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We've talked a bit, in the past, about the possibility of a nuclear bomb signal/demonstration by Russia, in its conflict with Ukraine and the West. The thought there has always been about a demonstration explosion, probably with a low-yield weapon, on or off the battlefield, or a nuclear power plant 'incident'.
Now, Global Times, a mouthpiece for the more right-wing within China's CCP, has described an alternative scenario. That scenario is provocatively titled Note to the US - a nuclear war can be won by rivals
The scenario looks simple: detonating one or multiple nuclear bombs in the stratosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), that would cause nationwide electrical grid anomalies, cascading systems failures, and ultimately unravel the fabric of American society. (Or, more likely, European society -- but then the Global Times is rather obsessed with the US, and counts the EU among future third-world nations anyway.)
Even non-state and rogue state actors could defeat the US with only a small number of EMP weapons, is noted, and one of the advantages of such an attack is that attribution is rather hard to do:
At least 15 nations can access low earth orbit, and many have access to geosynchronous orbit. The real nature of every object launched cannot be known with certainty. Nuclear weapons can also be concealed in and called down from the clutter of the super-synchronous graveyard orbit for surprise use.
And thus the MAD aspect is removed from nuclear weapons, argues Global Times: it's hard to bomb the real culprit back to the Stone Age, if you don't know who to blame in the first place. To end with some good news: luckily,
... the electrical infrastructure designs of Russia and others have spared no expense in applying Cold War civil defense lessons. Command economies, long range planning, hardened grids, and stability of centralized leadership further aid their societies in surviving any potential EMP attack. Given their histories and traditions, those cultures are probably more adept at continued functionality in the absence of amenities and infrastructure than the US.
Pfewww.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @05:34AM (12 children)
Do you seriously believe that the pentagon has not already gamed that one out a hundred ways from Sunday?
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday October 12 2022, @06:07AM (4 children)
No, but we haven't.
I suppose Flash- an Solid State- drives are more vulnerable to EMP. I wonder if there is anything that could be done beyond putting external drives in metal Faraday cages like metal boxes or cans.
Not that it would matter much. Without electricity pretty much 0% of the population would have water...
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @07:19AM
EMP causes voltage differences that grow with circuit length (and then those voltage differences can cause circuits to burn).
This is why in the case of solar flares continent-sized delivery networks go down, but household machinery lives on (unless it's not protected from the network surge).
An EMP generated closer to home will have higher frequencies (than a solar flare shock) present, but I don't see why you say flash or solid state is more vulnerable than disks (although it's true that disks usually have a metal covering...)
also: always keep water and food for 2 weeks. start from 5 liters a day per person (drinking, washing, cooking, etc).
yes, it's true that not everyone lives in hurricane country, but here in Germany once the war started there was no cooking oil for a few months.
the world is small enough for preparations to matter everywhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @08:19AM (1 child)
I have a metal can to store SD cards and other small electronics in. I was able to fit a battery powered radio in there while turned on to test that it blocks some signal. There is legitimate equipment to measure that but that is an easy way.
The nuclear EMP seems overrated for the individual. A bad geomagnetic storm could do worse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday October 12 2022, @08:54AM
A bad geomagnetic storm could do worse.
We get plenty of small storms. A huge one hit in 1859, the Carrington Event, and knocked out even the telegraphs. Telegraphs are electrical and downright numb and insensitive compared to electronics especially at the integrated circuit density. Then One of a similar scale just missed us in 2012 [nasa.gov].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @02:51PM
Bet your bottom dollar that an EMP attack strategy has been examined and a response has been devised.
Them that know won't say, and them that'll say don't know.
Any scenario discussed by the clowns who frequent SN will surely want in subtlety.
It takes a psychopath to imagine that orchestrating the horrific death of random humans is somehow a winning move.
Forgive me if I don't play along.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @10:51AM (5 children)
Janrinok, like runaway and fatphil, has been out of the defense loop since the Eighties, if not before. Swabbies don't get to handle a lot of intel. But Dark Brandon has them barely holding their fudge.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday October 12 2022, @11:51AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @07:36PM (1 child)
People who are still vibrant and bright and involved in their lives and careers, don't creep away in soporific early retirement.
John Cleese [gbnews.uk] (82) comes to mind.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday October 13 2022, @12:19AM
In the UK you usually retire from the armed forces on your 55th birthday, which is what i did. I have a good pension and I have not crept away. For this reason I am still very active elsewhere in addition to my work on this site.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 13 2022, @01:18AM (1 child)
That's kinda humorous. You people who have only ever seen a ship from miles away pretend to know how ships are run. Would it surprise you to know that ~80% of a ships crew has confidential clearance? ~50% have secret. At least 30% have top secret. It's hard to make estimates of higher clearance levels, my own clearances weren't that high. Of course, need-to-know sometimes pushes a guy deeper into that morass than he ever intended to go.
