People ranging from George Noory, (kooky) to Ted Koppel (maybe not so kooky) are raising the alarm.
So what is the Straight Dope? Can a rouge leader with a few low yield nukes and a delivery system bring us down by frying all our electronics? Is mass starvation in the cards when the gas won’t pump?
Answer needed fast, IMHO.
EMP weapons aren’t anywhere near as effective as a lot of people think they are. Yes, a nuke detonated over the US is going to cause some electrical mayhem. The entire country won’t go dark though, and the people in those areas that are hardest hit aren’t just going to sit down and cry helplessly and do nothing about it.
North Korea would also become a huge glass parking lot, so they would definitely end up on the worse side of the deal.
No. You need very high yield fusion weapons to excite the ionosphere enough to matter. Starfish prime was 1.4 megatons, and you probably want as much yield as you can pack into a missile to do enough damage. The missile also has to go off at about 400 kilometers up above the adversary - ordinary ICBMs won’t have enough fuel to reach that point, you’re talking about around as much dV as needed to reach orbit. (If the Russians fire an ICBM at the United States, it might peak at 400 kilometers, but only for an instant and that peak won’t be over U.S. soil)
TLDR : In order for the North Koreans to do this, they would need :
Fusion weapons, not just fission, requiring much more R&D and money. From what I have read, fusion devices are far more complex than fission bombs and all those complex parts have to operate exactly at the right time over a period of nanoseconds in the presence of a nuclear explosion.
Much larger and more powerful ICBMs.
Compact fusion devices able to fit on those ICBMs.
A death wish to use this.
As for what kind of damage it would actually do, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone realistically does. Probably most devices with a radio antenna would stop working, because the antenna let the destructive pulse in and killed the analog front end of the radio. I think some cars would fail but most would still run. Electronic Gas pumps might die, but the fuel would still be there, and the actual pumps would probably still work, so skilled technicians could get them working again. Older diesel trucks and tractors would probably all still work, they just wouldn’t have working radios.
The internet links would probably be broken in many, many places from the EMP killing routers, but most of the major hubs for the internet are inside steel framed buildings with metal roofs and the servers have surge protectors. And the actual signal input to those hubs are fiber optics.
And the destruction wouldn’t be total. Leave an electronic device in a car trunk, a metal locker, in just the right place shielded by metal in the walls above? It’ll be fine. Most failed devices would actually still be mostly working and the simpler ones would be repairable.
A lot of people would die, however. From failed hospital life support. From the power grid failures causing a heat wave and deaths from lack of air conditioning. The cars that failed would be blocking the roadways, even if most vehicles continued to run. And of course the economic damage would be immense - even if every single broken device could be re-ordered from factories in China, it would take years to replace everything.
And it’s obviously going to get worse.
It’s like someone points a gun at you, and you worry about hearing loss if it gets fired.
If they can explode a nuclear weapon high over our country…then they could explode it on our country, and wipe out a major city, doing far more harm to us than any EMP.
No a rouge leader would bombard us with lipstick and eyeliner.
ICBMs could launch stuff to orbit. For example, the Titan rockets were mainly ICBMs, but also were used to launch Gemini manned spacecraft. But the trajectory they use for delivering bombs won’t do it, because it intersects the Earth.
Also note the maximum altitude (apogee) they reach for delivering bombs is about 1200 km. It’s the boost phase that ends at 400 km. Cite, in case you want one.
every since that Jessica alba tv show and the sci-fi writers switched from nukes to emp bombs to “turn the world off” people have worried about this
ive been told yes its possible but it would only last days to a couple months as its not that hard to fix and wouldn’t lead to a collapse of society …
The actual damage wouldn’t come from the nuke, it would come from Trump’s reaction to it. If you thought Bush’s post-9/11 lies were bad…
People from Bin Laden to Putin to Jong Un have long understood that the best way to attack America is not through military superiority, but to simply goad us into following stupid leaders behind blind patriotism.
I (would like to) think that government and military lines-of-communication are hardened against EMP, and any such attack, while harmful to civilian infrastructure, would leave the government (or, at least, the military) fully operational.
And the counter-strike by the U.S. would leave Pyongyang and anyplace Dear Leader might possibly be hiding (short of Beijing) glowing bright enough to see with the naked eye from orbit.
It’s the complete opposite of that.
a 10 kiloton bomb can easily be 5 x 8% = 40% as powerful as the 1.44 megaton Starfish Prime at producing EMP.[35]
. Thermonuclear weapons are also less efficient at producing EMP because the first stage can pre-ionize the air[35] which becomes conductive and hence rapidly shorts out the Compton currents generated by the fusion stage. Hence, small pure fission weapons with thin cases are far more efficient at causing EMP than most megaton bombs.
Well Psy did bring us all to our feet and onto the dancefloor with "Gangnam Style’. Or is this some other Mad Korean we’re talking about?
Sorry, I’m still trying to keep up with changes to Trump’s inner circle.
to answer the op’s question, yes. an EMP would not just bring the US to it’s knees but the entire world. The damage from an EMP would shut down everything over a large multi-state area. That means no utilities such as electricity, water, or natural gas. All transportation would grind to a halt so food distribution would be disrupted.
