Re: [iwar] Re: EMP


From: Fred Cohen
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To: iwar@egroups.com

Thu, 19 Oct 2000 07:16:27 -0700 (PDT)


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In-Reply-To: <0272c34270913a0EMAIL002@email002> from "DrewSchaefer@ftnetwork.com" at Oct 19, 2000 02:05:16 AM
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Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 07:16:27 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: iwar@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [iwar] Re: EMP
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Per the message sent by DrewSchaefer@ftnetwork.com:

> Hi Fred and all,

> No need to put quotes around my name, it exists, it's who I am ...

> I profess my military ignorance, but thought that I had read about the
> development of EMP bombs ElectroMagnetic Pulse, as being NOT
> nuclear-derived, perhaps 10 months ago. 

The issue is not whether you can create a non-nuclear EMP weapon - the
Soviets did it many years ago.  The issue is whether it will be able to
have the disabling effect under consideration.  In order to have a very
large scale impact on a city, for example, you need a whole lot of
energy in your EMP weapon.  You could have a whole lot of little EMP
weapons placed at just the right places, but that sounds pretty hard too
for other reasons.  So the questions are: How many, placed where, and
with what energies do you need to have the desired effect? and What sort
of mechanism and organization can actually do that?

The answer seems to come up: one really big one and it has to be nuclear
if the goal is to take out all of the informaiton infrastructure of a
whole city of substantial size.  Of course if you do this, you may also
kill most of the occupants and perhaps dstroy many of the buildings
before you get to all of the information infrastructure...  If you did
it from outer space - like the test that took out a part of Australia
for some time (Was it the 50s or the 60s? - see "The Atomic Bomb Movie
with William Shatner as the narrator) - you would require both an atomic
capability and a space capability - and you would probably only take out
the city for a short period of time - and it would probably be pretty
easy to figure out who did it. 

The alternative is to do a dependency analysis and take out critical
nodes that would bring the information infrastructures to their knees. 
This is why taking out the power grid is such an interesting option and
why there is a substantial effort underway (and has been for some time)
to better protect the power grid in the US and throughout the world. 
Other things are feasible, and you could try to use an EMP weapon to
take out the power grid, but since the power grid is so good against EMP
weapons (all of the critical equipment is hardenned for high voltages
and currents and has fail safes in case of overloads), would likely
recover from such attack very quickly (it is designed to be recovered
rapidly after failures), and you could have moe effect with other
tactics, you would likely be wasting your time and money going after the
power grid with EMP.

You can keep analyzing this in other ways if you like...

> If someone is sure I am wrong about this, please let me know.

Nobody is really sure of anything, we just make estimated based on
experience and analysis.  If you have lots of money, you can do testing
to make yourself more certain, and some people have done this to some
extent for some of these things. 

FC

> Drew

--
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      Fred Cohen - Practitioner in Residence - The University of New Haven
				Have a great day!!!

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