The EMP Nightmare

If you aren't familiar with the threat from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), created by a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere above a continent (as opposed to a traditional nuclear near-ground detonation), Rick Moran over at Right Wing Nuthouse provides a good and sobering description.

You could be in your car driving to work one morning when, in a blink of an eye, American civilization would be destroyed. The first inkling you would have that something was amiss is when your car suddenly died. You turn the key to start it again and…nothing. The engine doesn’t even turn over. The next thing you would notice is that the exact same thing has happened to everyone else on the road. You reach into your pocket and grab your phone to call your boss to tell her you’ll be late and find to your horror that the phone is completely dead – not only no signal but the phone itself is gone.

Perhaps you run into the bank to try and get some cash. The bank employees are frantic. The back-up generators that were supposed to supply electricity in the case of a power outage aren’t working. Later, you find out that your account records have been wiped along with trillions of gigabytes of data stored in millions of other computers around the country.

This is just the beginning. When you finally make it home you realize that you have no electricity, no water, no refrigeration – nothing. Your battery operated radio doesn’t work. In short, you have been propelled back more than 100 years in time and, for the foreseeable future, must live as your great grandparents lived.This nightmare is the result of a relatively small (10 kiloton) nuclear device exploded approximately 300 miles above Kansas. The 2 million degree heat generated by the nuclear chain reaction lasts for only a millionth of a second or so. But then as it cools, that thermal radiation becomes gamma rays which interact with the atmosphere and the earth’s magnetic field and generates an electrical field a million times more powerful than anything on earth.