Either way, the author of this article does not cite any sources or relevant experience, and he doesn't include any biographical information about himself to judge how qualified he is to speak on such subjects. There's not much reason I see to take this any more seriously than any piece of fictional disaster porn you could buy on Amazon.
I don't know the truth for sure myself, but hopefully we all know better than to believe everything we read, especially about subjects like this where there appears to be very little hard science published.
EMP doesn't address small devices much. Small devices with no wires connected are not very vulnerable, because the energy is mostly at somewhat longer wavelengths, meters or tens of meters. Worry about cell towers, not cell phones.
Other than the power grid people, the civilian sector doesn't look at EMP hardening much any more.
[1] https://www.dau.edu/sites/default/files/Migrated/CopDocument...
The grounding is usually required to meet a standard and is tested during the towers installation. There are also coaxial surge arrestors and isolators that get used along the span.
Some of the site to site communications equipment has no ground component other than a PoE switch. The ethernet interface, radio, and antenna are all in a single packaged unit installed at height on the tower.
https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/ntk-pti-bb50nff?seid=dxe...
Curiously, all of the links people have thrown out in this thread seem to prove exactly what I said - there's damn little available to the public in the way of documented experiments on real hardware for EMP susceptibility.
I don't have any really solid cites for it offhand, but it has been my understanding that small devices aren't vulnerable. I don't know EMPs specifically, but I have been involved in standard EMI testing for approval of consumer-grade electronics, so I know there's already a fair amount of testing for and shielding against EM interference with everyday consumer electronics.
I don't know about recently but he was actively involved in the local RC airplane club for quite a while if I recall correctly.
His website is well worth checking out, he has a very extensive technical knowledge.
However, it is a failure mode that people who are really smart and qualified about one thing can assume they are equally smart and qualified about a bunch of other fields that require their own specific expertise. Alas, it doesn't work that way.
There's nothing wrong with not knowing about some specific technical subject. It is a red flag though when someone takes it as a threat to their identity and self-worth to acknowledge that they don't know much about some particular subject, even if they do know a lot about a different subject.
> Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights,[1]: 5 setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link.[6] The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.[7]
This was a 1 Mt bomb 10x as far from the surface as the article discusses.
All that to say, it's plausible.
In the case of the burglar alarms, it is hard to prove definitively, but a likely cause of the problem was analog motion detectors (mostly ultrasonic and RF in use at the time) which were already notorious for false alarms due to input voltage instability. Once again, modern equipment is probably less vulnerable.
Many of the detailed experiments in EMP safety are not published due to the strategic sensitivity, but the general gist seems to be along these lines: during the early Cold War, e.g. the 1950s, EMP was generally not taken seriously as a military concern. Starfish Prime was one of a few events that changed the prevailing attitude towards EMP (although the link between the disruptions in Honolulu and the Starfish Prime test was considered somewhat speculative at the time and only well understood decades later). This lead to the construction of numerous EMP generators and test facilities by the military, which lead to improvements in hardening techniques, some of which have "flowed down" to consumer electronics because they also improve reliability in consideration of hazards like lightning. The main conclusion of these tests was that the biggest EMP concern is communications equipment, because they tend to have the right combination of sensitive electronics (e.g. amplifiers) and connection to antennas or long leads that will pick up a lot of induced voltage.
The effects of EMP on large-scale infrastructure are very difficult to study, since small-scale tests cannot recreate the whole system. The testing that was performed (mostly taking advantage of atmospheric nuclear testing in Nevada during the 1960s) usually did not find evidence of significant danger. For example, testing with telephone lines found that the existing lightning protection measures were mostly sufficient. But, there has been a long-lingering concern that there are systemic issues (e.g. with the complex systems behavior of electrical grid regulation) that these experiments did not reproduce. Further, solid-state electronics are likely more vulnerable to damage than the higher-voltage equipment of the '60s. Computer modeling has helped to fill this in, but at least in the public sphere, much of the hard research on EMP risks still adds up to a "maybe," with a huge range of possible outcomes.
