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In what could potentially be one of the most, or least, significant actions of his term in office, President Trump Tuesday signed an Executive Order requiring federal agencies to strengthen critical infrastructure against ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks.
EMPs occur for a variety of natural and man-made reasons including, most notably, Nuclear Explosions and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), either of which could potentially take out entire sections of the country's electrical grid and other infrastructure and capabilities, requiring require years or decades to recover from.
Members and supporters of the decommissioned US Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse have long warned of the possibility of an EMP attack, with some individuals, such as Peter Pry, who previously led the congressional EMP commission, asserting that an EMP attack on America could kill off 90% of the US population.
This is because a man-made EMP has the advantage of being highly asymmetrical. A small country able to pull one off would cause potentially massive disruption to a large tech dependent country such as the United States.
Past EMP related coverage here, here and here
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:31AM (12 children)
really? I guess it takes someone like Trump to hear that number and not dismiss it immediately as bullshit.
if someone quoted this 90% to me I would end the conversation right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:46AM (4 children)
It is probably more like 99.9999%. If the sun scorches the earth like in the past only a few dozen to thousand people would survive. When the moon starts glowing red you've got like 20 minutes to get underground.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @12:01PM (3 children)
that's not an EMP!
I'll be pedantic in the following.
an EMP is a pulse: basically a discontinuity in the electromagnetic field. technically you can decompose it into a short superposition of frequencies, from long radio up to visible and/or beyond (it probably depends on the source), but essentially it's just a big sudden change in the electromagnetic field.
any change in the surrounding magnetic field induces currents in electrical conductors, that grow with the size of the conductor.
the electric grid is vulnerable because it's made from very long conductors.
this is why you're not allowed to put copper wires/aluminium foil in the microwave: big currents are induced in them and bad things happen.
if the moon is glowing red it means there's a large amount of radiation coming from the sun, or hot matter from a big enough coronal mass ejection has hit it.
large amount of radiation is a sustained high amplitude electromagnetic wave (not a pulse). you may liken it to many EMPs one after the other if the amplitude is high enough, and it can certainly cause the same effects that an EMP can cause, but it's much worse than an EMP.
sustained high radiation acts on nonconducting materials, not just conductors.
this is why you can put regular food in the microwave and it still heats up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @04:27PM (1 child)
Really? You're not allowed to? Who says?
Pretty much the worst thing that can happen by sticking aluminium foil in the microwave is that you'll make a bit of ozone in the microwave. Ozone is a bit nasty so it's probably a good idea to do this in a well ventilated area and don't stick your head in the microwave immediately afterwards. Probably wise not to use the same microwave oven you use for food preparation.
It's recommended to also put a glass of water in the microwave which acts as a dummy load so less power is reflected back into the magnetron, which should extend its lifetime.
Microwave ovens don't really work on this principle. Microwave ovens do not present particularly high energy radiation.
Regular food heats up in a microwave oven because regular food contains polar molecules. Such molecules will tend to rotate in order to line up their imbalanced charge with an applied electric field. A microwave oven presents a continuously changing electric field, which causes these molecules to vibrate. This effect is what causes the energy transfer and thus heats up the food.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 29 2019, @06:19PM
> You're not allowed to? Who says?
The same people who say you're not allowed to put anchovies in ice cream, I'm sure.
Fire and explosion can also result, which can rapidly become a much bigger problem if you're not in the room at the time. I once saw someone unthinkingly heat food on a plate with gilded trim. The gilding was vaporized and shattered the plate. I'd be surprised if nothing more toxic than ozone was produced in the process, and the microwave was never quite the same.
Of course, you can also use a normal microwave oven to melt blocks of aluminum for casting, but you want to modify it to survive the temperatures and currents generated first, and operate it in a well-ventilated and fire-resistant area, just in case.
As for normal heating - my understanding is that the primary mechanism of heating is the absorption of microwave photons by (primarily) water and oil molecules, rather than their mechanical agitation by a changing electrostatic field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:06PM
Radiation doesn't "come from the sun". That is like saying the sun revolves around the earth, totally wrong reference frame.
The speed of light is zero (photons do not age), the rest of the universe moves around the radiation at the speed of gravity/matter: c.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Friday March 29 2019, @12:37PM (6 children)
It also takes someone like Trump to sign a wishful-thinking EO like this, since you'd have to have absolutely zero clue about EMP and EMP-hardening (and Trump definitely qualifies there) to think you could do this on any significant scale without infeasible amounts of time and money involved. The reason why no-one's ever seriously approached this before apart from some critical military systems isn't because no-one thought of it, it's because it's impractical on any kind of real scale.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday March 29 2019, @03:00PM
Wouldn't it be more cost effective to issue an executive order requiring all EMP weapons, and solar flares to emit weaker pulses?
Can a presidential committee be formed to study this?
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Friday March 29 2019, @03:16PM (1 child)
Just to put this into perspective, a few years ago we got some funding to build a proper EMI-hardened system. Not EMP, just harsh EMI, so a sort of EMP with training wheels. Unit cost for a 3U rack device was US$40,000.
God it was nice though, being able to build a cost-is-no-object perfectly engineered device. I mean, you had to bring a box of tissues along when they unbolted, unscrewed, and unclipped the top of the case, and ask for some privacy.
Unfortunately the client ran out of enthusiasm once they saw the costs involved.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 29 2019, @08:22PM
The best client is one with plenty of enthusiasm and money to back it up.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @07:28PM (2 children)
No, it's called pork spending on a massive scale. The real purpose isn't protection of the equipment for that which truly must be protected for continuity of government already is so. The real purpose is another several billion for Halliburton, Lockheed, Raytheon, McKesson, Bechtel
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:59AM
Ding ding ding!
I wonder what the AC OP was thinking. Oh right, Trump supporter, not thinking.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:18AM
Ah, of course. So you set the threshold so that eyewateringly expensive equipment from L3 qualifies (do they even do SCADA? I guess they will now) but not ordinarily expensive equipment from Siemens, Schneider Electric, and so on. And you can spend infinite amounts of money "hardening" whatever it is you feel like hardening, and when it collapses anyway in the face of an EMP - the US power grid is nothing more than ten million km of EMP receiving antennae - there won't be anyone left to sue. I mean, there'll still be zombie lawyers crawling around, but no-one else left for them to sue.
Mind you it might work. The US grid is in a pretty shaky state from a combination of decades of deferred maintenance and trying to tie separate grids together into one super-grid. So you take the EMP funding and (a) use it to deal with the backlog of deferred maintenance and (b) harden it against actual threats, Ukraine-style SCADA hacks, Metcalf transformer attacks - all you need to do there is take out enough of them in various locations to exhaust the strategic reserve, which isn't much of a reserve, you can keep any extras you hit out of action for months if not years - etc.
So take the money for EMP protection and apply it to the deferred maintenance you haven't been able to get funding for.