Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Our entire way of life can be ended in a single day. And it wouldn’t even take a nuclear war to do it. All it would take for a rogue nation or terror organization to bring us to our knees is the explosion of a couple well-placed nuclear devices high up in our atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulses would fry electronics from coast to coast. Of course this could also be accomplished without any attack. Scientists tell us that massive solar storms have hit our planet before, and that it is inevitable that there will be more in the future. As you will read about below, the most recent example of this was “the Carrington Event” in 1859. If a similar burst from the sun hit us today, experts tell us that life in America could suddenly resemble life in the 1800s, and the economic damage caused could potentially be in the trillions of dollars. This is one of the greatest potential threats that we are facing as a nation, and yet Barack Obama has essentially done nothing to get us prepared.
The technology necessary to conduct such an electromagnetic pulse attack against the United States has become much more accessible in recent years. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, even rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran either already have or will soon have the capability to hurt us in this way…
Rogue nations such as North Korea (and possibly Iran) will soon match Russia and China and have the primary ingredients for an EMP attack: simple ballistic missiles such as Scuds that could be launched from a freighter near our shores; space-launch vehicles able to loft low-earth-orbit satellites; and simple low-yield nuclear weapons that can generate gamma rays and fireballs.
If a successful, large scale EMP attack ever did take place, it would be a catastrophe beyond anything that the United States has ever seen before. The EMP Commission, which was established by Congress, says that it is likely that most of us would end up dead…
What would a successful EMP attack look like? The EMP Commission, in 2008, estimated that within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown.
In 2009 the congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, whose co-chairmen were former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and James Schlesinger, concurred with the findings of the EMP Commission and urged immediate action to protect the electric grid. Studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Intelligence Council reached similar conclusions.
If you are a terrorist, a dictator or a fanatic that is looking for a “killshot” for the United States, those kinds of numbers would certainly get your attention.
And it was recently reported by WND that the Iranian military has already been playing around with such a scenario…
Peter Vincent Pry, who is executive director of a congressional advisory group called the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, raised the alarm as the agreement is about to be finalized.
He said U.S. military officials have confirmed such an Iranian plan.
“Iranian military documents describe such a scenario – including a recently translated Iranian military textbook that endorses nuclear EMP attack against the United States,” Pry wrote in a recent column in Israel’s main online media network, Aruz Sheva.
“Iran with a small number of nuclear missiles can by EMP attack threaten the existence of modernity and be the death knell of Western principles of international law, humanism and freedom,” he said.
Very chilling stuff.
And of course there are many, many others out there that would love to see the U.S. taken down other than just the Iranians.
Meanwhile, our power grid is far more vulnerable than most Americans would dare to imagine.
In previous articles, I discussed a recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report which stated the following…
“Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.”
Are you starting to get the picture?
Our entire way of life depends upon electricity. If you take away that electricity, our society is transformed literally overnight.
A successful EMP would be an utter nightmare for this nation. Just consider what U.S. Representative Scott Perry had to say about a potential attack last year…
“The consequences of such an attack could be catastrophic; all electronics, power systems, and information systems could be shut down,” Rep. Scott Perry said in prepared remarks during an EMP hearing in May held by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. “This could then cascade into interdependent infrastructures such as water, gas, and telecommunications.
While we understand this is an extreme case, we must always be prepared in case a rogue state decides to utilize this technology.”
In essence, suddenly nothing would work and just about everything that we take for granted would suddenly be gone.
In a previous article, I spelled out some of the implications of such an event…
-There would be no heat for your home.
-Water would no longer be pumped into most homes.
-Your computer would not work.
-There would be no Internet.
-Your phones would not work.
-There would be no television.
-There would be no radio.
-ATM machines would be shut down.
-There would be no banking.
-Your debit cards and credit cards would not work.
-Without electricity, most gas stations would not be functioning.
-Most people would be unable to do their jobs without electricity and employment would collapse.
-Commerce would be brought to a standstill.
-Hospitals would not be able to function normally.
-You would quickly start running out of medicine.
-All refrigeration would shut down and frozen foods in our homes and supermarkets would start to go bad.
And as I mentioned above, all of this can happen even without an attack.
A direct hit from a major solar storm can cause the exact same thing.
