So the current worry is an electromagnetic pulse? [1]
The "prepper" version of this usually confuses an actual EMP attack (which requires an atomic bomb) and solar magnetic disturbances. They're totally different. An electromagnetic pulse is a big RF pulse with a rise time in nanoseconds. A solar magnetic disturbance results in DC currents being induced into the ground over a period of hours.
An EMP attack is a threat, but if someone is firing atomic bombs at you, you have a bigger problem. That's the military view. It's mostly a threat to things which have long wires attached to them. Mobile devices are too small to be affected. It also doesn't affect fiber optics.
A solar magnetic disturbance is mostly a problem for AC long-distance power transmission on circuits which use a ground reference. This is a big problem for power grids, and they have ways to deal with them. There was a big event in 1989 which caused a blackout.[2] It appears as DC in AC circuits, causing partial transformer saturation. If this isn't detected, it can cause transformer overheating and burnout. But the big grids have detection for this, and reduce power levels in some transformers when necessary. This happens at a low level a few times every year.
It's really a relatively old disaster theory. I remember Winn Schwartau, of "Information Warfare" "fame", lecturing about it on stage at Summercon in 1997.
Later, in ~2009, I attended a NIST workshop for "smart grid" standardization right after Chu was nominated to lead DOE. It was mostly incredibly boring, with IT people from power companies talking to product managers from smart grid companies. Except that it seemed like every working group had at least one rando who was in no way associated with any actual smart grid concern who kept asking us to discuss EMP issues.
I think the generalized concern is, we're living in "an increasingly technology-dependent society", and if technology is suddenly taken away from us, we'll collapse into anarchy. It's the same narrative as Y2K.
This is a flavor of the Y2K narrative that seems, for some reason, to be heavily politicized.
> I think the generalized concern is, we're living in "an increasingly technology-dependent society", and if technology is suddenly taken away from us, we'll collapse into anarchy.
Is that actually inaccurate though? From everything I've read, our food/water supply is entirely dependent on oil and electricity, so it's hard to imagine how there wouldn't be mass deaths if that system suddenly got disrupted for an extended period of time.
Obviously there are ways of getting food and water outside of the commercial system, which is partly what the prepper movement is about.
Our tools, household items and clothes are built with planned obsolescence, can't be repaired by consumer and thus require frequent replacement.
Former CIA director estimates 2/3rd of US population will die in EMP [1], others 90% [2]. In US it would be so much worse because we used to comfortable consumer only life, and most wouldn't be able to adjust. Is that really that outlandish?
There is just the simple fact that such an "EMP" attack without a nuclear attack would still be an act of total war, with many people in any developed nation being killed if it worked. If you're willing to do that, and you have this technology... why not be willing to just bomb, or nuke? It's not like cities won't burn either way, and nukes (as you and others have stated) would do more damage.
The only reason these preppers focus on it, is because it's one of the few extreme scenarios they can imagine which they could reasonably survive. A nuclear holocaust isn't something you prepare for, it's something that you hope to either avoid, or be in the hypocenter of. Some kind of mythical "infrastructure killer" that doesn't actually physically alter that infrastructure too much... that you can imagine yourself seeing the other side of I think.
Like the "neutron bomb", the result is going to the be the same. What does it matter if a city burns because you nuked it, dropped napalm, or used a low yield airburst, or an EMP of some mythical design? The aftermath of a severe earthquake is the result of a similar process, and believe me, having to clear the old infrastructure is just an added expense.
Does anybody have any idea where this specific resurgent fear came from? The first place I came across it recently was, astonishingly, in the GOP 2016 platform [1] - there's a section on page 54 which makes the quite remarkable claim that "A single nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude over this country would collapse our electrical grid and other critical infrastructures and endanger the lives of millions" - this seems like SUCH an out there risk to specifically address that I figure there must be some particular source...
I'd imagine it's a plausible modern update of the Cold War fears for nuclear war. Instead of a thousand nukes, you just get one super-effective one. It's been a semi-common trope in apocalypse fiction, too - for instance, the TV show Dark Angel was set in a post-EMP U.S.
I read one of those disaster porn books on an EMP attack. It was a pretty good story, but I tried to look into the real effects of these things, as I didn't think it sounded very plausible to create that much destruction.
I don't claim to have done extensive research, but I got the distinct idea that we really don't have any idea what the effects of a large-scale EMP attack would be. Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast and then tried subjecting modern cars and computers and phones and such to them. As far as I can tell, it tends to affect things with long antennas and lengths of wire most strongly. Would we expect it to disrupt a modern car? Cellphone? Cellular base station, broadband base station? Hard to say for sure.
I have worked with shielding electronics from EM interference, where interference can sneak in through unexpected routes. Not sure if EMP style effects could penetrate in the same way, though. Cars seem like kind of a tricky case - there are some moderate length wires, like 6-8 feet probably, but they may be somewhat shielded. Could they pick up enough energy to damage essential electronics? I don't think anybody knows.
