Solar storm risk and EMP attacks
chris-said.io
chris-said.io
Q: Should I be more worried about EMP Attacks or solar storms?
A: Opinions differ. But the EMP Commission is more worried about EMP attacks.
Q: Why?
Here's where I expected the answer to be:
A: Because it's the EMP Commission. It's right there in the name. The Solar Storm Commission is down the hall on the right.
(I personally imagine it in the voice of John Cleese)
There's a book (ISBN 978-0143127048):
> Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch?
> Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment?
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/
Of course it's at layman's level of understanding, so further resources would be needed to get all the details.
I'd imagine that prioritising getting metal out of old components would be a more efficient process. It's my understanding that there aren't many easily accessible metal deposits left, as there would have been thousands of years ago.
Covered in the book: recycle first, especially early in the post-collapse world when there may be a lot of stuff just sitting around.
Laser print that on acid-free archival quality paper, bind and put in a dark, dry place and it'll outlive us all.
Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump out tons of copies as cheap paperback books.
Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.
and tcp/ip was literally built for nuclear war.
This would be like tech prepper paradise.
We could sync our tech trees and rebuild!
I mean, during a nuclear war, the networks would only need to stay working until a counterattack could be coordinated and launched.
After that point, the devastation would be so large planetwide that I think any potential TCP/IP users roaming the irradiated wastelands looking for food while coughing up blood would have other things on their mind than network access in any case.
For smaller scale events, sure, but while the networking design might be robustness-focused, there is still a huge amount of auxiliary stuff required, these need power and cooling, maintenance and administration, repairs, and so on.
Some parts of the internet system might be robust and resilient, but the whole system certainly isn't.
But this is one of the best uses of a Raspberry Pi. A Pi with an external USB drive and a small display will run off solar battery power, but still have enough storage for a complete Manual for Rebuilding Everything.
Add some EMP protection [1] and update the Manual from GitHub once a month or so, and you're set.
[1] And food.
However, I don't think it'd work for the long term given a suitably large catastrophy. This may sound like a No True Scotsman argument so let's just for the sake of argument define "suitably large" as "permanently disrupts the current industry base for things like chip fabrication facilities".
Once the tiny computer and/or its peripherals fail for whatever reason, such as simple wear and tear, that's it -- no new parts will be available for the more advanced components. Spare parts could be scavenged, but even that is a limited resource, and will just push forward the moment when the reference library goes away. At that point it had better be either useless or fully memorized.
So I think books are better for the longer term. Of course, books are brittle too in different ways, but they don't need to be paper books... A book could be printed on Tyvek like some hiking maps are; Tyvek doesn't mind water and can be folded and doesn't rip so easily.
Please note I might be biased since I really love books :)
ok, maybe not "find out" but... speculate?
Cellular networks have been resilient because they're possibly distributed mesh networks. I'm pretty sure the carriers have some gurus who officially or unofficially have figured out what happens.
DSL/cable type networks might be different.
I'm pretty sure dns and similar systems are widely distributed.
I wonder if a proper analogy might be the roadways. Even though one road or freeway might be blocked, people will be able to drive around and (maybe) get through. Who knows, maybe there are some "blocked mountain crossing" equivalents with the internet.
On a personal level, a laptop, a cloned git repository and a solar panel. :)
A further improvement would be to build a small community that practices these skills and tries to be as independent as possible from the current grid. These are all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult than the last but just imagine how much more difficult it would be to bootstrap society in a real SHTF scenario.
One step above the "small community of off-the-grid preppers" would be to come up with ways to make today's societies more resilient to systemic hick-ups, small and large, using either the means available already today or those which are very close in the technology tree.
Doing so would require a lot of decentralization, e.g. by localizing production of electricity and other consumables and making these smaller units more autonomous. Think not big cities with a power plant each, but rather groups of houses sharing solar panels and a wind mill.
Then again, this would probably be a kind of a pipe dream, as decentralization is by definition not completely under centralized control. This creates all kinds of friction. For example, if everyone produced their own electricity locally, what would the power companies do? And what would the state do with the lost tax money? There are plenty of problems like this, and I doubt one can find a win-win situation where the nowadays centralized things would not lose in some way.
Or maybe you're more inclined towards a "FM 21-76 US ARMY SURVIVAL MANUAL" kind of project?
And then experts focus on 2 unlikely generalized scenarios of an area EMP effect incidentally affecting the sites. As for the more obvious catastrophe of someone specifically targeting the locations? I guess that's being discussed separately?[1]
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-gri...
To me, this sounds standard risk management. It sounds like a clear picture that it falls in the "Low Likelihood / High Impact" quadrant, though, which is the toughest quadrant to address, because you get into exactly the kinds of questions you alluded to - unlikely, generalized ideas of what could happen, but having to balance that with everyday operations which are absolutely going to happen. Even with a known mitigation of stockpiling resources to recover from such an event, at a price tag of $300M, there are many other things that money could go to.