Maybe sodium lights are immune, in isolation?
https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...
What I'd really like is hard data on what is or is not actually vulnerable to these hazards and to what extent, based on hard proof rather than fear-mongering by interested parties, which this doesn't get us any further towards.
I've tried this many times, it's impossible to prevent gaps without welding it shut. Obviously I wasn't testing with an EMP or nuke, but trying to block 2.4GHz WiFi... But that is well within the E1 range the author states.
I think the problem with folding is it's too uniform, it's still too easy for waves to propagate through the humanly imperceptible gaps with only a few reflections.
The only method I found that worked consistently was to wrap many layers randomly overlapping and crumpling previous layers. My theory as to why this works is through self interference due to creating a long signal path with highly randomised reflections... No idea if that would help cancel out EMP.
They attenuate signals, they do not block them. The common verbiage is to say "faraday cages block EM radiation", so people naturally assume that it blocks EM radiation. But I learned the hard way while doing compliance testing that no, they do not block EM radiation, they just weaken it (and it's highly frequency dependent on top of that.)
An MR Faraday cage attenuates the RF signal about 100db (according to the engineer who built it). Phones work as long as the door is open 1mm or so. Blue tooth works through the cage just fine. Wifi doesn't work very well anywhere near the cage.
MR scanners get nice pictures with the scan door open, but the if the scanner next door has its door open (so 2x scanners running with door open), images are wrecked.
Also, the coastguard sends you grumpy letters if you leave the door open and scan (at 3T).
We image hydrogen which has a precessional frequency of 42*3MHz at 3T (though most ‘3T’ MR scanners seem to be more like 2.8-2.9T).
So they must use something at around that frequency. All I know for sure is that we got asked to stop blasting that RF out. Sometimes it is convenient to open the scan door while imaging.
I'm unsure why the FCC wouldn't be the ones to complain; but i've never managed to annoy a government with my radio-work yet, so i am not sure who calls who to send someone to knock on the door.
either way https://www.ntia.gov/sites/default/files/publications/januar...
also i only glanced the the US band plans, if this setup isn't in the US, then you'd have to find the relevant band plan for your area (although the US band plan for HF will be fairly accurate, HF is hemispherical on a bad day and global on a good day)
Are you mentioned - US only.
I’m in New Zealand.
as far as why the coast guard, that's a dive too deep for me today. Interesting story, though, on your part!
Well, sure. Can people inside the cage see outside? (Or a hypothetical person for a small cage.) If so, then clearly, not all frequencies are being blocked. A lot of "Faraday cages" are explicitly designed for radio and deliberately let other frequencies, particularly the visual range, through.
In fact we all have direct experience with that. Our microwaves use a Faraday cage to keep them in. But we can still see through the mesh, and you can tell that the inside can see out because outside light can go in and bounce back out. (That is, while there's probably a light in your microwave, it's obviously not the sole source of light.) Blocks microwaves well, but visible light goes right through the holes.
wavelength of red in inches: 2.46063e-5 wavelength of 2.4ghz in inches: 4.25 wavelength of xrays in inches: 7.87402e-7 (upper end)
You could easily see through a 4.25 mesh, that's almost chain link
you could not see through a 2.4e-5 mesh, that's call fabric, unless you can see through clothes in which case I'm not going near you. xrays can see through that :)
Sometimes we're trying to keep things (eg- information) outside from getting in, and other times we want to prevent things inside from getting out. There are practices to optimize for both that don't rely on "blocking".
By interfaces yes, but it can also be cancelled out through destructive interference as a side effect of reflection, which is my theory of how a "big ball of crumply aluminium" is so effective compared to less chaotic solutions.
Thank you brother.
Thank you.
2. google how many millions of miles/kilometers of electric wires is hanging in air all over the world providing people with electricity
3. do not google how many of those millions of lightning strikes PER DAY disabled those billions of miles of wires per day, by applying energy bigger than nuclear EMP. do not google that.
No, you don't get to ignore physics because the source is not a point source
>Very large area of EMP
How large?
