North Korea, China and Russia able to use the "E-Bomb"?
 

North Korea may soon be able to strike USA with ultimate doomsday weapon that deactivates (nearly) all electronics

We've known about this since the Cold War. :hmm: All the military hardware is already defended, and launching such a thing would be pretty much a death sentence to whoever launched it. Can anyone say, "global thermonuclear war?" :P

Well I guess the new thing is that these are specifically designed to be E-Bombs not nuclear weapons and the concern seems to be that North Korea has it. The cold war never stopped and more players enter the game again...

The only way to generate a decently sized EMP is via nuclear explosion. Though I meant that launching such a thing, nevermind detonating it, would be probably be met with an overwhelming response, nuclear or otherwise.

Yeah probably it would be. I'd prefer such a bomb over any ground-targetted nuclear device at any time though. At least the biota will survive this.

Then we can look at it as good news :xD:

Scaremongering.

This is a site that has such stories as anti-vaccination scaremongering (including the thoroughly and completely debunked 'autism' bull****), claims that E. coli is genetically engineered, and that bread contains human hair.

Seriously, check your sources first.

As clarke said, you'd need a nuclear weapon. Clearly, you don't know what a faraday cage is, or understand the concept of either defensive design or the principle of failsafe - if control is removed, then systems will fail to a safe state. A classic example is that the control rods are held in place by electromagnets. If the power is lost, they insert fully in 1-2 seconds. Modern designs even use a spring that would insert them even if gravity itself stopped working.
Also, you seem not to understand how nuclear weapons work. An airburst is damaging, a ground burst only makes a crater. A warhead capable of affecting anything more than a city would need to be thousands of megatons, or 20+ times the size of the largest warhead EVER (which is no longer operational and was not even put into production)

...oh, and north korea can't even feed their own population or generate electricity*, let alone build an ICBM or viable warhead.
* Seriously. Only Pyongyang and the towns right by the border have a powergrid.

I don't get the title of this thread. America would also be able to use such weapons, as would any other country that possesses a nuclear arsenal. There's always a threat of nuclear weapons anyhow, and we've known about EMPs for some great time now.

A month without power, oh noes.

And gas and, probably, water. ALso, where did you get a month from? EMPs permanently wipe out infrastructure.

Right, because we're going to just sit on our asses and starve to death, not replace circuitry.

Well, yeah. There's no money, because the banking systems have been destroyed. There's no transport, because most car batteries has been destroyed. There's little production infrastructure, because the computers that run that have been destroyed. Also, did I mention that soon, they'll be no food, because there's no power and thus all the fridges are broken?

Game over, man. :P

Kind of hard to make new circuitry when all the machines that are used for such purpose would be out of order, since it's not possible to replace current electronics with the kind of low tier products that would be possible to manufacture without the use of complex machinery.

Military and government systems are hardened against attacks like that, many corporate ones as well (paranoia runs rampant in the business world) EMP's are not a game over, that's alarmist bull**** that spreads every 3-4 years.

Why would corporation machinery be hardened against EMPs? They have more pressing concerns in the event of a nuclear war.

Can't profiteer if your equipment's down.

In the event of a nuclear war, most of the company - who live in cities - will be dead. Equipment failures are a non-issue.

Factories aren't in major population centers, besides, we're talking about the magic "EMP" that supposedly will end civilization. A nuclear warhead is devastating, but it won't shut down a country.

We mentioned that all transport, both private and public, has been made non-functional, right? It's all electric-based. :party:

If it doesn't cost them too much extra to have such precautions, then I guess that would be possible, but this is guesswork on my part.

People can only be paranoid if they can afford it. Usually big companies use their extra revenues to secure even more financial ground via all possible manners, as Intel did with its monopoly on the CPU market back in the day, and is now practically the only serious player in the x86 industry these days. It's even possible that they will surpass ARM in the mobile space when they move to small enough manufacturing processes, because they have unfair advantage in having their own fabrication facilities.

It's ironic that I use their products while I still loathe the company itself, but then again I'm sucker for quality products, and that can't be denied on their part, because they have the money and technology to deliver such products that others can't. Ethics is an unknown concept in the system that our society is built upon.

Anyhow, I'm a master of rambling stuff that bears little to no relevance to the topic at hand.

You're forgetting that a fictional EMP of the type in the fictional article in the OP would have to be several thousand megatons. There wouldn't be anyone left, anywhere, at all. The only country THAT stupid is iran, not even north korea.

The electromagnetics do strange things in the upper atmosphere, AFAIK. It's entirely possible to wipe out the American continent with a single-megaton bomb or less, you just have to do it several kilometres up. (And so waste the conventional effects of a nuke.)

True. I remember hearing in a documentary, that a nuke detonated several (hundred, I believe) kilometres above Alabama would shut down the whole U.S.

Alabama? That's weird placement, considering it's on the edge of the country :S

I think it was Alabama. This was way back last year. :P

I believe most modern flight controls are such are hardened to some degree, so they probably won't go out. Navigation systems and radar will take a bigger hit though. Oh well, not as bad as planes falling out of the sky.

And this is why I keep a back up computer, and other electronic whatsits in a nice secure anti-EMP box. Right next to my freeze dried food, bow, arrows, canned meats, and bottlecap collection.

Bring on the end of the world. I'm ready!!

Though I do rather like the idea of an EMP wiping out the world instead of a nuke...hmm...steals idea for book. Clarke you know the one I'm thinking of.

I would have said the same thing just a few months back, but now I'm scared that the end of the world is indeed coming, one way or another, and I don't want to go anymore...

I would hope, as fly-by-wire is the new thing. Even Boeing is done with conventional flight-cables. Though the fact that aircraft fly in the upper atmosphere will put them closer to the center of the electrical activity in the event of an EMP, and even any hardening might be rather pointless.

I'm fine with go, to hell with this horrid place. Though if I survive I am certainly carving out my own little nation. You are all free to join.

Yes, the place is horrid, but the people in it are not, mostly anyways.

As long as catastrophe doesn't strike very suddenly around where I live... well, I expect most of us hope for as much :embarrassed:

Since you live in America, and thus quite far away, you'll have around 90 minutes between launch and detonation, i.e. before the end of the world. :party:

(Europe gets, IIRC, 20.)

Its the people that MAKE it horrid!

Nuke em all and start over I say...or send the flood, one or the other.

I'd like to think myself as a kind person, useless and stubborn yes, but maybe that's because I don't fit in with the current paradigm.

I know there are people who make the world horrid, because usually problems do not make themselves, but without people this would all be pointless, because then there would be no reason to live. Social animals require social contact, and when deprived of it, we start to suffer and eventually die.