- even motorized vehicles that aren't damaged will be impacted by the lack of functioning fuel stations as gasoline stops flowing to and from the pumps. With regular deliveries interrupted by the lack of fuel and power, major urban populations will confront empty grocery shelves and a complete breakdown in essential services — from firefighting to garbage collection — in a matter of days.
Whee.
I guess my understanding of the physics is faulty. My understanding is that ever CME has an EMP as a sub-element in the event. The severity of the CME increases the severity of the corresponding EMP.
I guess I'd always seen EMPs as analogous to shockwaves: Every explosion has a shockwave, just some of them are more devastating than others, depending on attributes of the explosion.
Fascinating. And I get it now; I was using "EMP" for shorthand of the electrical damage caused by a CME, and that's not right. (Cletus and his ground wire.)
I knew about the fragility of our power grid (went deeply into the research behind switching to a solar install career, about 10 years ago) and that Mother Nature has some infrequently used tools in the shop that could shred our infrastructure... and that was before JIT manufacturing, overnight shipping as a norm, and electric fleet vehicles...
Yikes.
Friend's dad was part of a group that experimented with neutron bombs. We used to talk about things seventeen year olds shouldn't talk about. Said "yeah, it's pretty easy to lean a reaction towards ionizing radiation but it's still a nuke." And really, if you're going to nuke something, nuke something. The advent of MIRVs meant that the goal wasn't bigger nukes, wasn't fancier nukes, but was smaller nukes that you could loft more of. Nuclear posturing by everyone with nukes has been about "enough that they can't be stopped" pretty much since the Manhattan Project (fun fact - if the war had gone on another couple months we would have had five atomic bombs to drop).
I asked him about EMPs. He looked at me like I was an idiot. Everything you know to be "EMP" is actually orbiting radiation that kills electronics because fallout in orbit doesn't fall.
If you would like to avoid the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, avoid nuclear shooting wars. Because lemme tell ya - the occasional frizzle of a circuitboard here or there is nothin' compared to a 100kT airburst.