I'm not sure about most of this. The great majority of the articles and stories about this I've read trace back to layman speculation and disaster porn fiction written by people who have never claimed to actually be informed about how these things work. There's damn little stuff out there that traces back to actual experiments with real hardware. Probably most of the serious experiments are by various militaries and are highly classified. I've seen some more believable stuff suggesting that most consumer electronics and automobiles are not vulnerable at all to the much-fictionalized high-altitude nuclear EMP.
Either way, the author of this article does not cite any sources or relevant experience, and he doesn't include any biographical information about himself to judge how qualified he is to speak on such subjects. There's not much reason I see to take this any more seriously than any piece of fictional disaster porn you could buy on Amazon.
I don't know the truth for sure myself, but hopefully we all know better than to believe everything we read, especially about subjects like this where there appears to be very little hard science published.
There's plenty of unclassified info available. Start here.[1] This is an overview document from Defense Acquisition University, a unit of DoD. It's a painful PowerPoint. You have to plow through a lot of really boring military documents to get the details.
EMP doesn't address small devices much. Small devices with no wires connected are not very vulnerable, because the energy is mostly at somewhat longer wavelengths, meters or tens of meters. Worry about cell towers, not cell phones.
Other than the power grid people, the civilian sector doesn't look at EMP hardening much any more.
[1] https://www.dau.edu/sites/default/files/Migrated/CopDocument...
I did run through the whole thing. It doesn't actually say anything at all about what is or is not vulnerable, it's just a bunch of military standards and procedure about how to test for things and what to test, and some vague stuff about potential ways to protect things and what large military hardware they'd like to test.
Curiously, all of the links people have thrown out in this thread seem to prove exactly what I said - there's damn little available to the public in the way of documented experiments on real hardware for EMP susceptibility.
I don't have any really solid cites for it offhand, but it has been my understanding that small devices aren't vulnerable. I don't know EMPs specifically, but I have been involved in standard EMI testing for approval of consumer-grade electronics, so I know there's already a fair amount of testing for and shielding against EM interference with everyday consumer electronics.
> Worry about cell towers, not cell phones.
The grounding is usually required to meet a standard and is tested during the towers installation. There are also coaxial surge arrestors and isolators that get used along the span.
Some of the site to site communications equipment has no ground component other than a PoE switch. The ethernet interface, radio, and antenna are all in a single packaged unit installed at height on the tower.
That's a good point. Anything that is designed to survive lightning strikes also has considerable EMP resistance.
Communications equipment is not designed to withstand lightning strikes. Lightning protection is meant to prevent the tower from melting or the building from burning down, not to protect a receiver!
I happen to be from the same town as this guy. He is well known for building his own ramjet-powered cruise missile.
I don't know about recently but he was actively involved in the local RC airplane club for quite a while if I recall correctly.
His website is well worth checking out, he has a very extensive technical knowledge.
Okay, that's very cool! I don't mean to trash this guy at all, he may well be a real expert in some fields.
However, it is a failure mode that people who are really smart and qualified about one thing can assume they are equally smart and qualified about a bunch of other fields that require their own specific expertise. Alas, it doesn't work that way.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing about some specific technical subject. It is a red flag though when someone takes it as a threat to their identity and self-worth to acknowledge that they don't know much about some particular subject, even if they do know a lot about a different subject.
Here's congressional testimony on the topic from a top Pentagon Weaponeer named Lowell Wood, who I can personally assure you is well credentialed in this area.
https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...
Note that this testimony is a persuasive presentation, an effort to persuade congress to allocate additional spending for EMP protection. Mr. Wood may indeed be qualified to speak on the subject, but this aspect necessarily colors his speech. It's not like there's a shortage of cases of decently qualified people exaggerating the risks of something in order to get more funding and status for themselves and their pet programs.
What I'd really like is hard data on what is or is not actually vulnerable to these hazards and to what extent, based on hard proof rather than fear-mongering by interested parties, which this doesn't get us any further towards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
> Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights,[1]: 5 setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link.[6] The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.[7]
This was a 1 Mt bomb 10x as far from the surface as the article discusses.
All that to say, it's plausible.
It should be understood that the largest impact of the Starfish Prime test, knocking out streetlights, was the result of a very specific design detail of the street lights that is now quite antiquated (they were high-voltage, constant-current loops with carbon disc arc-over cutouts, and the EMP seems to have caused some combination of direct induced voltage and disregulation of the constant current power supply that bridged the carbon disks). The required repair was replacement of the carbon disks, which is a routine maintenance item for that type of system but of course one that had to be done on an unusually large scale that morning. The same problem would not occur today, as constant-current lighting circuits have all but disappeared.
In the case of the burglar alarms, it is hard to prove definitively, but a likely cause of the problem was analog motion detectors (mostly ultrasonic and RF in use at the time) which were already notorious for false alarms due to input voltage instability. Once again, modern equipment is probably less vulnerable.