In fact, NASA says that there is a 12 percent chance that such a storm will hit us during the next ten years…
NASA is warning that there’s a 12 percent chance an extreme solar storm will hit Earth in the next decade, sending out massive shock waves that would knock out grids across the world.
The economic impact of this doomsday scenario could exceed $2 trillion — or 20 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, we have been really lucky.
There was a close call in 2012 and another one in 2013.
The following is an excerpt from an upcoming book that I have co-authored with Barbara Fix that will soon be published entitled “Get Prepared Now”…
Most people have absolutely no idea that the Earth barely missed being fried by a massive EMP burst from the sun in 2012 and in 2013. And earlier in 2014 there was another huge solar storm which would have caused tremendous damage if it had been directed at our planet. If any of those storms would have directly hit us, the result would have been catastrophic. Electrical transformers would have burst into flames, power grids would have gone down and much of our technology would have been fried. In essence, life as we know it would have ceased to exist – at least for a time. These kinds of solar storms have hit the Earth many times before, and experts tell us that it is inevitable that it will happen again. The most famous one happened in 1859, and was known as the Carrington Event. But other than the telegraph, humanity had very little dependence on technology at the time. If another Carrington Event happened today, it would be a complete and utter nightmare. A study by Lloyd’s of London has concluded that it would have taken a $2,600,000,000,000 chunk out of the global economy, and it would take up to a decade to repair the damage. Unfortunately, scientists insist that it is going to happen at some point. The only question is when.
So keep an eye on the sun.
The giant ball of fire that we revolve around has started to behave very erratically, and it has the power to end our way of life at any time.
In fact, scientists tell us that we are about to get hit with a “glancing blow” on April 7th…
A filament of magnetism stretching halfway across the sun erupted during the late hours of April 4th (22:00-23:00 UT). The eruption split the sun’s atmosphere, hurling a CME into space and creating a “canyon of fire,” shown in a movie recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory: The glowing walls of the canyon trace the original channel where the filament was suspended by magnetic forces above the sun’s surface. From end to end, the structure stretches more than 300,000 km–a real Grand Canyon.
Fragments of the exploding filament formed the core of a CME that raced away from the sun at approximately 900 km/s (2 million mph): image. Most of the CME will miss Earth, but not all. The cloud is expected to deliver a a glancing blow to our planet’s magnetic field could on April 7th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.
The event of April 7th is not going to cause us major problems. But someday there will be a solar storm that will.
Personally, I cannot even imagine what life would be like without electricity.
Because we have become so deeply dependent on technology, most of us would have absolutely no idea how to live without it.
An electromagnetic pulse attack would be one of the fastest ways to cripple America and end the dominance of the United States in world affairs. And in this day and age, there are hundreds of millions of people around the planet that would love to see that happen.
So to not take steps to protect our power grid from such an attack is very foolish. But that is precisely what Barack Obama (and presidents before him) have chosen to do. We have technology which would mitigate the damage from an electromagnetic pulse, but rather than spend the money Obama has decided to just hope that it will never happen.
Up to this point, we have been fortunate.
But someday, our luck may run out.
Those of us left would have the duty to repopulate.
When the power in the building I work in yesterday went out the first thing I thought of was EMP. This power outage was the wierdest I’ve seen. The building right next to us had power. This is in an office park with some government offices and non-government. Supposedly the incident began at a power station in Charles County, Maryland, some 25 miles from where my office is located, when a support structure fell on a wire and broke it, sending some kind of surge or disruption through the lines. What is unusual is the spotty outages that occurred–part of the White House, some Metro rail stations, etc.
No uniform area outage. It was pretty much all fixed within a couple of hours.
Just very strange in the isolated nature of the power outages. Doesn’t make much sense.
From the graphic it looks like New Jersey is safe. So fuck ya’ll !! Admin is safe, Boston Bob is safe, and a few others here also. California is safe, unfortunately.
TE and all of MI is screwed. You Kentucky boys are royally screwed.
Anyhoo … I don’t know what’s so bad about being set back to an 1800’s lifestyle. I’ve watched plenty of Bonanza and Little House On The Prairie and Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman. It looks just fuckin’ grand!
That map is only one scenario. An EMP bomb could be set off anywhere in the lower atmosphere above the USA with varying consequences. Two bombs, one each over both west and east parts of the country would probably get 90% of the grid.