And while I'd like to feel safe knowing they have a solution ready, I don't know enough about the budgetary limits or what other programs would have to be reduced to make that $300M be available to give a solid personal opinion on any of this.
For the US government, $300M is pocket money. It's unbelievably negligent not to spend a relatively tiny sum which could avoid total collapse.
It's like owning a very grand house and not paying a few hundred dollars for insurance.
A better analogy might be that we all live in a very grand house, but can't afford the mortgage. Sure. a family meeting could certainly find the money in a drawer somewhere. But until we have that meeting, everyone is just sitting in their room doing their own thing.
The chances of an EMP attack
Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP?
A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so.
Q: Why not?
A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”.
The good news: I think most of these problems are solvable, and will assist us in being more ready to explore the extreme parts of our world and beyond. Making tempest and EMP shielding default in electronics manufacturing for example. It would also assist in reduction of the totalitarian surveillance regime... so I say lets all start talking about how to do shielding properly. There is a lot of misinformation out there about it. I do wonder though, how much of that misinformation is on purpose. Like encryption, at what point does the government decide to suppress a technology because it might hinder their power? Things to ponder.
Nuking a city destroys a city, destroying the electrical grid takes out most of a nations industrial production and forces them to focus on short-term survival.
An EMP taking out the power grid across the US in a way that isn't quickly recovered from would likely be a lot more devastating - definitely in terms of industrial capacity, possibly also in human losses due to starvation and general collapse - than nuking two major cities with the same yield.
Delivering a conventional strike on N transformer stations would probably be a better idea since there would then likely be a conventional retaliation and not a nuclear obliteration of the attacking country. I guess with North Korea you can’t know.
> The chances of an EMP attack
> Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP?
> A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so.
> Q: Why not?
> A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”.
From what I can understand an EPFCG needs an explosive-driven ferromagnetic generator (EDFMG). I imagine the EDFMG is used like a fuse or blasting cap for the EPFCG.
I'm not sure of the size of the devices.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-driven_ferromagnetic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...
As you might expect from a theoretical physicist, it's based on solid science, with a small amount of poetic licence that he describes in the afterword.
It's been described as "The Day After Tomorrow meets Neuromancer". Not sure I'd quite go that far, but it's a damn good read.
For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using that piece of electronics...
There are also conventional EMPs to worry about.
Also, you could probably just take out key points with carbon dust bombs like we did in Iraq War #1.
It doesn't even make sense, EMP's are nukes, someone just stared nuking you and you're worried about the EMP.
It starts to make sense once you know how nuclear EMP attack works. The detonation would happen high in the space (400 km) and would not cause direct effects or radiation on the earth.
EMP pulse in a continent wide nuclear EMP attack is not coming from the nuclear detonation directly. It comes from synchrotron radiation when free electrons in upper atmosphere interact with earths magnetic field
Any attacker is unlikely to choose the most costliest and fanciful form of attack. Wouldn't it be much more cost efficient to send multiple groups of people to drive around and snipe or blow up equipment of transformer stations at key places?
What is a threat to electronics are VHF pulses from initial xray burst from the bomb.
Naively, this map makes me think that a single such EMP means enough electronics break that every major power plant or industrial plant is down and not recoverable for weeks.
My understanding could be wrong, but wouldn't this mean exposing a 1 cm wide component (and/or components that have one cm long traces attached) to at least 250 V?
Wouldn't this be expected to destroy not every single component, but enough components to make enough hardware inoperable to collapse all industrial and power generation capabilities? (If you destroy 10% of ICs on only 10% of control boards in a power plant or factory, I'd assume that plant goes down hard and isn't coming up any time soon.)
That's the first (E1) pulse. And yes, the general idea is that it fries your electronics. Then the E3 pulse arrives and wrecks the electric network.
Also wouldn't that start/accelerate the Kessler Syndrome
The EMP is, if I understand right, created by a shockwave in the extremely diffuse plasma of the ionosphere, affecting electrons and ions differently, creating a massive charge separation, and the collapse of that charge separation is what produces the actual EMP. That said, this article is the first I heard of the E1/E3 distinction, so I don’t know enough to be sure of what an EMP would do to satellite electronics.
Oh but most wargame EMP scenarios assume full blanketing of the USA with EMPs so no such zone will exist.
Grid resilience is probably more appropriate in this case and is independent of generation technology.
From the article:
> One-third of major storms arrive unexpectedly, according to the SWPC’s own 2010 analysis. And that’s not just the small storms. According to a news article in Science, the SWPC might be also be poor at identifying the characteristics of severe storms, since they are so rare.