There is a small industry around a bizarre idea. Nuclear weapons are known to emit a powerful electromagnetic pulse when they explode. So grifters, cheap novel-writers, and proponents of moar defense spending push the idea that a random bad actor would detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude over the United States and WIPE OUT ALL OUR ELECTRONICS!
This is a dumb idea, for many reasons. I have debunked it many times. The group referred to as “Nuclear Twitter” regularly mocks it.
Kelsey Atherton, a New Mexico friend, has written what should be the last word on EMP. The title says it all:
Electromagnetic Pulses Are the Last Thing You Need to Worry About in a Nuclear Explosion
But if you’d like more detail, Kelsey has it for you.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
trollhattan
Gingrich has a sad.
Baud
This is considered a bad thing, right?
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: It is a way overblown thing. That’s what Kelsey’s article is about.
DAVID ANDERSON
@trollhattan: grifter, lazy and bad novelist and advocate for most defense funding… I think you found the archetype
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Favorite New Clear movies (non documentaries):
Fail Safe (Henry Fonda)
Fail Safe (George Clooney)
Day One
Dr. Strangelove
By Dawn’s Early Light
Hiroshima
War Games
Missiles of October
Ken
So what defense does the EMP crowd propose? The options would seem to be
Or is the answer, as usual, “more funding for my vaguely-specified defense program”?
dmsilev
@trollhattan: Best me to it. Best evidence that EMP isn’t ohmigod horrifying is that Gingrich has spent the last umpteen years arguing that it is.
RepubAnon
I could see Russia or China using an EMP weapon in conjunction with a major conflict. One needs both orbital capability and a massive follow-up plan to make it worth the risk.
However, one could get the same result with less risk of starting a nuclear war – via malware. Why use EMP if you can use a computer virus?
Yutsano
@DAVID ANDERSON: I have a few other tasty pejoratives for Newton Leroy but they don’t really fit here. Bad historian fits here though.
Baud
Faraday Cages 4 All.
Brachiator
What if you combine this with 5G?
More seriously, I didn’t realize the extent to which this was a thing floating around.
But I got it now. I guess the fantasy is that a sneaky first strike would render the US helpless and unable to respond. So, in nutcase land, is this used to rationalize the US striking first?
I guess also this kind of thing feeds the fantasy that there is a type of nuclear attack in which Americans would survive, and be able to fight back Red Dawn style, with all their Certified Second Amendment patriotic guns and rifles.
Thanks for all this, Cheryl.
Cermet
A direct hit by a extra powerful solar storm would make a EMF nuke look like a firecracker; that is the monster that they should prepare for not the ridiculous EMF boggyman
MarkPainter
I remember back in the 1980s, when Reagan had the Third Red Scare going and videocassettes were the must-have entertainment technology, someone wrote into an electronics magazine I was reading at the time to ask whether in the event of a nuclear exchange, the EMPs would erase his videotapes.
And yes, the magazine quite properly answered by telling him that in the event of a nuclear exchange, he would have more important things to worry about.
Also and relatedly: I am so old.
lgerard
@trollhattan:
That was my first thought as well.
Another avenue for grifting shut down.
Doug R
One civilian use for EMPs would be police forces using it to stop a speeding vehicle without the need for a dangerous chase. Of course Batman’s done it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMNUsM_nsec
Cheryl Rofer
@Brachiator:
I haven’t seen that so much as a reaction of general despair or the desire for more money, usually for missile defense.
I think this is more the motivator. ALL THOSE PREPPERS ARE RIGHT!
Leto
@Ken:
That’s the thing. We, the military, already have hardened communications, as well as anti-scintillation technology for our RF comms. Even though both of those things are kind of useless because when your comm site has a new resting temp of greater than 27 million degrees Farenheit, well… you know… I mean this is where the Navy pulls ahead with their submersible force but even then there’s only so much you can do. And then as stated above, why do all that when you can just launch a computer virus attack that will be just as destructive but without all the lethal radiation? These people are nutters.
