Talk:Nuclear electromagnetic pulse

US centric?

What's impressive about this article is that it is written exclusively from the point of view of an American with a presumed audience of Americans. The last "FAQ" is rather amazing in this respect—"America isn't defended!" --98.217.14.211 (talk) 16:48, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Popular Culture references

Should we add appearances of EMP in movies, books? Matrix, War of the Worlds and Modern Warfare 2 are the 1st to come my mind. OzhanTR (talk) 19:22, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Correcting the US centric problem

The broader question is: Where are the authoritative non-US publications about electromagnetic pulse that can be referenced in order to expand this Wikipedia article more broadly beyond U.S. and Soviet experiences and official reports?

Many EMP experts have stated in verbal reports that Europe, China and Russia have had extensive civilian activities devoted to EMP hardening. I have found hundreds of authoritative US-generated documents about EMP, and I have read many of them. I am sure that other countries must also have published non-classified material about EMP considering the work that they've done. I've only found a very few such articles, and most of them are not available in English. Please put any possible leads to authoritative non-US information here. X5dna (talk) 03:22, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Effects of EMP?

How does EMP damage sensitive electrical equipment?

How does it damage power systems?

How does one protect against it? Does shielding help?

Etc.

Gypsydoctor (talk) 03:33, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

More specifics:

My computer is off but connected to the power grid, will it be damaged?

Is the whole power grid in danger?

Does the article implies a large enough EMP over the US would send it back to the middle ages with no electricity, no computers, no spares, no water, no cars...? How far can this go? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.180.131.227 (talk) 19:18, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

It would send the US back to the middle ages. If you computer is off but connected, it will be toast. If you computer is off and unplugged, it will be toast. Yes the entire power grid is in danger. I would suggest reading "One Second After" to get an idea of what may happen. Just an FYI, the guy that wrote the story is highly respected and knowledgeable in the area of EMP. --Brian_{(view my history)}/^{(How am I doing?)} 04:21, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Effects of EMP. Best Available Information.

This article, and especially the now-archived section of this discussion page, had (for a few years) been a rather chaotic forum-like discussion of questions and answers about EMP effects and EMP protection. That problem went away for a long time after a link to the United States EMP Commission's excellent Critical National Infrastructures Report was put in the very first paragraph of the article. The link was removed on 9 August by Cybercobra on the grounds that it doesn't belong there. (By Wikipedia standards, he's right, and the link is still in the references at the bottom of the page.)

I'm afraid, though, that we're going to get right back into the same lengthy question-and-answer forum session about EMP effects unless the link to that report is featured quite prominently. The report is at:

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf

There are many problems with a Wikipedia article about specific EMP effects. One is that the article would necessarily be extremely long (literally book-length, and a very long book at that). The concise EMP Commission Critical National Infrastructures Report is more than 200 pages long. Another problem is that the likely EMP effects change continuously as electronic technology rapidly changes. Yet another problem is that EMP protection technology is continuously and rapidly evolving. Although the EMP Commission Critical National Infrastructures Report is a look at the situation in 2008, they were able to take a fairly good snapshot of the situation at one particular time. The report can also be extrapolated, to a large extent, to most other industrialized nations besides the United States. The EMP Commission was also able to do EMP simulator testing to substantiate their statements; however scientists and engineers involved in discussions on Wikipedia talk pages had to make educated guesses based on their individual widely-varying experiences with electromagnetic disturbances. X5dna (talk) 13:13, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Merging or Deleting Electromagnetic Bomb article