The monetary damage would be astronomical and it would trigger a world financial crisis. We don’t have the capacity to replace the damaged infrastructure in a timely manner. It would require scavenging electrical parts and control systems from all over the country.
What would probably happen is a mass exodus of people to other states until the damage is repaired and that would be measured in months and years.
A related but perhaps less cataclysmic effect is filling low orbit with radioactive fallout. I never knew how many bombs it would take but I know that there are serious concerns about someone setting off nuclear weapons at low earth orbit heights to spread so much damaging radiation at that altitude that few if any satellites, especially spy satellites, can survive. The concern was sufficiently high the military spent $ on coming up with ways to “clean” the environment after such an event. They were looking at a series of satellites containing electromagnets that would change the orbit of the particles enough to push them down or up and out of the way. I know very little about the project except that it existed as a research effort.
Although not explicitly stated by the OP, you can assume an EMP that NK can actually fabricate and reliably deploy. Some super-duper EMP weapon that can somehow blanket both the near and far side of the Earth with EMP would be insane if not impossible with current technology that can be strategically deployed.
Honestly, NK would have a better chance of significant disruption by having some dudes take a slow-boat over and go perform a synchronized attack on power stations and take out a seaboard (at most).
The phenomenon you describe isn’t due to fallout (which is debris sucked up by the atmosphere heated by the thermal pulse and irradated by neutron bombardment) but the energizing (“pumping”) of charged solar particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Two natural belts called the Van Allen Belts exist, pumped by solar paricle emissions but high energy nuclear weapons detonated at exoatmospheric altitudes, either by X-ray emission or direct injection of beta paricles. These artifical belts are not naturally replenished and will decay over a period of weeks, but can damage satellites and interfere with communications while they exist. They could be dissipated by simply flying a satellite with a long conductive tether through them, but it probably isn’t necessary.
There are a lot of misapprehensions and incorrect information about electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects and damage, here and elsewhere, but an EMP device with a wide enough field could do significant damage to the information and power distribution infrastructure of the continental United States, Europe, or South Asia. EMP disrupts electrical devices and can cause irreperable component damage via dielectric breakdown by saturating exposed devices (particularly those with large antennas or connected toman electrical network) with a quasi-coherent radio frequency energy pulse. Most critical stategic military equipment is designed to be robust against nuclear high altitude EMP up to the 50 kV/m atmospheric limit but non-critical and commercial equipment has become increasingly vulnerable due to miniaturization and the desire for lower power consumptioned, combined with highly networked and wireless devices which may contain multiple antennas.
Putting such a device in an ungrounded container such as an ammo box or car trunk, or evn protected by a so-called mesh Faraday cage is no guarantee of protection; even if the container significantly attenuates the radio signal (and a car body in particular does not, as demonstrated by the people you see swerving on highways every day while talking or texting on their cell phones) the pulse can generate large magnetic fields which can generate secondary pulses in circuits via induction. If your device has any kind of external antenna or floating ground it can and likely will be affected, which includes cell phones, computers, most electronic medical diagnostic equipment, vehicle control and communications systems, complex battery power management systems, et cetera. However, the most vulnerable system is our power grid; not only is it basically a perfect receiver for wide field signals but it requires constant active control by sensitive systems to load balance and homogenize electricity developed from different sources, and a control failure in one segment can cause regional cascading failures.
However, while a relatively small nuclear device detonated at the right altitude can generate an intense pulse on the ground beneath it, it takes a very large yield weapon optimized to produce X-rays detonated at a precise altitude to generate a destructive EMP across a broad region. So far, North Korea’s nuclear tests have been very low yield or fizzled devices which are likely quite dirty and generating little high energy X-ray yields. Nor have they demonstrated an ICBM-class delivery system capable of accurate targetting and survivability. And of course, such a strike would invite retaliation vastly out of proportion with any damage North Korea could possibly do to the US, even despite the ramifications in South Korea and elsewhere. Color me more concerned about the economy and the state of health care than the fat guy with the stupid haircut in Pyongyang.
Stranger
I literally don’t know what you’re talking about. An EMP is not some advanced nuclear device. It’s an old-school low-yield nuclear bomb detonated at a higher altitude. It’s the perfect nuclear weapon as it doesn’t require advanced fusion technology or accuracy and it creates a tremendous amount of economic damage. If dropped over the East Coast it would be chaos.
Like, did you read the post immediately above yours by Stranger? Last paragraph…
I know this is GQ and not IMHO. I apologize; but no one outside the US/Japan propaganda fog thinks that NK has the ability or the inclination to lob a nuke at the US for very obvious reasons, just like sane people knew Iran was not going to nuke Israel. You don’t throw stones at someone pointing a machine gun at you unless you are suicidal.
Never say never. Lotsa sanctions, limited resources, starvation, it’ll all catch up to them eventually.
Launch a nuke and that all goes away as your country gets mowed over.
The upper echelon has to know if there’s a rebellion they’ll be tortured as well as their families. The populace will go full circle on them.
yes and I cited otherwise with a source other than an internet poster.