Many of the detailed experiments in EMP safety are not published due to the strategic sensitivity, but the general gist seems to be along these lines: during the early Cold War, e.g. the 1950s, EMP was generally not taken seriously as a military concern. Starfish Prime was one of a few events that changed the prevailing attitude towards EMP (although the link between the disruptions in Honolulu and the Starfish Prime test was considered somewhat speculative at the time and only well understood decades later). This lead to the construction of numerous EMP generators and test facilities by the military, which lead to improvements in hardening techniques, some of which have "flowed down" to consumer electronics because they also improve reliability in consideration of hazards like lightning. The main conclusion of these tests was that the biggest EMP concern is communications equipment, because they tend to have the right combination of sensitive electronics (e.g. amplifiers) and connection to antennas or long leads that will pick up a lot of induced voltage.
The effects of EMP on large-scale infrastructure are very difficult to study, since small-scale tests cannot recreate the whole system. The testing that was performed (mostly taking advantage of atmospheric nuclear testing in Nevada during the 1960s) usually did not find evidence of significant danger. For example, testing with telephone lines found that the existing lightning protection measures were mostly sufficient. But, there has been a long-lingering concern that there are systemic issues (e.g. with the complex systems behavior of electrical grid regulation) that these experiments did not reproduce. Further, solid-state electronics are likely more vulnerable to damage than the higher-voltage equipment of the '60s. Computer modeling has helped to fill this in, but at least in the public sphere, much of the hard research on EMP risks still adds up to a "maybe," with a huge range of possible outcomes.
> wrap that in aluminium foil, making sure that the ends are folded over and pressed down hard to provide good inter-layer contact
I've tried this many times, it's impossible to prevent gaps without welding it shut. Obviously I wasn't testing with an EMP or nuke, but trying to block 2.4GHz WiFi... But that is well within the E1 range the author states.
I think the problem with folding is it's too uniform, it's still too easy for waves to propagate through the humanly imperceptible gaps with only a few reflections.
The only method I found that worked consistently was to wrap many layers randomly overlapping and crumpling previous layers. My theory as to why this works is through self interference due to creating a long signal path with highly randomised reflections... No idea if that would help cancel out EMP.
Let me tell you something from first hand field experience with faraday cages...
They attenuate signals, they do not block them. The common verbiage is to say "faraday cages block EM radiation", so people naturally assume that it blocks EM radiation. But I learned the hard way while doing compliance testing that no, they do not block EM radiation, they just weaken it (and it's highly frequency dependent on top of that.)
From messing about with MR scanners:
An MR Faraday cage attenuates the RF signal about 100db (according to the engineer who built it). Phones work as long as the door is open 1mm or so. Blue tooth works through the cage just fine. Wifi doesn't work very well anywhere near the cage.
MR scanners get nice pictures with the scan door open, but the if the scanner next door has its door open (so 2x scanners running with door open), images are wrecked.
Also, the coastguard sends you grumpy letters if you leave the door open and scan (at 3T).
Why does the coastguard get involved?
I think that 3T scanners are effectively transmitting on one of their frequencies in my region.
We image hydrogen which has a precessional frequency of 42*3MHz at 3T (though most ‘3T’ MR scanners seem to be more like 2.8-2.9T).
So they must use something at around that frequency. All I know for sure is that we got asked to stop blasting that RF out. Sometimes it is convenient to open the scan door while imaging.
"(and it's highly frequency dependent on top of that.)"
Well, sure. Can people inside the cage see outside? (Or a hypothetical person for a small cage.) If so, then clearly, not all frequencies are being blocked. A lot of "Faraday cages" are explicitly designed for radio and deliberately let other frequencies, particularly the visual range, through.
In fact we all have direct experience with that. Our microwaves use a Faraday cage to keep them in. But we can still see through the mesh, and you can tell that the inside can see out because outside light can go in and bounce back out. (That is, while there's probably a light in your microwave, it's obviously not the sole source of light.) Blocks microwaves well, but visible light goes right through the holes.
They let out enough to interfere with radios operating around 2.4GHz. They'll attenuate the stuff, quite strongly if built well (the only reason interference is a problem is because the oven is 3+ orders of magnitude more powerful than a typical 2.4GHz radio), but it's not a total block.
Anyone interested can test this with an RF bug finder, even the homebuilt ones that just increase the intensity of an LED when near a source will work to demonstrate the leaks.
yes, this has been studied: https://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csa...
That seems intuitive, though. EM radiation is either reflected or absorbed, and optimizing for that requires both a pretty complex understanding of RF behavior and generally knowing that materials are generally radiopaque and radiolucent at different frequencies and wattages.
Sometimes we're trying to keep things (eg- information) outside from getting in, and other times we want to prevent things inside from getting out. There are practices to optimize for both that don't rely on "blocking".
> EM radiation is either reflected or absorbed
By interfaces yes, but it can also be cancelled out through destructive interference as a side effect of reflection, which is my theory of how a "big ball of crumply aluminium" is so effective compared to less chaotic solutions.
Rough surfaces increase reflection in non-specular directions and decrease it in the specular direction. I have never heard that it would facilitate destructive interference.
Every time my friends make fun of my hat, every time I think of shedding the 'Luminum Life, something convinces me to stand fast.
Thank you brother.
Thank you.
Well, I am not sure how you expect redneck prepper types to pick up on enough RF theory to manufacture homemade metamaterials.
We aren't all rednecks. Or maybe we kind of are but some of us have engineering degrees.
You shouldn't need to prevent gaps entirely. You only need to make sure there are no holes larger than roughly the wavelength of the radiation you're trying to block. Which, for 2.4GHz wifi, is about 125mm. I think what you saw is that a single layer of foil isn't enough skin depths thick to block radiation sufficiently at that frequency.
