What you need to know about EMP weapons

Summary

Please visit the sponsor! What you need to know about EMP weapons 6 June 2025 As we sit, possible poised on the verge of a nuclear conflict in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe it's time to look at the damaging effects of the electromagnetic pulse that follows a nuclear detonation. Apparently, if a nuke is deployed at high altitude, the EMP produced can have some rather nasty effects on our delicate electronics below. You can also forget about the inverse-square law to protect you because some components of the EMP are not "point source" but actually generated by the interaction of gamma radiation with the earth's magnetic field. That produces a very large area of EMP which creates high flux-levels at ground-level, even though the detonation may be tens or hundreds of Km away. For this reason therefore, it strikes me that we should all know a little more about EMPs and ways we could hopefully mitigate the damage they cause. Apparently there are three phases to the way a nuclear detonation produces an EMP. However, it's kind of reassuring to know that nukes detonated at or near ground level don't produce nearly as much EMP as those detonated at 30Km or so above the planet's surface. To be truly effective, a nuke designed to disrupt or destroy infrastructure by way of EMP has to be exploded pretty damned high so direct radiation and thermal damage won't be much of a risk. During the first phase (known as E1), the detonation creates massive levels of gamma radiation which interacts with the upper level of earth's atmosphere to strip electrons from the rarefied gasses there and subsiquently induced massive currents (known as a Compton current) that creates a magnetic pulse with an extremely fast rise-time, typically 10nS or less. The result is a burst of EM energy that spans the spectrum from near-DC to tens of gigahertz and which induces currents in any conducting material that gets in its way. The earth's magnetic field also helps contain this burst of energy, meaning ev...