Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me this story, which was told to me as a true story, but I wouldn't bet too much on that.

A soviet bomber gets lost and finds itself over western germany. It has to land on a military airport, which pilots jovially invite the soviet pilots for a drink. While they are drinking, intelligence officers take pictures of the plane, and are laughing at antiquated soviet technology, using bulbs while the US was well into the age of transistors. It's only back in the US that the intelligence officers realised that the soviet were using bulbs not for the lack of transistors, but because they can resist a nuclear explosion...

View on HN

As far as I remember that story about "vacuum tube hindsight" is from a documentary on History Channel(?) about Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko [1] defecting by landing his Mig 25 in Japan, thereby letting the west get their hands on the most advanced soviet plane at the time [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Wester...

They still sell them today. They're called Nuclear Event Detection (NED) chips. It detects a spike in voltage from the air and drops all power to everything, acting as an instantaneous power interrupt for everything you care about.

I used to test them for Lockheed all the time on stuff that flies on stealth aircraft. There is a very specific sequence of events with very tight specs they have to pass, the whole thing is over in 250 ms, and that includes the shutdown duration.

http://www.maxwell.com/products/microelectonics/space-nuclea...

How do you test such a thing? Small nukes?

All it's measuring is for a voltage spike. The ones we had had a real input pin and a test input pin. You hook up an O'scope to the output, supply a one-shot signal to the test pin, and check to make sure the output did what it was supposed to in the allotted time.

Large radio antennas can create electromagnetic pulses like what you'd get from a nuke blast. I lived not too far from a site that tested them[1][2]. Just before it was decommissioned there were a lot of news articles written about how they did the testing. I can't find any photos now, but they're out there somewhere.

It's now a wildlife refuge..

[1]: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/woodbridge.h... [2]: http://eservice.pwcgov.org/library/digitallibrary/hsdw/A_Fol...

Would dropping power help? I thought the way the nuclear blast damages electronic circuits was by inducting large electric currants which would burn the components. If that's the case it doesn't really change anything whether the circuit was active or not at the time of the blast.

You can quite easily shield all your components from outside pulses. However, if you're processing signals from the air (like in the case of Radar systems, the ones I worked on), your stuff could quite easily get fried. Like an amp could get overloaded, a processor could get fried, a line could get burned, all kinds of things could go wrong. But the best thing you can do is have everything off. If you're close enough to a nuke that stuff that's off gets fried, your electronics are probably pretty low on your list of priorities.

There are EMP shielding techniques for solid state systems. The reality is the Soviets were very behind technologically in many areas compared to the west. A good example is the bulbous nature of their spacecraft. They simply didn't have the metalworking to make square cutouts and square windows that didn't eventually fail, so everything was round like a boat or a submarine design. Its fairly ahistoric to pretend this was all part of some master plan. It was just the best they could do and playing up the old technology as being magically superior is pretty silly.

The other story you hear is how the Soviets used pencils in space while NASA use spacepens. Pencils break off graphite which could get into controls and pressurized ink cartridges in spacepens are cheap and easy to manufacture. There's no downside to using a spacepen, but lots to using pencils.

Meanwhile, the few live confrontations between US fighters and Soviet made MiGs resulted in dead MiG pilots. Its clear that the higher tech and more innovative approach was superior and continues to be today. US missile defense systems keeping Russian and North Korean aggression from expanding for example.

"Meanwhile, the few live confrontations between US fighters and Soviet made MiGs resulted in dead MiG pilots. Its clear that the higher tech and more innovative approach was superior and continues to be today. US missile defense systems keeping Russian and North Korean aggression from expanding for example."

USSR (Russia) and USA both export junk versions of their technology to their clients, so I can't agree with your conclusion. Actual direct confrontations between the USSR and USA (MiGs in Korea and Vietnam) were on a much more even footing.

I think there are strengths to both approaches. The low-tech and rugged designs of many USSR designs have stood the test of time in many cases, most famously in the AK rifles and Soyuz capsules.

Fun story, but to my knowledge most military computer systems have always been radiation hardened in the nuclear age. Enrico Fermi correctly predicted EMP prior to the first nuclear tests all the way back in 1945, and made sure that the test equipment was shielded. Although, we did explore high altitude nuclear explosions (produce huge amounts of EMP) in the late 50s to early 60s and managed to accidentally fry some of our own early satellites in the process.

Most American military hardware has long since been shielded against EMPs I believe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com