One of my more popular Physics Stack Exchange answers: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/208520/82798
I need to test flaky cell phone connectivity issues and tried the same thing. Aluminum foil did not cause packet loss. But a microwave (not running) in a building with a metal roof in a room surrounded by metal filing cabinets did the job.
You can experiment by putting a cell phone in various kinds of faraday cages and seeing if it rings when called.
Related, today I learned that modern Android self-sabotages by refuses to reconnect to wifi if location is disabled.
Just don't fall for the old "turn off any adblockers and enable javascript" trick.
1. google how many lightning strikes are there per day
2. google how many millions of miles/kilometers of electric wires is hanging in air all over the world providing people with electricity
3. do not google how many of those millions of lightning strikes PER DAY disabled those billions of miles of wires per day, by applying energy bigger than nuclear EMP. do not google that.
Do you want to link your answers for comparison? The lightning strike issue seems to be mostly fuses with occasional more serious events. https://ewh.ieee.org/soc/pes/lpdl/archive/4_Bill_Chisholm_pa...
Starfish Prime blew streetlight fuses 900 miles away. I don't think lighting can do that.
Why not try a large Stanley cup? Double layered, top seals shut, pretty easy to get a hold of.
Your microwave oven is pretty good at attenuating 2.45 GHz signals.
That's a notch filter, though. Attenuation outside of whatever stopband the microwave door was designed for won't be nearly as good.
Very true.
>You can also forget about the inverse square law to protect you
No, you don't get to ignore physics because the source is not a point source
>Very large area of EMP
How large?
>Induces currents in any conducting material
So does a magnet falling off my fridge. What magnitude of currents, at what distance, in what sized conductor?
>During E1 the frequencies are so high
How high are they?
There can be radio waves strong enough to fry a silicon chip. There can be radio waves strong enough to melt glass vacuum tubes. This article provides no parameters by which one can make these calculations.
You might as well say "don't get nuked" which is admittedly sound advice.
Yeah, this reads like alarmism with no numbers.
It's been a long time since atmospheric nuclear testing, but the US did carry out a bunch of tests to measure such effects, and it would be good to dig up the numbers from them.
My understanding is that nearby nuke and high altitude produce different EMP. The nearby one destroys electronic, but less of concern since close to nuclear blast. The high altitude one covers a large area, but it is more like solar flare, causing current in large conductors and primarily affecting the grid.
The problem is that the recent government studies that say high altitude can hurt electronics are all made by alarmists. When we should be focusing effort on grounding the grid, both for EMPs and for flares.
I would expect this depends on yield, distance, any existing shielding (ie rebar in concrete), height of explosion and so on. Article doesn't discuss any specific bomb, hence no need for specific numbers.
1) Don't worry about it. If one goes off over a NATO country or Russia/China, you'll soon have much, much bigger problems to worry about.
2) There is no 2)
Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.
I truly, really, forcefully recommend reading the novel "Warday" by Witley Strieber and James Kunetka It takes place in the early 90s, several years after an accidentally limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the USSR. The story traces the journey of two reporters crossing the devastated country and chronicling the stories of survivors and how they got by, while also slowly developing the journalists' own survival narratives.
In a very well written, visceral way, this novel showcases the barbarities that even such a limited nuclear can unleash on a society, like few others I've read. On the other hand it also underscores the hopeful recovery efforts that people are capable of.
For anyone who appreciated those films, I can't imagine them disliking Warday. It's also delivers an unusually powerful emotional punch with its character development, well above the average for apocalypse literature.
One of the frighteningly realistic elements of the storyline is how it describes the nuclear bombardment as "moderate", at least compared to what was intended by the Soviets. However, because a large part of the fallout completely ruins the agricultural capacity of the country, the resulting development of widespread malnutrition turns a later flu epidemic into something truly murderous, causing far more death on top of what the bombs produced.
Finally, someone else who appreciates Warday!
It's really good. And as far as I can tell, as a layman who reads way too much about this stuff, quite accurate in terms of what the sort of limited strike depicted in the book would do in the short and long term. (I have quibbles, such as what happens to San Antonio and Manhattan, but nothing major.)
Highly recommended to anyone who like the genre.
I thought the book was both harrowing as hell, grim to the point of being close to a horror novel in some parts with its descriptions of what people went through, and also extremely moving. The scene where Streiber manages to visit the wreck of his Manhattan apartment was enough to bring tears.
I'm curious, What were your quibbles with Manhattan and San Antonio?
Edit, and yes, I've read that it was highly praised for realism. The authors really put their effort into making it as close to what things might really be like as possible. No hyperbole or dramatics, just the stark inevitable horror of even limited nuclear war and its effects
Mild spoilers here, I suppose!
It didn’t make sense that San Antonio would be targeted in the limited Soviet strike. It would be pretty far down the list, definitely not in the top 3. I believe Streiber has said as much, and that it was included because of the personal connection, and the reason given in the book (some military headquarters there?) was a weak excuse.
I can’t quite explain it, but it doesn’t feel right to me that Manhattan would be abandoned and salvaged like that. Seems like it would either be too dangerous for people to be there, or it would still be an actual city even if diminished. It seems like another thing done for the narrative and personal connection, to allow him to “return home” while also giving a reason he didn’t still live there.
