What's your thoughts on an EMP?

[Ranga]

Few years ago 24 hour black out caused riots on NY,
(Ok they're Americans) but how long would it take for that to happen here?
An EMP Device could be held in a sports bag and take out a massive area, non leathal but long term knock on effect would be.
Refineries and power station forced power downs,emergency service loss of comms,shipping and air loss of nav,this to me is an easy attack angle.
Your thoughts are welcome.....

[BadgerSE]

More worried about nukes then EMP to be honest.

Why blackout an entire nation when you can nuke it and kill several million people in the process and wipe out its army and demoralise and destabilise an entire country.

Besides, the blast from a nuke would in effect cause localised EMP to that strike area anyway.

From a terrorist point of view I would imagine acquiring nuclear material would be easier to do as well. They kill to get publicity and for whatever cause they believe in, using EMP would not cause a big enough impact really. That's my opinion and speculation on the matter.

[grenfell]

Theoretically possible but not something I personally worry about. One source of an EMP would be a nuclear detonation but the effects of the detonation would be far worst than the EMP effects. As to a device being used for terrorist purposes I still don't think it's high on the list of possibilities . Conventional bombs and perhaps dirty bombs are cheaper and easier to build and seem more suited to terrorist aims which seem to centre on causing maximum death tolls .
Is it just me but can anyone see an irony here. A few decades ago we were worried about neutron bombs that wipe out people but leave infrastructure intact but now with a potential EMP weapon we worry about the opposite .

[sfcfinchrs]

Most worried about a nuke war at the moment.

The more I study up on EMP (Solar Flare) the less I worry.

I keep any mission critical electronics in 20mm ammo cans most of the time.

I am starting to believe that if a vehicle is not actually running at the time of an EMP event. Then it is most likely going to be ok.

An interruption to the electric supply grid is going to mess things up pretty bad. Yet we have what we need to hunker down and adapt our lifestyle to the need.

[yorkshirewolf]

EMP is only ever really useful to knock out a countries electrical infrastructure, in a war, it's useful, but you're then going to have a very angry population to invade, unless you plan on invading and killing most of them, in which case why not use a conventional nuke?

The newer generation of fuel-air bombs are as destructive as low yield nukes, without the mass radiation and fallout, so for a war, surely they're a better option?

EMP might well be used in a terrorist attack, to knock us back to the stone age, just to see the country tear itself apart, but surely terrorism is about having the victim(s) know who did it, in order to terrorise them? So a dirty bomb or multiple small bombs would be more effective?

I think the most likely result of an EMP weapon being detonated would be mass depression, due to people not being able to use their phones/facebook/twitter...

[Plymtom]

Once you've been around long enough and had a good look around, you'll find plenty on this subject and many others, You've jumped in at the deep end a bit here, it'sfar better to add you two penneth to an existing thread, welcome aboard

[whenfires]

Would North Korea try it? They would only have limited access to nuclear material and could do severe damage with a small number of high altitude detonations.

It's ridiculously unlikely due to the international response to such an attack and they're not quite that mad....... are they?

[Arzosah]

I researched solar-caused EMP a while back for t'blog, and as far as I could tell, the USA and other countries with long power lines are more vulnerable than we are. We have a **grid** - America, and a few other countries, have lines (they have some areas with grids too). A grid has a lot more redundancy, i.e. it can take a lot more hits, before it breaks down.

UK power grid: http://www2.nationalgrid.com/uk/service ... rk-routes/

USA power grid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... erGrid.jpg

I didn't research nukes at all.

[BadgerSE]

I researched solar-caused EMP a while back for t'blog, and as far as I could tell, the USA and other countries with long power lines are more vulnerable than we are. We have a **grid** - America, and a few other countries, have lines (they have some areas with grids too). A grid has a lot more redundancy, i.e. it can take a lot more hits, before it breaks down.

UK power grid: http://www2.nationalgrid.com/uk/service ... rk-routes/

USA power grid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... erGrid.jpg

I didn't research nukes at all.

To be fair you don't really need to research nukes. The maths is pretty simple to any kind of folk that fear that word..

Nuke} large chemical reaction x lots of energy = a very big bang and lots of carnage and destruction.

[sniper 55]

Personally I suspect it's a lot cheaper and easier to hack the systems and shut the grids down that way.