The High Altitude EMP

~~ The High Altitude EMP
By Duke Montana

Why detonate a high altitude Electro Magnetic Pulse? It kills electronic devices internally so they no longer work. However, it doesn’t destroy human (or animal) life, buildings, playgrounds or anything else like a typical bomb would. This leaves your enemy living, but without any modern-day devices that they have become so dependent on.  So it makes their lives much more miserable, and draws out their death so suffering is more brutal. In other words… it could be a slow killer for an entire country.

The big problem is nobody seems to know how to protect electrical devices against this type of threat. You can spend hours on line reading stories that have good information and opinions from people on chat rooms, but almost all of them finish with something to the point of, “we don’t know for sure, this is only a theory”.  It’s like finding a manual on how to better understand the female mind and how it works, it just doesn’t exist. 

After talking with a member at my church over a brief meal, I found out her father worked on the Manhattan Project. I thought for sure he would have the answers to questions. As it turns out, even a guy with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Chemical Engineering doesn’t know how to build a Faraday cage that will protect sensitive electronics. He said at the time they were working on the Hydrogen bomb, “The biggest concern of some of the scientists of the time was that the high temperature of the explosion would ignite the nitrogen and wipe out the atmosphere”. 

So, this puts us back to square one on figuring out how to protect modern day electronics against an EMP.  I’ve had countless conversations with a wide range of career types to include TV repair technicians, electricians, radio broadcasters and I get the same answer, no clue. I share with them what I’ve gathered from all the talking and they agree with my findings that it’s a good place to start.

And as simple as it sounds, it may work… or not. Take an electronic device like a walkie-talkie and wrap it in thick tin foil. Then wrap it with a hand towel or cloth of some kind. Put it inside a microwave oven or a tin trash can (with the lid on) and you’ve made the best chance of a Faraday cage that I can find. The microwave oven theory seems pretty realistic because it uses radiation to cook food, yet standing in front of it while it’s running doesn’t harm you. 
 
The tin trash can idea seems okay in theory, but it also seems a bit simple, maybe too much so to work. To be honest, I’ve gone with the tin trash can idea as a primary, but I expanded it a bit. I also used silver insulation and put a layer in my attic to reduce a pulse as it travels downward. I figured it may help a bit with heating and cooling, plus help save some of my electronics. A lead lined room or safe could also be used, but nobody knows how thick it should be in order to protect sensitive devices. And where the hell do you buy sheets of lead anyway?
 
Another unknown variable is the distance you are from the center of the EMP. Obviously the further you are from the blast, the better chances your electronics stand of surviving. A tin trash can set up may work fine if you’re more than 800 miles from a ground detonation, but if it goes off 5 miles above your exact location it may still fry your equipment. 

And if none of that got you a bit worried, here’s another option of chaos that could ruin your Super Bowl party, a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the Sun. From time to time our Sun has explosions of energy that are commonly referred to as solar flares or CMEs.
 
A CME releases huge quantities of matter and electromagnetic radiation into space from the Sun’s surface. The ejected material is plasma made up of electrons and protons.
A flare moves through space much faster, but a CME has the potential to be much more dangerous in terms of electrical things. Depending on its strength, it could take one day or up to five days for it to reach Earth. The first recorded CME event was on September 1, 1859 that is often referred to as the Carrington Event of 1859. We’ve only had a few since, but there was one website reporting there is a 12 percent chance that we could have a big one between now and 2022.

In my reading of CMEs, I found nothing telling me how to make a faraday cage or anything else to prevent damage to electronics. A person has to wonder how deep a bunker would have to be to in order to be protected from either an EMP or CME.

As I said before, using an EMP weapon on a society would be a cruel and slow way of killing them off. Estimates show that within a year roughly 90 percent of the population effected by the blast would be dead. A fellow by the name of William Forstchen wrote a book that was published in 2009 about this very subject called, “One Second After”. It may be a novel, but it was well researched and in my opinion is a must read for anyone who takes prepping serious. Another more recent (2015) book by retired news anchor Ted Koppel, “Lights Out” is a big eye opener as to how unprotected our country is against a cyber- attack that could leave us all in the dark.

The question that comes to my mind is this; what does the enemy want as an end result- to simply kill us slowly or do they want our land after we’re all dead? If all they had to do was repair the electrical grid and then move in, that may only be a two or three year delay to moving their people into our homes as they continue on with their lives. And a fairly small price to pay for a new continent to occupy.

If ISIS were to attack our grid, and as a result… send us back to 1880 and they didn’t want to take over our land that would still leave it open for us to defend against anyone who wanted to try and take it. Consider how easy it would be for Mexican cartels to advance from the south. Where would they stop? What if China or North Korea felt they wanted to take over the West half of the country and Russia took everything east of the Mississippi? You can see how it could easily become a chaotic mess and difficult to survive.