RepubAnon
@MarkPainter: But what about my 8-track tapes? And my reel-to-reel recordings?
Youngster!
?
Leto
@Cheryl Rofer: WOLVERINES!!!! (The 80s version, not the horrible reboot.)
The Pale Scot
@Baud:
I know, get rid of cellphones and video screens, I might be able to go back to setting type. I enjoyed that job
Baud
Joy seems more relaxed tonight. Kamala is on.
The Pale Scot
One Second After
It’s a lot like the Emberverse series, without the spacebats
Baud
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Very zen or did the EMP get you?
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: First night she had Joe, second night she has Kamala? Hmm. :)
I’ve noticed that Kamala is using her social media feeds to heavily promote Biden events and proposals. I’m sure that other senators and leaders are doing similar, but it’s really nice to see how tightly she’s coordinating with his campaign. Good on her.
Another Scott
Protection of electronics from radiation is still a big issue in many cases, even without EMP. And there are natural things (solar flares, etc.) that can do a number on electrical things as well. Of course, people being clever, there are always people trying to come up with non-nuclear EMP-type weapons.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0307_CISA_EMP-Protection-Resilience-Guidelines.pdf (133 page .pdf) is a summary of DHS’s anti-EMP (and related phenomena) efforts. Some of it is obvious (grounding equipment), but it goes beyond that too.
But, yeah, adversaries aren’t just going to explode a bomb in the atmosphere – if it comes to that.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Not to mention, protection of humans from radiation once they get away from near-Earth…”)
Frankensteinbeck
I put an EMP bomb in one of my Supervillain books just so I could have someone explain it’s an irreplaceable mad science weapon and regular science cannot build one. EMP bombs are one of those things you have to lampshade in super power fiction, like clones.
Tony Jay
So when the Russians forced 1980s America into The Transition by detonating nukes in the atmosphere, all the stuff about installing Sam Neill as KGB chief of the Midwest, sentencing Kris Kristopherson to 10 years in a Texas gulag and grooming Robert Ulrich to be President of the breakaway Republic of Heartland was even more fictional than it appeared?
Does Trump know?
Omnes Omnibus
No. Now stop with the stupid questions.
MisterForkbeard
@Frankensteinbeck: Hey, dumb question: I stopped reading these books after I got through the 4th one, because honestly the ending depressed me at a time when I didn’t need additional complications happening.
I’d like to finish out the series. Please tell me the 5th one has a happy ending. Or at least a non-depressing one. :)
(Also: My wife loves your books too. Keep it up!)
Omnes Omnibus
@Frankensteinbeck: @MisterForkbeard: I think this might be one of those lie to him if necessary situations.
Citizen Alan
@Leto: Actually, the reboot is kind of brilliant if you pretend it’s actually a satire about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Which was plainly not what the filmmakers intended but it certainly works as such.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
As I recall, a civilian-generated EMP (in a van full of hackers) featured as a plot device in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.
EMP has been seriously studied. There is an EMP generated by nuclear bursts, so having EMP-hardened electronics is important if the warhead doesn’t actually land on you and you’re supposed to survive with your electronics intact so you can blow up something after everybody else on earth is dead.
But yeah, it’s basically just one of the side effects of a nuclear attack where there are other things to worry about.
Tony Jay
@The Pale Scot:
Given the main hook of the Emberverse setting is that we’re restricted to swords, bows and only technology that operates on muscle power, that must gave been one hell of a Magical EMP Bomb.
Redshift
@Leto:
I’m no expert, but I think a computer virus attack that will wipe out all of your enemy’s electronics is only slightly more plausible than an EMP attack. In that it’s at least theoretically possible, but the chances of conditions being right for it to work are rather slim.
chopper
yeah, the EMP stuff’s only redeeming quality was that it made an okay background event for some post-apocalyptic fiction. otherwise it’s just stupid. i mean, yeah, it could possibly be done, but there are much bigger actual risks. the fact that a bunch of RW nuts glommed on to the “OMG EMP IS COMING” train just shows how idiotic the whole premise has become.