>Induces currents in any conducting material
So does a magnet falling off my fridge. What magnitude of currents, at what distance, in what sized conductor?
>During E1 the frequencies are so high
How high are they?
There can be radio waves strong enough to fry a silicon chip. There can be radio waves strong enough to melt glass vacuum tubes. This article provides no parameters by which one can make these calculations.
You might as well say "don't get nuked" which is admittedly sound advice.
It's been a long time since atmospheric nuclear testing, but the US did carry out a bunch of tests to measure such effects, and it would be good to dig up the numbers from them.
The problem is that the recent government studies that say high altitude can hurt electronics are all made by alarmists. When we should be focusing effort on grounding the grid, both for EMPs and for flares.
Was just thinking about how electronics back in the 80s and 90s tended to die from static electricity and similar very often, as they didn't have much built-in protection.
These days almost all transistors and microcontrollers have built-in overvoltage protection, and all serious circuits adds additional external protection like TVS diodes and such, especially for anything connected to cables (which would act as antennas).
So I'm guessing the area which an EMP is effective could be lower these days compared to back in the 80s and 90s?
Well, if it will melt glass vacuum tubes then it will likely smoke my a* - and my brain along with it. (Just following the directive: "...bend over and kiss your a* goodbye!")
2) There is no 2)
In a very well written, visceral way, this novel showcases the barbarities that even such a limited nuclear can unleash on a society, like few others I've read. On the other hand it also underscores the hopeful recovery efforts that people are capable of.
For anyone who appreciated those films, I can't imagine them disliking Warday. It's also delivers an unusually powerful emotional punch with its character development, well above the average for apocalypse literature.
One of the frighteningly realistic elements of the storyline is how it describes the nuclear bombardment as "moderate", at least compared to what was intended by the Soviets. However, because a large part of the fallout completely ruins the agricultural capacity of the country, the resulting development of widespread malnutrition turns a later flu epidemic into something truly murderous, causing far more death on top of what the bombs produced.
It's really good. And as far as I can tell, as a layman who reads way too much about this stuff, quite accurate in terms of what the sort of limited strike depicted in the book would do in the short and long term. (I have quibbles, such as what happens to San Antonio and Manhattan, but nothing major.)
Highly recommended to anyone who like the genre.
I'm curious, What were your quibbles with Manhattan and San Antonio?
Edit, and yes, I've read that it was highly praised for realism. The authors really put their effort into making it as close to what things might really be like as possible. No hyperbole or dramatics, just the stark inevitable horror of even limited nuclear war and its effects
It didn’t make sense that San Antonio would be targeted in the limited Soviet strike. It would be pretty far down the list, definitely not in the top 3. I believe Streiber has said as much, and that it was included because of the personal connection, and the reason given in the book (some military headquarters there?) was a weak excuse.
I can’t quite explain it, but it doesn’t feel right to me that Manhattan would be abandoned and salvaged like that. Seems like it would either be too dangerous for people to be there, or it would still be an actual city even if diminished. It seems like another thing done for the narrative and personal connection, to allow him to “return home” while also giving a reason he didn’t still live there.
But again, these are both minor points and really don’t detract from the work at all. San Antonio is little more than a bit of background flavor, and the story makes Manhattan well worth it.
That only a few actually landed was because of problems with Soviet strike capacity and of those few that got through, which ones actually did was mostly a question of random bad luck, so I just assumed that by said bad luck, one of them happened to be for San Antonio, which in a full, thousand-warhead strike, would almost certainly be one of the many targets chosen.
To elaborate a bit on that last point btw, I once saw a predictive map of all likely Soviet nuclear strike targets for a full-blown nuclear war in a military strategy book from the 80s (at the height of both countries' arsenals) that I used to have. It had hundreds of US cities and military installations with little dots over them, often just because they had even modest military or industrial significance. Apparently, if you're going to launch everything and have a lot to launch, might as well be generous with your delivery....
That's how I saw it at least, and at least it seemed like a fairly plausible justification for including San Antonio even though really, he just wanted to.