But again, these are both minor points and really don’t detract from the work at all. San Antonio is little more than a bit of background flavor, and the story makes Manhattan well worth it.
If there is a chance at survival, no matter how slim I would take it. Even if it brings me suffering at least I tried to escape death. Whether my end was peaceful or dignified is of no relevance to me, because I won't be around to regret my end.
The problem is how much of your resources and time right now will you spend "prepping" for that "no matter how slim" chance in the future.
Its like working out in the gym - if you see it as a chore and a must, it is or becomes painful very quickly. If you make it fun and self-motivating (and ie get into hiking and camping in the wilderness, or practice shooting on targets, or training martial arts, some people really enjoy gardening and so on), the time is not wasted but enjoyed.
But I agree thats hardly a mindset of typical US redneck prepper. Although most of them live in rural areas and at least some hunting skills are sort of essential to cut costs.
> hunting skills are sort of essential to cut costs.
That's the first time I have heard of marauding post-apocalyptic biker gangs being called "costs"!
This discussion reminds me a beautiful sentence I read in 'The Power and the Glory' by Graham Greene: "Hope is an instinct that only the reasoning human mind can kill."
>Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.
If Sarah Connor's dreams taught me anything, it's that there's an optimal middle ground to be had here.
You don't want to be exposed to the flash nor the heat pulse seconds later, because it's pretty much instant blindness followed by your skin melting off.
What you do want is the blast wave that sends large objects plus the pulverized debris with it in your direction, so you probably just get crushed instantly.
I'd only recommend the lawn chair part if you've got a protective suit and flash blinders, in which case the real question is what you're drinking and/or smoking at the time.
I think you have to be pretty close to the actual fireball to die within 20ms, and most fireballs would be air bursts 1km altitude or higher.
As I understand it the main reason there isn't instant disintegration out to hundreds or thousands of meters is that as soon as enough initial gamma and X-rays turn surrounding material into plasma most of the energy released goes into fireball formation because the plasma is virtually opaque to all EM and the fireball grows in volume as a plasma until expansion reaches equilibrium with compressed surrounding air, everything at the plasma/gas interface is incandescent and radiates as a black body of ~10,000C which transfers a lot of heat but not sufficient to atomize many centimeters thick objects unless they are very close.
Portions of the towers that suspended initial nuclear tests survived, for example.
The problem with this strategy is that the "instant death zone" is much much smaller than the "3rd degree burns over 100% of your body" zone.
I don't share your fatalism, but I can't criticize it. It is an understandable position. With that said, if your desire is truly to remove yourself from existence in the aftermath of such an event it is better to have some plan to do so already laid in. The majority of immediate casualties will not be deaths, you are very likely to regret relying on the weapons.
That would also grant you the chance to reconsider whether the resulting world is actually not worth living it -- or at very least to confirm that it is in fact so bleak.
> Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.
That's all fine and dandy if you only have yourself to think about...
OK, so you'll need a bigger roof and more lawn chairs...
I have a nice view of the skyscrapers of a large city some 70 km to the North. Looking at it from my lawn chair probably won't kill me but it could make me blind.
That sounds like a good idea but the physics mean you have a far greater likelihood of painfully regretting that choice; "It seemed like a good idea at the time" will be no solace.
Using an example of a 350kt airburst on NukeMap[0], the fireball radius is 700m with an area of 1.53 km². The Thermal Radiation Radius with 3rd degree burns is 7.67 km with an area of 185 km². The Light Blast Damage Radius is 13.9 km with an area of 610 km². While the numbers will be different for different yields, the basic ratios will be the same.
This means that your person in the lawn chair is highly unlikely to get to unconscious bliss in 20ms. They are 120 times more likely to enjoy the full experience of 3rd degree burns and ~400 times more likely to get significant injury while still being alive.
It seems far better to take shelter and do all you can to survive intact, and help others. If the situation on the other side is intolerably bad, you'll likely be able to find ways to end your situation far less painfully vs being naked against a nuke blast.
Fuck that. I’m going to resist dying. I am going to keep those around me, alive.
Surviving will be a miserable ordeal. That being said, all of my ancestors have survived every major calamity in the history of life on earth. The way I see it, I owe it to them to try surviving whatever comes next. A few select generations lived through much, much worse.
It may sound bizarre, but I don’t believe in an afterlife so I might as well lean into something to give me inspiration. The idea that I exist because my extremely distant ancestors survived every mass extinction gives me a sense of wonder.
>Surviving will be a miserable ordeal
Life is already a miserable ordeal for far too many people.
Which is why if I ever see a mushroom cloud, I’m running towards it.
And you'll survive. You'll build the cornerstones of future civilization! They'll erect statues of you!
And then in 100 years they'll curse you and tear down those statues because they found out you ate the last kangaroo in order to survive.
for a few minutes / hours I guess
Outside of acute radiation poisoning and blast damage, it's still a big planet.
The real problem is what happens over the next 3 to 12 months, since global trade and agriculture would fall apart.
Most projections of casualties from nuclear war have much higher fatalities from famine then bombardment.
Funny that you mention "The Day After", I watched that movie in high school then went to lunch in a school that overlooks the Kansas City skyline.
