On the topic of EMP weaponry

[SinerAthin]

Hey guys.

Minor Pacific Rim spoiler below

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

There was one scene in Pacific Rim where one of the Kaju's used an electromagnetic pulse to effectively shut down all electricity in Hong Kong.

My questions to you:

Would it be possible to do something similar in the future; to devise a weapon that could knock out all electronic equipment within many miles? Or would such a thing be reserved to the realm of sci fi and fantasy?

and two;

How would this affect future wars if one side could easily dump an EMP on the battlefield, effectively shutting all any and all advanced robots, electronic systems etc? Would this force both sides to go back to fight with primitive chemical and fossil fuel driven technology as more advanced technological units were rendered too vulnerable and obsolete?
Would this render the concept of robot armies obsolete?

[Euphoric]

It wouldn't render high tech warfare impossible if we had the capability to intercept or disarm missiles mid trajectory.

[RubiconDecision]

See:
http://www.empcommission.org/
Two pdf files with an executive summary and a detail of potentially damaged critical infrastructure.

The main issue is lack of shielding currently and the turn around time to acquire transformers that would be damaged. That time would be enormously long as the transformers have to be made upon demand. The costs in lost electronics would be incalcuable.

The easiest way to launch the attack would be submarine based off the shore, so little time to react to any missile carrying the payload. Then based upon the location and height, how much would be affected.

This kind of map is commonly shown. What would be worse would be to launch one close to the upper NE coast. Why? It would kill the most amount of people, not by the blast, but by ruining transportation of goods and services, rendering medical centers useless, and 80% of the USA lives in that corridor. Hitting in the center shouldn't affect deep military instillations which are shielded, but would ruin transportation networks.

A blast closer to the midpoint of that population density would create very real problems where no water and sanitation would exist for millions. Chaos would likely happen as no emergency supplies would get to the majority of them. It would decapitate the USA's political command structure, but not the military.

Of course Obama has been decapitating the military command structure since he got elected (237 high ranking officials fired).

Since the SW arid regions of the USA is highly dependent upon water being transported (their rainfall is inadequate for agriculture and to support human population) then a strike in the middle might also cripple California. The height of the blast can result in either more damage and less area of effect or more area of effect with less damage.


"As of 2011, about 250 million Americans live in or around urban areas. That means more than three-quarters of the U.S. population shares just about three percent of the U.S. land area."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/american...n-the-rebound/

Looking at the map, the routes of refugee migrations, availability of water, the lack of likely effect, then some parts of Maine or the Great Lakes might be better for some Americans depending upon the missile explosion of a potential EMP weapon.

Since North Korea has some limited space capabilities, a satellite could be disguised, launch an EMP weapon directed at the USA as well.

[conon394]

Oh God oh god no its Newt Gingrich's fear mongering ....

For a more rational view by like an actual expert with no budget or political dog in the game:

https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...a-nuclear.html

I would not loose much sleep on this one. If you are in need of a worry fear driving your car if need to be afraid of something.

[RubiconDecision]

Oh God oh god no its Newt Gingrich's fear mongering ....

For a more rational view by like an actual expert with no budget or political dog in the game:

https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...a-nuclear.html

I would not loose much sleep on this one. If you are in need of a worry fear driving your car if need to be afraid of something.

Impressive. It cites the Starfish test in Hawaii that is over 50 years old and then extrapolates that EMP would not be harmful...as if technology has stood still. (YAWN)

On the other hand, a commission at the behest of the US Congress seeking a multidisciplinary team to evaluate the potential effects based upon present day technology.

Which do you think would be better to make a conclusion, a person citing old data, or many people from many disciplines looking at the effects and ramifications of present day technology?

[Niles Crane]

I just assume if it was feasible the Americans would have got on to it already. I'm sure the DoD must have experimented with it at the least. They seem to have heaps of money for stuff like this.

[SinerAthin]

That's quite impressive.

I guess if they had EMPs in Terminator, Skynet wouldn't have been a problem

[Gaidin]

How would this affect future wars if one side could easily dump an EMP on the battlefield, effectively shutting all any and all advanced robots, electronic systems etc? Would this force both sides to go back to fight with primitive chemical and fossil fuel driven technology as more advanced technological units were rendered too vulnerable and obsolete?
Would this render the concept of robot armies obsolete?

Look up Bipolar Junction Transistors and Avalanche Breakdown and how crap like this gives them so much problems while analog circuits have a much better time shrugging it off if it's not hilariously powerful depending on the type of EMP.

