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What you need to know about EMP weapons
- PaulHoule 1y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
- meepmorp 1y ago> 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?
- closewith 1y agoFollowing 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.
- hcfman 1y agoSomehow 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.
- diggan 1y ago> 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?
- impossiblefork 1y agoI'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.
- closewith 1y ago> 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.
- sharpshadow 1y agoExactly, 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.
- jajko 1y agoThose 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.
- bell-cot 1y agoI'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 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.
- closewith 1y ago> 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.
- XorNot 1y agosigh 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.
- closewith 1y agoAn 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.
- XorNot 1y agoAnd 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).
- CalRobert 1y agoI 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.
- bilbo0s 1y agoIt'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.
- hcfman 1y agoOr New Zealand ones :) I imagine Peter Thiel might be spending more time down there these days :)
- bilbo0s 1y agoNot 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.
- tgv 1y agoThe killing of Franz Ferdinand was just the starter shot. Everybody was already waiting in the blocks to rush.
- diggan 1y agoMaybe that's based on the "Doomsday Clock" (https://thebulletin.org/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.
- bargainbin 1y agoAnyone using that exercise in melodramatics as their basis for probability of nuclear war deserves to be laughed it and subsequently ignored.
- diggan 1y agoThe author is writing about post-nuclear detonation, of course it's an exercise in melodramatics and theories, that's clear from the onset.
- hollerith 1y agoDoomsday clock is not an estimate of nuclear risk these days, but includes risks like climate change.
- Nursie 1y agoThere’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.
- polotics 1y agoclassic 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.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoThe 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.
- GJim 1y ago> 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.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoAt 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.
- GJim 1y agoI despair at such naivety.
- Calwestjobs 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOG_7LKWLZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOG_7LKWLZo
- Amezarak 1y agoWhy? 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.
- MobiusHorizons 1y agoWe 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.
- lenerdenator 1y ago1) 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)
- diggan 1y agoI 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.
- littlestymaar 1y ago> 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).
- muzani 1y agoBut 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.
- Workaccount2 1y agoI 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.
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- tronicjester 1y agoTo prevent nuclear war YouTube has now blocked videos related to faraday cages.
- _nub3 1y agowtf?
- imglorp 1y agoNot 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-media-considered-harmful https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own... Is someone keeping a list of all the various censorship triggers on YT?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- flufluflufluffy 1y agoI think this was a joke related to Jeff’s post xD
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tomxor 1y ago> 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.
- davidmurdoch 1y agoI 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.
- Workaccount2 1y agoLet 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.)
- washadjeffmad 1y agoThat 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".
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- hollerith 1y ago>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.
- hcfman 1y agoHey don't knock mister Simpson. He's an icon. I'm amazed he's still going.
- bollybobthoeton 1y agoCan't I just chuck it in the microwave and hope no one presses start?
- jefftk 1y agoFrequency 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.
- Calwestjobs 1y agochuck 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.
- cesarb 1y ago> 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.
- cogogo 1y agoEl 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.
- mrbluecoat 1y agoA great, but chilling, read on this topic is 'One Second After', by William R. Forstchen
- wiradikusuma 1y agoSo the situation in the Eternaut series is possible, man-made?
- amit9gupta 1y agoThe 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/dp/0593476093 https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Scenario-Annie-Jacobsen/d...
- BryanLegend 1y agoI read it and it's completely biased to a worst imaginable scenario. Not likely to reflect any real world at all.
- andybp85 1y agoThe 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).
- arethuza 1y agoI 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?
- sbierwagen 1y agoI 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?
- nancyminusone 1y ago>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.
- pjc50 1y agoYeah, 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.
- jajko 1y agoI 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.
- ianburrell 1y agoMy 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.
- magicalhippo 1y ago> The problem is that the recent government studies that say high altitude can hurt electronics are all made by alarmists. Was just thinking about how electronics back in the 80s and 90s tended to die from static electricity and similar very often, as they didn't have much built-in protection. These days almost all transistors and microcontrollers have built-in overvoltage protection, and all serious circuits adds additional external protection like TVS diodes and such, especially for anything connected to cables (which would act as antennas). So I'm guessing the area which an EMP is effective could be lower these days compared to back in the 80s and 90s?
- os2warpman 1y agoEMP weapons do not exist.
- akkartik 1y agoWhat about turning devices off, does that protect against one or two of the three phases?
- euroderf 1y agoI see no voltages in the article. But I've read 50,000 volts per foot of conductor.
- ctippett 1y agoGenuine 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?
- 1970-01-01 1y agoDatacenters hate this one weird trick!
- ufmace 1y agoI'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.
- jvanderbot 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime 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.
- jcrawfordor 1y agoIt 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.
- mikewarot 1y agoGiven 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.
- sandworm101 1y agoTitle is misleading. Article only dicusses nuclear emp issues with zero mention of the plethora of non-nuclear emp weapon options.
- ChaoPrayaWave 1y ago[dead]
- timcobb 1y ago> As we sit, possible poised on the verge of a nuclear conflict in the Northern Hemisphere Am I missing something? Should I be worried?
- charintstr 1y agoThe 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
- timcobb 1y agoYeah, so how are we on the verge of nuclear war?
- charintstr 1y agoWe’re not. The author is just caught up in the threats/fear
- nonelog 1y agoThe 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-probability-prediction-s8-e17.html https://rumble.com/v6sm22l-marina-jacobi-near-new-york-90-pr...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amelius 1y agoIt doesn't answer the most basic question: how many layers of tinfoil do I need?
- paulnpace 1y agoThere are also old Mercedes turbo diesels with mechanical fuel injection. I'm pretty sure those would survive an EMP, although I'm assuming things like starter motor circuit works (is it even possible to push start a diesel?).
- olelele 1y agoI heard from a pretty crazy audio engineer in Berlin that there are miniature vacuum tubes from Soviet jet fighters that function as replacement in microphones bc they are vibration resistant. The jets were designed to survive emp.
- schiffern 1y agoShame to see such (otherwise excellent) writing fraught with mistaken SI usage, as defined by the authoritative SI Brochure.[0] It's a small thing that makes any writing feel less credible. Hopefully the author sees this post and can correct it. The author is using British English so I have preferred that convention. I include a second option which at least corrects any mistaken abbreviations, but the first option is always the correct version. >tens or hundreds of Km "tens or hundreds of kilometres" or "tens or hundreds of km" >30Km "30 kilometres" or "30 km" >10nS "10 nanoseconds" or "10 ns" >Khz to low Mhz "kilohertz to low megahertz" or "kHz to low MHz" >hundreds of mS "hundreds of milliseconds" or "hundreds of ms" >a few Khz "a few kilohertz" or "a few kHz" [0] https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/ https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/