Part of the book's premise was also that the weapons were launched on rockets loaded onto anonymous cargo ships and timed to detonate at the same time over the continental US and Western Europe. Sounds pretty implausible to me that anybody could pull off a complex attack like that without a lot of mistakes and/or obvious preparation work. How long did it take us to get SLBMs working right? And I don't think even the rouge states would be willing to use a untested Rube Goldberg delivery system to launch an EMP attack whose effect on the target nations will be unknown.
Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast and then tried subjecting modern cars and computers and phones and such to them.
More of that was done during the Cold War. In my aerospace days I used to get reports on things such as tests of AUTODIN nodes using a truck-mounted EMP generator. One observation was that if you welded together the wire mesh used in reinforced concrete, before pouring the concrete, you had a rather coarse Faraday cage. That was enough to attenuate EMP to the point that the switching equipment was unaffected.
L-3 Services makes an EMP generator now for testing US military equipment.[1] The US military does pay some attention to this. But the general military view is that EMP effects are secondary to blast effects of nuclear weapons. The blast effects will knock out more than EMP does. If you're going to harden something against EMP, it also needs to be blast-hardened.
>Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a
small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast
Additionally the US DoD has an EMP weapon that comes in guided missile form via Raytheon/Boeing Phantom Works' CHAMP (publicly tested in 2012, confirmed in operation thereafter [1][2]) for taking out buildings, power grids, and such. It can be discharged 100 times per sortie.
Targeting power grids 'the old fashioned way' in Desert Storm, Lockheed F-117As dropped a cluster bomb full of carbon graphite filaments (BLU-114/B). This shorted out power lines/transformers and destroyed 85% of Iraq's power grid. Later used in Serbia and accidentally in SoCal during testing [3].
"The idea for these soft bombs apparently grew out of a training accident in souther California. Military aircraft were dropping chaff - hundres of metallic strips used to confuse enemy radar. An airplane released its chaff near a power switching station and many of the strips fell onto a power switching station, blacking out a large area of Orange County."
- Weapons of Mass Casualties and Terrorism Responce Handbook - Charles Stewart MD FACEP
In the olden days, Sandia used to run a big-ass EMP tester. It was large enough to fit a B-52 on the laminated wood platform, which remains the worlds biggest wood-and-glue-only structure. Officially, it's not been in service since 1980, so I assume the boys in the know have EMP shielding of military aircraft under control. I also assume that knowledge, where applicable, has been passed on to areas vital for national security such as electricity generation and distribution.
There's enough detail in your post to identify the book as "lights out" by Crawford. There's at least three books with that title and insane as it sounds Ted Koppel wrote an EMP realistic fiction on the exact same topic, yeah that Ted Koppel you're thinking of... Crawford's book is ground zero for the entire genre AFAIK and maybe 25 years ago he was discussing early revisions of it online on the internet probably on usenet. Way back when it was unusual for book authors to be involved on the internet or BBSes before "everyone's on social media"
I was astounded to check out the copypasta near clone books on Amazon. Much as its impossible to buy real cables or real chargers on Amazon we're getting to the point of there's going to be 1000 copypasta for every real or original ebook as per the linked story.
There are five interesting points about the original book and the copypasta phenomena and EMP in general.
1) I've done the EE stuff and read the QST/QEX articles about hardening radio gear for EMP and some of the professional stuff and I guarantee nobody writing or talking about the topic has done even that much research. From a commo point of view its harder, faster rise and fall lightning and you have to do lightning protection anyway, so... People who fail at lightning protection like to claim nothing can be made lightning proof; their either pedantically correct that you can only reduce the rate of damage by a factor of a million or so which is usually economically useful, or they're bad or non- engineers and they don't know what they're doing.
2) To the technical illiterate its all magic so its a variety of technobabble with no relationship to reality. For example actual (simulated) nuclear EMP testing of modern cars is pretty much a bust. In the genre all diesel electric locomotives burn out which is technologically speaking, hilarious. Its almost like zombie fic where the zombie stands for anything but actual zombies. This hand wavy magic IS how the general public sees EE or telecom stuff. Sure to people in the know their idea of magic is all ha ha funny alchemical but the fact remains there is no reason or rationality involved in the general public vs EE stuff.
3) The prepper - survivalist community is not by any means unified and this kind of fiction sells very well to a very small subgroup although most are interested in surviving hurricanes or blizzards while living in rural areas or living thru likely economic collapse (along the lines of 1930s, 2007, etc). I would guess the average city slicker wouldn't last more than a year in the country, so some prepper stuff is very much "back to the soil" propaganda. I guess I'm a prepper because I have a decent first aid kit in my car (and some training to use it and up to date CPR cert etc) and I have a fire extinguisher and some MREs and stuff in case I get stuck in a blizzard (which has in fact personally happened to me, and because I was prepared its an incredibly boring story, also I've been trapped in a house with no electricity during a blizzard and that was also very boring, oh and I was trapped in a cabin after tornados went thru the area and covered all the roads with trees, but I'm old, this stuff doesn't happen every decade, etc, none the less you can prepare or you can prepare to suffer, your choice...)