Ken
One of the Clooney Oceans N movies had an EMP device. They used it to knock out a casino security system. They also knocked out all power in Las Vegas, so (as many others have pointed out) killed a bunch of people in hospitals, nursing homes, airplanes, and so forth.
Tony Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s not something I can commit to at such short notice.
Ken
@Redshift: One concern is computer virus attacks against the infrastructure. Shutting down the power grid would have much the same effect claimed for EMP. It also has the advantage that you can turn everything back on after conquering the decadent Americans.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony Jay: Pro Tip: If you put “asking for a friend” after the question, it makes you look smart and helpful. At least that’s what my friend told me.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
People who I know and trust say we’re actually better prepared for EMP now than we used to be because we’re more likely to harden electronics for non-EMP reasons. As I understand it, engineers today are more likely to shield things from electromagnetic interference from stuff like solar flares and ubiquitous use of radio for short-range communication, and that incidentally makes it less susceptible to EMP.
Geoboy
@Yutsano: If you’re looking for reasons to dislike Gingrich, you shoudl never leave off the list “Told his first wife he was sending her to Dumpsville while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery.” Class act, that Newt! When we were in the Atlanta metro area we lived in his district and I still remember celebration we had we he got sent to Congressional Dumpsville when it was revealed that he was cheating on Wife #2 while trying to get Clinton impeached fr rlying about a blow job. Come on, karma! We’ve got a ton of work for you to do on his “spiritual” (you’ll forgive the word) descendants.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geoboy: Jesus Christ, he waited until after the surgery. What more can you ask of the man?
Redshift
I blame “The Day After” for launching the EMP craze, though I may just not be aware of earlier causes. I remember after it aired, people talked about the scene where all the cars stopped working, asking “what was that? is that real?”
Original Lee
@Cermet: Yup. Well, except it probably won’t wipe out all consumer electronics, just the big transmission grids.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
They have actually made short range non-nuclear EMP devices. Most of them still require explosives to work; they’re the only thing that can provide the kind of concentrated power you need to generate even a small EMP.
Tony Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
So step one is get a friend? What am I, goddam Hercules here with all the labours? Sheesh. They told me this gig would be easy.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Loved Fonda Fail-Safe, fantastic tension and a great cast.
By Dawn’s Early Light was good too, and based on a book I adored.
Don
Way back when, in the days of core memory and the earliest memory chips, there were isolated instances of the dreaded “cosmic ray damage” to the memory. So there became ECC, for Error Correcting Code, chips, which added unnecessary hardware and software to take advantage of these features.
At least I seem to recall those days. But I also recall the normal grad student BS session over adult beverages that covered these, and similar, topics. We concluded, just before heading home to put our children into the bath, that this could not be a problem that mattered.
EMP seems to be of the same magnitude. Amiwrong?
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony Jay: See, that’s where you are putting in too much effort. Just fake it like the rest of us.
dmsilev
@Don: ECC memory is still around. It’s mostly a feature in servers of various sorts, not your typical laptop. Memory cells have gotten a lot smaller, so it doesn’t take much to flip a bit by accident.
Some of the instrumentation I work with is susceptible to cosmic rays; not unusual to see a few hits per hour. That’s for something designed to be ridiculously twitchy-sensitive to light, though.
Roger Moore
@MisterForkbeard:
Yes, it has a reasonably happy ending. It’s not perfect, everything turns out exactly as the protagonist would want it ending, but it’s a satisfying ending that doesn’t leave you in the bleak place the 4th book left you in.
Ken
@Don: I suspect it’s similar to the odds of dying from a meteor strike, which are surprisingly high. That’s because the main contribution isn’t from you personally being hit by a ten kilogram rock. It’s from the planet getting hit by a ten kilometer rock, killing pretty much everyone.
