. People feared computer systems would malfunction across the globe, causing mass mayhem and disaster. Nothing happened. Can we live without electricity? Certainly. 90% dead? I sincerely doubt it. Have we devolved so into a nation of weaklings?
abe, you have no clue. Read the book One Second After. 80-90% dead in 12 months is quite accurate. No medicine, no cars, no heat, no food and most importantly no fresh water. I'm prepared, but I'll bet you're not. I moved to a mini farm that can be self sufficient if the need arises. Plenty of fresh water, food, wood and many guns to protect it.
EMP/solar flare ain't no Y2K bullshit. Our grid is fragile and is based on inter connectivity for power sharing. Congress found that the grid backbone has few replacement parts to use for repair if more than one system fails. It could take several years to bring it back on line. In the worst case scenario of all 3 grids being damaged they will probably never get it back online. Again, the replacement parts are in short supply and several major components would have to be built from scratch. That won't happen in time. Stay healthy and be ready.
Our electric grid supplies us with electricity. It's rather old and antiquated. It also makes an awesome antenna: wires strung for thousands of miles, all interconnected, ready to receive that electromagnetic radiation. They said that event in the 1800's made the telegraph wires glow orange, that's how hot they got. I don't think they'll fix the grid anytime soon if it gets hit, that's for sure. We don't even have the capacity to build large generators in the US anymore. Bad it will be if it happens.