As for Manhattan, I also had a hard time believing it would be abandoned so totally, but the claim was that the bomb detonated especially dirty if I remember right, and bombs like that really can leave a place too contaminated to live in for many decades. There are atolls in the pacific where this happened from "mismanaged" tests in the 50s.
Either way, glad you (obviously) loved the book as much as it deserves!
“At that time I got a look at the condition of San Antonio. I remember being astonished that this little city had been so terribly devastated on Warday. People had hardly even heard of it in Britain. One would have expected Los Angeles or even Houston before San Antonio. Of course, it has since come out that a good part of the planned Soviet attack didn't go off, so in a sense San Antonio was simply unlucky. The Soviets had given it first-strike priority because of the extensive U.S. Air Force repair and refitting facilities there, and the huge complex of military hospitals, the atomic supplies dump at Medina Base, and the presence of a mechanized army that could have been used to preserve order across the whole of the Southwest as well as seal the Mexican border.”
So the first strike was those three cities, and then the followup total strike didn’t happen, presumably stopped by the US counterstrike.
For Manhattan, it says that the biggest hazard is from chemical pollution from abandoned storage facilities, particularly nearby in New Jersey. Which seems kind of plausible, although I imagine people would be a lot more tolerant of such health hazards in this world. I guess everyone evacuated, and then the fact that you can’t just walk back to Manhattan might keep people from returning.
Using an example of a 350kt airburst on NukeMap[0], the fireball radius is 700m with an area of 1.53 km². The Thermal Radiation Radius with 3rd degree burns is 7.67 km with an area of 185 km². The Light Blast Damage Radius is 13.9 km with an area of 610 km². While the numbers will be different for different yields, the basic ratios will be the same.
This means that your person in the lawn chair is highly unlikely to get to unconscious bliss in 20ms. They are 120 times more likely to enjoy the full experience of 3rd degree burns and ~400 times more likely to get significant injury while still being alive.
It seems far better to take shelter and do all you can to survive intact, and help others. If the situation on the other side is intolerably bad, you'll likely be able to find ways to end your situation far less painfully vs being naked against a nuke blast.
As I understand it the main reason there isn't instant disintegration out to hundreds or thousands of meters is that as soon as enough initial gamma and X-rays turn surrounding material into plasma most of the energy released goes into fireball formation because the plasma is virtually opaque to all EM and the fireball grows in volume as a plasma until expansion reaches equilibrium with compressed surrounding air, everything at the plasma/gas interface is incandescent and radiates as a black body of ~10,000C which transfers a lot of heat but not sufficient to atomize many centimeters thick objects unless they are very close.
Portions of the towers that suspended initial nuclear tests survived, for example.
But I agree thats hardly a mindset of typical US redneck prepper. Although most of them live in rural areas and at least some hunting skills are sort of essential to cut costs.
That's the first time I have heard of marauding post-apocalyptic biker gangs being called "costs"!
If Sarah Connor's dreams taught me anything, it's that there's an optimal middle ground to be had here.
You don't want to be exposed to the flash nor the heat pulse seconds later, because it's pretty much instant blindness followed by your skin melting off.
What you do want is the blast wave that sends large objects plus the pulverized debris with it in your direction, so you probably just get crushed instantly.
I'd only recommend the lawn chair part if you've got a protective suit and flash blinders, in which case the real question is what you're drinking and/or smoking at the time.
I don't share your fatalism, but I can't criticize it. It is an understandable position. With that said, if your desire is truly to remove yourself from existence in the aftermath of such an event it is better to have some plan to do so already laid in. The majority of immediate casualties will not be deaths, you are very likely to regret relying on the weapons.
That would also grant you the chance to reconsider whether the resulting world is actually not worth living it -- or at very least to confirm that it is in fact so bleak.
That's all fine and dandy if you only have yourself to think about...
You jest, but imagine lining up your four year old to die (you may be childless, so that might be hard for you).
I think the argument a few posts up was that this is the humane way out, rather than dragging themselves or their loved ones through the burns, trauma, radiation poisoning, starvation, and/or depredation that they assume comes next. Having loved ones is not a counterpoint to this sort of thinking.