People with no clearances who live aboard a ship know details that Jane's has never published, all of which are classified.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @04:38AM
Lying Stolen Valor, again? The US Navy has no record of a Runaway1956 ever serving on any kind of "wessel". And, we said "intelligence", which it is obvious you are deficient in. Enough brains to handle a deckmop? Possibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @07:07PM
At least Democrats have natural protection [soylentnews.org] against nuclear fallout.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday October 12 2022, @06:50AM (20 children)
That's a lot of trash talk for a country that was so sloppy, it didn't check its tires before going to war. Chinese tires no less. My bet is that both Russia and China have skimmed a lot off of those "spared no expenses".
And of course, the whole argument is just an excuse for appeasement:
My take is that here "Russia and China" aren't countries, but merely some pathological leadership. And I see that this author hasn't mentioned a "core priority" that should be acknowledged and respected yet isn't presently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @07:22PM (9 children)
Or that the Godless Russian commies are worse than the Godless Ukrainian marxists. There's a lot of nuance based on faith, but keep in mind that they fear the spectre of some amorphous "other side" winning the election, much more than they fear global Armageddon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @07:25PM
Uh, I forgot... Godless Ukrainian marxist nazis.
General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, posted a photo to Twitter of himself wearing a swastika bracelet. [infowars.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 12 2022, @10:34PM (7 children)
The Godless Russian commies are invading other countries and the Godless Ukrainian marxist nazis aren't. That's real world how they are worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @03:02AM (6 children)
Simple, the left — notably this tired little trike (troika?) — has drummed incessantly that Republicans are all nazis. And nobody's worse than Republicans. Therefore... put that in your ipso, and facto it. Or they'll be calling you a nazi, too.
nazi - Derogatory term for a person who is fanatically dedicated to, or seeks to control, some activity, practice, etc.
Sounds like a rehash of Jeff Foxworthy's "You may be a redneck if"
In Russia's defense, they know that we are now feckless woosies, so that sort of invasion thing is just part of their nature, coming out naturally. But suddenly nazis are the good guys because... well, I dunno. If we were well managed, that bear would've stayed caged, and we would've been the [unsung] good guys.
Frankly, I don't think there are a lot of good guys in today's environment. Maybe, just maybe, the UK may try to be a bona fide country: UK PM Liz Truss to Formally Designate Communist China a ‘Threat’ for First Time [breitbart.com].
The current USA management is certainly pro-China, so I guess we'll all have to be anti-GB, now. Does that mean we have to be pro-gun, if GB is anti-?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 13 2022, @03:31AM
Indeed. Now imagine my deep care when Putin got on the bandwagon and started calling Ukrainians nazis. Late to the Party, he is.
Given how feckless the accusation of nazis was every time you've mentioned it either by US or Russian sources, I'm not seeing a reason to care.
So what? I don't see the point of good guys, if one isn't interested in good guy behavior.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @03:37AM (3 children)
If I wasn't clear, sometimes there are wars without good guys. Stretching metaphors, maybe it's like... nevermind, redacted. Goes in the stack o'stuff for a better venue.
I did that post hours ago, but couldn't get a non-banned dynamic IP, so it sat there with a big red message atop it. Should've dropped the whole thing.
See ya later.
If you're still here.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 13 2022, @01:23PM (2 children)
Well, today, one of those not-good-guys is threatening nuclear war and the other not-good-guy is fighting for its existence. Sometimes it really is cut and dry rather than 50 shades of gray.
In other words, you or someone else on your ISP/TOR node has been shitposting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2022, @04:36AM (1 child)
I don't think Russia wants to be the world's pariah for the next century. Wouldn't rule out any random scenarios, but I think catastrophes are as likely from this country right now, as from them. Sure, somebody in the Middle East is always six-months from dropping the big one, and now our bozo management is slipping them pallets of cash...
We do all look alike to you.
I feel bad enough posting this now, since it might accidentally encourage somebody else to stop by here before the election... it's a scenario, it could happen. Shudder.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 14 2022, @12:37PM
I take it by the vaguely worded "this country" you mean the US, not say Zimbabwe? The sort of catastrophes the US would generate would be mostly self-inflicted, like screwing up its economy or becoming an unpleasant place to visit. It does hurt the rest of the world to some degree, but they can route around the damage.
Meanwhile, Russia is the player here that has been threatening nuclear war - though presently of a limited extent. They're the ones who invaded Ukraine. And their rationalizations for all this is ridiculous. It doesn't pass the reasonable man test. A reasonable man wouldn't think that Ukraine (or its hypothetical membership in NATO) was a problem that required a war, much less the eight and counting years of war. Nor would they buy that Russia is under an existential threat that justifies use of nuclear weapons.
