Featured Image: Map of potential disruptions from a polar orbit high altitude nuclear airburst.
I was asked to write a bit about Electromagnetic Pulses and the state of readiness on both the military and civilian sides. So let’s start at the beginning, what exactly is an Electromagnetic Pulse and what does it do?
An Electromagnetic Pulse or EMP (also called Transient Electromagnetic Disturbance or TED) is a brief burst of electromagnetic energy. Depending upon the source, the origin of an EMP can be natural or artificial, and can occur as an electromagnetic field, as an electric field, as a magnetic field, or as a conducted electric current.
The fields generated during an EMP can cause damage to electrical devices. Typically the damage is due to higher than normal voltage disrupting circuitry, damaging components, and burning up transformers, transistors, resistors and other components. On a large scale, they can shut down the electrical grid, destroy any electric infrastructure, and damage electronics.
There are several sources that can create an EMP, but we are only going to deal with a couple of them, the ones that can cause widespread disruptions. Those include coronal mass ejections or solar flares, nuclear related EMP and non-nuclear EMP weapons. Each of these types of EMP have their own causes, mechanisms and potential effects, so we’ll look at each one separately, starting with CME.
A coronal mass ejection or solar flare is the release of a large amount of plasma from the surface of the sun. They mainly consist of protons and electrons held in a plasma state by a magnetic field. The Auroras are caused by solar plasma hitting the magnetosphere.
Of the three types of EMP we’re looking at today they are the type that has the potential to cause the most widespread damage. The Carrington Event, the largest geomagnetic storm recorded, hit the Earth on 1-2 September 1859. The plasma from that particular CME hitting the magnetosphere lit up the skies all over the world. It also damaged telegraph systems worldwide, causing fires, melting telegraph wires and shocking operators. Imagine, if you will, a CME of that magnitude hitting Earth today. A considerably smaller CME hit in 1989, disrupting radio communications worldwide and knocking out power to most of the Canadian province of Quebec.
While Physicists knew a nuclear explosion would cause an EMP, it wasn’t until STARFISH PRIME in 1962 that the full effects of an airburst nuclear device were known. The 1962 test was part of Operation Fishbowl, and detonated a 1.4mt warhead at an altitude of 250 miles 19 miles south of Johnston atoll in the south Pacific. The resultant EMP blew out street lights, set off burglar alarms and took out a microwave telecom relay in Hawaii some 900 miles away. It also damaged several satellites in low-earth orbit.
As part of their 1962 “K” tests, the Soviets detonated a 300 kt nuke in space over Kazakhstan. That detonation caused multiple electrical grid related fires, including a major fire at a power plant in the city of Karaganda.
Our final culprit in the EMP world are non-nuclear EMP generators. There are several types of NNEMP devices out there, but the ones we are concerned with are military in nature. Almost all of these require some type of explosive to generate the pulse. They are also orders of magnitude less powerful than a nuclear EMP. The smaller impact is offset by greater discrimination/accuracy. A typical use case would be to take out a command and control or radar site.
Now onto the effects of EMPs. For the most part the effects are the same, regardless of type. The voltage spike is greater than the device or object can handle, damaging it. The amount of damage incurred is tied to the size of the object. For instance, your digital watch is likely to be undamaged by most EMP, the same with your laptop, unless it’s plugged in. If we were talking about waves, and I guess we really are, I’d call it fetch, that is the distance the wave has to travel. The longer the distance the pulse can travel, the more damage it can inflict. Don’t ask me why, I’m not a Physicist. So, for either a CME or nuclear airburst EMP we’re looking at damage to power grids and anything plugged into them. Secondarily, an EMP would likely cause fires, lots of fires. The voltage overload can cause sparks and excess heat. Those of you in California already know what happens when a powerline falls in a wooded area. Now imagine that in hundreds of locations as overloaded high voltage lines break.
I know pop culture says that most vehicles would be damaged or rendered unserviceable, but that just isn’t true. Despite the fact that modern cars and trucks have lots of electronic components, they are rolling Faraday cages. The steel body parts and rubber tires should shield most of the electronics from damage.
So, now the question is what is being done about all this? The short answer is not much. So far, there have been very few steps taken to harden the US grid from EMP. Why? You might ask. It comes down to money. The grid operators say it’s the government’s problem and the government says it’s on the grid operators. According to my research, experts have identified a relatively small number of large transformer/transmission facilities that need to be protected from EMP lest there be a cascading failure that takes out the entire US grid.
In 2003 a moderate power surge caused a grid failure in the northeast/upper midwest in the US and Ontario Canada. That outage only lasted a day or two in most areas affected. This editor was living near Rochester NY at the time, and the power was restored within 6 hours. However, most stores and restaurants were closed until the power was restored. Fortunately, most communications were unaffected. That would not be the case with an EMP.
If you want to take a deeper look into what is going on on the civilian side of things, take a look at this article from the Lexington Institute. It describes the ongoing efforts to harden the grid. You might also want to check out this piece at Biomedcentral.
As far as the military goes, the US military has been EM hardening since the results of the 1962 Starfish Prime test. The DoD has a series of requirements in place regarding electromagnetic pulse hardening. Those standards cover everything from radios to vehicles to aircraft to ordnance.
Additionally, the DoD has been taking steps to harden entire facilities in the past few years. There is a pilot program currently running at JB San Antonio that is hardening the military facilities as well as critical civilian facilities.
The final topic we’re going to look at is what you can do to prepare for an EMP disruption. You can start with a whole house surge protector. They intercept voltage spikes from your electric feed, and some can regulate the voltage in your household circuits. They can also mitigate damage from a lightning strike. A typical installation will run you about $500.
If you’re really serious about EMP preparedness, you should have backups of all your sensitive electronic devices and keep them stored in a Faraday cage or other EM protected storage. This includes cell phones, laptops, GPS units, and the like. I would also shield a generator if you have one. Believe it or not, solar panels and batteries would be unaffected by an EMP, but any charge controllers and the like should be shielded.