I can't necessarily imagine making these decisions, but it is not unprecedented that parents would do so for themselves and their children. It's happened with much less trigger than a nuclear holocaust.
Another problem with that argument is that you'd actually be able to position yourself to be vaporized, when I don't think anyone could know what would be targeted with that level of certainty (beyond a couple things like the White House, Pentagon, etc).
Like maybe by setting up some lawn chairs on a roof, you just signed you and your family up for extra burns and trauma because you assumed they'd target downtown, but they actually only targeted the airport so you're miles away from the vaporization zone.
After that you'll become less and less ok as you start having to deal with increasingly intense challenges to your continued survival.
It may sound bizarre, but I don’t believe in an afterlife so I might as well lean into something to give me inspiration. The idea that I exist because my extremely distant ancestors survived every mass extinction gives me a sense of wonder.
Life is already a miserable ordeal for far too many people.
And then in 100 years they'll curse you and tear down those statues because they found out you ate the last kangaroo in order to survive.
The real problem is what happens over the next 3 to 12 months, since global trade and agriculture would fall apart.
Most projections of casualties from nuclear war have much higher fatalities from famine then bombardment.
No chance that had anything to do with the panic attack I had when Putin put his nuclear troops on high alert after invading Ukraine. No sir, not at all.
The problem is the person coming after him - if he will be an extremist nutjob, everything is possible even if only 5% or 10% of soviet missiles still work.
Hiroshima in 1957, about a mile from the epicenter of the nuclear strike: https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1024,...
This is destruction on a scale that has not been seen in the likes of civilization outside the bronze age collapse.
The fact is there is going to be no one coming to help replace burned up hoes and shovels.
Threads and the Day after weren't a snapshot of one single city - they were a snapshot of what would be happening everywhere else at the same time.
Why?
Why would it be happening everywhere - in South America, Africa, Asia, and many other places - at the same time?
South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.
I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).
"How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild."
That's what I was responding to.
The world has never seen destruction and fallout that is even remotely comparable to what we’d get.
If the risk was a war involving bombs like Little Boy then there wouldn't be much to worry about beyond localised disaster. The issue is the weapons that are 2-3 orders of magnitude more powerful.
And you're referring to Germany, which that took casualties approaching something close to 10% of its population during WWII - so you're eyeballing a scenario where a country just lost 10% [0] of its population and saying it looks fine to you. That seems a weak argument that the damage is nothing we need to worry about. We can argue over whether nukes are going to kill 100%, 50%, 10%, etc of the population but frankly I don't see where you would want to go with that.
[0] Not from bombing, obviously, but the situation you're talking about is nonetheless one where Germany just suffered massive losses and you're saying you can't see that in a photograph after the cities were rebuilt so no worries if something worse happens.
For example - if far right extremists took over Turkey and attacked Russia, then Russia nuked a Turkish airbase, what would the US/UK/France do? It's not actually that obvious.
There’s also the argument that using nuclear weapons make sense when a nuclear state has a weaker conventional force that its opponent. Russia still has a pretty strong conventional force, but for example North Korea is in this position against most likely adversaries.
Facing the Warsaw Pact, the US never renounced first use of nuclear weapons.
A nuclear attack by Russia on Turkey would not be merely legally and abstractly an attack on the US under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which it would do massive irreparable damage to US credibility to ignore, but would almost certainly be a nuclear attack on US forces in the direct and literal sense.
In the given scenario above, Turkey attacks first, in which case Article 5 would not apply to a retaliation.
This lack of blaming is partly why Turkey and Greece had to sign at exactly the same time, so that neither could take advantage of being able to attack the other whilst being themselves shielded by NATO.
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…” -
Arguably, the text of Article 5 doesn't have to, since an act of aggression breaches the obligations of Articles 1 and 2, as well as the pre-existing obligations which the Treaty explicitly does not alter under Article 7.
Otherwise I struggle to understand how any NATO member could’ve engaged in any of the overt or covert expressions of military force in Iraq 2003, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Egypt, or Algeria to name but a few.