Yes. Pacific Rim took real science and fluffed it up for your entertainment. Just sayin'.

(By the way, 95% of the technology we depend on for society to function is digital. Be scared.)

[RubiconDecision]

If only Just-in-Time inventory controls that managed trucking or barge or rail operations are affected, the whole country would be hopelessly crippled. In the time it would take to reorganize and distribute food and medicines, countless millions would die.

If it affected water utilities then they begin to die in three days. I don't know how much water you actually have packaged in your home, but imagine being in a place without water utlities and see the chaos caused by a lack of it. It's happened in every disaster and results in people unable to cope. Unbelievable things happen in urban centers due to high rises and lack of sanitation, with people dumping feces out the window or piling it up in corridors. In a sustained situation without water utilities, you have deaths in the first week, then contagion.

Any person can make a biosand filter. The problem is the time it takes to produce the culture to help eliminate some of the pathogens. In that interim one filters and boils or treats by chemical additives like unscented bleach or uses a dillution of pool shock.
http://www.cawst.org/en/resources/biosand-filter

A serious EMP attack without remediation from other nations to supply transformers plus supplies and technicians, would result in massive deaths. Read One Second After to see one small town trying to deal with it. As the food runs out, stock animals are sacrificed, and competition comes for what few resources are left, then cannibalism as has happened in history in places like Stalingrad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After

In that novel, there's an 80% death rate from diverse causes over a year's period without remediation. Why? Because even in rural areas, with the lack of stability, it takes time to grow plants and raise animals, and entirely due to weather, climate, and soil fertility. One cannot merely forage for food in such numbers. It's implausible to survive by hunter-gathering based upon a small town even having 1000 citizens.

The reality of specialization is that only by technology can urban areas manage to persist, and that the normal aspects of resources limited villages to 1500-2000 people at most and only when spread out enough to raise crops, livestock, and harvest some of their game, fish, nuts, and wild edibles.

What's the most common wild edible that no one will think to eat? Grass seed, but the problem is a black fungus called ergot that collects upon that seed. One would be malnourished and suffering from vitamin defficiency, but would survive if they knew how to harvest common grass seed and could purify water.
http://www.eattheweeds.com/crabgrass...sanguinalis-2/

The second most common wild edible is the humble acorn. It has very high tannins, that must be dealt with by leeching, but then provides a whopping amount of fat, protein, and carbs. The problem? The harvest is very limited, and you're competing with lots of wild creatures who can climb as well as scavange from the base of the tree.
http://www.eattheweeds.com/acorns-the-inside-story/
Then maple syrup. These are the most common. Again, a very short window in which the sap rises and in such composition to provide nutrients, but only by condensing it. Otherwise it's merely sweetened purified water.

Since most people have no agricultural skills, don't read about the history of the frontier and homesteading, lack access to water sources and fertile soil, have little skills save their specialized ones, probably within an office setting, then many people would die in a major EMP attack. They wouldn't die from the attack, they'd die from the effects of the attack on electronics, and then by others competing in such a massive way for limited resources, as well as idiots who would do things like drink bad water and assume that they wouldn't get dyssentery.

Someone will inevitably retort, "Yeah, Man, but what about wars! People survive all the time." They do. Our ancestors were smart people connected to the land, who had interdisciplinary skills, knew the land, or had recollection of it, and so they coped. Do we as postmodern people have even a tenth of the life skills that our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers possessed?

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

In the testing that preceded the never-to-be project ORION they wiped out a huge chunk of the Pacific with an EMP by accident. But EMP shielding and stuff is on most vehicles and electronic devices completely inadvertantly now a days, so you don't have much to worry about outside of a concentrated EMP, which would require the nuking of a city itself to affect the immediate area.

[RubiconDecision]

http://www.newsmax.com/KenTimmerman/super-emp-emp-northkorea-nuke/2011/06/16/id/400260/"
"The Soviet Union conducted an atmospheric test of an EMP weapon in 1962 over Kazakhstan whose pulse wave set on fire a power station 300 kilometers away and destroyed it within 10 seconds.

Such a weapon — equal to a massive solar flare such as the “solar maxima” predicted by NASA to occur in 2012 — poses “substantial risk to equipment and operation of the nation’s power grid and under extreme conditions could result in major long term electrical outages,” said Joseph McClelland of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Senate testimony last month.