4) Most prepper fiction is highly escapist like bad sci fi. Real societal collapse looks a lot like Venezuela, Brazil, "the middle east" during periodic wars, Somalia, West Virginia (only halfway kidding) etc. Everyone's not gonna die although a lot will, and its gonna suck a lot worse than you think no matter how pessimistic you are. But we come from a long evolutionary line of survivors and even in the worst case its mostly not that big of a deal.
5) Some of the tropes are just funny. Outlaw cannibal biker gangs. The retired Marine who either saves everyone or is a complete PITA or both. Hillary is gonna take all our gunz.
People who fail at lightning protection like to claim nothing can be made lightning proof; their either pedantically correct that you can only reduce the rate of damage by a factor of a million or so which is usually economically useful, or they're bad or non- engineers and they don't know what they're doing.
I've noticed that. There are many antenna towers on mountaintops and high buildings that routinely take lightning hits without damage. Solutions are well understood.[1]
What seems to bother some people is that the parts for lightning protection are so massive. You need big grounding rods, heavy copper cable, and big spark gaps to handle the lightning current. Everything else in the system is miniaturized. Lightning protection components look like 1920s technology.
Haha I kind of wish that the engineer who specified a wellhouse and sewage treatment plant for a "rural" commercial building had also specified some surge protectors. Within the first six months I had to replace several control circuits (thankfully no pumps), and after installing the surge protectors there has been no problem in six years.
To your point 3 there is absolutely nothing unreasonable about being prepared for reasonably foreseen events of the sort you describe. I don't live in a particularly rural area but we do get blizzards and I live down a long dirt driveway. I certainly know where flashlights and lanterns and gas stoves are where I can quickly grab them if the power goes out. (I also have a couple sources of wood heat--including a woodstove that I had installed partly as heat backup.) f course, I have first aid kits handy but that's a good idea in any case.
Frankly my main concern if I lose power for an extended period in the winter is my pipes freezing. Personally, I'll be fine.
Another point, speaking of tropes, it is kind of a trope, but do you think you could tell, say, the DNC delegates like this one, that Hillary doesn't want to ban guns? https://youtu.be/QJipQgOk_vY
Kinda goes into the "dog whistle" concept. I notice that Liberal activists are constantly claiming that Republicans are racist, sexist, homophobe, etc due to vague reinterpretation of comments and positions that are supposedly subtle signals to racists. Meanwhile, the Democrat politicians routinely say that they want "common sense gun control". A little digging usually shows that their real goal is to ban and seize all guns, even if they know that they can't do it right away. But that doesn't stop the same Liberal activists from calling gun-rights advocates crazy for saying that those same Democrat politicians want to take their guns.
The book I read is actually One Second After by William R. Forstchen. I looked up the "Lights Out" by Crawford, and it looks like it was published about 20 months after, at least according to Amazon. I'm not sure who copied who when, just saying that that's the book I read, and it's a pretty good story, if probably technically unrealistic and a little full of standard prepper tropes.
Thanks for the real-world info, though. You're saying that modern cars are pretty much unaffected by EMPs, in addition to trucks, locomotives, and other major infrastructure? Does this cover all realistic strengths of EMP effect? Are we talking like the only way the EMP effect could hurt anything is if the bomb is close enough to physically destroy it anyways? So no realistic likelihood of damage from the orbital nuke scenario, no matter the power level of the bomb?
FWIW, I associate "prepper" with wildly impractical and poorly thought out levels of preparation for wildly unlikely disasters. Being prepared for things that are realistic and have actually happened in the recent past is just common sense.
Or google around for "Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack"
The TLDR version is cars are pretty much EMP proof, although its a central tenant of some survivalist belief system that "EE is magic therefore all modern cars will stop running in any attack at any level"
A good way to protect electronics from an EMP is to make it physically small and in a metal cage either insulated from ground or really really well grounded. Like a car, or a diesel locomotive. Train engines will survive. Their signalling and billing systems, maybe not so much, so in practice that's as good as knocking them out. I would think an electric locomotive or trolley would be a hopeless situation.
Whats usually missed in survivalist type lit is a "mission kill" does not mean opfor is completely physically vaporized. Knocking out 10% of cars on the road is almost as effective in the long economic run as vaporizing 100% of them. You're going to get China to make replacement parts for cars that haven't been made in years delivered in six months and meanwhile those cars can sit abandoned clogging the roads for weeks until they're all towed plus or minus 10% of the tow trucks being broke and you're gonna do this during the riots? 10% of the population including police fire and doctors just aren't going to go to work for weeks until they arrange transport? Sure. Or, you don't need to vaporize every SCADA system at every chemical plant and refinery, just a couple will be quite enough to make a dent in the industrial safety record. So yeah, after an EMP event, of whatever source, if 95% of cars or whatever are unaffected its still a HUGE problem, because 5% of "the modern world" is pretty large indeed.
