If I am not mistaken, during the Cold War era, the Soviets were protected in a small measure by the fact that a considerable amount of their military electronic equipment was not of the delicate solid state nature, instead it was largely the older vacuum tube technology and offered a bit more protection from EMP?
Wow, I wish I’d said that.
The brain isn’t completely immune to electromagnetic fields, though. I don’t know how it compares to a nuke, but ‘Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation’ literally induces brain activity with a coil that creates a rapidly changing local magnetic field.
Large bursts of EM radiation can certainly make you sick; when I worked with high-powered transmitters in the Army, we were specifically instructed never to stand in front of a directional transmitter, like an LPA, when it was transmitting. Being a few metres in front of a 10,000 watt jammer LPA pointed straight at you can make you ill, or so I was told; I never wanted to find out. However, I’m not familiar enough with EMP radiation to know if it’s the same thing, and standing right in front of a hot LPA may actually create more concentrated EM radiation in that space than an EMP explosion would from a distance.
Radiation is radiation. It’s energy, and sufficient energy in any form can hurt you, whether it’s EM or a speeding bus.
You’d think, with a cruise missle, it’d be able to shoot it’s capacitors and then recharge them off of the turbine and use them against another target, repeat.
I wonder what would happen to people with electronic implants, like pacemakers, defibrilators, or cochlear implants? Would the implant just stop working, or would it arc, spark, or cook before dying?
Have you ever heard the term, “ground zero”? I don’t think this would work so well.
Whether it’s on or not doesn’t matter. I read something that was largely too technical for me to understand, but I got the impression that the radiation ‘resonated’ with wiring over a certain length, and basically made it fall apart, kind of like a high pitched sound breaking glass.
But that may be a bad analogy.
My understanding of EMP weaponry is that the goal is to generate by inductive coupling a sufficient voltage to damage the semiconductors present in almost all modern electronics. As the EMP passes through the conductors of the equipment (wires, circuit board traces, etc.) it generates a voltage spike which (hopefully, if you’re the one using the weapon) exceeds the maximum voltage rating of the semiconductors in the equipment, permanently damaging them. A few tens of volts is all it takes in most cases, but generating even that modest level of voltage from a significant distance requires a huge EMP (damn that inverse square law!)
EMP can be generated by any explosion. Even firecrackers are capable of such a thing. It comes down to ionizing and separating electrons long enough to induce an electric and magnetic field.
In the case of nuclear weapons, gamma radiation emitted by a detonating weapon slams into electrons (via the Comptom Effect) and sends them on a Mr. Toad’s wide ride. The positively charged ions are left behind. As a result, a changing electric field (E) is created. In addition, an changing electric current is created which in turn results in a changing magentic field (M). With that, Mr. Maxwell pointed out that the result is an electromagnetic wave (I’m skipping some subtleties, but you get the idea) reigning havoc to any device which 1) has the means to couple the energy, and 2) can’t withstand the energy that it does recieve. In the case of vacuum tubes, they are by nature inherantly more robust by virtue of the relatively large size that the energy would be dissapatied on. With an IC running 0.7 micron sized transistors, it would be virtually impossible to design protection into this device for energy level we’re talking about. Instead, the design of these circuits nowaday is a series of layered protection (e.g., the IC has inputs that can withstand high voltages [5-10 kV], board layout, power supply design, etc.)
But even unplugged circuits could be damaged as the power cord would act as a recieving antenna, if the correct frequency were applied (and Nuclear EMP has a pretty wide bandwidth).
In the case of “conventional” powered EMP weapon, as I understand it, a parallel inductor-capacitor tank circuit is used instead. The explosives indirectly provide the energy necessary to induce the pulse. When the mulit-Farad caps are discharged, they travel through a large inductor. At the same time the explosives modify the geometry of the inductor and give a severe case of the squeezies. The result is an enormous increase in the current density, magnetic field, et. al. and a beneficial/nasty pulse results.
The downside of these conventionally power EMP devices is that it could be built by anyone with limited resources (I’ve heard $400.00 for a weapon that could do some serious damage (Popular Science?), but it seems to me timing along with understanding the hydrodynamics of high explosives would make this far more complicated, then some high school shop project.)