Say I’m talking on the phone with someone on the other side of the state. (We both have, oddly enough, corded phones.) Suddenly, an A-Bomb goes off near the other guy’s house. Not close enough to vaporize my friend instantly, but enough to fairly quickly incinerate him before the shockwave hits.
Now, my question is…what, if anything, do I hear on my end? A high-pitched squeal as the other guy’s phone melts? Would the line just go dead? Would EMP just make the whole question moot?
Years ago my local wacky DJs ran a ‘destroy your phone contest’. They would put a listener on the air while he/she smashed their telephone in variously creative ways.
A few were ok, one guy was at work and ran it over with a forklift which sounded mildly amusing. But one guy said he was going to shoot it in his backyard. Of course the goofball DJs were all hyped about it, but I’m listening thinking this is going to be absolutely nothing unless he misses a few times.
He didn’t and it was (absolutely nothing that is, line just went dead same as if he’d hung up). Guess wacky DJs don’t need to know high school physics to get hired…
You probably wouldn’t hear much. Telephones are designed to transmit a very narrow range of sound frequencies roughly corresponding to what the human voice can create. I imagine that the sound produced by a nuclear explosion would lie mostly outside those frequencies.