But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.
The question is how many would be willing to go nuclear in response to Russia nuking US forces in Türkiye in response to a conventional attack by Türkiye, which any plausible "Russia nukes Türkiye" scenario would involve.
In circumstances where there were only a couple thousand American casualties, and those were incurred as collateral damage rather than as primary targets, it might make sense for the US to respond with conventional airstrikes and for Russia accept those and not escalate further.
This would depend a lot on the individual president though, like I could imagine Trump/Obama being much more risk averse than personalities like Bush 2 or JFK.
My biggest fear with MAD is that it only takes a single irrational leader, and we've seen so many of them lately.
Awareness of something is the first step in adapting. One can adapt beforehand, or, one can adapt afterwards; with more limited resources, necessitated by circumstances, under more time pressure, with more suboptimal tools, and so on.
It is unquestionable that an EMP would have an extreme impact in all aspects of society and the lives of people. Preparations on macro and micro level can mitigate some of the problems that would follow. And preparations require awareness.
The current threat is actually for New York.
The information comes from this session: https://rumble.com/v6sm22l-marina-jacobi-near-new-york-90-pr...
From the first paragraph:
> maybe it's time to look at the damaging effects of the electromagnetic pulse that follows a nuclear detonation.
Sure we are in deep trouble, but at that point, but I disagree with your “not sure there are bigger problems after that”: the following problem would be a nuke exploding in your direct vicinity (instead of in high altitude/space where it caused an EMP).
https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Scenario-Annie-Jacobsen/d...
It starts with North Korea launching two ICBMs against DC and a nuclear plant in California. Interceptors fail and the warheads hit their targets. This is unlikely, but possible. The launch is explicitly irrational, the act of a mad dictator.
In response, the US counterstrikes with Minuteman, despite having perfectly serviceable air deliverable nukes. Russia detects the launch, and the imprecision of their own early warning systems along with North Korea being next to Russia, they conclude that the US is attacking them. They do a massive launch, the US does a massive launch, worst possible assumptions for a 10C nuclear winter, four billion dead.
The only thing I learned from the book is that if you roll 1 over and over and over again, the worst can happen. But we already knew that?
It was not fun seeing the saber-rattling on Twitter after reading, as Twitter does have a significant part in the story.
One important thing is that the US's response to NK in that book was non-nuclear. They can kill millions of Americans but they are not actually an existential threat. The US did not use nuclear weapons on Afghanistan after 9/11, they used conventional explosives.
Another is that, according to 2020 at least, the North does not have a very robust nuclear command and control communications system, or, being a small country, much in the way of space surveillance assets. They apparently use regular cell phones and commercial imagery.
One of the unfortunate coincidences that kick off the nuclear launch is that the cell phone network is overloaded after South Korea does a missile strike on one of the dictator's residences. From NK's view, missile strikes on official residences and the abrupt collapse of communications, with no reliable information from the outside world, mean that a NATO decapitation strike is underway, so they launch the missiles before they lose them. You wouldn't have the same scenario in the US, simply because we have so many more nuclear weapons and a much longer nuclear command line of succession that a decapitation attack with conventional weapons would take millions of cruise missiles. (North Korea has no backup dictator, while the US has 18 people in the order of succession.)
But you know who is really next to North Korea and has nukes? China.
It seems weird that Russia would even particularly care to be involved in this scenario, frankly.
Hopefully the author sees this post and can correct it. The author is using British English so I have preferred that convention. I include a second option which at least corrects any mistaken abbreviations, but the first option is always the correct version.
>tens or hundreds of Km
>30Km
>10nS
>Khz to low Mhz
>hundreds of mS
>a few Khz
And front page today, Jeff discovered that media servers are also verboten: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-own...
Is someone keeping a list of all the various censorship triggers on YT?
No thanks, I'll wait for factual information.
The exception would be things like HF ham radio, etc.