No chance that had anything to do with the panic attack I had when Putin put his nuclear troops on high alert after invading Ukraine. No sir, not at all.
As we saw puttin' is just empty talk, he is too smart and paranoid to fuck up his mafia empire be built so hard, his survival in some deep shelter with few bodyguards would be very short, person like him doesn't have any reliable true friends.
The problem is the person coming after him - if he will be an extremist nutjob, everything is possible even if only 5% or 10% of soviet missiles still work.
yup. "the survivors are the lucky ones" is fantasy.
It is a well understood phenomena of human nature to say that "I would rather die then go through X" and then when you go through X (or worse) you don't want to die. This is well understood because it happens a lot with illness or accident. Also its a very adaptive trait that we want to avoid terrible situations but most of us don't quit.
nuclear war is a lot more survivable than people make it out to be. if you can get your hands on enough clean water to hide in a basement for a week you'll basically be ok
You'll basically be ok for a week.
After that you'll become less and less ok as you start having to deal with increasingly intense challenges to your continued survival.
I think it’s important to understand fictional stories, even reasonable speculative ones, will usually have very little to do with actual reality. Don’t base your choices on what you saw in a movie.
One has to recognize the genre of "Threads" and "The Day After" - they represent suffering porn that has little to do with how actual disasters play out. In "Threads", the way people suddenly lose the ability to speak and rapidly turn into cavemen after a nuclear strike is comical. Kids grunt instead of talk, everyone shuffles around like zombies, and basic things like farming or using tools just vanish. How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild.
Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...
Those events happened when widespread support and supply were brought into to deal with the relatively limited destruction.
This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.
The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.
Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.
> The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.
Why?
Why would it be happening everywhere - in South America, Africa, Asia, and many other places - at the same time?
Asia, because there are a lot of targets there.
South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.
> Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...
If the risk was a war involving bombs like Little Boy then there wouldn't be much to worry about beyond localised disaster. The issue is the weapons that are 2-3 orders of magnitude more powerful.
And you're referring to Germany, which that took casualties approaching something close to 10% of its population during WWII - so you're eyeballing a scenario where a country just lost 10% [0] of its population and saying it looks fine to you. That seems a weak argument that the damage is nothing we need to worry about. We can argue over whether nukes are going to kill 100%, 50%, 10%, etc of the population but frankly I don't see where you would want to go with that.
[0] Not from bombing, obviously, but the situation you're talking about is nonetheless one where Germany just suffered massive losses and you're saying you can't see that in a photograph after the cities were rebuilt so no worries if something worse happens.
Not all uses of nuclear weapons necessarily escalate to the doomsday maximum exchange scenarios. There are many interesting points of equilibrium in between.
For example - if far right extremists took over Turkey and attacked Russia, then Russia nuked a Turkish airbase, what would the US/UK/France do? It's not actually that obvious.
You’re going to see the most strongly worded letter in the history of human civilization.
Responding to conventional weapons with a nuke ? Unlikely.
The USA did it against Japan. Of course those were special circumstances, but all wars have their own set of special circumstances to some extent.
There’s also the argument that using nuclear weapons make sense when a nuclear state has a weaker conventional force that its opponent. Russia still has a pretty strong conventional force, but for example North Korea is in this position against most likely adversaries.
The irony is that if your defenses consist of, on the one hand, nuclear weapons, and on the other hand, pitchforks brandished by several farmers... You are going to be very, very respected.
Until someone calls your bluff, perhaps accidentally, and realizes much of the nuclear saber-rattling was just that. Of course, since it wasn't entirely a bluff, this is the easiest way to get a nuclear war going. (Get a country with nukes but limited conventional capabilities into a brinksmanship contest.)
Turkey is a member of NATO.
More than that, Turkey is a member of NATO that participates in US nuclear sharing and has substantial US forces (aside from the nuclear weapons) deployed.
A nuclear attack by Russia on Turkey would not be merely legally and abstractly an attack on the US under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which it would do massive irreparable damage to US credibility to ignore, but would almost certainly be a nuclear attack on US forces in the direct and literal sense.
> A nuclear attack by Russia on Turkey would not be merely legally and abstractly an attack on the US under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty
In the given scenario above, Turkey attacks first, in which case Article 5 would not apply to a retaliation.
The text of article 5 doesn’t distinguish whether the attack on the NATO state was justified or even whether the NATO state attacked first.
This lack of blaming is partly why Turkey and Greece had to sign at exactly the same time, so that neither could take advantage of being able to attack the other whilst being themselves shielded by NATO.
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…” -
> The text of article 5 doesn’t distinguish whether the attack on the NATO state was justified or even whether the NATO state attacked first.
Arguably, the text of Article 5 doesn't have to, since an act of aggression breaches the obligations of Articles 1 and 2, as well as the pre-existing obligations which the Treaty explicitly does not alter under Article 7.
I see what you mean - although articles 1 & 2 seem to be treated more like guidelines rather than rules.
Otherwise I struggle to understand how any NATO member could’ve engaged in any of the overt or covert expressions of military force in Iraq 2003, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Egypt, or Algeria to name but a few.
None of the conflicts you list were NATO actions.
Not under the Trump doctrine
That’s the point. In theory Turkey is covered by the NATO nuclear umbrella.
