Bzzt! Welcome to the dark ages

Pat,
A Land Rover is a large vehicle, but you didn’t provide any data about it other than a mention that the PAS theoretically reduces at speed. (Don’t) try turning it off completely on the freeway.
Mike,
BBC NEWS | England | London | Airliner crash-lands at Heathrow
17 Jan 2008 … A BA passenger jet from China crash-lands short of a Heathrow runway after reportedly losing power.

I don’t believe there is anything we are going to be able to do to EMP-proof our infrastructure. The thing that is most important about this line of thought, though, is to bring out how fragile our infrastructure really is and EMP from an aggressive act or even from a huge solar flare could cause us a great calamity.
Just the number of people stuck in elevators in buildings that have them computer controlled would be staggering. We can’t go around putting little tin foil hats on all of our electronics gear. And I have had problems with “alpha particle induced soft errors” in chips with ceramic packages. If the pulse doesn’t fry the electronics, it is has the potential to randomly change the state of many things such as the contents of memory locations, registers internal to processors, the state of logic devices, etc. There is no telling what the equipment is going to do because there are going to be things changing state at more or less random. Even if your computer isn’t killed, it is probably going to have its memory scrambled. Plan on the Internet being gone for a while too.
And … I promise it will happen some day. That there was a huge solar flare in the 1800’s says such events are probably fairly common over geological time. We have no idea how common they are. Attempting to design to survive it is probably futile or cost prohibitive but maybe what we CAN do is design so that the systems fail in some kind of predictable manner. Of course, that is hard to do for a computer whose memory gets changed at random.

I’m not so worried about Iran and North Korea. They play their games so that they can always have feel like they some sense of self-importance. If they create trouble won’t be as bad as knocking out the US grid because the repercussions for them and the whole world would be devastating.
I’m more worried about the mental damage being done to young generations by media disinformation campaigns that spread hatred of capitalism and free markets while glorifying anarchism, communism and fascism. This is called subversion and we see it daily from the Guardian and other media outlets. Most of last week the Guardian has been attacking British police at the G20 protest and defending the scum who came out to attack them, making them out to be victims of police brutality when it was the other way around. Our environmentalist friend George Monbiot, liar extraordinaire and co-founder of a Marxist-Islamist party, led the charge.
Then take a look at the attack on free markets in the media. Government and lawmakers were responsible for sub-prime in the first place, not the free market. The result we have now is that the free market takes the blame for everything while sub-prime has gone international.
The conclusion of the G20 summit saw politicians create $1 trillion of wealth, most of which will be for developing nations which they will have to pay interest on. Some money will also be used to keep nations poor by putting them on welfare. That’s what regulation is all about – imperialism. True free markets allow nations to be equal players on the world stage but the elites don’t want that and neither do the Leftist journalists who are brainwashing our X-Box playing youth into accepting greater government control of their lives. The media feels it is untouchable from criticism. It has become drunk on its power to influence opinion, suppress information and manipulate the masses.
There is the real threat that would destroy our freedoms from within. So the question is, what is the bigger threat? Living under an eco-communist nightmare created by our own people or an EMP weapon that might never be launched because the attacking nation wouldn’t benefit from doing so?

NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft recently discovered a hole in earth’s magnetic field which is 10 times as large as previously thought. The magnetosphere protects earth from the plasma of solar flares, now has a hole in it four time the size of the earth. A large solar flare would knock out hundreds of key transformers that would take years to replace and living standards would plummet. Winters without electricity might be tough. Fortunately the sun is real quiet now.
Worrying about North Korea is almost a ridiculous as worrying about mans CO2 causing catastrophic global warming. These countries don’t have a suicide wish. Although the population is poor, the leaders live pretty well.
As for the terrorists, thats a possibility. But even then, those who might help provide them with such a weapon would have to consider the consequences of being even a suspect.
GK (19:48:12) : [i]”People need to understand that for the Islamic extremists – dying as a result of this battle is not only what they want, but what is REQUIRED for them to succeed.”[/i]
The Islamist leaders who rule Iran already have paradise on earth with many more virgins than the 72 you get in paradise. Religions are created for the herd so the leaders can control them. In Islam, the promise of paradise after death, while they live in a paradise on earth, is a good way to motivate people to go on suicide missions that serve their interests. Life is already good enough for the leaders, and they are in no hurry to meet Allah, so they will not send their herd on suicide missions if it would lead to their demise. Saddam getting hung may have made an impression as well.
In any event, Iran has no nuclear weapons, and North Korea makes crappy rockets apparently. Pakistan would be a more likely suspect, but the argument made applies to them as well. This is just alarmism of the AGW variety.

This sounds a bit like AGW scaremongering, yes EMP will have an effect but I thing it has been grossly overstated.

I never could grasp the elctro-magnetic part of physics, found it fascinating but much went over my head. Anyway I enjoyed watching “Goldeneye” & have know about EMP scince my father used to work for the UK ARWE. Daft really under the official secrets act he wasn’t allowed to tell us what he had for lunch in case the Russians got to here about it, not that they probably didn’t know anyway.
I digress. (Moderator please feel free to amend/delete if you think I may put ideas into heads etc although I frankly doubt that I am a first) What I find really frightening is not so much the odd rogue state using the technology to launch a deadly weapon, but tell me my fellow WUWTites, using the simple analysis from the altitude/radius connection, surely it would be possible to construct a small version not for national/international usage, but one used on a local scale on a 5-10 mile radius outward & upward, like airports, banks, military installations, government departments? The local disruption & chaos would be horrendous with emergency services unable to mobilise, etc. no local communications available. That I think would be more of a risk & far more frightening. We have seen the damage caused by 9/11 & 7/7 & Madrid, add in a tactical device like an EMP generator?????

Sorry, sticky fingers again, that should have read AWRE!

It may be an uncomfortable truth for some people in the US, but the US was the ONLY nation to use nuclear weapons (not counting tests). The US has an unbelievable arsenal of weapon systems ranging from cruise-missiles to carrier battle groups – and the US have proven that they are willing to use them to bomb other nations into the “dark ages”, as you call it, and they have done so repeatedly. The US is spending more on its military budget than combined military budgets of the rest of the world. The US has meddled in the internal affairs of every nation under the sun, unsing from hostile economic measures, assassinations and mercenaries, to its full military “might”. The US threatens every nation with nuclear annihilation that would even THINK about launching a missile in the general direction of the US.
So maybe, just maybe, all those little countries which are willing to sacrifice a substantial part of their Gross National Income to build nuclear weapons (and ICBMs) do so to build up a deterrent to prevent an US attack on their county? So maybe, just maybe, could you for one moment look at the world from the point of someone who is at the wrong end of your imperial armada? Like anybody outside of the US?
Ah, who am I kidding? Empires have never been brought down by reason! Empires need to come down crushing! So you do what you do, maybe even more. Throw more money at your military! Maybe this will bring you down even faster.

regarding the answer to an eventual nuclear attack, i am not sure at all that the current US administration would be in a hurry to retaliate if anyone fired a nuke with the intention to make damage. they would probably write an angry letter to the UN, and start negotiations….
EMP would be a massive PITA, but i tend to believe that enough infrastructure would survive to keep things running. someone might remember the Y2K bug story and how it boiled down into nothing. a lot of computers will be fried alright, but real data centers and important networking equipment is really, really protected. and most high speed data communication is done via fiberoptic, which is itself immune to EMP. now, im not sure how the grid would react to a EMP. but if it can survive lightnings, it can probably survive EMP.