Am I missing something? Should I be worried?
also Voltage is difference between two levels, "potential". so that means 5Volt dc device will work if "GND"/minus pole is 3000volts "above real earth" and positive pole is 3005Volt "above real earth"
difference between + and - is voltage, so 3000 V - 3005 V is 5 V.
youtubers can film experiment showing this.
Many desktop PCs have enclosures with one or more sides made of glass or acrylic. That does not seem "designed to minimize EM emissions" to me.
I guess that's what I get for not doomscrolling like I used to, but I wasn't aware we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Can someone explain that for me?
Can’t say I blame Ukraine though.
Where some minor player commits some act and the entire Western-Russo world spirals out into war. Only this time we use nuclear weapons instead of trenches and cannons.
Would be an interesting case study for Brazilian historians in the future.
I mean, just consider it from our (US) perspective. Any Russian naval assets that are harbored in, say, North Korea; I'm not sure that we could assume they don't mean us any harm. So I'm almost certain our subs launch strikes on North Korea despite them not really being involved directly in NATO-Russian hostilities. I think the same would go for US, (or NATO), bases and NATO naval assets harbored in Australia or New Zealand. There's just no way Russian sub captains let those targets go.
I think, in general, having had your nation destroyed is probably more reason for all those guys to fight each other and strike at targets of that nature. Not less.
Ukraine managed a pretty effective attack on a few days ago, which is the last time it was brought up in a “you should probably stop supporting Ukraine with money and arms. Also, in unrelated matters, we still have a lot of nukes.”
Then there was the short-lived open hostility over Kashmir a few weeks back, with newsreaders everywhere reminding us that both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers.
Imminent threat of launch? Unsure. But it’s definitely a bit more … I dunno, ‘present’ than it has been for a while.
Lets not forget in first hours of 2022 invasion there were numerous hunting squads deployed in Kyiv with explicit orders and training to execute all Ukraine's high command, including Zelensky and all his family, and cause chaos on civilian and military infrastructure. There are numerous videos how those guys failed, were caught and mostly executed since they expected a very different situation on the ground (which is valid even as per Geneva convention, as non-marked combatants behind enemy lines would often face). One of many FSB and GRU's failures.
If we want to talk about terrorism, list of items on russian side is very, very long and new items are added every day. As I said, empty words and all know it. The closer you look at russia these days at all levels the more similarities with nazi Germany you will find. History really keeps repeating itself with sometimes stunning precision.
It wouldn't be a rational act. It would be an emotional act by an irrational dictator.
Does that mean past usage also wasn't rational? Or it was rational in that case, but impossibly can be rational in the future?
Any use is going to lead to at a minimum an equally harmful response.
Plus, the pre-attack triad cred of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95 bombers was pretty limited. Notice that they are turboprops. From the 1950's. Hitting hard against the western nuclear powers (US/UK/France) ain't in their talent set.
Part of the reason it's so critical to Moscow is the uncertainty over the viability of their missile-based systems (both the land-based and sea-based legs of the triad). Maintenance has been so poor on these systems that no one is sure how reliable they are.
All other comparable attacks have been considered devastating in history.
ICBMs, and in particular submarine based ICBMs, are what provide nuclear deterrence in a serious fashion. They arrive faster, and are effectively unstoppable at scale.
9/11 was devastating. October 7th was devastating. Pahalgam was devastating.
The drone attacks against Russian airbases were highly destructive, caused extreme shock, and were extremely impressive - the literal definitions of devastating.
The response will depend on the emotional and political reality within Russia. Although they have not lost their nuclear strike capabilities, they have lost face and now Putin may feel the need to act to retain his strongman hold on the country, or risk being Ceaușescu'd.
Russia certainly hasn't actually ramped up any nuclear rhetoric in response, which it's been happy to do at other times when it would be taken less seriously (and ramped it down significantly in late-2022 after it's US back channels communicated their intentions if any nuclear weapons or nuclear terrorism was used in Ukraine).
Please stop believing the ridiculous Russian propaganda.
Using even a single tactical nuclear weapon would be game-over for Putin's Russia.
Israel has a policy of the Samson option that they define as destroying the enemy but they also imply they will destroy the world. Russia has made similar statements.