Effect of EMP on electronic/ballistics shooting equipment

[DRNewcomb]

I wonder if the ignition systems of recent small engines (e.g. generators) would survive an EMP?

 

[swd]

The book "One Second After" is a good EMP scenario story.

Great book. Tough to get through the end if you have a young Type 1 diabetic child.

 

[rayjay]

Great book. Tough to get through the end if you have a young Type 1 diabetic child.

Sadly, for a lot of us the best thing would be a bullet to the head in the first few days. I take a handful of pills everyday. When they ran out I would be practically an invalid. Not that it would matter. In the cities the chaos and violence would be unimaginable. Just the stench of all the dead bodies would cause huge numbers of suicides.

 

[carlsbad]

I've spent my career in the Electric Utility business. A more likely scenario would be a widespread and long lasting electrical grid outage from terrorist activities. I have kept a set of mechanical reloading tools but it would certainly affect my accuracy to go back to them. Unfortunately, in this scenario the targets I may have to shoot would be bigger. --Jerry

 

[dickn52]

Seems like 1999 was a tragedy in the making too. My agency hired and worked and for 6 months we heard doom and gloom stories of this and that. 2000 rolled around and NOTHING happened then either.

 

[DRNewcomb]

Seems like 1999 was a tragedy in the making too. My agency hired and worked and for 6 months we heard doom and gloom stories of this and that. 2000 rolled around and NOTHING happened then either.

This is because government and industry spent a fortune to make sure nothing happened. I remember talking to a ship captain who the Coast Guard inspectors made describe the whole process of doing manual celestial navigation just in case all the nav-aids went "kerflewie" at midnight 12/31/'99. We scrapped whole computer systems because one never-used function in one never-used program was not Y2K certified. The preparations for Y2K were enormous. Much more than we've ever given to the possibility of a rogue actor setting off an EMP.

 

[carlsbad]

Starfish Prime is the source of much of our fear of EMP experimental knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

This was a 1.4MT fusion bomb. Although not huge, it is much bigger than most of the bombs in our arsenal and bigger than any rogue actors out there are likely to have. Even the claimed hydrogen bomb Rocketman detonated was only 100KT yield. So a rogue EMP, although devastating, would likely be relatively small. --Jerry

 

[dickn52]

This is because government and industry spent a fortune to make sure nothing happened. I remember talking to a ship captain who the Coast Guard inspectors made describe the whole process of doing manual celestial navigation just in case all the nav-aids went "kerflewie" at midnight 12/31/'99. We scrapped whole computer systems because one never-used function in one never-used program was not Y2K certified. The preparations for Y2K were enormous. Much more than we've ever given to the possibility of a rogue actor setting off an EMP.

Yeah, we IT people all over the place for months in prep and final prep. SOLUTION: Unplug everything at 2300 the night of and power up at 0600. So for 7 hours US Customs had no computers and we actually survived it all.

 

[SheepDog]

The Starfish Prime warhead was a very efficient bomb, likely 2 to 2.5% of the nuclear material was converted to energy. This means that it produced less gamma rays than a less efficient bomb would have. The 10 kiloton explosion that was used on Hiroshima was only about 1 to 1.5% efficient and if it were detonated at 250 miles above the earth the damage would be a circle on the earth below, with a diameter of 2700 miles. The only saving grace with the Starfish Prime was that the test was done over the Pacific Ocean. It still caused damage 900 miles away in Hawaii. This was minor damage to secondary transformers and partial grid effect which is pretty good considering that Hawaii didn't have a lot of long wire grid. There was also no semiconductors in widespread use in 1962 and certainly no ICs. Even the military monitoring equipment was taken past its limits by the EMP. The outcome today would be far worse affecting airplane and ship guidance as well as communications. If The detonation was over Kansas it would completely disable the USA, some of Canada and all of Mexico.

The yield of the weapon is of little concern but the efficiency is of far greater concern. The less efficient the explosion the more damage it will do because more material is left to penetrate the atmosphere. North Korea has the missile and a nuke that could easily cripple the USA for decades.

 

[DRNewcomb]

Starfish Prime is the source of much of our fear of EMP experimental knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

This was a 1.4MT fusion bomb. Although not huge, it is much bigger than most of the bombs in our arsenal and bigger than any rogue actors out there are likely to have. Even the claimed hydrogen bomb Rocketman detonated was only 100KT yield. So a rogue EMP, although devastating, would likely be relatively small. --Jerry

From what I've been reading (and that's all I know about the subject), the size of the explosion is not nearly as important as the amount of gamma rays emitted. A bigger bomb does not produce a stronger EMP because there's a saturation limit for the number of electrons that can be knocked out of their shells. It's possible for a small bomb to produce a lot of E1 EMP. E1 is a very fast transient that is unique to nuclear EMP and would be responsible for frying most semiconductors, including surge suppressors.

 

[243Mendoza]

Can you imagine what an EMP do to firearms equipped with a electronic device recognizing the owner before enabling the trigger!

 

[people]

I've spent my career in the Electric Utility business. A more likely scenario would be a widespread and long lasting electrical grid outage from terrorist activities. I have kept a set of mechanical reloading tools but it would certainly affect my accuracy to go back to them. Unfortunately, in this scenario the targets I may have to shoot would be bigger. --Jerry

It is amazing how easy it is to take out our power grid. Scary easy. Kind of shocking they have not been doing this option for a long time.

 

[DRNewcomb]

It is amazing how easy it is to take out our power grid. Scary easy. Kind of shocking they have not been doing this option for a long time.

The Northeast is particularly vulnerable because they don't like ugly, nasty electric generation plants cluttering up the landscape, so they buy power from Ohio and send it to Connecticut, New York City, Rhode Island, etc. The Southeast is much less at risk because the generating capacity is distributed around the network. This is regarding normal blackouts, terrorist attacks, etc.; not EMP.

 

[people]

The Northeast is particularly vulnerable because they don't like ugly, nasty electric generation plants cluttering up the landscape, so they buy power from Ohio and send it to Connecticut, New York City, Rhode Island, etc. The Southeast is much less at risk because the generating capacity is distributed around the network. This is regarding normal blackouts, terrorist attacks, etc.; not EMP.

Those who do not know what he is talking about. There was a huge blackout that started from a tree touching a high voltage line. This caused a cascade failure.

Most of our infrastructure is just as vulnerable. It is almost a miracle how our systems keep running.