Pry said that a group of Russian nuclear weapons scientists approached him in 2004 when he served as staff director of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, to warn the United States that the technology to make that weapon “had leaked” to North Korea, and possibly to Iran.

“They told us that Russian scientists had gone to North Korea to work on building the super-EMP weapon,” Pry told Newsmax. “The North Koreans appear to have tested it in 2006 and again in 2009.”



http://bipartisanpolicy.org/news/pre...-electric-grid
The US electric utility grid is extremely vulnerable as power is created one place, then is shared to deal with problems in producing a sufficent amount in others. While EMP is a signficant potential problem, due to that interconnection, something as simple as an orchestrated cyberattack, or merely snipers in less than ten key areas, would result in knocking out that interconnection.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12050
http://www.utilityproducts.com/artic...id-attack.html
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/14/5604992...-vulnerability

[Condottiere 40K]

1. Strategic use of EMP would certainly trigger a nuclear response, in a case of use them or lose them, even if no one is quite certain as to how far the EMP pulse would disrupt civilian or military networks and infrastructure.

2. Undoubtedly, the US military have tried to shield what they've tagged as being of national security interest, which probably includes the White House.

3. The second aspect is tactical use on the battlefield, and considering the direction military technology is heading, you would want the capable to jam or just shut down all forms of electronics, not just by, let's say a global power that relies heavily on high tech as a force multiplier and tries to suppress that of his opponent, but also insurgencies that want to temporarily paralyze a better equipped force.

[RubiconDecision]

Yes, of course military installations as well as certain government buildings are shielded. What might happen though with an EMP attack by submarine would be trying to determine who launched it? With nuclear deterrence, it's a swift response, not a delayed one in which you're attempting to determine the source. That delay would lead to further problems especially if American infrastructure is crippled. Bold actions without careful deliberation could lead to major strategic errors against the wrong nation. Then it's Armageddon.

The price estimation for shielding is rather small for America. Compared to the money we waste on other things, it's really a no-brainer.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Our fighter jets already jam the electronics of enemy jets when near an airport so they can't get off the ground. That's how we obliterated the Iraqi Airforce without loosing a single jet.

And yes, it would only take a month of breakdown of our logistics to kill 99% of the population of the US as they all starved to death for lack of their BigMacs.

We have a manual water filter and live pretty close to the lake, so we'd be good to go on water. Could also filter it with cloth and boil it for other purposes as well. And nuclear powerplants are shielded against EMP so I'm not that concerned about the electricity going out.

[conon394]

Reviving this

What might happen though with an EMP attack by submarine would be trying to determine who launched it?

The US has spent a lot money for a long time to you know track ICBMs. That infrastructure is very much hardened. What Subs? you only have 5 choices and I think we can reasonably exclude the UK and France. So EMP - India, China, Russia and India is not really in the game yet. I not even sure China is by all accounts its first SSBN sunk at dock and its next ones are noisy and underwhelming in performance. So just Russia. Terrorists - really? What they are going to build a secret ICBM complex in Iowa and launch a missile - when? Iran cannot even make a bomb for years, North Korea aside from lacking any effective and demonstrable infrastructure has nothing to deliver but a few crude bombs at best that are mostly just to save it from attack.

The problem here is an EMP attack amounts Nuclear war and in its most sophisticated manner, that takes time and vast amounts of money and the US has such and thus also has a more or less invulnerable and absolute counter strike ability. So MAD remains in effect. Even if al qaeda somehow via fantasy gets a SSBN and a crew to operate it it seems to me the US still retains the ability to lash out at anyone even suspected of aiding that via EMP or actual nuclear obliteration. It occurs to me also that while Iran or al qaeda, or Hezbollah etc seem happy to use suicide attacks the people in charge but Bin Laden, or the ISI or Imad Mughniyah or Syria or the leaders of Iran were/are content to lead from the rear. Similarly the leaders of North Korea while vile do seem to enjoy living the high live and not being dead. As such One has to wonder at who would provoke the only nation on earth that has proved it is really willing to erase not 1 but 2 cites of the map with atomic weapons, and has the capacity to EMP or Destroy more or less the rest of the world on stand by.

All in all I sleep pretty easy on this one the equation is rather simple - yes somebody could maybe do this one day (but likely only Russia now and for the next 20 or so years) and 30 -60 minutes later they would all be dead anyway.

[RubiconDecision]

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editor...emp-attack.htm
"Vulnerability: Expert testimony before Congress on Thursday warned that an electromagnetic pulse attack on our power grid and electronic infrastructure could leave most Americans dead and the U.S. in another century.