Its possible to generate an electric surge locally stronger than the ionosphere could ever generate, and people are forever trying to sell semi-portable microwave based weapons to the police and army. They don't work very well even at strengths higher than EMP level.
Below thermal levels its unusual for transmitter sites to knock out cars. 99% of cars and service trucks laugh off a mere 50 KW broadcast transmitter. There's a 750 KW UHF TV transmitter in my area, you're not supposed to, but employees can drive up to it while its transmitting and cars are like "whatever". Supposedly a coworker burned out his car radio antenna input driving to a mountain top tower site, although the rest of the car was unharmed (its always a friend of a friend story, never happens to anyone first hand). Mountain tops are covered with extremely high powered transmitters. A lot of skyscraper buildings have some remarkably high power transmitters on top. Even if the building is an antenna null, the neighboring skyscraper certainly isn't in a null, LOL.
> An EMP attack is a threat, but if someone is firing atomic bombs at you, you have a bigger problem.
That's my take on it. EMP of that kind implies large nuclear detonations at high altitude. One or two will cover a good part of country. Military already tests their hardware for EMP resistance ( know someonw who worked at such a facility, it was really a fun job! ). So the idea is they'd be hardened enough to retaliate but after that it is probably game over and in large with major cities destroyed or population killed.
But if that didn't happen during Cold War, there is probably less chance of it happening today. So one should be more worried about slipping it the shower or eating too many twinkies, than say buying cooper faraday cages for their toasters.
What are some of the conventional weapons that can generate an EMP to cover a large part of our country? It has to be a high altitude nuclear blast for the physics to work from what I know.
> being subject to nuclear fallout.
Well, it is a high altitude blast, so fallout will be minimal. The point is after a such a blast the next likely step is icbms start flying. If your toaster is working or not, make a huge difference after that.
> you can have your gadgets fried without being subject to nuclear fallout.
Yes on a small scale they can have "your gadgets" fried. But others' gadgets will still be working. You can go to a hotel to another town and still get your morning toast there
Non-nuclear EMP weapons are not going to cover a large part of a country, of course.
I guess a lot of this is "what's your threat model". I can well imagine: 1) Survivalists planning for continuity of bread toasting in remote areas following a nuclear exchange. 2) Survivalists defending against Them(tm) targeting the camp with a conventional EMP, to disable radio communications and power generation etc.
I know someone who is a senior meteorologist for FEMA, and this person takes part in some interdisciplinary disaster planning events based around specific scenarios. He told me that there actually is no FEMA plan for a very large solar storm (like the Carrington Event), because we'd just be screwed. In a massive grid-down scenario like that, they expect a 90% die-off in the first few months.
This was two years ago that I had this conversation, and I'm not sure when the actual exercise he was referencing took place. My understanding is that there has been a lot done to prepare the grid in the past 5 years, so we may be in better shape today. I hope so.
They do say the worst case scenario would have a major impact--perhaps especially in the Northeast of the US--and affect about 10% of the US population. But there's nothing like "90% die-off" even if, as stated in the report, having "major implications for the insurance industry."
> A study last year estimated that the cost of a solar storm like the Carrington Event could reach $2.6 trillion worldwide. A considerably smaller event on March 13, 1989, led to the collapse of Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid and a resulting loss of electricity to six million people for up to nine hours.
Its not going to kill alot of people. It is going to knock out the power for a few hours.
Not accurate. From the actual report you're citing:
"The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between
20-40 million, with durations of 16 days to 1-2 years. The duration of outages will depend largely on the
availability of spare replacement transformers. If new transformers need to be ordered, the lead-time is likely
to be a minimum of five months. The total economic cost for such a scenario is estimated at $0.6-2.6 trillion
USD."
And if you look at the appendix:
"The economic costs of the outage scenarios are estimated by calculating the percentage of residential,
commercial, and industrial customers without power by state and using the average amount of electricity
consumed by each segment in each state per hour. The total amount of electricity "lost" for each sector in
each state is then the product of these items."
In other words, 0.6 - 2.6 trillion isn't the economic cost of the power outage, it's the amount of money the electric utilities would lose on sales during at extended downtime.
There's always an unstated premise: "assuming all else is equal". In a disaster scenario it won't be business as usual. In a true emergency scenario a transformer plant can be operated 24/7 with rotating crews. It wouldn't take 5 months to get new transformers.
Exactly transformers are really simple things, a bucket of mineral oil, cable, and a core can be assembled in a few hours. It's not going to last for 50 years like that, but needs must.
This guy was just messing with you. Worst case is something that 90% of people would not notice. The induced current across very long wires is relatively tiny compared to the power grid, and it has zero impact on fiber.
Electronics are generally well protected from the power grid due to lightning strikes.
