Army Bob: An EMP is like a very powerful microwave

by Robert M. Traxler

The recent incursion into our national air space of a Chinese balloon from Alaska to Virginia and covering several states and location caused an uproar. The predictable national divide showed itself again, as it does in damned near everything in our polarized society.

The conservatives said our President was lax and painfully slow in removing the threat; the progressive/socialists are saying President Donald Trump allowed balloons three of them when in office. He, and those in positions in authority at the Cabinet level, deny it; for this column, who did or did not know of the spy balloons in the past does not matter, nor should it. We need to develop a plan to ensure it stops, immediately.  

A column “One Small Voice,” by Ms. Lynn Mandaville, made me realize that most good folks do not understand the external threats against our nation. In the letter to the editor, I referred to an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack against us but failed to properly describe the real threat of an EMP device. British Dr. Michael Faraday, known for inventing the electric motor, theorized the existence of electromagnetic energy in the atmosphere in the 1830s, He rightly or wrongly is credited with discovering the theory of an EMP generated by splitting the atom. Dr. Faraday’s theory was not proven until the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in 1945. 

An EMP can be created in various ways, but the two that are a threat to our way of life are a massive solar flare (a massive coronal ejection), and a deliberate attack. The sunspots, solar flares, have happened in the past but are rare. The first recorded EMP was in 1859 and it affected electronics; however, in 1859 there were not many electronics and no microchips or microprocessors to burn out. Most “experts” say a solar event would destroy our power grid for years but not affect our vehicles, home generators or other home electronics.

The power lines are massive conduits for an EMP, and it moves faster and with more intensity than the system can discover and unsheathe protections against, like circuit breakers. It is estimated a natural event happens every 100 to 150 years. The United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Interior and National Security says it would take two to five years to recover from a solar event. The report is online, google congressional reports on an EMP.  

The second threat of an EMP is a deliberate attack by a belligerent nation or state sponsored terrorist group. The power source sufficient to burn out all of the microchips and microprocessors in our nation, northern Canada and southern Mexico needs a nuclear detonation to power it. The optimum location would be the Missouri-Kansas border, 18 to 50 miles above our nation. The Chinese “weather balloon” was at that location and at 12 miles in altitude, and it would be a simple thing to add more helium to the balloon and have it rise six more miles. Is the Chinese balloon being at that location concerning? You betcha.  

Most scenarios of a world war start with an EMP weapon destroying a nation’s ability to communicate; an EMP would destroy our civilian communications, medical system, transportation system, trains, planes, autos and trucks, everything you have with a microchip. Heck, we have an air freshener that has a microchip. Solar and wind power generation would see the wires connecting them burn out, as would home generators, cell phones, and the list goes on. Three joint congressional reports on an EMP event all paint a bleak picture.

In my opinion, the Chinese balloon being at the optimal location to detonate an EMP device should scare the crap out of us and not, I say again, not be allowed ever to happen again.

We do not know the weather and atmospheric data the balloon generated when at the Missouri-Kansas border, information that would be of extreme value. We do know that with burst communications the data could have and probably was sent to China undetected. The FU-GO bomb that landed in our area during WWII had a self-destruct device on the package (it failed), but that was 1945 tech. Inj 2023 you can bet it functioned on the Chinese device.  

Ask yourself why the balloon flew to the exact optimal location to deploy an EMP weapon? Coincidence? We cannot allow such a potentially devastating device to be over our nation again. Who did what, when based on politics, be damned, it cannot be allowed to happen again. To those who will ridicule this column, read the congressional report, and ask why military communications, vehicles, aircraft and other equipment, the Emergency Broadcasting System and White House are EMP protected? 

A good way to understand an EMP is to look again at history. When microwave ovens were first marketed, they were called radar ranges, they cost many hundreds of dollars, thousands in today’s dollars, and heavy — it took two people to carry one. A strange thing started to happen — people around the ovens or looking into the window were dropping dead, and it was quickly realized that the victims were people who had heart pacemakers. The energy was coming out of the range and frying the microelectronics in the pacemakers. If you look at your microwave in your kitchen it has a metal grid in the inspection window, that is a Faraday cage designed to keep the energy inside the oven. Those of us old enough to remember the 1970/80s remember signs in restaurant windows and doors warning of microwave use, telling folks with pacemakers not to enter.

An EMP is like a microwave only much stronger and faster, because it is powered by an atom bomb after all. My opinion.