
Solar storm risk and EMP attacks - csaid81
https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-about-solar-storm-risk-and-emp-attacks/
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stickfigure
I was a bit surprised by this exchange:

 _Q: Should I be more worried about EMP Attacks or solar storms?_

 _A: Opinions differ. But the EMP Commission is more worried about EMP
attacks._

 _Q: Why?_

Here's where I expected the answer to be:

A: Because it's the _EMP Commission_. It's right there in the name. The _Solar
Storm Commission_ is down the hall on the right.

(I personally imagine it in the voice of John Cleese)

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daenz
This reminds me, I've been toying with the idea of starting a github
repository for survival and rebuilding society if a major SHTF scenario
occurred. It would be crowdsourced and bake-able into an ebook for offline
reading. Anybody interested in it as a "Show HN" post?

~~~
jnurmine
If such a major SHTF happens that it warrants rebuilding the society and
figuring out how to survive, then Github will be down, internet will be a rare
occurence and your computer isn't likely to work for very long either.

Electronic distribution and consumption of media isn't very resilient if one
expects a large-scale SHTF event. For such a scenario, it'd be better to pump
out tons of copies as cheap paperback books.

Of course, this depends on the definition and scale of the SHTF. Personally I
don't think it's much of an SHTF if one still can consult e-books in any form.

~~~
throwaway4aday
An even better plan would be to learn the skills that you would put in that
book. The amount of information you can put in a book is only enough for a
rough starting point (and that's if the book only has one subject). The
practical experience necessary to do these things correctly and efficiently is
only really gained by doing them repeatedly.

A further improvement would be to build a small community that practices these
skills and tries to be as independent as possible from the current grid. These
are all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult than the last but just
imagine how much more difficult it would be to bootstrap society in a real
SHTF scenario.

~~~
jnurmine
I completely agree with you. Any book would be at best a memory aid or a
reference.

One step above the "small community of off-the-grid preppers" would be to come
up with ways to make today's societies more resilient to systemic hick-ups,
small and large, using either the means available already today or those which
are very close in the technology tree.

Doing so would require a lot of decentralization, e.g. by localizing
production of electricity and other consumables and making these smaller units
more autonomous. Think not big cities with a power plant each, but rather
groups of houses sharing solar panels and a wind mill.

Then again, this would probably be a kind of a pipe dream, as decentralization
is by definition not completely under centralized control. This creates all
kinds of friction. For example, if everyone produced their own electricity
locally, what would the power companies do? And what would the state do with
the lost tax money? There are plenty of problems like this, and I doubt one
can find a win-win situation where the nowadays centralized things would not
lose in some way.

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drtillberg
I interpreted the report as: "There are 9 unguarded remote sites which, if
damaged maliciously or accidentally, would lead to complete collapse of the
U.S. as a nation."

And then experts focus on 2 unlikely generalized scenarios of an area EMP
effect incidentally affecting the sites. As for the more obvious catastrophe
of someone specifically targeting the locations? I guess that's being
discussed separately?[1]

[1] [https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-
gri...](https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-
grid/index.html)

~~~
codingdave
I must have missed the "unguarded remote" part of the article. I read that
there are 30 critical sites, any 9 of which would be a problem if taken out.

To me, this sounds standard risk management. It sounds like a clear picture
that it falls in the "Low Likelihood / High Impact" quadrant, though, which is
the toughest quadrant to address, because you get into exactly the kinds of
questions you alluded to - unlikely, generalized ideas of what could happen,
but having to balance that with everyday operations which are absolutely going
to happen. Even with a known mitigation of stockpiling resources to recover
from such an event, at a price tag of $300M, there are many other things that
money could go to.

And while I'd like to feel safe knowing they have a solution ready, I don't
know enough about the budgetary limits or what other programs would have to be
reduced to make that $300M be available to give a solid personal opinion on
any of this.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The US military budget is nearly $700bn annually, and NASA's budget is
$22.6bn.

For the US government, $300M is pocket money. It's unbelievably negligent not
to spend a relatively tiny sum which could avoid total collapse.

It's like owning a very grand house and not paying a few hundred dollars for
insurance.

~~~
codingdave
The US government is operating at a deficit. And budgets are assigned to
specific departments, who still try to fit all their programs within it.

A better analogy might be that we all live in a very grand house, but can't
afford the mortgage. Sure. a family meeting could certainly find the money in
a drawer somewhere. But until we have that meeting, everyone is just sitting
in their room doing their own thing.

~~~
stainforth
This analogy is a fallacy that holds us back. MMT states that our nation is
not a house.

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arminiusreturns

      The chances of an EMP attack
      Q: I’ve heard a lot from you about how dangerous an EMP attack could be. But how likely is it that anyone will actually try to attack us with an EMP?
      A: Unlike the EMP Commission, most national security experts view EMP attacks as a second rate threat. While perhaps some small terrorist groups or rogue nations might launch a localized EMP attack that might take out a substation or two, it’s unlikely that any country capable of launching a major EMP attack would actually do so.
      Q: Why not?
      A: Because to launch a major EMP attack, a country would need a large nuclear weapon. And if a country was planning on using a large nuclear weapon, it would make more sense — in the morbid logic of war — to conventionally drop it on a city than to launch an EMP attack which would at most cause some brief power disruptions in a few states. As physicist Yousaf Butt put it, “A weapon of mass destruction is preferable to a weapon of mass disruption”.
    

This is very wrong and just tells me we should be even more cautious due to it
being a blind side. The defense industry has for over a decade had highly
deployable, targetable, non-nuclear EMP. (ex1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh1rgy25XhU))
If there is one thing I know, it's that the tools we develop for war in other
places tend to end up being used back at home. So I would also disagree with
the casual dismissal of the likelihood of use domestically. Further, part of
the entire reasoning in natsec circles for the increasingly egregious
violations of the constitution is because of the increase in ability for non
nation-state actors to be able to perform in new types of asymmetric attacks,
and I would say non-nuclear EMP would be just one in that list.