Likewise for memory bits, the odds of one flipping because of a lucky cosmic ray are probably swamped by the odds of all of them frying at once because the Sun lobbed a plasma ball in our direction.
Another Scott
@Don: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
It’s a thing, and it becomes more of an issue as electronics gets smaller and more closely packed together.
But, compared to COVID-19, it’s not worth much worry.
Cheers,
Scott.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I have noted a plethora of post-apocalyptic EMP kindle stories flooding my Facebook Amazon offerings. When I go to the links, they’re about 300 pages long, and reviewers compliant they’re poorly written, unedited and generally stupid. I note with some disdain that they’re written from heroic right wing heartland perspectives.
My theory is that in a resource depleted world, you do better in the cities, turning arable lots into easily tilled and secured gardens, chicken and pig habitats. The ruralities starve of a dearth of human labor without the constant input of energy for machines.
MomSense
On the list of things to care about right now, EMP isn’t on it.
jlowe
I went down this rabbit hole, dang it. Read Kelsey’s FP paper which was pretty good (I first encountered his writing from reading Grand Blog Tarkin). Of course, his assumption that a massive intelligence failure would be a prerequisite is a chilling thought under our current circumstances. Despite the low-risk nature, EMP seems to be a lively topic these days.
trollhattan
@Baud:
“How’s the weather there?”
“It’s a Faraday?”
Brachiator
@Ken:
In a movie, only bad guys and those necessary to move the plot along are affected by an EMP. This is an actual real world limitation of EMP. It was tested on a sound state in Culver City in the 1970s. The only collateral damage was a walkie-talkie used by a second unit director.
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Where you gonna get the pigs and chickens?
trollhattan
@Ken:
I much prefer the electromagnet van in Breaking Bad, to wipe out the laptop’s file storage.
dmsilev
@Brachiator: Meat aisle in the supermarket of course. Just season with some resublimated thiotimoline and you’re good to go.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I find the wild rumors about solar flares almost as bad or worse than EMPs. For years there has been kicking around the internet the idea that a really big solar flare event would “knock us back to the stone age”. Not only knock out all the electrical grids but somehow prevent us from turning them back on again. FOREVER!!!! (Dun-dun-DUNN!)
Ken
@Brachiator: “Pigs” and “chickens” are code. He means “Eloi”.
Frankensteinbeck
@MisterForkbeard:
It ends with Penny laughing! The end of book four and the very beginning of five are deliberately the darkest moments of the series. There’s some emotional rough moments in five, but there’s also Gerty Goat, and… yeah. It ends with Penny laughing.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
OK, this is pretty funny. Thanks! ;-)
West of the Rockies
EMP is still a white-hot topic… On Coast to Coast AM radio among the conspiracy theory crowd. That and those damn lizard men in the halls of power.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Twitter is finally going to quell the QAnon idiots.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1285726277719199746?s=19
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Brachiator:
Exurbs and suburbs are full of ‘em.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
“We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks.”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
No longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in Trends and recommendations
Work to ensure we’re not highlighting this activity in search and conversations
Block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter
Subsole
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
If you want something exceedingly grim, look up “When the Wind Blows”. Animated movie, rather British.
I would seriously caution against if you are at all depressive. But very good.
Subsole
@Tony Jay:
I vaguely remember that show. The part about us losing our country because we hated each other – and mostly just shrugging our shoulders and accepting it – was a little painful, post-11/16.
Subsole
@Tony Jay:
I vaguely remember that show. The part about us losing our country because we hated each other – and mostly just shrugging our shoulders and accepting it – was a little painful, post-11/16.
@Omnes Omnibus: Which books??
Villago Delenda Est
This is for Dorothy Windsor and Elizabelle!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
When this shit is over, the former Confederate states should consider themselves lucky if they get to retain their names and don’t have their borders redrawn.
They deserve it.
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5f1741ffc5b6cac5b732d8b8/amp?__twitter_impression=true
Subsole
@Tony Jay:
And you believed them?