There have been over the months multiple calls to acknowledge and respect Russia's goals in this war. But why should we? They're crazy and Russia probably lied about it anyway. Meanwhile we're supposed to ignore Ukraine's goals in this war too? They genuinely are under existential threat and Putin's threats are salt in that wound.
Further, this escalation is a known Russian strategy. They played the same game during the Cold War such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The idea is that you keep escalating until the foe backs off, and then you win. There are two counter strategies: appeasement and matching the escalation. Given that Russia has repeated engaged in wars with its neighbors over the past two decades with no indication that they'll stop, appeasement is a losing strategy while they have backed off in the past in the face of counterescalation. So guess which strategy Europe and the US are following.
It's not hard once you rule out "random scenarios" that have no basis in fact. This is not an out of the blue act of irresponsibility. Russia had done this sort of thing longer than you've been alive. Putin further is a product of this - I think it was insane to ever elect former KGB to office.
Get an account if you don't like the disadvantages of pure anonymity. It's your problem not mine.
I don't. This is an opportunity for you to learn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @04:44AM
Liz Truss according to Breitbarf. You know you can't square stupid, don't you? 0x0=Conservative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @08:30PM (7 children)
Your take, most amusing...
There are no "countries". There are only business conglomerates. They determine the fate of your "nations".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 12 2022, @10:24PM (6 children)
Those "nations" are the biggest conglomerates on Earth, whether you consider them business or not.
And you sound like the kind of person who views every activity through the "business" filter. Wiping your ass? That's biz in the bathroom!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @10:57PM (5 children)
The City of London, Vatican Bank, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, HSBC, Bank of America, etc. etc. etc. are bigger
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 13 2022, @03:21AM (4 children)
Don't waste my time. Here's a simple exercise. Take the revenue from all that list combined and compare it to the revenue of Russia and China. It might compare well to Russia which is presently financially crippled, but not going to hold a candle to China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @04:55AM (3 children)
Everything depends on how the financiers shift their accounts and the interest they charge. The Euro is less than a dollar. We are crushing the enemy!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 13 2022, @02:08PM (2 children)
Further, only an idiot, such as yourself, would consider business winning or losing because one medium of exchange happens to be higher valued than another - there's far more in the sea of finance than currencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2022, @01:53AM (1 child)
You are wagging the dog, business is business, the state is a charade, a storefront. The common currency is still the petro-dollar
That's like saying *there's far more in the sea than sea water*. Without currency, there is no "sea of finance", there is only parched rock and mud. Since you like to throw the word around, the idiot is you
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 14 2022, @03:00AM
In other words, by your own viewpoint the state is merely the largest business on the block.
Which would be insightful even if that were what I were saying. It's more like there's more than salt in the sea. Money is a significant part of finance, but for a glaring example, it doesn't matter what currency you do most finance in. Some securities and loans are tied to particular currencies. Most isn't.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 13 2022, @01:24AM (1 child)
*yawn*
Don't you ever get tired of that flag waving, long after the rest of the parade participants have packed up and gone home? You're cheering the country, and thus the politicians, who foisted the F-35 on the military, while claiming that it's a 5th gen fighter.
As for skimming, I doubt there are many people anywhere more adept at skimming than the US military industrial complex. Once again, look at the F-35. It should be the A-35, with the A for Abortion.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 13 2022, @03:18AM
I'm here for the truth. I know you don't buy that, but you'll need a stronger argument than jingoism.
And we still have to explain why Russia failed to take Kiev.
They probably are more adept, but they need to be. Russia is an easy environment for skimming.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday October 12 2022, @09:04AM (4 children)
That is only true if one believes that there are nuclear weapons just circling the earth waiting to be detonated. The big players may have done this (3, perhaps 4 countries?) but for most the weapon will first have to be launched. We can identify launches and track missiles quite effectively now. We will know where it came from.
Furthermore, most things circling the earth that a big enough to be a nuclear weapon, as well as most other items as well, are already tracked and identified, at least as far as who they belong to. If one of them suddenly goes 'big bang' it shouldn't be difficult to identify which one of them it was. And if it is being detonated over the USA where do you think the Russian (and Chinese) intelligence collection assets spend some of their time. The collateral damage to friendly systems would be significant. It would not only affect GPS, but also Glonass and BeiDou - which are essential for employing one's own nuclear assets in the exchange that you have just started!
