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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Every major military has known about and built countermeasures against nuclear EMP for almost 75 years. Such an action (aside from risking WWIII) would damage Taiwan's civilian infrastructure while leaving the military barely touched, which is exactly the opposite result the Chinese would want.

Not just the military! You can buy an EMP shield for your home emergency generator.

Also a tin-foil, er, I mean EMF blackout hat.

That's one of the most absurd products I've seen. A diesel generator is going to be absolutely fine, it's the wiring in your house you need to worry about. Zero need for a faraday cage to be more complicated than a metal box, either.

Wait what. How does an EMP ruin the wiring in a house?

The EMP pulse is an electric field pulse, up to 50,000 volts per meter for the nuke scenarios. The longer the wire, the greater the voltage differential over the wire (up to the depth of the field pulse as it passes over a few nanoseconds). The biggest risk to a house is this voltage built up over the electrical network hitting the house, heating up wires and destroying appliances.

A whole-house surge protector is the simplest investment here but even with that isolation, it'd take just a single stretch of 10m x 2mm gauge copper parallel to the electric field to hit 500kV and heat up by some 50 degrees c more or less instantly, which is enough to pose fire risks.

This government source cited by Wikipedia's article on this topic seems to indicate that the effect of an EMP somehow scales with the length of the wire through "line coupling", so short wires in a car or a wristwatch will be largely unaffected, while longer wires used for electrical transmission will experience severe effects.

Wow. That sounds incredibly devastating.

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