With North Korea developing the ability to launch satellites does anyone think that they may try to generate EMP’s over the U.S. to “level the playing field” somewhat?
Heh. No.
EMP weapons, despite the hype associated with them, are crappy weapons. They were first developed in WWII where they were going to make the enemy bombers just fall out of the sky! Ever read about that actually happening? No? There’s a reason why not. They worked well under controlled laboratory conditions, but were extremely ineffective when used against real targets.
EMP weapons today still fail to live up to the hype. A satellite based EMP just isn’t going to have the strength to do anything effective. The main problem you run into is simple physics. The power of an EMP drops off with the square of the distance. Double the distance, and you’ve dropped to 1/4th the power. Triple it, and you’re down to 1/9th. Because the power level drops off so quickly, you need a huge honkin EMP to do anything effective, and even then it needs to be somewhat close to your target. Right now, if you want that big of an EMP, you’ve got one choice, a nuke. North Korea doesn’t have so great of a surplus of nukes that they can afford to waste a few on EMP weapons.
You’ve also got the problem that even with a nuke level EMP, a lot of the stuff that folks do to stop lightning damage (Ufer grounds, halo grounds, etc) also are pretty darn effective at blocking EMPs. While your nuke level EMP will probably fry the electrical systems of a few vehicles, it’s not going to be effective against computer installations and command and control centers. You’ll probably wreak a bit of havoc on the electrical grid, but it’s designed to recover from stuff like that. Otherwise, solar flares would leave the U.S. in the dark a lot more often than they do.
So no, I’m not worried at all about a North Korean EMP weapon.
So no, I’m not worried at all about a North Korean EMP weapon.
thanks man, now I’m not worried either
I’ll also point out that if they did detonate a nuke to create an EMP against us, that would presumably result in us launching nukes at them in retaliation. And not just to generate an EMP. And that’s an obvious enough response that unless they are suicidal, they won’t do any such thing.
Okay----but what about a **non-**North Korean nuke?
Maybe from somebody who’s got a surplus.(Iran?)
Or maybe from somebody who’s only got one, but that’s all he needs. (Al Qaida? )
I didn’t know if the EMP would affect satellites as well, I thought that an EMP (or series of them) might fry circuits in space as well as in planet based silos leaving only submarines with nuclear missiles but they’d be in the dark too without GPS/communications?
Anyways, some smart people here!
Keep in mind; our nuclear launch & targeting systems were designed to work against anything the USSR could do. NK is an inferior threat by far in every way.
Evidently the Starfish Prime nuclear test in 1962 disabled some satellites, but it’s worth pointing out that these were in low earth orbit (less than 1200 miles up); GPS satellites orbit at an altitude of about 12,000 miles.
A nuke will do more direct damage than the associated EMP to electrical systems. It’s like worrying about the scratch in your windshield when your engine is on fire.
They haven’t made their nukes small enough to fit on a missile and they haven’t proved they can reliably manufacture missiles capable of travelling that distance or being launched on anything short of many months of obvious preparation. They’re a helluva long way from being able to produce an EMP weapon and getting it to the USA.
Keep in mind that whoever crosses the threshhold of actually using nuclear weapons will bring down some serious rain of hell on themselves; and nobody else in the world will try to stop the retaliation.
So the only thing nukes are good for, for an inferior nation like NK, is that it stops us from backing them into a really bad corner - they would only use them if they ahve nothing left to lose… (“Deterrent”).
As mentioned above - the EMP function requires a serious nuclear weapon to have any effect. The stuff the NK are playing with are Hiroshima-sized weapons, say 12 to 30 KTons. People moved back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few days after, some never left; the radios and such on the Enola Gay (admittedly, tube tech) worked fine. The stuff the USA and Russia were threatening to throw at each other were a whole different level - up to 50Mtons. Set one of those off high up and you might fry the electronics of the eastern seaboard. Set it off a mile up over a city and it’s glass, and forests burst into flames 50 miles away.
BB-gun vs. AK47.
Ok, how about using carbon fibers to short circuit circuitry? Is that used as a weapon?
AIUI, current ballistic missile systems (ours, anyway) don’t use GPS; it wasn’t accurate enough the last time our nuclear delivery systems were redesigned. The next generation will, but it have several layers of redundancy. Current missile systems use inertial tracking* and celestial reference** and there’s no reason they’d remove these systems. Assuming GPS-guided missile systems are deployed, they’d be less accurate if GPS capability was lost, but hey, they’re nukes. Close is good enough.
*Basically, using accelerometers so the missile can determine where it is by keeping track of where it started from and how far/fast it has traveled.
**Looking at stars, just like old-timey sailors. There’s also terrestrial guidance, where the missile directs itself by looking at landscape features, but I assume this isn’t used in ballistic missiles since they are nowhere near the ground.
Being a military project from the start during the height of the Cold War, I have to presume that the GPS satellites were built with some sort of protection from EMPs (or perhaps other more realistic anti-sat measures) in mind. “Take out the GPS constellation” surely would have been up near the top of any Soviet first strike plan.