The good news: I think most of these problems are solvable, and will assist us
in being more ready to explore the extreme parts of our world and beyond.
Making tempest and EMP shielding default in electronics manufacturing for
example. It would also assist in reduction of the totalitarian surveillance
regime... so I say lets all start talking about how to do shielding properly.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about it. I do wonder though, how
much of that misinformation is on purpose. Like encryption, at what point does
the government decide to suppress a technology because it might hinder their
power? Things to ponder.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
It seems like an EMP attack would be best bet against the US for an actor with
a very limited number of nukes. From the field strength maps I've seen, a
single large nuke (not sure if NK's nukes are large enough) would affect all
of the US, two nukes and they could hit the coasts.

Nuking a city destroys a city, destroying the electrical grid takes out most
of a nations industrial production _and_ forces them to focus on short-term
survival.

An EMP taking out the power grid across the US in a way that isn't quickly
recovered from would likely be a lot more devastating - definitely in terms of
industrial capacity, possibly also in human losses due to starvation and
general collapse - than nuking two major cities with the same yield.

~~~
alkonaut
Any nuclear exchange will be focused on preventing the other side from using
their nukes first and foremost. If the US has N locations to launch nukes
from, then an attacker better have N+1 nukes if they want to spend one in the
atmosphere for EMP too.

Delivering a conventional strike on N transformer stations would probably be a
better idea since there would then likely be a conventional retaliation and
not a nuclear obliteration of the attacking country. I guess with North Korea
you can’t know.

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dghughes
Whenever I read about EMP it reminds me of an interesting device called an
explosively pumped flux compression generator (EPFCG). It generates an EMP
using explosives but the blast is not the goal it's generating a massive
electrical current (millions f amps in a microsecond).

From what I can understand an EPFCG needs an explosive-driven ferromagnetic
generator (EDFMG). I imagine the EDFMG is used like a fuse or blasting cap for
the EPFCG.

I'm not sure of the size of the devices.

[https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1996/apjemp.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-
driven_ferromagnetic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive-
driven_ferromagnetic_generator)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator)

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Starwatcher2001
If this subject interests you, I'd highly recommend the book "Sunfall" by Jim
Al-Khalili. It's the physicist's first venture into fiction and is based
around the threat of coronal mass ejections and a flipping of the Earths
magnetic field. He also weaves hacking, encryption and other science themes
into the plot.

As you might expect from a theoretical physicist, it's based on solid science,
with a small amount of poetic licence that he describes in the afterword.

It's been described as "The Day After Tomorrow meets Neuromancer". Not sure
I'd quite go that far, but it's a damn good read.

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Seb-C
So I am not an expert in this field, and actually I only have a vague idea in
what a transformer does, but is there a reason to believe this would not be
repairable? We are not talking about a usual bomb, so most of the materials
and infrastructure would still be there. It would not make any sense to build
a new one instead of repairing or replacing the damaged parts.

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baybal2
> EMP attacks...

For an EMP attack to be effective on modern electronics, you need to blow up a
multimegaton nuclear bomb close enough for it to take out whomever is using
that piece of electronics...

~~~
T-A
No. Optimal altitude for an EMP attack is actually a few hundred kilometers
up. The "base case" usually considered in these scenarios is a nuke going off
about 400 km over Omaha. At that altitude, the ionosphere helps you create a
"slow" E3 pulse which induces a field in the tens of volts per kilometer at
ground level; and since you can see most of the continental US, you have
plenty of kilometers to work with.

~~~
baybal2
That long wave EMP was only a threat to early unprotected powerlines, not
electronics.

What is a threat to electronics are VHF pulses from initial xray burst from
the bomb.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
What's the range of that pulse, and how does it relate to the field strength
map seen on Wikipedia
([https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EMP_mechanism.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EMP_mechanism.png))?

Naively, this map makes me think that a single such EMP means enough
electronics break that every major power plant or industrial plant is down and
not recoverable for weeks.

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sabujp
i'm assuming this is now being discussed due to the recent kurzgesagt video :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo)
. Key takeaways are that solar flame detectors are only 33% effective and we
don't have a stockpile of enough transformers.

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mywacaday
The UK Sky drama COBRA deals with this scenario and the difficulty of getting
replacement transformers after a solar flare

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bawana
So does this mean that fewer if any people will suffer in rural underdeveloped
areas like Africa and Asia?

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sabujp
It seems to me we need massive localized solar and battery investments as a
backup.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I think the EMP situation can cause permanent damage to solar panels and
batteries, even in off grid configs, though they would indeed help people who
are out of the damage zone.

Oh but most wargame EMP scenarios assume full blanketing of the USA with EMPs
so no such zone will exist.

Grid resilience is probably more appropriate in this case and is independent
of generation technology.

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nayuki
"Could Solar Storms Destroy Civilization? Solar Flares & Coronal Mass
Ejections" by Kurzgesagt:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHHSSJDJ4oo)

~~~
koheripbal
tldr: Nope.

~~~
csaid81
I think the answer is not "nope" but "probably nope". That video is perhaps
overconfident in our ability to detect these storms.

From the article:

> One-third of major storms arrive unexpectedly, according to the SWPC’s own
> 2010 analysis. And that’s not just the small storms. According to a news
> article in Science, the SWPC might be also be poor at identifying the
> characteristics of severe storms, since they are so rare.

~~~
koheripbal
Sometimes you get close enough to zero that for any reasonable application,
the answer can be rounded to zero.

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chahex
A perfect time to bring out new energy source.