Well. I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson today, haven’t we.
Also, really like the ‘nym. Man did some killer work.
Subsole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Hell, cities could live off rats roaches and pigeons for a good while before they even start thinking about
cannibalismgardening. I said gardening.Doug R
@Citizen Alan: I thought the rebooted Battlestar Galactica was a satire of the Iraq occupation.
Ruckus
@MarkPainter:
Well no one but an idiot is going to believe in EMP warfare.
Fucking oops, I see the issue at the current time….
But a nuke would destroy his video cassettes, either melt them or blow them into shreds, either way, unusable. Of course he wouldn’t be there to watch them in any event…..
Subsole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
“Ah, a smoldering pile of ash that might once have been a barn door. Here, let me just sweep it into a vaguely closed position.”
Kay
Every single political reporter is gushing because Donald Trump told people to wear a mask.
The bar for “Presidential” is now sub-floor. Literally anyone can clear it.
Roger Moore
@Subsole:
Frankensteinbeck’s Please Don’t Tell My Parents… series.
Jay Noble
School year ’77-’78 I was an exchange student to Finland. One of the things I got asked about most was the Neutron Bomb. Kill the people with little to no damage to infrastructure, let the radiation die down and ouila move your people into perfectly good cities and towns. Being Finland, they were understandably concerned and felt they were likely to get better info/insight from a nerdy US high schooler than their neighbor.
Since that time, I’ve been fascinated with the “poof! no humans but they left all their stuff laying around” concept.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Villago Delenda Est: Love it! LOL. That’s a blast from the past.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Subsole: Well, if you like post-nuke war tales, Threads, a BBC movie from Mick Jackson, is a must-see.
Kay
Dan B
@Brachiator: Chickens, across the street. Ducks and geese, two doors south. At least in our neighborhood.
And I’d hazard a guess that 5 miles south there are pigs but we know for sure there is a cow that grazes by the street just four miles due south. It’s a double take experience to come over the hill.
dmsilev
FTNYT: Trump’s Request of an Ambassador: Get the British Open for Me
Mike in DC
https://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
You can build and use non-nuclear EMP devices, but they affect a much smaller area. Presumably, though, if one were trying to launch a covert assault of an airport or something, this might be an option. But nothing like a massive blast wiping out large swathes of our grid.
Roger Moore
@Jay Noble:
The thing is, that was never what the neutron bomb was intended to do. The neutron bomb was a reaction to the discovery that nuclear bombs are surprisingly ineffective at killing well dug-in troops. The neutron bomb was designed to be better at killing them than ordinary nukes of the same size, but it still would have destroyed all the buildings and other civilian infrastructure. The claim it would kill people while leaving infrastructure intact was Soviet propaganda targeting people’s fear that capitalists cared more about stuff than people.
Subsole
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I have heard good stuff about that, not seen it yet. Thanks.
Patricia Kayden
Subsole
@Roger Moore:
Danke, kamerad.
Miss Bianca
What? You mean that almost the entire premise for James Cameron’s Dark Angel is *gasp* – ludicrous?
Next you’ll be telling me that the military *isn’t* developing a race of MasterKid Super Soldiers!
Me, whatever. DA is still one of my guilty pleasures.
piratedan
@dmsilev: what a strange request from a President that has supposedly divested himself of all of his business interests….
Villago Delenda Est
@Miss Bianca: Next up, Bruce Banner tells Rhodey and Scott Lang that Back to the Future is bullshit.
Matt
And here I thought Goldeneye was a documentary.
MJ
They are going to use the EMP on Shavuot/Pentecost 2024 in President Trump’s seventh year in office.
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
I remember Asimov’s story about resublimated thiotimoline. He was working on his doctorate when he wrote The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline. It was published right before he went up before the firing squad. Who finished up her questions with: “And now, Mr Asimov, could you tell us something about the properties of resublimated thiotimoline?”
