Imagine this:
You live in New York, or maybe Los Angeles. Boston or San Francisco. Chicago or Houston. Seattle or Miami. It won't matter.
You're toiling away at life, maybe at work or at home, sitting at your computer, or watching a game on your 4K TV, when the power goes out. Sudden silence.
Of course, you know that happens sometimes. But off in the distance you hear a crash and wonder: "Did the traffic lights fail too? That's rare, but I suppose it can happen."
But quickly you notice something else: Your UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) isn't beeping. Not only did it fail you just when it was supposed to protect your system, but normally it would be beeping now, and it's not.
The power isn't coming back on, and you don't hear sirens for whatever accident you think you might have heard... nothing. Just silence.
You're wondering what could have happened.
What you don't know is that it's happening throughout the entire continent: All of America, Canada, and Mexico are completely powerless.
Someone has exploded a nuclear device above the atmosphere. Approximately above Kansas, more than a thousand miles away from you. So of course you don't know this. Even a lot of the people in Kansas don't know it. There was no pressure wave. No mushroom cloud. There was a burst of light that quickly faded but not everyone (the whole of North America) was close enough to see it. You didn't see it. No one in your state saw it.
It was an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) from the nuclear explosion. By exploding it where they did, its effect was able to spread across a vast area.
No cities (or people) were turned to dust. No concussive shock wave was knocking over buildings, sending cars and people flying through the air. None of that happened anywhere, and yet...
...And yet this will soon become the biggest catastrophe in history, roughly equivalent to the wiping out of the dinosaurs from an asteroid impact 65 million years ago, only this time the dominant species being wiped out is us, and the cause... is also us.
But those moments haven't come yet. The nuclear reactors will quickly overheat and melt down, and the water in their spent fuel pools would soon evaporate, causing the zirconium fuel cladding to self-ignite, perhaps even causing a criticality event when the uranium fuel pellets gather as they drop to the bottom of the dry, on-fire spent fuel pool.
You look at your phone. To your surprise, it still seems to work, but it can't connect to anything, and... you smell smoke.
Something's caught fire somewhere, but again, no sirens. You try to use your phone some more, but it can't connect. People are coming out of their houses. You hear glass breaking. People can't get out of their cars any other way. The smell of smoke gets worse.
Science fiction? Or scientific fact? Could one nuclear bomb do all that?
A complete study was done years ago. It's still classified, but there's every reason to believe this an utterly realistic scenario. Not only that, but any nuclear-tipped missile that reaches the upper atmosphere could cause an EMP that could devastate an area hundreds or thousands of miles wide if it detonates prematurely, or if that's what someone actually wants to do with it, or if it's designed so that if someone tries to destroy it in-flight (after it leaves the launch area) it will blow up — and someone tries.
For a society running on energy, this would be bad enough. For one running on nuclear energy this would be fatal, because the backup generators would not work, the control systems would not work, MAYBE some of the automated SCRAM equipment would work (if they're based on always-on electromagnets and gravity or springs if the power fails)... but that would only provide a temporary solution. Without circulating water, it's a lost cause. The reactor staff runs — literally, because their cars won't start. Some are stuck behind electronic doors and gates that won't open.
Most of the military would be incapable of moving, other than on foot with what they can carry. The most sophisticated long-range bombers and a few other things are theoretically protected from an EMP, but full testing has never been done, because atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was prohibited when this writer was six years old — 64 years ago. Delicate electronics have come a long way since then and are in every major weapons system — including the triggers in the nuclear warheads.
The runway lights, maintenance hanger lights and doors, testing equipment, lifts, power tools... would all be unavailable, and power itself — would never return. (Oddly enough, a Ford Model A might still run -- if it had gas!)
The tissue of living organisms would not be affected by the EMP, but it cannot be said that absolutely no one would be killed by the EMP burst itself. If you have a pacemaker or were being operated on at the time — those people might not make it.
Which might mean they're the lucky ones, because things will keep getting worse.
As the power grid fails to come on, water cannot be pumped, fires cannot be put out, and soon, food spoils and thirst, hunger and desperation drive those with weapons to start to overpower those without. But even before that, the nuclear power plants would be spewing toxic radioactive gasses and people living downwind would be getting violently ill, not recovering, their insides melting away, turning to mush, like Alexander Litvinenko, after he was poisoned by Putin's henchmen with Polonium-210.
Few people, if any, would know why people were getting so sick. No one would be able to do anything, or know where to go to get away from whatever is making everyone so sick.
Wandering gangs would grab whatever they can, kill whoever they want, and it would never, ever get better.
One bomb. One EMP. One entire continent, with over 100 nuclear reactors destroyed (94 in America, 19 in Canada and two in Mexico).
The rest of the planet would not get away unscathed. Not with over 100 nuclear reactors melting down, their fuel pools catching fire, and if any airplanes fell out of the sky onto a nuclear waste dump (dry storage system) that too would probably be on fire too.
The genetic code of every living thing would soon be affected, and within a few decades, there would be few large living things left on earth.
Is there a solution? A way to stop this from being possible? Or do we just have to hope nobody does it?
Of course it can be prevented, but the solution is not found in any non-proliferation TREATY. Treaties can be broken. In reality, this tragic possibility can only be prevented by all sides dismantling anything that could launch such an attack. Dismantling the nuclear warheads AND the nuclear reactors.
And we still won't have solved the problem of what to do with the waste, but at the very least, we should stop making more.
Society needs to shut down the nuclear reactors and stop making the primary ingredient for nuclear weapons (Plutonium-239), and the primary (most vulnerable) TARGET for nuclear weapons (nuclear reactors and nuclear waste dumps).
Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
Notes:
Fortunately, the prolific and very talented author Annie Jacobsen has researched the topic of EMPs fairly thoroughly and her book Nuclear War: A Scenario (Copyright © 2024) (
our review is online here) presents some of this information (although all of it was fairly well-known long before her book came out).
From Nuclear War: A Scenario, pages 154-155: "Richard Garwin wrote the first paper on nuclear EMP in 1954, at Los Alamos (its findings are classified)." In 1962, after Starfish Prime (a high-altitude nuclear test blast), "it became clear that an EMP weapon exploded at high altitudes has the capability of permanently destroying large-scale infrastructure on the ground." Also on page 155, Jacobsen mentions a former CIA analyst telling about a Russian nuclear EMP test blast that destroyed "all manner of electronics within an enormous footprint extending hundreds of miles." Jacobsen also mentions that no one really knows if the EMP-protection for Marine One will really work.
On page 254, Jacobsen refers to a U.S. EMP Commission which has — for decades — "asserted that a high-altitude EMP attack will damage or destroy America's entire block power grid."
On pages 265 and 266, Jacobsen describes how every electronic controller in every factory would fail. Valves for gas pipelines would "rupture and explode." Planes would fall out of the sky... one disaster after another would begin to occur.
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
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