The Consequences of Nuclear War- An EMP exploded in space could have significant effects, particularly on America’s notoriously flaky electrical grid.

The Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) from a nuclear weapon is caused by the gamma radiation from the detonation knocking electrons off atoms in the atmosphere. The electrons spiral through the Earth’s magnetic field, generating radio waves. The radio waves radiate out until they are absorbed by the atmosphere or meet a conductor of the right length. If they meet a conductor, each radio photon will cause an electron’s worth of current in it. If a lot of radio waves are absorbed by the conductor, then there will be a surge of current, and if the surge is powerful enough it will blow fuses or jump switch gaps or make permanent defects in transistors and other electrical elements, rendering the electrical device useless.

Two things to bear in mind about this process. First, that the mean free path of gamma rays in atmosphere is limited, no matter what size the weapon. A low-energy ray of 0.1 million electron-volts has a fifty per cent chance of being absorbed by the air in 36 metres. A higher energy ray of 1 MeV is absorbed by the air in 85 metres half the time. Very quickly, you run out of gamma rays. In the larger nuclear detonations the effect of those spiralling electrons is overwhelmed by the fireball before they can radiate much radio energy.

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Radio waves themselves can be absorbed by the air in a similar manner to gamma, though the ranges are far longer, and the higher energy waves are more likely to be absorbed than the lower energy waves.

The sum of these two effects mean that, at best, the EMP effect scales as the square root of the yield in theory, and in practice the effect is even more limited: a 1.4-megaton weapon has only 2.5 times the EMP effect of a 10-kiloton weapon. And the effect in the lower atmosphere is limited to around 16 km at most. This is only slightly larger than the Light Blast radius of a Minuteman III warhead.

It’s worth noting that before the first atomic detonation, the Trinity Test in 1945, physicist Enrico Fermi predicted the EMP pulse, and took steps to protect the test-monitoring instruments from it. But he got it wrong and lost some data from the test due to some of the instruments being knocked out.

In 1958, in the Yucca Test of Operation Hardtack, a modest 1.7 kiloton device was raised by balloon to a height of 26 kilometres and detonated. Due to difficulties with instruments on the aircraft carrier that released the balloon and was supposed to monitor the test, this test also lost data, but other instruments indicated that the EMP was five times higher than was expected.

Where the air is thinner, the gamma rays from the detonation of a nuclear weapon are less absorbed by the air and the fireball is greatly diminished, so a greater EMP is produced, but even so, Yucca was still more powerful than it should have been.

In the Sixties, the US performed a number of high-altitude nuclear tests, most of them low-yield and still technically in atmosphere. The most significant test was Starfish, which was a large, 1.4 megaton device, detonated at an altitude of 400 kilometres above Johnson Island in the Pacific. This produced an unexpectedly powerful EMP.

In Hawai’i, 1500 km from the launch site, burglar alarms were activated by the pulse, a microwave link was disrupted, and three hundred streetlights were blown out. In the vacuum at 400 km altitude, the gamma rays had nothing to be absorbed by until they reached the thin atmosphere below, and the fireball was insignificant. So a large area of atmosphere was energised by the radiation, a lot of electrons went spiralling away, and they travelled a long way before running out of energy.

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In addition, high energy electrons were produced in the Lower Van Allen Belt, which persisted for some time, knocking out three satellites immediately, and a half-dozen more over the next several months.

So EMP’s reputation is down to the nuclear weaponeers having mis-underestimated the effects repeatedly, culminating in the far-reaching effects of Starfish. Note that while unexpectedly affected by the EMP, the effects were still limited in Hawai’i. As a whole, the islands were fine, with the worst effects being in electrical systems that were sensitive or had long conductors oriented to pick up the long-wave (low-energy) radio waves that reached that far.

Just like the aerials on an old radio or TV set picking up a weak signal, unshielded conductors in electrical devices will be more adversely affected by EMP if they’re pointing the right (or wrong) way. Two identical devices might or might not suffer from an EMP if they’re oriented in different directions. If a device has more short paths in its circuitry than long ones, it should be more likely to survive at a given range.

And finally, if the device is completely wrapped in a conducting surface, the current produced by an EMP will flow around that surface, leaving the contents alone. This is what is known as the Faraday Cage effect, and is what protects airliners when they are struck by lightning (as they are about once a year on average).

So, the short answer is that, when nukes are exploded on or near the ground, the EMP is less significant than all the other effects such as concussion, heat, and so on. If your iPhone or pacemaker is knocked out by a nuke’s EMP, the chances are that the rest of your body will be burnt or broken, making the pacemaker the least of your worries.

An EMP exploded in space could have significant effects, particularly on America’s notoriously flaky electrical grid, but note that military equipment is designed with short conducting paths and shielded by Faraday cages to minimise such a tactic, the military having known about the true extent of EMP for over sixty years and built their equipment accordingly. An EMP burst over the continental United States would just signal an incoming attack, inviting instant retribution.

If you want to protect yourself from an orbital EMP weapon, prepare a Faraday cage for your back-up electrical equipment, and place it in your fallout shelter or other safe place. In addition, stop voting for politicians who block infrastructure bills.

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