The sad part is, Stucky, is the fact that you’re crowing about living in NEW JERSEY with electricity, while those of us down here are screwed. You know what the word
Thing is, I’d rather live in Kentucky without electricity than New Jersey with electricity…
Shit… that was supposed to say “You know what the word “Irony” means, don’t you?”
Meh… I write a bit about irony, and irony itself bites my ass…
Double meh…
Imagine a world without Twitter, Google, YouTube or Facebook. Anyone under the age of 25 would have to learn what a star or a cloud is. Not “The Cloud”, a cloud.
What’s the ‘v/m’ designation mean? And why is it least in the middle? Lastly, someone here knows this….how high would these things typically be launched – same as a real nuke?…..how high is that? And Stucky, whoever down-arrowed me on your post regarding your Mother – well, I hope you didn’t think I meant anything other than good thoughts.
Tommy,
I’m no expert on the matter. But, from what I can understand of the maths involved, a nuke needs to be biffed higher than 100km above the Earth’s surface to generate an E3 level EMP similar to the Carrington Event.
v/m means “Volts per meter”.
Biffed high enough, the little EMP generated by the nuke slams into the Earth’s atmosphere which, by some mojo called “The Compton Effect”, supercharges the EMP which then slams into the Earth’s surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compton_effect
The lack of any preparations for a Carrington Event or EMP strike truly indicates the over the top corruption and breath taking stupidity in Washington. I guess the companies that would profit from protecting the grid don’t have lobbyists writing up budgets.
Thanks Billy, anybody ever looked into emp-proofing your shit? How many millions do you have and when you’re done, the whole towns’ coming for your efforts. There are just some things in my opinion, if they happen, they happen.
“Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman”
Umm-mm, I would stop being a high plains drifter and settle down in a little house on the prairie and be her mule with that sister Sara.
Tommy says: anybody ever looked into emp-proofing your shit?
My shit is EMP proof. I get about forty miles a day on green grass and water.
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Some of us have prepped for this but it is low on my expected list. I fear dollar collapse more than emp but the results will still be an epic cull.
Btw 1 of my truks and my sw/am tube unit wlll be on the air kbbi5056 out of sw ohio look for me on the low 2 meter scale.
What’s the downside?
“The sad part is, Stucky, is the fact that you’re crowing about living in NEW JERSEY with electricity ….” —– Billy
Ok. Every 6,000 or so posts I get the opportunity to say something positive about this shitfuk state I live in …. and you want to take even that away from me?? Have some compassion for fukssake!
Sensetti, yes….yes, I know – I’ve heard about the ponies…….what ’bout that truck you’ll use to haul ’em to the foothills to begin your new adventure? Suppose anyone else might see you and ponder a life on your horse? Just sayin’.
Stucky- You are totally messed up in the head. My doomstead is in the middle of 200 Amish farms.
THEY DON’T USE FUCKING ELECTRICITY NOW !!!!!! THEY LIVE BETTER THAN YOU DO.
WTF? I am not yelling, just don’t believe you are that dumb.
Just think of all the family supporting JOBS it would create!
Thanks Billy, anybody ever looked into emp-proofing your shit? How many millions do you have and when you’re done, the whole towns’ coming for your efforts. Tommy
No problem, brah…
EMP proofing my shit? It doesn’t take a lot. A working Faraday Cage can be knocked together with wire and 2×2’s in an afternoon. Don’t have that? Use a steel ammo can, then ground it with wire. The whole point is to get the EMP to go around your shit, not through your shit. You don’t need to make a Faraday Cage to EMP proof your whole car… just figure out what you’ll need to replace (circuit boards, etc) and then put them in the cage. If an EMP takes place, wait it out, swap components and you’re in business.
Given the zillions of cars and trucks in the US, it’s a given that some will survive – being in underground parking garages, etc. Or just being so old that the EMP has no effect. Which is partially why I bought a truck from 1973. Anything prior to about 1980 is probably okay. Anything after that is probably toast.
People coming for your shit? Yep. Thought of that. Passive electricity generation only (unless at the absolute end of need), no generators. Light and noise discipline – which means covering your windows with aluminum foil or paint them and so make them light tight. If you have to run a generator, then hook it up with multiple mufflers to minimize the sound. Or do that, then put it in a soundproofed building or shed. Or even underground. And only run it during the day for short periods – sounds carry much farther at night.