But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.
> But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.
The question is how many would be willing to go nuclear in response to Russia nuking US forces in Türkiye in response to a conventional attack by Türkiye, which any plausible "Russia nukes Türkiye" scenario would involve.
It’s not obvious how many casualties the US itself would tolerate before going nuclear.
In circumstances where there were only a couple thousand American casualties, and those were incurred as collateral damage rather than as primary targets, it might make sense for the US to respond with conventional airstrikes and for Russia accept those and not escalate further.
This would depend a lot on the individual president though, like I could imagine Trump/Obama being much more risk averse than personalities like Bush 2 or JFK.
> If one goes off over a NATO country or Russia/China
The current threat is actually for New York.
The information comes from this session: https://rumble.com/v6sm22l-marina-jacobi-near-new-york-90-pr...
But I don't live in any of those places. Also I believe India-Pakistan has nukes too. And possibly Israel-Iran. North Korea too? The peace loving nations are well within fallout range.
My biggest fear with MAD is that it only takes a single irrational leader, and we've seen so many of them lately.
I don't want to jinx it, but even the most deranged leaders don't want to rule over a nuclear wasteland. And they especially don't want to go down in their history as the worst person who ruined everything for their party.
No, but some might have a "take the world down with me" attitude.
Netanyahu?
I agree about not worrying about it, but one should be aware -- awareness about something is not equal to worrying about something.
Awareness of something is the first step in adapting. One can adapt beforehand, or, one can adapt afterwards; with more limited resources, necessitated by circumstances, under more time pressure, with more suboptimal tools, and so on.
It is unquestionable that an EMP would have an extreme impact in all aspects of society and the lives of people. Preparations on macro and micro level can mitigate some of the problems that would follow. And preparations require awareness.
I mean, the article is about the EMP wave following a nuclear detonation, I'm not sure there are bigger problems after that, we're already pretty deep into "shit has hit the fan" at that point.
From the first paragraph:
> maybe it's time to look at the damaging effects of the electromagnetic pulse that follows a nuclear detonation.
> I mean, the article is about the EMP wave following a nuclear detonation, I'm not sure there are bigger problems after that, we're already pretty deep into "shit has hit the fan" at that point.
Sure we are in deep trouble, but at that point, but I disagree with your “not sure there are bigger problems after that”: the following problem would be a nuke exploding in your direct vicinity (instead of in high altitude/space where it caused an EMP).
The book Nuclear War: A Scenario Hardcover by Annie Jacobsen should be essential reading for all politicians and those profiteering from the Military Industrial Complex
https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Scenario-Annie-Jacobsen/d...
I read it and was not impressed.
It starts with North Korea launching two ICBMs against DC and a nuclear plant in California. Interceptors fail and the warheads hit their targets. This is unlikely, but possible. The launch is explicitly irrational, the act of a mad dictator.
In response, the US counterstrikes with Minuteman, despite having perfectly serviceable air deliverable nukes. Russia detects the launch, and the imprecision of their own early warning systems along with North Korea being next to Russia, they conclude that the US is attacking them. They do a massive launch, the US does a massive launch, worst possible assumptions for a 10C nuclear winter, four billion dead.
The only thing I learned from the book is that if you roll 1 over and over and over again, the worst can happen. But we already knew that?
A similar book of this category may be The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States which describes how a series of events, which have separately happened in the past, may lead to NK launching nukes. But it is not framed as the irrational actions of a mad dictator, but a series of coincidences that suggest NK was itself being attacked.
It was not fun seeing the saber-rattling on Twitter after reading, as Twitter does have a significant part in the story.
Russia may be kinda sorta next to North Korea, technically.
But you know who is really next to North Korea and has nukes? China.
It seems weird that Russia would even particularly care to be involved in this scenario, frankly.
I read it and it's completely biased to a worst imaginable scenario. Not likely to reflect any real world at all.
The book says that that's exactly what it's supposed to be, to inspire people to talk about it. But (also from the book) the war games the USA runs around these situations always end in a massive nuclear exchange. Sure, some specific situations, like the Devil's Scenario, I would imagine might not reflect a real war, but the case the book is making is that reality is far more likely to be closer to the worst case than to a "best case" (whatever that means here).
I had assumed that if there was a full nuclear exchange that of course both sides would target nuclear power stations in enemy territory - like anyone would be sticking to "rules" in that scenario?
El Eternauta on netflix is an Argentine sci-fi series based on an old comic recently released. It is very well done. Best series I’ve watched in a while. Avoiding any real spoilers it pretty much kicks off with an EMP frying all modern electronics and the grid.
The remarkable form of nuclear EMP is that an exoatmospheric explosion creates a pulse of gamma rays which ionize the air in the upper atmosphere and create a plasma explosion that creates strong EM fields over a wide area
To prevent nuclear war YouTube has now blocked videos related to faraday cages.
Not surprised, but is there a source? I guess hiding your electronics from The Man is subversive.
And front page today, Jeff discovered that media servers are also verboten: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own...
Is someone keeping a list of all the various censorship triggers on YT?
I think this was a joke related to Jeff’s post xD
wtf?
>The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication . . . The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact . . .
No thanks, I'll wait for factual information.
Hey don't knock mister Simpson. He's an icon. I'm amazed he's still going.
