What will be the consequences of an EMP bomb being dropped above the US and putting all US electrical/electronic systems out of commission?
** EMP Bomb Possible or Probable? **
Who and how will retalliation result?
The source of that article is WorldNetDaily, bastion of crappy journalism.
I’m on my PDA so that WND site came through screwy, but did it say that Iran could use scuds to get an EMP bomb over the USA and detonate it remotely “without a high level of sophistication”? :dubious:
That didn’t even qualify as an article. There is no way to damage all electronic devices with a single weapon.
However, If Iran did launch a nuclear strike it would have a return address on it. There wouldn’t be Iranians left to celebrate.
If you are going to offer a cite, at least go to a credible site, or four:
The Electromagnetic Bomb - a Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction, written by an Aussie defense analyst, courtesy of Maxwell AFB.
I’m not so sure that an EMP weapon would actually damage the hardware any. It should be possible to switch anything off and then restart it. The problem is more for things that aren’t going to go down gracefully. I other words, some planes would drop out of the sky (nbot all of them) and a lot of people will die from silly, every-day things.
EMP bombs don’t work by magic - they require extremely high levels of power output, although for a small amount of time. That’s supposedly achievable using chemical explosives in the small devices, whereas nukes automatically give an EMP pulse. Putting all US systems out of commission would require a HUGE nuke in space - there’s not many nations that could do it, and they have the integrity and safety of their statehood to worry about.
As for the smaller, explosive-pumped devices, you’re talking a radius measured in tens or hundreds of meters being affected. Something to worry about, but quite frankly we’ve had worse. At least the things are non-lethal.
Wasn’t this the premise of Dark Angel? Terrorists detonate one nuclear warhead in space and turn the US into a third world country.
I doubt this is possible with just one bomb.