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What you need to know about EMP weapons

aardvark.co.nz

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Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#91

Post by euroderf »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #50
lenerdenator wrote: post #4

1) Don't worry about it. If one goes off over a NATO country or Russia/China, you'll soon have much, much bigger problems to worry about. 2) There is no 2)

Not all uses of nuclear weapons necessarily escalate to the doomsday maximum exchange scenarios. There are many interesting points of equilibrium in between. For example - if far right extremists took over Turkey and attacked Russia, then Russia nuked a Turkish airbase, what would the US/UK/France do? It's not actually that obvious.

Responding to conventional weapons with a nuke ? Unlikely.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#93

Post by spacebanana7 »

euroderf wrote: post #91
spacebanana7 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all uses of nuclear weapons necessarily escalate to the doomsday maximum exchange scenarios. There are many interesting points of equilibrium in between. For example - if far right extremists took over Turkey and attacked Russia, then Russia nuked a Turkish airbase, what would the US/UK/France do? It's not actually that obvious.

Responding to conventional weapons with a nuke ? Unlikely.

The USA did it against Japan. Of course those were special circumstances, but all wars have their own set of special circumstances to some extent.

There’s also the argument that using nuclear weapons make sense when a nuclear state has a weaker conventional force that its opponent. Russia still has a pretty strong conventional force, but for example North Korea is in this position against most likely adversaries.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#94

Post by jajko »

tintor wrote: post #87
armada651 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a chance at survival, no matter how slim I would take it. Even if it brings me suffering at least I tried to escape death. Whether my end was peaceful or dignified is of no relevance to me, because I won't be around to regret my end.

The problem is how much of your resources and time right now will you spend "prepping" for that "no matter how slim" chance in the future.

Its like working out in the gym - if you see it as a chore and a must, it is or becomes painful very quickly. If you make it fun and self-motivating (and ie get into hiking and camping in the wilderness, or practice shooting on targets, or training martial arts, some people really enjoy gardening and so on), the time is not wasted but enjoyed.

But I agree thats hardly a mindset of typical US redneck prepper. Although most of them live in rural areas and at least some hunting skills are sort of essential to cut costs.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#95

Post by clutchdude »

mopsi wrote: post #86
yabones wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.

One has to recognize the genre of "Threads" and "The Day After" - they represent suffering porn that has little to do with how actual disasters play out. In "Threads", the way people suddenly lose the ability to speak and rapidly turn into cavemen after a nuclear strike is comical. Kids grunt instead of talk, everyone shuffles around like zombies, and basic things like farming or using tools just vanish. How is anyon…

Those events happened when widespread support and supply were brought into to deal with the relatively limited destruction.

This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.

The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.

Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#96

Post by widforss »

tomxor wrote: post #80
washadjeffmad wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems intuitive, though. EM radiation is either reflected or absorbed, and optimizing for that requires both a pretty complex understanding of RF behavior and generally knowing that materials are generally radiopaque and radiolucent at different frequencies and wattages. Sometimes we're trying to keep things (eg- information) outside from getting in, and other times we want to prevent things inside from getting…

> EM radiation is either reflected or absorbed By interfaces yes, but it can also be cancelled out through destructive interference as a side effect of reflection, which is my theory of how a "big ball of crumply aluminium" is so effective compared to less chaotic solutions.

Rough surfaces increase reflection in non-specular directions and decrease it in the specular direction. I have never heard that it would facilitate destructive interference.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#98

Post by jajko »

lenerdenator wrote: post #66
yabones wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.

Funny that you mention "The Day After", I watched that movie in high school then went to lunch in a school that overlooks the Kansas City skyline. No chance that had anything to do with the panic attack I had when Putin put his nuclear troops on high alert after invading Ukraine. No sir, not at all.

As we saw puttin' is just empty talk, he is too smart and paranoid to fuck up his mafia empire be built so hard, his survival in some deep shelter with few bodyguards would be very short, person like him doesn't have any reliable true friends.

The problem is the person coming after him - if he will be an extremist nutjob, everything is possible even if only 5% or 10% of soviet missiles still work.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#99

Post by jajko »

nancyminusone wrote: post #62

>You can also forget about the inverse square law to protect you No, you don't get to ignore physics because the source is not a point source >Very large area of EMP How large? >Induces currents in any conducting material So does a magnet falling off my fridge. What magnitude of currents, at what distance, in what sized conductor? >During E1 the frequencies are so high How high are they? There can be radio waves stro…

I would expect this depends on yield, distance, any existing shielding (ie rebar in concrete), height of explosion and so on. Article doesn't discuss any specific bomb, hence no need for specific numbers.

Re: What you need to know about EMP weapons

#100

Post by dragonwriter »

rjsw wrote: post #89
spacebanana7 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all uses of nuclear weapons necessarily escalate to the doomsday maximum exchange scenarios. There are many interesting points of equilibrium in between. For example - if far right extremists took over Turkey and attacked Russia, then Russia nuked a Turkish airbase, what would the US/UK/France do? It's not actually that obvious.

Turkey is a member of NATO.

More than that, Turkey is a member of NATO that participates in US nuclear sharing and has substantial US forces (aside from the nuclear weapons) deployed.

A nuclear attack by Russia on Turkey would not be merely legally and abstractly an attack on the US under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which it would do massive irreparable damage to US credibility to ignore, but would almost certainly be a nuclear attack on US forces in the direct and literal sense.

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