Kay
@dmsilev:
Mary Trump is right. The saddest part isn’t Trump. It’s all the people who go along with him. Thousands. So few stood up to him you can count them on two hands.
NotMax
Atmospheric detonation is so 1950s.
Orbital detonation for deadening satellites is where it’s at.
debbie
@Kay:
O/T, but is it possible to recall a bailout?
Just One More Canuck
@Matt: no, but Idiocracy was
Amir Khalid
Off topic:
When I fired up my Win10 laptop for the morning, it suffered some kind of memory glitch that made take forever to get going and then it failed to start Firefox. Two attempts to restart did not work. I let it sit a while, then it restarted fine on the third attempt. Should I worry?
Kay
I’m really thrilled about this. It’s a huge anxiety producing problem for millions of parents and lower income kids will be the hardest hit.
MUCH tougher with Covid, too, because the new rule around here is a fever of 100 or higher and kids are barred from daycare for 24 hours or until the fever goes back under 100. Healthy kids often have slightly higher temps, for all kinds of reasons. I’m glad they’re checking for Covid but these parents are not going to be able to go to work. Just the stress they’re feeling is incredible.
Republicans won’t do anything. This is an area where Democrats can show a real, practical contrast.
Elizabelle
I guess this is an open thread? Headline writers at the NY Daily News have done it again.
You’re welcome.
Kay
@debbie:
I don’t know but I was with fancy-lawyer people after work today and this was ALL they talked about. They think there will be arrests of former First Energy execs. I personally do not believe that because I’ve grown incredibly cynical, but they do.
Elizabelle
@Villago Delenda Est: Love it! Thank you! Always a good day for the Beatles.
debbie
@Kay:
How could they not be arrested for this?!?
BruceFromOhio
Yeah but Jessica Alba TOTALLY KICKED ASS, and had a real cool motorcycle that still worked!
frosty
@Amir Khalid: I dunno about worrying but I’d definitely be backing up everything important right now.
I had a crash about 2 weeks ago where Win10’s restart, safe mode, and other recovery options did nothing. The HP recovery software let me do a backup but that was it. I had to wipe it and start over.
Kay
@debbie:
Beats me. I’m still trying to figure out what happened.
Generation Now were the incredibly aggressive fake activists who harassed and targeted opponents, and almost everyone was an “opponent”. Every good government group opposed the deal. It stunk to high heaven.
Just please DEAR GOD don’t accept a plea deal and bury it. They NEED to go to trial. We’ll never find out what happened unless they take it to trial.
Origuy
@Amir Khalid: Click the Start button and choose Event Viewer from the Windows Administrative Tools group. In the left hand pane in the Event Viewer window, expand the Windows Logs option and choose System. You will see a LOT of entries that you don’t care about; look for anything labeled Critical around the time you had problems.
You can filter the errors by choosing Filter Current Log on the right hand pane and choosing Critical. Look for any thing that mentions memory or disk errors.
Kay
@debbie:
Here’s the thing- BOTH slates of GOP candidates were purchased by First Energy. The whole big-drama “fight” they played at in media for months over which slate was going to prevail didn’t matter at all. BOTH were corrupt, and corrupt in exactly the same way.
Heads they win, tails we lose.
BruceJ
@The Pale Scot:
My High School had a couple Linotype machines that were given us by our local newspapers when they switched to photo-setters in the early ’70’s. I have composed a page of type on one..
I am an old…
debbie
@Kay:
It sounded to me like he approached First Energy and pitched the idea of the quid pro quo. The balls of that! Guess he learned nothing from his previous disgrace.
Yutsano
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I poked a QAnon bear there. I expect a flood of tweets I shall politely ignore now. And if they threaten me or my job bring it on. I’m totally within my rights here.
Ken
They’re rich?
