There is no shame in enjoying dystopian science fiction. Whether it’s The Time Machine or The Hunger Games, it helps us to contemplate the ways in which civilisation might fail.
The danger is when we start to take the allegorical warnings literally, as too many people do when the subject turns to talk of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. For example, there have been that North Korea could use one to cripple US power supplies, disrupt sensitive equipment and cause societal collapse. This is silly.These fantasies have been on full display after James Woolsey, former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, told an interviewer on National Public Radio that the “really dangerous thing” that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might do is .
We know nuclear explosions can cause an EMP – a burst of energy that can interfere with electrical systems – because of a high-altitude test called Starfish Prime that the US conducted in 1962 above the Pacific.
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US nuclear weaponeers wanted to see whether such weapons might black out military equipment by ionising the atmosphere. The US launched a missile to a height of about 400 kilometres and exploded a bomb with the force of 1.5 megatons of TNT – about 100 times larger than the one dropped on Nagasaki.
But it was a disappointment for anyone who hoped these blasts would be able to knock out Soviet radar and radio systems. The most notable thing for those on the ground were the stunning visuals. Dick Stolley, a well-known journalist sent to Hawaii by Life magazine to cover the test, watched from a beach, where he described seeing the sky turn “a bright bilious green”.
Inflated impact
Yet over the years, the effects of Starfish Prime have been exaggerated. One expert testified before the US Congress that it “very unexpectedly turned off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific. This EMP also shut down radio stations, turned off cars, burned out telephone systems, and wreaked other mischief throughout the Hawaiian Islands, nearly 1,000 miles distant from ground zero.”
It didn’t. That should be obvious from the light-hearted tone of Stolley’s reporting. The only immediate effect on the ground was the failure of a single string of street lights in Honolulu. It is still not clear whether Starfish Prime was to blame.
Things are different today. We rely far more on electronic gadgets, equipment that in principle is vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse. Those pushing for “awareness” of the EMP threat argue that an attack would lead to “planes falling from the sky, cars stalling on the roadways, electrical networks failing, food rotting”. But there is little data to support such alarmist claims.
A few years ago, after pointing out this lack of evidence, an angry commentator directed me to an episode of a US TV programme that showed an EMP simulator disabling a car. A colleague of mine rang up White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where the episode was filmed, and they explained that the producers had staged the shot. Of course we knew that – because the power windows still worked on the car that “wouldn’t” start.
A exposed 55 vehicles to EMP effects in a laboratory. Even at the highest levels of exposure, only six needed to be restarted. A few more showed “nuisance” damage to electronics, such as blinking dashboard displays. This is a far cry from the kind of fantasies that are being aired as tensions between the US and North Korea rise.
An electromagnetic pulse is a real phenomenon, but we shouldn’t exaggerate its effects. An atomic bomb detonated in a city would be – as we know from Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a much greater catastrophe. Nuclear weapons are scary enough without the science fiction.
