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• There will be a brief period, lasting a few hours to a few days, where backup generat-
ors that were not damaged by the E1 and E3 effects will still be functional and
provide some semblance of services, until they run out of fuel and cease to operate.
• Most smaller electrical devices that were not plugged in, or turned on, at the time of
the EMP will still be operable, provided they were not connected to long runs of
cable such as Ethernet network lines or the local grid.
• If the EMP happened during normal waking hours, roughly 10 to 15 percent of cars
and trucks that were on the road at the time of the EMP will stop operating immedi-
ately, causing major traffic tie-ups. Cars not operating at the time of the EMP will be
mostly functional, though many will have annoying issues. Realize that today's cars
all have complex microelectronic controls that are highly susceptible to EMPs, and
the last time a car was exposed to a real nuclear EMP was in 1962 when they had
electromechanical systems that were far more resistant to EMP than today's cars, so
it is quite possible that the simulated EMP testing programs have underestimated ef-
fects on automobiles. In general, since automobiles have spark plugs that emit signi-
ficant short-range electromagnetic pulses, they are designed to be fairly hardened
against this sort of thing and will be more resistant to EMPs than most other modern
electronic devices that were not specifically designed to be hardened against EMPs.
Note : I recently met a retired naval officer who had spent nearly thirty years in the
U.S. military's nuclear program. He assured me that if a nuclear device designed for
optimal EMP effect was detonated at the proper elevation above the United States, its
effect on modern motor vehicles would be far worse than the effect predicted by the
official report, which was based on an “average” (not optimized for EMP) nuclear
device, effectively crippling nearly all vehicles that contain microelectronics and an
electronic fuel-injection system across an area totaling thousands of square miles.
• Most streetlights and traffic signals will be damaged by the E1 and E3 effects, con-
tributing to major traffic problems in metropolitan and suburban areas.
• The magnetic data on personal computers, banks, and business systems will probably
survive, but microelectronic control circuits in most of the devices that read and write
that data (computer hard drives, tape drives, etc.), if operating at the time of the EMP,
will be damaged or destroyed.
• The one-to-three-day supply of food in supermarkets will be rapidly depleted owing
to the destruction of the electronic SCDA- and PLC-based systems that control
today's highly automated “just-in-time” delivery systems. Loss of the grid means that
food-storage refrigerator systems will stop functioning when backup generator fuel
runs out in one to three days' time.
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