It doesn't answer the most basic question: how many layers of tinfoil do I need?
Genuine question, what happens to any commercial aircraft in the vicinity of such a detonation? Are they at a high enough altitude to avoid the EMP blast or can we expect them to lose all electronics?
Given the contemporary rules about RF emissions, fairly robust shielding practices are the norm now. I suspect most consumer electronic devices would be fine.
The exception would be things like HF ham radio, etc.
> As we sit, possible poised on the verge of a nuclear conflict in the Northern Hemisphere
Am I missing something? Should I be worried?
The New York region has recently been "declared as threatened". However, not by officials - this information comes from this session: https://rumble.com/v6sm22l-marina-jacobi-near-new-york-90-pr...
The Ukraine conflict has frequently raised nuclear fears mostly due to Russian nuclear sabre rattling. But this has been happening since 2022 and it’s hard to see anything going hot anytime soon
Yeah, so how are we on the verge of nuclear war?
We’re not. The author is just caught up in the threats/fear
A great, but chilling, read on this topic is 'One Second After', by William R. Forstchen
Datacenters hate this one weird trick!
I see no voltages in the article. But I've read 50,000 volts per foot of conductor.
What about turning devices off, does that protect against one or two of the three phases?
Can't I just chuck it in the microwave and hope no one presses start?
Frequency is too high. Needs to be solid metal, and your microwave uses a mesh. Your microwave is also super leaky electromagnetically, which you can see by the effect on 2.4GHz WiFi. It's just not leaky enough to cook you.
chuck what? your desktop pc already is inside of metal enclosure designed to minimize EM emissions, per UL/CE requirements for electronic devices.
also Voltage is difference between two levels, "potential". so that means 5Volt dc device will work if "GND"/minus pole is 3000volts "above real earth" and positive pole is 3005Volt "above real earth"
difference between + and - is voltage, so 3000 V - 3005 V is 5 V.
youtubers can film experiment showing this.
> your desktop pc already is inside of metal enclosure designed to minimize EM emissions, per UL/CE requirements for electronic devices.
Many desktop PCs have enclosures with one or more sides made of glass or acrylic. That does not seem "designed to minimize EM emissions" to me.
So the situation in the Eternaut series is possible, man-made?
EMP weapons do not exist.
Title is misleading. Article only dicusses nuclear emp issues with zero mention of the plethora of non-nuclear emp weapon options.
> As we sit, possible poised on the verge of a nuclear conflict in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe it's time to look at the damaging effects of the electromagnetic pulse that follows a nuclear detonation.
I guess that's what I get for not doomscrolling like I used to, but I wasn't aware we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Can someone explain that for me?
We aren’t really. But people bring it up every time Russia sees a setback or embarrassment in the war with Ukraine. Look up operation spider web if you want to know the latest. It was quite an impressive strike by Ukraine on the strategic bombers Russia has been using to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine (some parked very deep in Siberia). They are also part of Russia’s strategic nuclear triad, so some people are concerned this could lead to nuclear war.
Maybe that's based on the "Doomsday Clock" (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/) being as close to "human extinction" as it has ever been? Not sure, but sounds plausible the author is reading into that.
Anyone using that exercise in melodramatics as their basis for probability of nuclear war deserves to be laughed it and subsequently ignored.
The author is writing about post-nuclear detonation, of course it's an exercise in melodramatics and theories, that's clear from the onset.
Doomsday clock is not an estimate of nuclear risk these days, but includes risks like climate change.
I think the idea is that Ukraine’s attack on Russian nuclear capable bombers weakens Russia’s nuclear triad (plane, sub, and ICBM nukes) and makes the situation less stable.
Can’t say I blame Ukraine though.
It's kind of like WWI.
Where some minor player commits some act and the entire Western-Russo world spirals out into war. Only this time we use nuclear weapons instead of trenches and cannons.
Would be an interesting case study for Brazilian historians in the future.
Or New Zealand ones :) I imagine Peter Thiel might be spending more time down there these days :)
Not sure Australia-New Zealand make it? In fact, I'm fairly certain they would get hit. Just as certain as I am that North Korea would get hit.
I mean, just consider it from our (US) perspective. Any Russian naval assets that are harbored in, say, North Korea; I'm not sure that we could assume they don't mean us any harm. So I'm almost certain our subs launch strikes on North Korea despite them not really being involved directly in NATO-Russian hostilities. I think the same would go for US, (or NATO), bases and NATO naval assets harbored in Australia or New Zealand. There's just no way Russian sub captains let those targets go.
I think, in general, having had your nation destroyed is probably more reason for all those guys to fight each other and strike at targets of that nature. Not less.
The killing of Franz Ferdinand was just the starter shot. Everybody was already waiting in the blocks to rush.
The end of the cold war didn't also end the threat of nuclear war. Russia has threatened to use nukes if aid to Ukraine continues, while they haven't followed through on those threats it's not impossible that they will eventually.
> it's not impossible that they will eventually.
Please stop believing the ridiculous Russian propaganda.
Using even a single tactical nuclear weapon would be game-over for Putin's Russia.
At some point it could be game over for Putin’s Russia anyway, then what is to stop them.
Israel has a policy of the Samson option that they define as destroying the enemy but they also imply they will destroy the world. Russia has made similar statements.