It has been suggested that the Electromagnetic bomb article be merged into the Electromagnetic pulse article. I can see nothing of value in the Electromagnetic bomb article. In fact, the Electromagnetic bomb article contains some important errors. The Electromagnetic bomb article has always been mostly a repository for rumor and opinion, with some occasional information from popular media articles that contain no scientific references. The Electromagnetic bomb article contains little valuable information beyond what is in the Electromagnetic pulse article. I suggest that the Electromagnetic bomb article simply be deleted if others agree with this assessment. X5dna (talk) 00:30, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I found some material in "electromagnetic bomb" that was not overlapping and had references, so I merged the articles rather than nominating for deletion. I left out dubious material, but I did end up pulling over some unreferenced passages. It's clearly tagged as such, and unless I think unreferenced material is probably wrong, I prefer to leave it around until someone can at least make a good-faith effort to find sources. Please feel free to yank anything unreferenced which you know is wrong, and I expect some amount of smoothing out will be necessary as the new content settles out. (But at least now we have one article in need of improvement, instead of two largely overlapping articles in need of improvement.) -- Beland (talk) 02:51, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I deleted two sections that were imported from the "electromagnetic bomb" article that contained so many errors that the sections were pretty much beyond repair. It will take some time to fully integrate and reference the remaining material. I think that the topic of "Electromagnetic Pulse in Fiction" would be a good one for a separate article. I have been told that the Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel did a show on how Hollywood gets EMP wrong. I haven't seen that show, but Electromagnetic Pulse is usually portrayed incorrectly in fiction, although a few recent works of fiction have done a pretty good job. X5dna (talk) 03:35, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Weapon Yield Terminology

When discussing weapon yields, I don't mind the parenthetical conversion to terajoules or petajoules, but the repeated use of "kilotons of TNT" or "megatons of TNT," rather than just kilotons or megatons, seems to make this article much harder to read. It seems to me that we no longer need to continually refer to a 146-year-old chemical explosive that the average reader of this article probably considers to be completely irrelevant to the understanding the topic of this article. Most readers think of kilotons or megatons as nuclear weapon yields. Wiki-links, as appropriate, to the "TNT equivalent" article seem more reasonable than the repeated references to TNT. X5dna (talk) 05:50, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Since no one else has commented on this, I went ahead and removed the repeated references to TNT in the nuclear weapons yield statements in this article. In addition to making the article more difficult to read, the often-repeated TNT references added to the possible confusion since many methods of non-nuclear generation of electromagnetic pulse use chemical explosives. Where the references to TNT equivalence were removed, I wiki-linked to the article on "Nuclear Weapon Yield" in case any reader actually had any confusion about the terms kiloton or megaton. X5dna (talk) 11:18, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Common Misconceptions Section

I re-wrote the "Common Misconceptions" section to be more encyclopedic, and less like a part of an essay. Although this section mostly repeats material in earlier sections, I don't think that this section should be deleted since the misconceptions that it addresses appear almost daily in new writings in the popular press and on the internet. Further suggestions are welcome. X5dna (talk) 01:56, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

On the topic of this section, I am missing the "misconceptions" part of the section. All I see is a list of explanations, but the actual misconceptions are not explicitly stated. I think it should mention the (cited) misconception, and then debunk it. As it stands, these are just random fragments of information. Remco47 (talk) 15:17, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

This is an inherent problem with Wikipedia as it pertains to subjects which have many very common and widespread misconceptions. Although it is very easy to find these misconceptions about EMP all over the internet, the misconceptions are not specifically listed as such in any authoritative source. Wikipedia has a strict "No Original Research" policy. This means that the misconceptions cannot be listed. The corrections to the misconceptions are easily confirmed in many authoritative sources, so the facts correcting the misconceptions can be listed. This article originally had these very common misconceptions listed along with the actual facts, but there were a lot of complaints about listing the misconceptions, so they were removed. (In fact, I am the one who originally listed the misconceptions because they were so widespread. I am also the one who took the misconceptions out, because I could not figure out a way to include them without violating Wikipedia policies.) There is also a bit of a problem with listing statements that are known to be false in an encyclopedia, even if the false statements are immediately followed by a correction of the false statement. X5dna (talk) 05:38, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