The Pale Scot
Obscure memory from lurking in the library reading obscure magazines (I miss living in Rome/NE USA). The damage caused by Starfish was not caused specifically by the EM radiation released by the blast but by its interactions with the earth’s magnetosphere (field lines?). Meaning any EMP effects would be disparate and unpredictable, like a SW Florida thunderstorm raining on one side of the street but not the other. To be assured of an effective EMP strike you’s have to use enough close surface airbursts that it’s a MAD strike anyway. That scenario is an American one though. The Brit movie Threads, the scariest most dismal movie I’ve ever watched, has WW3 starting with a low orbital blast over the N. Sea, disrupting communications for the critical few minutes the UK has to react.
If someone could get large bombs in orbit disguised as satellites that would be a problem. Which NK, Iran and even European countries cannot do
Yutsano
Look: all we need is one good Carrington event and we’re pretty much ungestuppt.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
First impression is that something burped with regards to a Windows update. What version of Win 10 is running?
Click Start button, then go to Settings. Click System then click About in the System pane. You may have to scroll down a bit to see what the version currently is.
Suggestions:
1) Run Malwarebytes to check for nasties, just in case.
2) Click Start, go to Settings. Click Update & Security and – even if it is saying you are up to date – click Check for updates and let it do its thing. Chances are one or more updates which are uninstalled will show up. If so, install them.
3) If the problem is persistent, you might try using a Restore Point to configure your computer to an earlier state (how to). Choose a recent Restore Point. You won’t lose your files by doing this, BTW, however it does take a small chunk of time to run the restore.
L85NJGT
Yeah, but what about the ZOMBIES?
The Pale Scot
@Brachiator:
And from my experience of NYC Lower East Side gardens, where ya gonna get the soil?
The Pale Scot
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
That would/will be a bitch because transformers and high voltage routers are made to order, there aren’t more than a score sitting in warehouses (USA). So we’d have to fabricate them without high voltage reliable current “Tricky”
The Pale Scot
@West of the Rockies: You can’t convince me Steve Miller isn’t a Reptilian
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
@Origuy:
@frosty:
Weird, but the laptop is now running better than before the glitch: pages are loading faster, and videos load without the turning circle of wait.
The Pale Scot
@BruceJ:
Yea, the type setting job was boutique work using picked paperie stock (Jesus, Safari/google won’t even recognize “paperie”) years after photo setting, it was cool.
When I was fabricating cabinets we’d send pieces to an old brownstone garage in Brooklyn that had been a woodworking shop for over a hundred years to get a nylon/polyester coating. The building smelled incredible. I tried together a job there for years.
All that stuff seems to be gone now, sad.
Like shaping surfboards
Dan B
@Elizabelle: Happy Birthday. But I’m confused how a huge dildo is going to promote births.
A friend is confused.
Thanks.
BTW goslings, crickets, and ducklings are chirping in many directions.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Maybe it was an EMP attack, who knows?
Sloane Ranger
@Amir Khalid: Possibly. Any erratic behaviour in a computer is a cause for concern. It may be nothing but a couple of weeks ago my laptop started randomly closing my browser, throwing me out of whatever site I was in, then last week it wouldn’t let me open anything in my Office package. I thought it was a virus or similar, took it to my computer repair shop, they turned it on and nothing- not even the fan working. Apparently the motherboard’s fried.
Moral- take issues like this seriously and have it checked out.
Uncle Cosmo
My guess is that Newt as “novelist” contributed “possibly 2-1/2 or impossibly 3” vague ideas to each tome under his name, while his coauthor (often William Fortschen IIRC) was content to do all the heavy lifting, trading on the Big Name for product placement and sales. (I read Fortschen’s standalone 48 Hours earlier this year & although it wasn’t all that impressive, he at least knows how to assemble a fairly gripping novel.)
Uncle Cosmo
@Cermet: This is the centerpiece of Fortschen’s 48 Hours I cited in #131 supra – though he does have to invoke a few twists and turns to finagle the catastrophe he needs for the plot.