Hooking up with your neighbors and forming a support and defensive network before anything bad happens will pay dividends… try and go it alone, and you’ll probably get dead.
Obtain and read the book “A Failure of Civility”. I think it might be in it’s second printing… probably the best book on the subject of disaster survival out there…
And further more, while I am feasting on a yummy grass fed Amish ribeye steak and fresh vegetables, you can email a picture of a steak to your starving ass.
I really can’t see a EMP from another nation either unless we are somehow hit with a computer virus that knocks out our ability to first detect a launch and our retaliatory strike back setting off a domino of strikes.
MI is already being warned that due to government mandates closing our coal electric producing plants to be prepared for rolling brown and blackouts starting in 2016.
Glad I live on the west side, away from the shitstorm that will happen on the East side (TE?) when the lights go off right in the middle of a seasonally adjusted man caused global warming summer plagued with droughts and increased allergy’s…
Bea Lever
Ya dick! Invest in one of THESE, quickly.
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Heh.
Okay Stuck… I’ll allow you your “We’ll still have electricity, neener neener!” remarks…
Question: Since most of the stuff you use every day – food production, coal production, etc – is all in the EMP zone, what will you damnyankees with your fancy electricity have to eat?
Yeah…
Best get used to beets and potatoes with beets and potatoes on the side with an order of beets and potatoes… or cabbage… or whatever it is you all grow up there.
Oh, and once the tobacco runs out (or weed – Kentucky’s biggest unofficial cash crop is weed) give it a day or two and every smoker will be going apeshit for a butt…
So there’s that… heh heh…
Tommy I live in the woods now. National forest and paper company land all around me.
I have two bug out destinations. One in Colorado on a high mountain ranch a friend of mine owns, hence would need to haul horses and pull my van trailer to that spot. The other is in the Kiamichi Mountains in Eastern oklahoma, It would take me about four days with my string of horses to get there. But more than likely I’ll shelter in place unless something pushes me out.
Put your preps in place the best you can, have a couple viable fall back positions, then don’t worry about something that may never happen. Enjoy the day you’re standing in.
I believe after the first 90 days things will have settled down. What do I mean by that? After 90 days the majority of people who are gonna die will be dead.
Hell you can take a backpack and a small tent & make it 90 days with a little forethought and strategic planning. So when people say they can’t prep I say bullshit, their just to damn lazy. I could take 100 bucks and hit spring cleaning garage sales and come up with everything I need to walk off my place with nothing but what I could carry and make it just fine till the initial phase had past.
I don’t think our intelligence services would necessarily be able to tell who’d launched the EMP strike. Strikes could be launched from trawlers in the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico and even the Great Lakes. Satellite data might be able to track the trawlers backwards in time, but not definitively, especially if they’d been moved under heavy cloud cover. Thoughts?
A preppers’ wet dream.
I would be willing to bet that since 99% of the cars/trucks in the EMP zone would be out of commission, there would be raids on NJ to steal all of your vehicles.
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Sensetti, you make me think of that old dude on Grizzly Adams. Think Llpoh was on there too (hehehehe).
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Billy and Bea (sounds like a homosexual dating service)
I would like to live a long life like my dad (90+). But, ya know what … NOT if there’s a nuke or EMP strike. Fuck that shit … eking out a living via some saved up preps, or hunting possum God forbid, or fighting off Zombies, etc etc. I can understand younger folk doing all they can to survive, especially those with young children. But, that ain’t me. I’m 61 and I’ve led a relatively full life … a damn good life compared to the horseshit that will be the result of a nuke attack. Fuckit, I don’t need it.
I hope I’m at Ground Zero! Poof! Gone in a nanosecond. Actually a pretty good way to go, as opposed to a grenade splitting me open and my bowels lying next to me on the ground as I bleed out and writhing in agony.
It will be wonderful to finally know what’s on the Other Side. If Paradise … I’m better off than you! No denying that, so why fear death? If Just Nothingness … I’m still better off than you. Of course, if there’s a literal Hell and Jeebus mistakenly sends me there, then we’ll call that an even swap … since your hell would be here on earth.