If it makes you feel better compared to lighting strikes which regularly hit power lines and are DC this is locally much less of an issue. Sure, if this happened tomorrow it would make the news, but other than some extremely local events where things failed it just the right way it's a non issue.
Maybe you're right. I've been doing this for some time, and I do admit there generally seems to be far more fiber cuts that equipment outages :-) Maybe that's because of redundancy, or the failures in equipment are less visible than the fiber reroutes.
OTOH, every time I've tried to do 1 mile + wifi on a tower (e.g. 20 meter antenna tower) it's always been the lightning that killed the AP!
I'm not going to cite a source because it was a personal friend in a private conversation, and it was off-the-record. I don't want to get anyone in trouble.
Feel free to ignore it. Seriously. I don't really care one way or the other. It's a nested comment in an HN thread, and it's actually presented by me as hearsay. (Whoever you are, I don't really need you to define hearsay for me.) It's not like I just reported this in the WSJ. I dropped into a forum where people have informal conversations about a variety of things, and this was my random, downvoted, "hey I heard this thing once" contribution. I've given about as much information as I care to, and people can interpret however they like.
In general, the author seems to believe that these storms are not likely to cause national-scale extreme hardships like the ones you mention. The experts admit being unsure, but nothing like 90% casualties seems probable.
There are some much more problematic scenarios, such as the ever present rogue asteroid one, and the often overlooked super-volcano one. It seems Yellowstone is a likely trouble spot.
My wife hails from a little rural village a few miles outside of Syracuse, NY. A place that when the weather gets bad, it REALLY gets bad. There have been snow storms where they have been without power and blocked in for a few days. As a result of this my in-laws have become preppers without realising it. They keep a supply of petrol, dried food, water, fire wood, batteries, gas bottles and have various types of radio at their disposal. They also have a backup generator for the house. They are in the process of fitting solar to try and avoid using the generator when things are bad because in a snow storm a generator sound really creepy. They could live for a week without any lifestyle changes if the power went off and the roads were impassible.
When we were getting married and all the extended family arrived at the house for the big do, some relatives turned out to be preppers and were fascinated with the setup. One phrase I kept hearing was "We read in this book that if you do this, then..." and my father-in-law would respond with "Well, when we were actually without power during the 93 blizzard we learned that..." Basically experience trumped mass produced prepper books.
To a certain extent weather makes preppers of us all. I daresay people in Syracuse can rely on harsher weather coming more regularly than down here on the Texas coast. We get hurricanes and tropical storms but they have the entire Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard to choose from.
Every time a storm comes we get the usual advisories to stock up on a few days of food, check flashlight batteries, fill a clean tub with tap water for drinking, etc. Those things are drilled into your head from grade school and are repeated on news broadcasts before every major storm.
What's interesting is the unexpected byproduct of outages. Particularly here in the South home construction techniques have changed over the last 100 years. Older homes have lots of large, screened windows, whole house fans and vented attics to help move large amounts of air and help with heat. Even without power you can open all your windows and get a cross breeze. New construction is heavily insulated, has fewer windows and makes no concessions for mass airflow outside the air conditioning system.
Hurricane Katrina was an epiphany for many home owners down here as power was out for weeks afterwards; previously comfortable homes became sweltering hotboxes. The effect on local generator supply was immediate and obvious: sold out everywhere. I heard through the grapevine of entrepreneurs driving down truckloads of them to make a quick buck.
Even so gasoline-fueled generators can be difficult to keep fueled after a hurricane - people leaving the city have a tendency to deplete supplies and gas stations may not have power to pump. But natural gas tends to stay on even when power fails since gas distribution systems can have their own generation and some use the fuel they're moving to maintain pressure.
All the anecdotal evidence I have points to a heavy uptick in natural-gas-fired whole house generator sales after Katrina. In fact there was a trend for a while of new construction actively advertising whole house generator inclusion. I think it happened to a lesser extent again after Ike. Life really stinks down here without air conditioning. I guess my point is most preppers seem to concentrate on food and water, but at least down here electricity is high on the list. :-)
It's pretty fascinating to me that people don't default to having a couple days of food in the house. I guess if you have an electric stovetop dry goods aren't so useful when the power is out, but for people with gas, $10 of pasta will go a long way (and is easy to rotate through). I might not have a lot of choices left after 3 days, but there'd be food whether I went to the store or not.
I'm sure the reliability of the fuel supply in the aftermath of a disaster is a factor for the nat gas generators, but if you are going to install one permanently, not having to deal with deliveries and stale fuel are also pretty big advantages.
Oh yeah! Far superior to the hassle of dealing with gasoline and unless you buy a monster generator you're not going to power your entire house off of it anyway. Agreed wrt some simple dry goods. A box of crackers and some cans of tuna will go a long way, assuming you can find the can opener. :-)
Anyone know of good survival/prepper guides. Ones written by reputable authors/experts, well researched, and practical?
