Would a submarine survive an EMP strike if it was submerged?
Peter Vincent Pry — executive director of the task force on National and Homeland Security
Radio waves don’t travel well underwater, and the military uses electronic equipment that is “hardened” against EMPs, so I’d say yes in deep water.
Of course, any question like this depends on the details of the EMP attack, and in this case on the details of the submersion. There are EMP weapons designed to take out individual cars (they don’t work very well, but that’s what they’re designed for), and there are EMP weapons that consist of powerful nukes that are meant to affect an entire continent, and a sub could be under a couple of meters of water, or a kilometer.
That said, I have no idea what the relevance is of a power outage that lasts a year. The only way we’d get that would be if someone or something repeatedly pulsed us every few days, as soon as we got the systems back up.
Probably based on a nuclear attack which would not target just one area like Washington DC, but the entire east coast, Colorado, Missouri, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington State.
A blackout lasting a year with a 90 percent death rate and societal collapse kinda requires everyone to be a helpless idiot. People aren’t that helpless and stupid.
And if we’re using nukes (which is pretty much the only way you’re going to get that level of EMP damage), you might as well actually be nuking cities instead of just targeting the nation’s electrical grid.
That said, hardening the U.S. electrical infrastructure is a good idea. I suspect that Peter Vincent Pry is doing a bit of scaremongering to try to get funding to do that, as anything less than scaremongering probably isn’t going to convince Congress to shell out a few billion dollars to do the work.
As for the submarine, as Chronos said, the depth matters. An EMP wouldn’t have much of an effect on a deep sub for the same reason that the deep sub can’t communicate via radio. Water does a good job of blocking electromagnetic waves. If the sub is on the surface or close to it, like it’s snorkeling or snooping around at periscope depth, or maybe it has come to the surface to communicate to a satellite, then the sub could be in big trouble.
The length of the conductor exposed to EMP matters. Cross-country transmission lines will develop very large voltages that can fry whatever is plugged into outlets. But according to Wikipedia, small items that aren’t plugged in have a much lower risk of being damaged. Cars are a relevant example, in that they are short, tend to have metal paneling, and typically already include shielding to cope with EMI from the spark plugs (fun fact: in the US National Radio Quiet Zone, vehicles with spark-ignited engines are not allowed because the spark noise interferes with radio wave research, including astronomy).
So a submarine, with a nearly-contiguous steel hull only a few hundred feet long, with a design that probably includes defenses against EMP, submerged several hundred feet below the surface in nice salty sea water, will probably be OK.
I admire your optimism. Let’s take a look at Katrina, which was a very localized event involving one city, New Orleans. Social order pretty much collapsed. There were literally bands of roving people with guns and virtually no real help for days. All this happened with every other part of the United States in perfect order. Now expand this to a scenario involving dozens of cities and the nation as a whole in complete chaos.
I do believe, however, that people in rural areas would fare much better.
I disagree. If I’m an aggressor, I want chaos to be an ongoing weapon in my favor. Setting off several 100 megaton devices in key locations and completely crippling power and communications over thousands of miles will produce panic and chaos above and beyond the actual bomb destruction at ground level.
When we attacked Iraq, our first wave of jets were stealth aircraft that destroyed radar and communications targets, not military targets.
Of course setting off several 100 megaton devices in key locations will set off mass panic…but it will be because of the massive death toll and spreading radiation, and not to a fictional “year without electricity”.
Yes, once society breaks down, it takes a long time to rebuild it. But society doesn’t break down immediately whenever there’s a power outage. Some places have had widespread power outages from events very much like an EMP, and the power was out for only twelve hours before it was brought back up. Other places have had power outages lasting for several days, and emerged with society intact. So there’s plenty of time to fix an EMP before it becomes serious.
Now, if we’re talking about war, there are a few nations who could EMP the entire US (Russia and China are the only ones of those whom we could plausibly end up at war with, but Britain or France might be able to do it, too). But there’s nobody who could repeatedly EMP us. The only way to EMP an entire continent is via nukes, which would mean that within half an hour after the attack, the attacking country would be in no shape to do anything further to us. Now, there might still be panic and rioting and so on from the fact that HOLY SHIT WE JUST GOT NUKED, but the power outages that could be fixed in a few days would be the least of our concerns.
Damn. Now I have one thing more to worry about the Big Milkshake.
It’s also set off chaos and panic when a thousand or so American nuclear weapons fry the aggressor’s country.
A nuclear attack on the US is a suicide attack; the aggressor’s nation will very quickly no longer exist in a meaningful fashion. Therefore there’s no reason to hold back with something as mild as an EMP strike.
He’s the head of a think tank that does nothing but scaremonger about EMPs. (The “Task Force on National and Homeland Security” is not a government body.)
I cannot find any record of the major donors to his task force, but I have some guesses.
This is a very commonly believed myth.
Fear of riots and looting as well as racial animus played a huge role in the hyped chaos in New Orleans after Katrina, but a major fraction of the actual violence (which is itself a small fraction of the violence that was reported at the time) was paranoid ‘self-defense’ against people (mostly black people) fleeing the flooding or seeking help.
The myth is very convenient for people who want to claim that society is a veneer eggshell-thin, but it is not an accurate representation of what happened after Hurricane Katrina. The murder rate in New Orleans went from 57.1 per 100,000 person-years in 2004 to 65.3 per 100,000 person-years in 2005 to 84.8 per 100,000 person-years in 2006. Citation: Murder Rates in New Orleans, La, 2004–2006 - PMC while murders and the tragedy associated with them increased, they didn’t double, or triple.
That’s an unacceptably high murder rate, it’s not the total breakdown of civil order that it’s portrayed as.
Using the hype of Katrina to claim that other parts of the U.S. would descend into chaos after an EMP should be taken with a grain of salt.
Super Computer Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? " - *War Games *- 1983