Okay is it copy image or copy image location? I need ‘show this’ buttons or something simple – more simply than me….beat you to it.
The article below is from a year ago but is relevant to this post, attacks on the grid are already happening and we are all more vulnerabe than we think or the government wants us to know about.
Officials beleive 2013 attack on PG&E Metcalf substation a “dress rehearsal” for a larger electric-grid attack to come
// February 6th, 2014 // News
Location of the PG&E Metcalf substation electrical-grid terrorist attack
PG&E Metcalf substation terrorist attackThe Wall Street Journal released a stunning report yesterday revealing that on April 16 of last year, what looks to be a coordinated terrorist attack on the nations’ electric grid, took place in Los Angeles, California. Originally reported as an “act of vandalism”, many officials are now coming out and admitting that they believe the attack against a PG&E substation was a dress rehearsal for a larger electrical-grid attack to come.
Although details of the attack are of course, sketchy, what we do know is this. The attack began just after midnight on April 16, 2013. A group of men (experts say it would have required more than one man to conduct the attack) climbed through at least two different manholes to an underground AT&T utility bunker, located on Monterey Highway near the busy U.S. Highway 101 freeway and only a short distance away from a critical electrical substation in the area, and cut the telephone communication cables. The fiber-optic communication lines were cut in such a way to make quick repair impossible. A few minutes later, cables in a vault owned by Level 3 Communications were also cut. Thirty minutes later, a group of attackers spent the next 20 minutes in and around a PG&E substation firing weapons (believed to be AK-47s) at 17 different transformers, critical components of the electrical grid in the area, located on a route that fed essential power to Silicon Valley and some of the largest technology companies on the planet (including Apple, Facebook, and Google). The moment the police neared the area of the attack, the shooting stopped and the assailants disappeared without a trace.
During the assault, power officials rerouted power around the damaged sites and increased the amount of electricity being produced at power plants to compensate for the disruption. Had they not acted quickly, the entire area would have blacked out – and the grid would not have come back online quickly thereafter. Utility workers required nearly a month to complete all repairs on the damaged electrical grid components. Regardless, during the attack, some 911 services were knocked offline, landline service was cut, and cell phone service to the area was disrupted.
PG&E was quick to call the attack the work of “vandals” in their official press release. But was it a terrorist attack?
After closed-door, high-level briefings were presented to federal agencies, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission noted:
“The attack was the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.”
Typical electric transformer at a electrical substationRetired PG&E Vice President Mark Johnson told a utility security conference:
“This wasn’t an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation. This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.”
In addition, experts from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia were flow in after the attack. After walking the site with FBI agents, the military experts said the attack looked to be a coordinated “military style” professional job.
The Wall Street Journal noted how common it is for terrorist organizations to target electric grid components:
“Overseas, terrorist organizations were linked to 2,500 attacks on transmission lines or towers and at least 500 on substations from 1996 to 2006, according to a January report from the Electric Power Research Institute.”
Is this a case of focusing too much on cybersecurity attacks and missing what’s going on right in front of our faces? Officials noted that in the PG&E Metcalf Substation attack, the attackers took great care to fire at the transformers’ oil-filled cooling systems which would “bleed oil” and slowly shut off the transformers while not causing a visible explosion as would have occurred if the internal components of the transformer had been targeted. Investigators also pointed out that surveillance video caught what appeared to be “light signals” given prior to the initiation of the attack and seconds before the attack ceased.
And why did the attack miss public attention? In addition to purposeful secrecy by corporate and federal officials, the attack occurred the day after the Boston Marathon bombings which of course, all media attention was focused on.
Additional notes
Suspect sought
One month after the attacks, a man dressed in all black was seen “lurking” near the substation. A manhunt ensued with no results. Below is the reward info:
“AT&T is offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. Anyone with information for the Sheriff’s Office can contact investigators at 408-808-4431.”
Report from Foreign Policy
The following was reported by Foreign Policy and hints that the attacks were terrorist related.
“Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks — or groups of transformers — were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.
Cooling oil then leaked from a transformer bank, causing the transformers to overheat and shut down. State regulators urged customers in the area to conserve energy over the following days, but there was no long-term damage reported at the facility and there were no major power outages. There were no injuries reported. That was the good news. The bad news is that officials don’t know who the shooter(s) were, and most importantly, whether further attacks are planned.”