I'm not particularly paranoid (I suppose that's what paranoid people say...), but I do think there's a certain fragility to our civilisation that we're happy to overlook.
The thesis of Life After Doomsday by Bruce Clayton (get the Dial Press paperback edition if you want to look at it, it has annotations following the original), is that if you're prepared to survive a major nuclear war, you're pretty much set for anything less than that (modulo of course each threats particulars, like storm surge for hurricanes).
He (and I, who started becoming a nuclear war survivalist in 1968-9 in 2nd-3rd grade when my mother became a Civil Defense Block Mother, I still have the sign) recommend you read another book on expedient nuclear war survival, which is a lot more timeless. It's based on serious research at Oak Ridge, up to and including handing a set of printed instructions to an "average" American family, video taping them trying to follow them, and iterating on them. Oh, yeah, in the traditional fashion, the author(s) tried out this stuff themselves: Nuclear War Survival Skills
Check out the official on-line copy here: http://www.oism.org/nwss/ but if you're worried about a nuclear weapon event, get the dead tree copy, for the Kearny Fallout Meter needs better precision than you'll get from digital -> computer printer.
For that matter, you almost certainly want dead tree (or microfiche, there's a company that used to do that) copies for when the light go out.
After that, there's a lot more, but I don't have time to go into it (in the middle of renovating a house built in 1910), check my previous postings on the subject if you can find them, 5 minutes with Google and the built in search engine were useless and I have precise search terms, e.g. the obscure Bad Times Primer by C.G. Cobb. Or email me for more (address is in my info).
It's sort of a homesteading guide, starting with what sort of land is suitable and discussing the construction of buildings and farming and various crafts. It has a lot of information that would be handy in a world where energy is no longer incredibly abundant.
A 2 year prep isn't going to mean shit if the oil stops flowing.
I enjoyed "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" by Lewis Dartnell. It describes (briefly) the practical background of a wide array of basic technology.
A related question: Where do you, as a marketer, draw the line between producing a product to serve the needs and interests of a particular market and enabling activities you disagree with or believe to be harmful (even if only harmful to the consumer)?
In this case, writing for the "prepper" audience seems to fall near the line of providing content relevant to the consumers' interests and enabling/encouraging paranoid 'end-of-times' behavior that at best prepares the consumer for a natural disaster and at worst entrenches distrust of society in the audience.
Is it possible to ethically market a product that relies on a belief system or set of values you disagree with?
It depends on your ethics. Which I think is more than a trite rejoinder. You don't have to go very far back in history to see how slippery received wisdom can be.
Here's a vaguely on target real world example: There are doctors who perform surgeries for people that refuse blood transfusions for religious regions. Presumably some of the doctors disagree with the belief, but they perform the surgeries anyway.
In that situation it isn't a huge conundrum, choosing to engage the patient on their terms can be better than letting them suffer or die (so while your predicate is true, it's also the case that there is strong alignment of interests). It's had an impact on how medicine is practiced otherwise: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-jehovahs-witness...
Anybody have any better real world examples that more directly get at the tricky part of the question?
I think it is more than a possibility, and sometimes a moral imperative. Is it ethical to refuse to engage with people who you disagree with? It is always a possibility that it is your ethics/world view which is mistaken.
That said, your question was "is it possible?", not is it the right thing in this or any particular case. Just be wary of thinking than anyone who doesn't agree with your ethics is unethical, for there be dragons.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article... as someone who does believe in an eventual collapse I really appreciated the balanced approach while still making some fun of the fringe elements.
For the record, my belief is in a non-specific collapse based on the increasingly built-in fragility and complexity of civilization as espoused by Joseph Tainter[1] in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies"[2].
The science historian, James Burke, had a sobering walkthrough of the consequences of a large-scale failure of technology in the first episode of the first of his classic "Connections" series: "The Trigger Effect"
(Even more sobering is that, nearly 40 years after this series was filmed, we have a new layer of technological dependence: telecoms networks and data services. This would greatly amplify a lot of the things that Burke describes.)
Reminds me of an area historically known for its sword makers where I met people stockpiling swords in preparation for the coming doomsday. Apparently, there is a belief among religious locals that before the actual end of the world, God is going to stop all the modern machinery (including guns) effectively throwing everyone back indo the middle ages. Silly thing, but it keeps local blacksmiths at work allowing to continue old traditions for what it's worth.
Statistically, you're more likely to die in a post-apocalyptic scenario then you are in a car accident, so if you worry about things like wearing your seatbelt or driving sober then it's hardly irrational to be a prepper.[1] That being said, given that according to JAMA only 1.2% of Americans meet all seven guidelines for cardiovascular health[2], spending your weekends preparing for the apocalypse isn't necessarily the best use of time for most people in terms of increasing their life expectancy.
It's not irrational IMHO to be prepared to live a couple of days or so without power or grocery stores, as that's happened dozens of times all over the US for a variety of reasons. A total collapse of civilization on the other hand, not so much.