Uncle Cosmo
Some people kind of freaked out after the Starfish Prime test in 1962, which
IIRC a dollop of paranoia was added to the mix in 1976 when Victor Belenko defected from the USSR by flying his MiG-25 to Japan. The interceptor’s electronics (including its radar) were largely vacuum-tube technology, which (IIRC) was considered to be impervious to EMP, and US military analysts – past masters at adding 2 and 2 and gettting 22 – jumped to the conclusion that the Soviets had deliberately built with obsolescent technology so in any future war they could use EMP effects to knock out the West’s solid-state systems. (In fact the Reds were just not good at fabricating microchips, and the tubes worked well enough – an echo of the legend that, when their respective space programs needed a way to write in microgravity, the US spent >$1M to develop a zero-g pen…while the USSR just used pencils.)
Anyhow, the EMP threat was evaluated and defined, countermeasures to protect military assets were developed and deployed, & everyone went back to sleep the sleep of the just.
Robert Sneddon
@Frankensteinbeck:
Actually… we spent some time in a pub with an over-loud jukebox designing an EMP bomb because we couldn’t get at the plug to disconnect the damn thing. We got it down to the size of a rather heavy briefcase because of all the Li-ion batteries it contained — a homopolar generator was considered but the resulting torque as the disc decelerated to provide the couple of megajoules needed would have pulled it from the user’s hand. Getting hold of the nuclear-weapons-grade kryotrons was going to be another (although, in this group of people, not insurmountable) problem.
The EMP briefcase would have a very short range, a metre at most but that would have brought blessed quiet to the pub by frying the jukebox’s electronics without leaving any of our fingerprints on it. Folks with pacemakers and the like shouldn’t be anywhere near it when it was fired though since the pulse would have two symmetrical lobes. We discussed a number of other uses for it and someone suggested “doof doof” cars, the ones with anti-social audio systems. Big smiles all round.
Booger
@RepubAnon: Heck, a well-placed cat meme could take down the intertubes.
Ked
The linked article makes a very good argument that EMP would not be a major component of an attack plan in “a nuclear war”, defined as a large exchange of weapons between us and (say,) Russia.
It makes a decent case that a terrorist attack would just use a nuke on a city.
It does not at all make the case that EMP is not a real thing and that as civilians with off-the-shelf electronics, a high-altitude nuclear detonation would not damage our gear.
I totally agree that the hysteria is unfounded, but could someone actually address this with science? Like, if someone detonates nuke with size X at altitude Y above a point Z distance away from me, what are the odds that a laptop sitting on my desk will be damaged beyond needing a reboot? Or a car? Or the power distribution grid in my town?
When I was a kid we got one of those science yearbook things from the encyclopedia vendor, and one of them (this was like 85 or so) had an article claiming that three nukes detonated at some height would wipe out all electronics in the continental US. As a science-y kid, I was somewhat skeptical (atmospheric attenuation? inverse-square law? just plain line-of-sight?) but there is some kind of repeatable phenomenon involved here. But we need some kind of numbers or there’s no sense in believing the claims in either direction.
Aleta
@Booger: Lol. For that matter, merely fake news of an EMP invasion could jam the roads. “Once that GPS goes, our country’s lost !”
Cheryl Rofer
Those calculations have been done and are rather boring unless you’re choosing targets and the weapons to use. The point of Atherton’s article is that a nuclear detonation above the US indicates a whole lot more trouble than your laptop being fried. Or even the power distribution grid in your town.
Nora
My son has been a security analyst for a large utility company for the last five years. One of his early task was to take petty cash and go to the bookstore for a copy of Ted Koppel’s book on EMP. https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Ted-Koppel-audiobook/dp/B0143RYF9W/ref=sr_1_2?crid=7V4BTEWNOXQQ&dchild=1&keywords=ted+koppel+lights+out&qid=1595439685&sprefix=ted+koppel%2Caps%2C205&sr=8-2
My guess is the management wanted the office to read it to have a response for the public. My son eventually read someone’s copy. There are real threats to the electrical grid out there. But EMP is not one of them.
Another Scott
@Robert Sneddon: rofl.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.