I don't think that significantly reducing your intelligence sources at the same time as neutralising your own strategic nuclear weapons to a significant degree will be an attractive option for any sensible person. The only weak link is that Putin is not being sensible but now trying to control a bad situation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Wednesday October 12 2022, @11:32AM (1 child)
You're not really taking into account the EMP itself. Sure, they can track everything now, but if a nuke goes {E.M.P.!} how much of that tracking and identifying capability will remain?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 12 2022, @03:51PM
Probably most of it. It'd be a no brainer to harden infrastructure intended for use in a nuclear war against EMP.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 12 2022, @09:24PM (1 child)
The US has this neato space plane that can carry concealed payloads. Maybe things that violate treaties. It can also change its orbit. It can stay up for a long time without viagra.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday October 14 2022, @06:59AM
They have, but it is not invisible. Everyone can see where it is even if they do not know what it is doing. If it suddenly explodes (and the position of the explosion itself will be relatively easy to identify) then it will be no secret as to who owned it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @10:03AM (9 children)
at this point I'm pretty sure putin or whoever is controlling him has already decided that they want to use nuclear weapons.
but I don't think the grunts will do it.
if anyone is competent enough to actually handle the technical details, they will refuse the order (and maybe they already have, we just don't know it yet).
"kill my children if I don't do it? if I do it they die anyway, you moron!"
by the way, this is why it's important for nato not to attack russia themselves --- that may actually be something that changes the minds of the competent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @02:26PM (3 children)
If you assume there are competent people in positions of power, in Russia or the West, you haven't been paying attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @02:57PM (2 children)
You assume Ukraine gave "all" of the nuclear weapons to Russia. Do they have any they can return at an opportune time?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2022, @03:45PM
FATAL: No such assumption.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 12 2022, @04:12PM
Second, Russia would have taken great care back then to make sure it got all those nuclear weapons back in the 1990s and would have kept any Ukrainian nuclear weapons program under heavy surveillance. Russia has already done a great deal to insure that Ukraine doesn't have nuclear weapons.
This brings me to a point from the Global Times article. It demands that we "acknowledge and respect the core priorities Russia and China". But even if we accept that your post echos said core priorities, concerns about purely imaginary Ukrainian nuclear weapons aren't worthy of acknowledgement much less respect. We don't have to take this bullshit seriously.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 13 2022, @01:32AM (4 children)
Modded you up, but it's important to understand something. Grunts don't detonate nukes. Sergeant Wilson has no say in such a situation. Sarge probably doesn't know what the major is about to do, it's Sarge's duty to provide security to the major, and that's all.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday October 13 2022, @04:26AM
Not at Sergeant's level, but not at general's level either (below, in certain circumstances).
You might want to read Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine. (The better title should be something like "Decision making in a distributed system under ambiguity, uncertainty, duress and communication problems).
Particularly with what we're discussing here, EMP, perhaps combined with a couple of directed sabotage actions against transatlantic subsea communication cables, this is becoming a highly contemporary read.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @05:08AM
I guess "grunt" is not the right word.
I just picture the classic scene of two people turning their keys at the same time --- in order for that (or the russian equivalent) to have any effect, a bunch of people have to take care of technical details beforehand, and those are the people I'm referring to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2022, @11:01AM (1 child)
Nice to see Runaway put all his Naval ignorance to use talking about Army.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2022, @11:19AM
Tell it to the Spartans.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday October 13 2022, @11:15AM
He refers to a 2004 Congress report, but in reality Congress was already worried about EMP back in 1997. There were hearings in 1997 [house.gov], 2003 [govinfo.gov], 2004 [heritage.org], 2005, 2008, 2012 [govinfo.gov], 2014 [congress.gov], 2015 [house.gov], err, eat your heart out [congress.gov].
Even the DHS was preparing in 2018 [dhs.gov] and 2020 [cisa.gov], in support of Executive Order (E.O.) 13865 [ucsb.edu] (from 2019) on Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday October 13 2022, @12:31PM
Next week, NATO will organize an exercise called Steadfast Noon around here. The exercise will be about dropping nuclear weapons, and will involve an unusually high number of fighter jets, between 50 to 60 of them.
The conclusive note to the news item was that the latest generation of nuclear weapons, the B61-12s, can be better 'aimed', and the power of their explosion can be configured from 0.3 to 50 kton. The B61-12s can only be carried by F35A's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2022, @05:19PM (2 children)
Nukes are extremely high-maintenance devices. To put it in perspective, it costs the US $10 million per nuke every single year just to keep them all working.
The idea that anyone has a secret arsenal of functioning weapons in orbit ready to be used is completely delusional.
The idea that Russia, a country that has demonstrated to be incapable of even maintaining their own trucks, could be framed for such an attack is even more preposterous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2022, @11:54PM (1 child)
The orchestrated headlines editorials, experts, candidates, influencers, posters, and 50¢ armies, will move on to the next election topic, around Monday afternoon.
It's like how the entire media had decided that anyone who wasn't vaccinated, was a literal mass murderer, but when it came out that the shots didn't even work for that, they quickly changed the subject.
By next weekend, we'll be saying, "Hey, I just remembered, wasn't Russia supposed to bomb Seattle, about now?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2022, @09:59PM
Sad delusional Fox viewers, told they are victims so they immediately believe it. Entitled shits the lot of you.