I dunno. Consider the chart at the wiki for EMP. It has significant EMP levels over an awfully long range. Much longer than the blast or heat effects would extend. And since you don’t need a multi-megaton device to generate significant EMP (see the wiki + these additional links), the disparity in distances is even more pronounced. The ‘not needing a hydrogen bomb to produce EMP’ really surprised me, as well as the plot at the wiki showing the relationship between electric field strength and device yield.
It’d be the end of any government that tried it, of course, but said government could make it awfully expensive for the U.S. What would the cost be to replace billions of consumer electronic devices, never mind the data?
I was assuming thousands of lives lost to a nuclear blast above a city would trump electronics damage from a high altitude blast.
That and a terrorist organization usually doesn’t have the capability to deploy and detonate a nuclear device at high altitude. The threat from them is still at ground level.
There seems to be some misunderstanding of the kind of EMP threat posed by a country such as North Korea. There are two general classes of EMP weapons: non-nuclear directed EMP weapons, e.g. the near-mythical “EMP cannon” or explosively pumped flux compression generator, and high altitude nuclear EMP (HEMP) weapons. The former is a directed energy weapon that has been pursued by major military powers for decades for user on the battlefield scale to disable the electronics and avionics of the opposition, and is very difficult to achieve in a tactical-sized delivery system. Neither North Korea nor any other emerging military power (Iran, Egypt, et cetera) has the means to field such a weapon against the continental United States, or probably even construct an effective weapon. In general, research in directed energy weapons (lasers, particle weapons, EMP cannons, et cetera) has proven to be extremely problematic due to the high power throughput requirements and the complex electrodynamic interactions both within the lasing or amplifying medium and in the external atmosphere, such that even going on three decades since Reagan’s infamous “Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars)” speech and tens of billions of dollars of research we still have yet to field a single effective directed energy weapon of any sort.
The latter, which consists of detonating a high energy thermonuclear weapon with a high ratio prompt output in the gamma spectrum (which creates the cascading conditions that results in regional or continental EMP) is relatively easy once you have the ability to construct and locate a high yield nuclear weapon in space above your target. For instance, the Starfish Prime shot in 1962 detonated at 1.4 MT two stage thermonuclear device 400 km above the Pacific Ocean, and resulted in damage to incandescent bulbs and other relatively insensitive electrical devices as well as creating a new radiation belt (an artificial Van Allen belt) which damaged a number of unprotected satellites that passed through the belt in their orbits. It should be understood that the radiation damage to satellites and the EMP effects are two completely separate phenomena that just happen to stem from the same event. The HEMP pulse only affects electronics that are below 50 km altitutde, well below Low Earth Orbit.
The 1962 Starfish Prime shot, which was not intended to cause EMP damage, was relatively low power EMP field (5-6 kV/m) and occurred over a sparsely populated area (mostly broad ocean area). A similar weapon detonated over the continental United States would have a more powerful EMP field due to the closer proximity to the North Pole (magnetic flux lines are more closely spaced), and would have impacted greater populated and industrial areas A modern weapon optimized to generate HEMP, detonated at ~300 km altitute with a prompt gamma yield in the 400 PJ range detonated above Nebraska would blanket the continental US with E1 component of EMP at the 50 kV/m atmospheric saturation limit. This would result in widespread destruction of sensitive electronic components, particularly anything attached to a large antenna (such as cellular stations, radio transmitters, power controllers, et cetera). The E3 (longer lived) component of the pulse would disrupt radio and microwave communications and cause widespread disruption of the electrical power infrastructure (damage to transformers and generators). This CRS report details the current estimated threat and vulnerability with regard to HEMP attacks.
Neither North Korea nor Iran currently have the ability to field a high yield thermonuclear device suitable to generate this kind of pulse, but given orbital launch capabilty they could certainly place a less effective nuclear EMP weapon above the US that could cause some moderate degree of disruption. Russia or the PRC, on the other hand, could easily build and field such a weapon at any time. There is little, at this point, that the United States could do about it; despite decades of research and warnings by FAS and various defense avocacy organizations, the United States does not maintain a rapidly fieldable strategic anti-satellite weapon system.
Stranger
Whitney Streiber, before he went all UFO on us, wrote a well-researched post-nuclear-war novel called “Warday.”
The novel makes a big deal that the most damage done in the (limited) nuclear exchange was by the 6 EMP-optimized nukes the USSR detonated in orbit over the US, disabling virtually every piece of even moderately advanced electronics. They also caused Air Force 1 to crash-land.
Anyway, 5 days after Warday, the characters note that the nukes that while the nukes that fell on cities killed millions, the chaos and economic disruption caused at least as many deaths in the following years. IIRC, he says they were the most efficient use of nuclear weapons in the war.
That said, the book might have been full of crap. But Streiber seemed to think the EMP threat was at least as great as the threat of direct detonation.
Are HEMP weapons cheaper to build then “plain old” nukes?
I’m thinking of Israel’s arsenal.