That dire warning came from Peter Vincent Pry, a member of the Congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.

He testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee's Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event could wipe out 90% of America's population.

Most people's eyes might glaze over upon mention of the committee name, the title of the hearing — "Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): Threat to Critical Infrastructure" — and the general subject of EMP. But it is a real threat and not the stuff of science fiction.

Some attention has been paid to the potential cataclysmic effects of a natural phenomenon such as a massive solar storm, an event that has occurred in America's horse-and-buggy era when it did not matter.

Today an electromagnetic pulse event would be devastating. It wouldn't need a solar storm, just a solitary nuke detonated in the atmosphere above the American heartland. We would envy the horse-and-buggy era.

"Natural EMP from a geomagnetic superstorm, like the 1859 Carrington Event or 1921 Railroad Storm, and nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states, as practiced by North Korea during the nuclear crisis of 2013, are both existential threats that could kill 9-of-10 Americans through starvation, disease and societal collapse," the Washington Free Beacon quoted Pry as saying.

As we reported early last year, Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst, believes that North Korea's recent seemingly low-yield nuclear tests and launch of a low-orbit satellite may in fact be preparations for a future electromagnetic pulse attack."

So the experts are concerned, but conon394 is not. Who will you believe? The article literally came out this week. Maybe Conon should be advising the president since he knows more than anyone else?

http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/su...infrastructure

Multiple videos and PDFs can be downloaded at that link.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Our town wouldn't be affected. We get our electricity from the nuke plant which is shielded against this stuff, and that's provided it would have an effect to begin with.

Glory to Uranium!

(Also, most people seem to forget that detonating a Nuke above the atmosphere would be useless for doing anything more than wiping out satellites. The energized particles in the ionosphere would negate the EMP effect)

[General Retreat]

All things considered, EMP really isn't a practical route for weapons development. So far as the physics go, you're still basically dropping a nuclear bomb on something. If you want to bring a country to its knees, targeting infrastructure is the best way to go, yes, but not physically. I'm sure there are threads dedicated to this already, but cyberwarfare is by an order of magnitudes more efficient.

When the virus Stuxnet was first discovered, it had been spread throughout networks globally. Fortunately, it was coded only to activate when certain perimeters were met, with those conditions being satisfied within strategic nuclear power plants in Iran. For what was possibly the most sophisticated and dangerous piece of malware written up to that point, that was a tame mission objective. What if it had been written to indiscriminately ruin the day of any infrastructure it came across?

The fact of the matter is that many, many power stations and other critical points of infrastructure are not hardened against concerted digital attack. As this article mentions, most digital encryption is done through certificates that last for decades. Lots of the procedures developed in the 80s are archaic by today's standards.

This is where the first strike capability Rubicon has been talking about comes into its own. Launching an EMP attack is a ludicrous way to inflict damage if you're not looking to start a mutually destructive nuclear war. Once that missile flies, there's no way it won't be traced - as conon has elaborated on already.

Cyberwarfare is much, much harder to trace. You don't need distinctive uranium enrichment facilities, or facilities capable of producing the delivery mechanism. If the US had just openly bombed those nuclear power plants in Iran, the world'd likely be going through a nasty spat of wars right now. As it stands, no-one can prove the US was responsible, and US/Iran relations are showing signs of stabilizing for the first time in ages.

So then, cyberwarfare. More efficient. Deniability. Damaging. As a fire and forget weapon, I'd take that over detonating a nuke any day.

[Gaidin]

All things considered, EMP really isn't a practical route for weapons development. So far as the physics go, you're still basically dropping a nuclear bomb on something.

A nuclear test knocked out Hawaii without destroying it. Why shouldn't we worry about EMPs?

[RubiconDecision]

http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/hemp_hpm.htm

Here's a very brief assessment. It includes references to several Congressional Research Services reports. Those are usually pretty good in describing in brief the issues, potential solutions, and problems. See:
CRS Report RL32114. Computer Attack and Cyber Terrorism: Vulnerabilities and Policy Issues for Congress.
CRS Report RL32411. Network Centric Warfare: Background and Oversight Issues for Congress.
CRS Report RS21528. Terrorist 'Dirty Bombs': A Brief Primer.
CRS Report IB92099. Nuclear Weapons: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Those CRS products can usually be found on the web. There often are War College papers as well, and roundtable exercises too.