Nuclear EMP BOMB

What do you think would happen if a Nuclear EMP Bomb was set off at the optimal distance above land in the middle of the USA?

Do you think that it would bring USA to it's knees? Do you think that all electronics will be destroyed, or just certain ones?

It would take a pretty ridiculous EMP to cover the entire nation.. most likely only electronics that are within a certain range of the detonation would be affected, said range being dependent on the yield of the device.

A nuclear emp bomb that is set off at the proper distance from land has the range to effect all of the USA.

would lasers survive?

The device would need to be set off from a position in earth orbit for that kind of coverage to occur. Only a few developed nations have that capability, rendering that threat somewhat minimal. But yes, if it happened it would put us back 120 years at least.

Apart the fact that you probably need 100 megatons, for an efficent coverage of a similar area, are years that the more delicate militar infrastructures are cabled with 3 or 4 levels redundant optic fibers and stored in shielded bunkers or under some mountains ..... i can understand that normal civil networks will be surely damaged, but not militar ones, i think ..... and, anyway, also part of the main civil lines actually uses optical fibers mux units .....

So, imho, yes, for a decent damage, but no, for a "country on its knees" situation .....

To help put these into perspective for you:


30 miles up is about the altitude that supersonic jets fly

120 miles up is a little below where the space station is

300 miles up is just below the Hubble telescope



Trust me. NOTHING is up there that we do not know about. Anything larger than about 4 inches in diameter is constantly tracked in the atmosphere. Stuff up there travels at about 5 miles a second. We need to know where it all is in order to move our satellites (etc.) out of the way of destructive junk that is heading toward it.

Peace,
dave

It's possible a massive solar CME blast could do the same thing. It'd fry all the transformers on the grid due to massive over current... If enough transformers go down the grid would be black for quite some time..

It happened on a small scale a while ago

Space Weather: Blackout - Massive Power Grid Failure

-Kendall

An emp would not be the weapon of choice to bring the us to its knees,
There are far worse things that losing tech, bio weapons being the most effective released just right quick and dirty.
An emp we could recover protected backups would be fine heck my back ups in a magnetically shielded safe would be fine. (i think)
If the device was not plugged in it would still be fine.
Even newer cars if they were running would have a good chance at surviving the pulse.
Cars themselves are a Faraday cage which is a shielded enclosure or metal box, This If the car was at ground zero yes it would over power the Faraday cage effect but a small distance away and it would be just fine.
There is much research to be done. you might have seen the video on tv of a car driving under an emp generator and dieing, but if you read up on that it was tested at multiple distances they only showed you the on that worked. to over power the Faraday cage effect they had to get within 25-30ft but any farther the car was fine.
A hardrive would not lose its data as its case itself is a Faraday cage and even if you pc fried there are fail safes for your psu and mobo to go before you hdd.
People seem to think a emp melts all electronic circuit but in truth it just flashes them but most have protection or way of keeping the discharge away from the sensitive components, it might be broke but its data is still stored.
even more so an emp has a frequency which has to be tuned to what you want to destroy there can be a broad range but it cant be tuned to every one, so it might just be able to effect a small range of our electronic world.

I doubt there would ever be a EMP attack with such radius - building a device that powerful is difficult enough, and carrying it to orbit would be another challenge.

Any emp attack is likely to be very targetted, perhaps to something like the pentagon, or the nyse. Launchin a continent-wide attack would be very expensive, and not much more effective in causing mayhem than a couple of very local attacks.

Also, EMP weapons are constructable, but mostly stuff off fiction. They can surely be built, but the question is if building and deploying one is more effective than just blowing the target up with conventional explosives.

With a background in biochemistry, i'd say the biggest treath that could kill people by the million would be biological in nature. Biological warfare is considered dirty and 'not done', but if some rogue faction decided on using it anyway, very dangerous weapons could be developed at moderate cost.

A bioweapon could be developed and built with costs in the order of (tens of) millions, whereas a devastating emp or nuclear weapons programme would probably end up costing billions.

An emp capable of doing that would cost many billions of dollars and the people doing the attack would probably cause more damage by just flying the massive nuke into new york or something.