Here’s something a little interesting. Five guys stand out in the desert while a 2KT nuclear bomb goes off 10,000 feet overhead.
Here’s what I find interesting – there is a tape recorder, and a movie camera, running throughout the test and it’s immediate aftermath. We know these guys are directly under the explosion. The explosion is approximately two miles overhead. Nuke goes off and…the cameras keep going, the tape recorder keeps going. I thought, according to all the hype of the last couple of years, that EMP would have knocked those devices out. What gives? Not a big enough yield?
(Sidenote: the guys in the test apparently lived into their late sixties and mid-eighties.)
I’m guessing it’s a combination of factors.
2KT is a fairly low yield. Back when we were still making nuclear artillery rounds they usually had a higher yield.
This also points out the idea that there could be a minimum required yield vs distance for a useful level of EMP.
A side not would be that the electronic equipment used was probably mostly mechanical which would be much more resistant to the EMP effects.
If you read over the 2008 report from the EMP Commission it shows that in their limited testing not everything gets fried.
http://www.empcommission.org/
Steelheart
I had an uncle that worked on nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 50′s, he died of cancer at 55. It was the wrong kind of cancer to be elated to the blasts, but radiation treatments were the best thing to treat his cancer with and he couldn’t do them because of his previous exposures. Prudence really is the best option most of the time.
I think the EMP stuff is way over-hyped.
Michael, that is pretty amazing because my dad was probably on Christmas Island with your uncle. My dad, fortunately, is still alive and kicking but gettin up in years for sure.
Up until the 1980′s most of the cameras in use (movie cameras) were mechanically wound affairs … i.e. EMP would not impact them. If you also look at earlier electronics like tape recorders that were transistor based they tend to be more EMP proof than our modern day chip based systems. Finally, there is a torodial effect with the magnetic lines where a donught just to the north of the center of the blast gets NO EMP. I’ll dig around and post a link to an article later that describes this.
Lesson learned here is that we should start hoarding 1950′s cameras and tape recorders for SHTF.
I like where your head is at.
The cameras used do not have long antennaes (e.g. any wire 2-3 ft or longer) to pickup EMP and were not connected to the electric grid. Plus, this was a very low yield (2 kt) at a low altitude (10,000 ft) so virtually all of the EMP effects would be within the area of the blast radius of the device.
When I was doing research for my EMP related novels, I found some contradictory papers as to what the likely effect of an EMP would be. There take on the matter was that there would be a negative feedback loop, and that a bomb is not powerful enough to have much of an effect. All theroretical though, and that paper could be wrong as well.
A solar flare, which has to line up perfectly or we would be fried many times over is another matter. The accounts of the big solar flare in the 19th century are pretty dramatic.
From reading the Congressional EMP report I think a lot less stuff is actually going to get fried than some folks say. Power loss equals total mad max but cars would probably still run as long as they had gas, etc.
It may be electrontubeoperated equipment like old radios. apparentlyt hose are supposedtoberesistant or even immune to emp.
To gain the true EMP effect that we read about, the burst would have had to been at a much higher altitude to gain the cascading effect.
No semiconductors…
The transistor was invented in 1954.
Others sorta beat me to it, but…
(1) low yield
(2) mechanical camera, tape-recorder was a tube-based affair. The EMP fries silicon “chips” – vaccuum-tube-based devices are immune – which is why the commies used tubes in their MIGs, etc all the way up to and (AFAIK) the latest generation!
HTH…