External link to Popular Mechanics 2001 article

Would anyone object to the deletion of the External link to the cover article in the September 2001 issue of Popular Mechanics? The lead-in to that article states, "In the blink of an eye, electromagnetic bombs could throw civilization back 200 years. And terrorists can build them for $400." This statement has caused confusion in discussions all over the internet since it confuses nuclear EMP with non-nuclear EMP, and leaves the impression that terrorists can build a nuclear weapon for 400 dollars. This Popular Mechanics article has been responsible for so much misinformation and confusion that I don't believe that the Popular Mechanics article should be linked from a Wikipedia article. X5dna (talk) 05:49, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Electromagnetic pulse in fiction/popular culture

Someone has added a description of a video game which includes an EMP to this article. The video game reference clearly does not belong in this article. Whenever I can find the time, I hope to create a new page called "Electromagnetic pulse in popular culture," although anyone else is welcome to begin such a page if they have time to start the page before I do.  There was once an article called "Electromagnetic pulse in fiction," but it was deleted back in the days when articles were deleted by Wikipedia administrators for trivial reasons. That deletion has proven to be a very serious mistake because whenever there is no article for "Electromagnetic pulse in fiction," then fiction will begin to creep into the scientific article on "Electromagnetic pulse." Misguided Wikipedia policies of the past have led to articles (such as this article on 1 December 2009) which seem to show video game rules as being actually equivalent to real and powerful nuclear weapon effects. There is a need to have a separate article about the occurrence of electromagnetic pulse in fictional/gaming situations so that it can be clearly distinguished from the occurrence of electromagnetic pulse in reality. (This has been a problem in Wikipedia for many years). X5dna (talk) 10:30, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

New article on Electromagnetic pulse in fiction and popular culture

There is now a new article called Electromagnetic pulse in fiction and popular culture.  This new article is the place for all fictional and video game references to electromagnetic pulse. Please do not put fictional references in the scientific article on electromagnetic pulse. X5dna (talk) 04:56, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Citation needed???

I removed the "citation needed" tag after the phrase "Typical modern scenarios seen in large numbers of news accounts and opinion articles . . ." in the "Post-Cold War attack scenarios" section. A Google search today for "electromagnetic pulse" in news articles shows 2,580 news articles and 17,718 blog postings about electromagnetic pulse for a total of 20,298 possible references that could be used here. Although not all of these possibilities would be appropriate for references here, a large number of them would be. Including only the most highly appropriate references would still leave hundreds of highly relevant examples. Citations are not needed for things that appear in news and opinion articles on a daily basis. These "citation needed" tags for obvious things like this are simply time wasters. X5dna (talk) 02:28, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

EMP Mechanics incorrect

"The E1 pulse is the very fast component of nuclear EMP. The E1 component has an intense electric field that can quickly induce very high voltages in electrical conductors. E1 is the component that can destroy computers and communications equipment and is too fast for ordinary lightning protectors."

This is not entirely accurate. The incident electric field does not induce currents in conductors. In fact, the boundary conditions on an electric conductor dictate that the tangential component of the incident electric field is zero, and the normal component induces a surface charge density (assuming for the sake of academic argument that the electric conductor is perfect - zero resistivity).

What induces a current in an inductor is a tangential MAGNETIC field. However, because in normal space a time varying electric field is necessarily coupled with a time varying magnetic field that is orthogonal to it, an incident electric field pulse comes with an orthogonal magnetic pulse for free, and this is what induces the potentially damaging currents in electronics. It is nonetheless the incident magnetic field, and not the incident electric field, that is the direct cause of coupled current in electric conductors.

--173.62.183.174 (talk) 13:51, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

I changed the term electric field to electromagnetic field so that it would be technically correct with reference to E1 (since the previous post is correct with respect to some details of the E1 mechanism). E1 currents can be induced from both the electric and magnetic field components (depending upon a number of factors). It is important to note, however, that it is excessive voltage that exceeds rated the breakdown voltages of devices and equipment -- and not excessive current -- that initiates most of the E1 damage. X5dna (talk) 04:04, 19 February 2010 (UTC)