chaparral wrote:
eb wrote:
chaparral wrote:
eb wrote:
chaparral wrote:
No, the EMP threat is just silly.
Read up a little bit (start with Starfish Prime), and get back to us.
Recall that Starfish Prime was in the early 1960s when our electronic infrastructure was minimal compared to now. And yet streetlights were knocked out 900 miles away.
I have, I know about starfish prime. Can you tell me what percentage of street lights were knocked out? Or do you just know that street lights were knocked out? Do you know how difficult it was to get them back on? There is detail far beyond the simple fact and that detail is critical to understanding the danger.
This may shock you, but the more you read into it, the less concerning it is. Seriously, if you gave me the choice between a high altitude detonation to maximize EMP effect and a detonation targeting a large population center, I would take the high altitude all day long. And that goes for anyone launching a nuke, I can only hope us dismissing this threat makes some adversary think it is a better idea than hitting a city. Plus optimizing the blast for the greatest effect is difficult and requires a precise knowledge of what the atmosphere is doing at that time and very big device. If they want to waste a bunch of material making a huge warhead to detonate high up, that is much better than them using that same material to build a couple smaller warheads to hit cities.
Look, if you want to take issue with "90 percent of population will die", I'm with you. If you want to take issue with the EMP commission report (
https://apps.dtic.mil/...ltext/u2/1051492.pdf), I'm with you. That report seems alarmist and speculative.
But when you say "the EMP threat is just silly", I think you're taking it a little too far.
Starfish Prime (and the Soviet tests in that era) clearly showed that even distant nuclear detonations can damage electrical infrastructure. Yeah, it was relatively easy to get a few 1960s streetlights working again in Hawaii. Remember, it's Hawaii: small power grid, relatively short conductors. At that time, few transistors, and no ICs to speak of. The 1962 incident had peak fields of maybe 6 kV/m in Hawaii - modern weapons would reach 90-100 kV/m, perhaps more for the secret EMP weapons that several countries probably have.
How do you think modern infrastructure will fare if subjected to a targeted EMP attack? Not just the power grid which is obviously vulnerable; I'll assume you know about the 1989 Quebec outages. What about traffic control systems? What about SCADA systems on oil and gas pipelines? Almost none of this infrastructure is hardened.
Also, your argument about a EMP attack versus attacking a city is a false equivalence. There is no reason an adversary couldn't do both, or combine EMP with other tactics.
Finally, I can tell you that DoD takes EMP takes very seriously. My work has taken me to several facilities which have significant hardening. I'd like to know how many tons of copper are in some of these walls and ceilings - from what little I've seen it's a hell of a lot.
You have totally avoided why someone would use a nuclear warhead for EMP effect and not attack a city. You then say, well a country can do both, but then why would we care about hardening our power grid against EMPs? Good thing we saved the power grid from EMP, because the cities are a smoldering ruin and most of our power lines were knocked down by blast waves, but the power grid would have survived anyway!
This is the central argument, why would an adversary using a nuclear war head for an EMP attack, instead of attacking a city? It is just so much more effective to hit a city.
The military is different, they are making it so their systems could survive a nuclear attack, so they could continue to fight. This prevents an adversary from using an EMP to knock out the US militaries ability to respond to an attack. But that is different from some fear of the civilian infrastructure. I mean it is the same reason that we don't build our cities underground, but the military will put important control systems in bunkers. Just because the military does something, does not mean it makes sense for the civilian world to do the same.
Avoided it? I brought it up! EMP is a largely independent tactical option. As such, we should be prepared to defend against it, and we should be prepared to employ it. There are many possible scenarios where some world leader or terrorist may choose to deploy an EMP device rather than directly attack a city or military facility.
You say "It is just so much more effective to hit a city." Well, that totally depends on what your goals are, doesn't it?
Deploy a worst-case EMP and you might disable an economy at continental scale for months to years. Deploy that same ICBM with a different warhead on a populous city, and a few millions die and the rest of the world ticks on.
Think of it as analogous to a neutron bomb - yes, it's a nuclear weapon, but the EMP and the neutron bomb have different uses (and consequences) than a thermonuclear warhead on an ICBM.
Maybe you don't remember the days when folks were building fallout shelters in their backyards, and those black and yellow signs were on many streetcorners. The reason we don't build cities underground because it's too damned expensive. And the level of hardening at missile defense facilities would not be needed or appropriate for all but the most critical civilian infrastructure. We harden many civilian facilities against the possibility of terrorist attacks (think about all those TSA agents), but somehow we haven't hardened our power grid and pipeline system very well.
Why is that? I think it's because of a number of factors. Much of the vulnerable infrastructure is privately owned, and private industry doesn't see such investments as an appropriate return on investment. Government? Multiple federal agencies have more or less knowledge and jurisdiction (DOD, DOE, DOT, DHS), and they don't coordinate effectively. So the result is one "action plan" after another, acknowledging vulnerability and proposing ameliorative measures. But like most sweeping "action plans", not much gets done.
Here, for example, is DOE's latest resilience plan for the US power grid:
https://www.energy.gov/...20January%202017.pdf It's full of words like "share", "cooperate", and "promote". But hey, at least they recognize the problem (and I'm sure most of the details would be classified or proprietary).