I despair at such naivety.
Why? Because you expect we’d nuke them for it? Hadn’t heard this before and honestly am not sure why they don’t at this point, it seems like they have less and less to lose as the war goes on. I read in the NYT a few weeks ago the pentagon estimated the escalation back in dec/jan had a 50/50 shot of going nuclear.
There’s been a lot of rattling of nuclear sabres of Russia’s Ukraine invasion.
Ukraine managed a pretty effective attack on a few days ago, which is the last time it was brought up in a “you should probably stop supporting Ukraine with money and arms. Also, in unrelated matters, we still have a lot of nukes.”
Then there was the short-lived open hostility over Kashmir a few weeks back, with newsreaders everywhere reminding us that both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers.
Imminent threat of launch? Unsure. But it’s definitely a bit more … I dunno, ‘present’ than it has been for a while.
Following a devastating recent strike on the air leg of the Russian nuclear triad by Ukranian drones, some analysts believe the use of nuclear weapons by Russian has become much less unlikely.
Somehow I don't see those as related. Any use of nukes will not be an act of rationality. That's the utter stupidity behind this belief in MAD keeping us safe.
Exactly, there is no official communication that the attack on nuclear capable planes is revenged with a nuclear attack. What has been very clearly communicated though is that the attack on the personal transport trains has been counted as a terrorist attack and now Russia is about to declare Ukraine leadership as a terrorist organisation. A change from special operation to a terrorist hunt involves various changes.
Those are just empty names russian tv is making up to amuse less bright part of population. Its just another war, has been since 2014, nothing more and nothing less.
Lets not forget in first hours of 2022 invasion there were numerous hunting squads deployed in Kyiv with explicit orders and training to execute all Ukraine's high command, including Zelensky and all his family, and cause chaos on civilian and military infrastructure. There are numerous videos how those guys failed, were caught and mostly executed since they expected a very different situation on the ground (which is valid even as per Geneva convention, as non-marked combatants behind enemy lines would often face). One of many FSB and GRU's failures.
If we want to talk about terrorism, list of items on russian side is very, very long and new items are added every day. As I said, empty words and all know it. The closer you look at russia these days at all levels the more similarities with nazi Germany you will find. History really keeps repeating itself with sometimes stunning precision.
> Any use of nukes will not be an act of rationality
Does that mean past usage also wasn't rational? Or it was rational in that case, but impossibly can be rational in the future?
I'm not the person you're responding to, but most of the irrationality of nuclear weapons use is when it's nuclear weapons use against an entity which also has nuclear weapons.
Any use is going to lead to at a minimum an equally harmful response.
> Any use of nukes will not be an act of rationality.
It wouldn't be a rational act. It would be an emotional act by an irrational dictator.
I'd replace "some analysts" with "some alarmists". And unless you're in the hyped-up headline business, the attack fell well short of "devastating".
Plus, the pre-attack triad cred of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95 bombers was pretty limited. Notice that they are turboprops. From the 1950's. Hitting hard against the western nuclear powers (US/UK/France) ain't in their talent set.
The point is that Tu-95s are still an integral part of Moscow's aircraft leg of their nuclear triad. They are fully capable of carrying nuclear-tipped standoff weapons and attacking Europe. They fulfill the same role as the B-52 (also a 1940s-1950s design) does for the USAF. Their apparent cruising speed is roughly 100kph less than the B-52 and they are comparable in range.
Part of the reason it's so critical to Moscow is the uncertainty over the viability of their missile-based systems (both the land-based and sea-based legs of the triad). Maintenance has been so poor on these systems that no one is sure how reliable they are.
> And unless you're in the hyped-up headline business, the attack fell well short of "devastating".
All other comparable attacks have been considered devastating in history.
Yet the passably professional military news sites I've read describe the attack in terms like "substantial", "demoralizing", and "temporarily constrain Russia's ability to conduct long-range drone and missile strikes into Ukraine". Not "devastating", nor any similar (emotive or maximal) terminology.
sigh all of that history existed before the development of ICBMs and submarine launched ICBMs particularly. Which happened around the 1960s-ish depending how you count it.
ICBMs, and in particular submarine based ICBMs, are what provide nuclear deterrence in a serious fashion. They arrive faster, and are effectively unstoppable at scale.
An attack can be devastating without harming any military capabilities at all.
9/11 was devastating. October 7th was devastating. Pahalgam was devastating.
The drone attacks against Russian airbases were highly destructive, caused extreme shock, and were extremely impressive - the literal definitions of devastating.
The response will depend on the emotional and political reality within Russia. Although they have not lost their nuclear strike capabilities, they have lost face and now Putin may feel the need to act to retain his strongman hold on the country, or risk being Ceaușescu'd.
And no one responded to any of those with strategic nuclear attacks.
Russia certainly hasn't actually ramped up any nuclear rhetoric in response, which it's been happy to do at other times when it would be taken less seriously (and ramped it down significantly in late-2022 after it's US back channels communicated their intentions if any nuclear weapons or nuclear terrorism was used in Ukraine).
classic bully move of saying if you don't hand over the lunch money and keep quiet, he's going to plant that knife in your belly. Except the bully goes to the same school and his daddy (Russian's oligarchy Putin pet masters) really like their jetsetting vacations.