I will also say that I've wondered how many of the people prepping are capable of spending a day hiking in the woods with a decent pack on their back. Having a ton of stuff may not be very helpful if you don't have the physical capabilities to adapt to unexpected circumstances.
> Having a ton of stuff may not be very helpful if you don't have the physical capabilities to adapt to unexpected circumstances.
The actual amount of physical stuff you'd need to survive some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario really isn't more than a few hundred bucks, e.g. a year worth of crystalized iodine for purifying water and a flint & steel fire starter costs all of $25. What's more expensive is learning the edible plants and mushrooms in your area and their medicinal properties, plus whatever other miscellaneous survival skills you'd need.
I'm not a gun owner, but at the same time I realize that it's not possible to live as a vegetarian in a survival situation. This is because plants have almost no calories, you can't digest them without fat, most don't have enough protein, they take too much energy to gather and cook, etc. So without being able to cover everything with tofu, blue cheese, nutritional yeast, etc., there is basically no way to survive for any period of time without a gun. I have an interest in edible plants and mushrooms, so that's where I overlap with the preppers, but I feel like not owning a gun is one reason it wouldn't really make sense to label myself as such.
IMHO, in a realistic survival situation, unless you already live in an extremely remote area, like hundreds of miles from even a small city, the other survivors are going to be a much more immediate concern. Unless of course whatever the disaster is results in immediate casualties in the 95%+ range in all major cities, and you somehow survive this.
There would be a huge number of people in the area and no prospect of feeding all of them. They would all be very determined indeed, and many would have their own guns. Everyone would either starve, die at the hands of raiders/thieves, or become raiders and thieves themselves, and thus have plenty of supplies from whoever did prepare. Having a gun would help, but more important would be to have a large group with military-like organization strong enough to stand up to the stresses involved in surviving such an apocalypse. If you already have that or can make it/become part of it, you'll survive. If you don't, then your guns probably won't help you much, no matter how fancy they are and how much ammo you have.
So IMHO, to realistically prep, you'd have to either live way, way out in the boonies already, already be part of some kind of warlord militia in our current mostly peaceful world (a street gang might do it), or just accept that this is basically never going to happen anyways.
> There would be a huge number of people in the area and no prospect of feeding all of them.
I'm currently in NYC, where clearly there are way more people than edible plants. Even if you look at only the 1% or whatever who know which plants are edible, there still wouldn't be nearly enough plants to feed them.
But in any sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, the first thing that would happen is that people would be unable to mow their lawns and the parks. So within two or three weeks the amount of edible plants would go up 100x. Still not enough food to make staying in a city viable for the longterm, but probably enough that you could feed yourself while hiking or biking to a more remote area.
You think a few weeks will turn lawn grass into an abundant food supply?
Actual wheat takes months before it's ready to harvest. If, on the day of the apocalypse, every single person in NYC dug up the lawns and parks and planted every inch with edible grains, they'd all starve to death long before getting any bread. If they planted before the apocalypse so that the harvest came in just before the shit went down, they'd still starve to death, because a city doesn't have enough arable land to feed even 1% of its occupants. The amount of land required to keep NYC fed is larger than the city itself.
That's putting aside the fact that there's nothing in lawn grass that humans can get enough calories out of to even make up for the effort of harvesting.
So in your typical NYC grass you have: dandelion, chicory, common mallow, burdock, curly dock, bitter dock, red clover, plantain, various onions and mustards, etc. All of that stuff gets pretty big very fast if you don't mow over it. Obviously you still can't feed yourself on only plants, but the quantity of edible plants would probably outstrip the number of people who knew what they were. NYC has 30,000 acres of public parks, and tons more unofficial open space.
Just because you can eat something doesn't mean it will keep you alive. Dandelion greens, for example, definitely don't provide enough calories to make up for what you spend gathering them. I'm not sure they have enough to make up for just the effort of chewing and digesting them.
Everything you've mentioned there is just greens except for the plantains and onions, which will certainly be stripped bare in days. The rest might liven up a salad, but it definitely won't give you the protein and calories to stave off starvation.
Red clover actually has a lot of protein. The folks who survived the Irish potato famine were the ones who never abandoned the traditional Celtic practice of eating clover in favor of potatoes.
Just moved into NYC myself actually. I'm pretty sure that if some disaster knocked out all transportation, including food delivery trucking, then at least 95% of the whole east coast urban area would be dead in a month. Even getting out isn't good enough, because millions of others will be trying to get out at the same time. You'd have to already be out before it happens.
I don't think that knowing which plants are edible will help much either. You'd also have to somehow not die from robbery, disease, etc, and be able to protect your "garden" from millions of desperate starving people who will probably put anything green in their mouths no matter the real nutritional value just because they're desperate. Don't underestimate what a parent will do when they watch their kids starve to death.