Typical electric transformer at a electrical substationBloomberg report in the incident
The following was reported by Bloomberg the day after the event. At this time it was being called an act of vandalism but reveals details about the attack which supports the current theory that the attack was an act of terrorism or a preface (practice run) for a larger attack.
“PG&E Corp. said gunshots damaged a substation in Silicon Valley, triggering an alert to conserve power in the region that is home to Apple Inc, Facebook Inc. and Google Inc.
PG&E’s Metcalf substation near San Jose was damaged by gunfire early this morning, Joe Molica, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based utility, said in a telephone interview. Multiple gunshots were reported in the vicinity of the station at 1:46 a.m., said Kurtis Stenderup, a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office.
Law enforcement officials are considering the incident an act of vandalism and will conduct a criminal investigation, Stenderup said in a telephone interview.
California Independent System Operator Corp., which operates the state grid, issued a “flex alert,” or an urgent call for conservation, for the San Jose area, particularly Silicon Valley and Santa Clara. Damaged equipment at the substation near San Jose will limit capacity on the grid, according to an e-mailed statement from the ISO.
“We’re looking for conservation now, from both residents and businesses,” Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the operator in Folsom, California, said by telephone.
Silicon Valley, the southern region of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, is home to six of the 10 biggest U.S. technology companies by sales, including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp., and thousands of startups. Companies in the area received 41 percent of U.S. venture investing last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Virginia.”
My book club of twenty plus years actually read “One Second After” last month – and it wasn’t my selection!
Not particularly well written but certainly an eye-opener for these 50 – 60 year old mostly still liberal, college educated white girls. After a robust two hour book discussion most had decided suicide was the best option.
Olga- If the grid going down and the CAT 5 chimpout to follow would cause the suicide of mostly liberal, college educated (Obama voting) people……..well I think we just found the silver lining.
Yes – the “Liberals” are to blame for everything. EVERYTHNG.
The non-liberals are blameless, brilliant, talented gifts-from-heaven that for whatever reason sat back and allowed the country to go hell.
Is EMP real? Is it high tech global warming? Has anyone ever actually duplicated it?
DAMN! One more f**king thing to worry about!
Bring it on! The herd needs culling. The FSA, fruits, fairies and sick will perish quick. Except for the smell of the die-off and steep learning curve to adapt to life in the 1800’s, I’m not seeing a problem. THe only thing that will be more helpless than the sheople will be the govt and that’s not a bad thing at all.
EMP is real. A simple Faraday cage will protect against it but it won’t be worth building one. If you have walkie-talkies, CB radio, gps or other small electronics you want to protect, store them in an old unused microwave.
Sensitive electronics can be stored in a microwave oven”no cooking allowed!” If we have an EMP attack? Don’t use your toilet or it well become a plugged up nasty mess. Get some kind of outdoor toilet. Things you take for granted now.Won’t work. I figure the natural gas will only work for a few day’s. Water also,Get some kind of tank to hold water. I recommend getting games and cards and books to read. Camping gear. Yep, One missile fired off the deck of a ship could screw up about half the country.I figure the east coast by New York is where it will come from.
Here’s a link to the official EMP Commission report from 2008.
http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf
Several good books have been written about such an event, including “One Second After” and my favorite (which actually spawned an entire series of books “Dies the fire”. In this one, society goes medieval, it’s not just a pulse, the physics enabling electric to work has changed.
Is EMP real? Is it high tech global warming? Has anyone ever actually duplicated it? – cliff
Yes, cliff. It’s real. The phenomenon was noticed a long time ago during the period back when we were blowing off nukes in the Pacific left and right. The test shot was called “Starfish Prime” and was biffed at 250 miles above the Earth’s surface. It knocked out power in Hawaii.
Previously, the effect had been noticed by us and the Brits, but blown off as something else…
Starfish Prime changed that. The whole “What the hell was THAT?!?” thing… we didn’t even know nukes could do that… on purpose, I mean.
Which led to further study, Compton waves, the Compton effect, blah, blag…
I’ve known about this stuff for a few years. One more, “oh shit the world will suck it hard!” possibilities for my children. Boy, they are going to LOVE me so.