I don't think owning guns will help much in such a dense urban area. There's just too many people. Even if you have effectively unlimited ammo and a very defensible position, you'd probably still get overwhelmed in short order. Even if you don't actually have much of anything, people will assume that anyone with that much protective firepower must have a lot of stuff to protect. Maybe if you're already set up to be a warlord king with a few hundred people under your command. That you can feed somehow, and also have the ammo and position for.
IMHO, anyone who really thinks that anything like that is going to happen should just move to rural Montana or something now and get started with the farming and such. I moved here, so you can guess what I think.
Good analysis, but you missed the hiding in plain sight -> hiding in general strategy.
Until you're not gaunt enough from lack of food, who's to know you have stored a lot of grain? Water access is a much bigger issue (why aren't you out scrounging for it, showing up at the military water access points if your city is lucky enough to have some, etc.), but if no one knows you're even there in your dwelling, assuming you can store enough water, you might be able to wait it out.
Ah, bigger issue there is probably a general fire forcing you out of it. In which case you're screwed, and should have bugged out long before the first mass wave of refugees.
> it's not possible to live as a vegetarian in a survival situation
Well, maybe not impossible, but difficult enough that you're doing yourself a grave disservice.
> there is basically no way to survive for any period of time without a gun
How do you jump to this? In fact on any medium-to-long scale, guns are going to rapidly become useless. You'd be better off with a compound bow and a good supply of hunting arrows. Even without a projectile weapon there are plenty of other options: Fishing, trapping/snares, herding, captive smaller food-animals (chickens/rabbits).
I realize that it's not possible to live as a vegetarian in a survival situation. This is because plants have almost no calories, you can't digest them without fat, most don't have enough protein, they take too much energy to gather and cook, etc.
Nuclear War Survival Skills says you can almost get by with grain, but that includes sprouting it for vitamins (and making yeast might be better for that). BUT children will not thrive without fats.
As for hunting, I am not only a gun owner, but my father's favorite/only hobbies are hunting and fishing (the latter of which I don't like, whereas hunting was OK, if he offered to take me on a hunt I'd go).
While we didn't hunt anything that we didn't eat, it's generally not an efficient way to gain high quality protein or fats. To do that, you need to cheat with methods that as I vaguely recall don't involve guns, e.g. use big nets to catch fish (or raise your own catfish, for example, although as I recall most fish we in the US catch aren't good oil sources). For animals, "poaching" and trapping methods, e.g. snares: http://www.snareshop.com/departments.asp?dept=14
As for not being able to label yourself as a prepper, I'm an old school nuclear war/economic collapse 60s-80s survivalist, and as others have noted, if you aren't able to protect you and yours, including the stores of materials and food you'll be needing to survive, well, why bother unless you live in a completely rural low population far from the big cities areas where you can depend on others in the community to do that in general for all.
(And, hey, try one out some time, they're lots of fun and not very dangerous if you follow the 4 Rules (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cooper#Firearms_safety) and for your first time or three, have a formal or informal coach.)
I find their math extremely questionable. They estimate an 0.1% chance of outright human extinction every year--not just a global disaster, like a plague or a nuclear war, but the death of every human. The only things that could really plausibly cause that are events that humans have no control over--a supervolcano, a rogue comet, a gargantuan solar flare, a nearby supernova, etc.--which means that the human race should have been wiped out about once a millennium. But here we are.
Sure, being a prepper doesn't mean you're going to survive the apocalypse either, it just makes it (perhaps only slightly) more likely.
With drunk driving specifically, if you're driving at just over the legal limit then you're 5x more likely to die than if you're driving sober. So if you buy into the idea that you're 5x more likely to die in a post-apocalyptic scenario than in a car accident, then it follows that even if you only drive while drunk then you're still more likely to die in a post-apocalyptic scenario. (Since approximately a third of all car crash deaths involve an intoxicated driver, and the 5x automobile death figure includes both sober and intoxicated drivers.)
The "prepper" version of this usually confuses an actual EMP attack (which requires an atomic bomb) and solar magnetic disturbances. They're totally different. An electromagnetic pulse is a big RF pulse with a rise time in nanoseconds. A solar magnetic disturbance results in DC currents being induced into the ground over a period of hours.
An EMP attack is a threat, but if someone is firing atomic bombs at you, you have a bigger problem. That's the military view. It's mostly a threat to things which have long wires attached to them. Mobile devices are too small to be affected. It also doesn't affect fiber optics.
A solar magnetic disturbance is mostly a problem for AC long-distance power transmission on circuits which use a ground reference. This is a big problem for power grids, and they have ways to deal with them. There was a big event in 1989 which caused a blackout.[2] It appears as DC in AC circuits, causing partial transformer saturation. If this isn't detected, it can cause transformer overheating and burnout. But the big grids have detection for this, and reduce power levels in some transformers when necessary. This happens at a low level a few times every year.
[1] http://americanpreppersnetwork.com/2016/07/emp-electromagnet... [2] http://www.pjm.com/~/media/training/nerc-certifications/re6-...