Yep Stuck, if the US does it, it could force the Agenda 21 plan without having to convince 90-95% of the people to get on the trains, and in the buses. Guess where they are coming? Yep, the West coast, East coast and Southern coast. Right out of the playbook. Good thing we’re a democracy and not a country of evil rich men ruling clueless, compliant, ones!
No electricity means we have dozens of nuke plants ready to go full Fukishima. For a while, whom knows how long, ALL electricity would be routed to the nuke plants to make sure the core doesn’t melt down, and that the spent uranium stays in its cold, circulating water bath.
You know, because the fucking “pro” lifers, business experts and the progressive, liberal, victim-inducing for their own gala & benefit, do-gooders, screamed, “NOT IN MY BACK YARD!” While choosing to leave it in a more dangerous spot in the SAME freaking yard.
Yep. Nuclear & radiation annihilation if the grid goes down and there are not people/skills/resources enough to keep power going to them. Oh the freaking irony.
So, wouldn’t matter if it is “here” or “there” my friend, we both would be FUBAR, as would most everyone else.
There are dozens of places in our “modern” (50-100 year old and obsolete long ago in many cases) electrical, water and gas grid that if they fail, we screwed for a long, long, time. The products aren’t made ANYWHERE, and the researchers and R&D, not to mention the fabricators, were dead long ago. Bye, bye, knowledge.
This is how a new dark age happens folks.
Go north, flee by boat south, that seems to be the only “option.”
@Olga, it makes me so sad that at only 50-60 you all think dying would be best. Would you take your kids and grandkids with you? Or is suffering and hardship good enough for them? Is your health and mobility THAT limited?
We have been gifted with more advantages and opportunities than any other single society EVER, EVER, on earth.
And what do we do to show how grateful and thankful we are? Destroy the only real asset you ever own, before we are 50?
Screw that. I’m not off’ing myself, I’m buckling down to get even stronger, healthier, and younger. I want to help my children in this world, not just through the next one.
In unrelated news, Aerospace Command is moving all their vital hardware back into Cheyenne Mountain.
http://news.yahoo.com/us-aerospace-command-moving-comms-gear-back-cold-015320113.html
Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
@TE
“One Second After” does a terrific job painting a picture of what a 10 – 20% survival rate over the course of a year actually looks like – and it isn’t pretty. Children with swollen bellies, adding sawdust to the bread, deciding who gets more calories, wondering when it’s time to kill and eat the family dog, parents starving themselves in the hope that someone else will take in their kids, disease and infections that kill with impunity – and all this is a defensible enclave temporarily protected from the bands of marauders led by a protagonist who conveniently has all the answers and still buries his insulin dependent daughter.
I personally did not say I would prefer suicide – and to their credit they were all interested in living right up and until the “raping, pillaging hoards” came knocking.
Half of us are not married – some have kids hundreds of miles away – and alone is alone.
@Olga, but you have each other!
And yeah, if Fermi goes into full meltdown, it would be hard to not decide today was the day, but I wouldn’t do it unless my children went first.
There are actually ways to survive if you are outside ground zero, even in the highly irradiated areas. Right after Fukishima I studied and searched and came up with a not-everyone-dead scenario survival plan. It helps that I have an underground room with a dirt floor and cement and dirt blocks walls that is literally in the middle of my home. Have the tanks for water storage, have the iodine, have the prayer book and survival foods. At least the authorities would be so scared for themselves they more than likely wouldn’t be searching our homes for us.
Craziness, but once I found out stuff like that, I can’t sleep until I figure out a contingency plan. Even if it is futile, at least I tried.
More scary bullshit with no basis in reality.
SSS says:
More scary bullshit with no basis in reality.
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I agree with you. I have read that it would take thermonuclear weapons to create an effective (and localized) EMP strike.
@SSS, doubt you will see it, but what part has “no basis” in reality?
That solar flares served as huge disruptions to the modern technology of the late 1800s is undisputed, so that can NEVER happen again?
We are killing people world over, think they will never fight back on our soil?
Our government is pursuing thousands of rules that are actively culling us. Think they wouldn’t consider it after we start falling apart?
You are right, completely bullshit with no basis in reality.
Glad my world isn’t as black and white as yours, just because something hasn’t happened in the past 100 years, doesn’t mean it “can’t” happen.