Yes, but… Dark Angel is *science fiction*. It is no more relevant to a public policy debate than Lord of the Rings.

>” Hopefully, those who are cynical or scared will take the time to do their homework and find ways to use the EMP issue to make critical infrastructures and the communities they serve safer from all kinds of threats. ”

This sounds like an explicit request to overhype the danger in order to manipulate public opinion and spending priorities for covert reasons (other than those openly stated) through the creation of an artificially-exagerrated sense of fear, which is exactly what you have been being accused of. QED by your own admission.

For this reasons, there are those looking to discover ways to harden civilian critical infrastructure from both the manmade and natural threats. Though the amount of critical infrastructure needing protection at some level is orders of magnitude larger than the needs of the military, there is little awareness of the combined threats though it is already included in the NFPA fire code 1600 for business continuity. For all practical purposes, there is no current civlian market.

However, there are some of us who are looking to find creative ways to fund and protect these critical infrastructures without government funding. Hopefully, those who are cynical or scared will take the time to do their homework and find ways to use the EMP issue to make critical infrastructures and the communities they serve safer from all kinds of threats. I believe this can be done and welcome particpants from all sides of the issue to come to Niagara Falls this September 8-10 to discuss the issue further.

The EMP panic is an unfounded scare, a myth along the lines of the Red Mercury hoax, and it is being deliberately encouraged by people who want to get juicy government defence contracts selling the army the equivalent of those silly rubber strips that superstitious people have hanging from the backs of their car tyres to “protect against static electricity”.

There are plenty of far more workaday threats to our infrastructure of far greater probability of occurring that we should focus our attention on defending against – floods, the cascading breakdowns of the electrical grid when placed under stress that we saw both in Europe and Canada in the past couple of years; vulnerabilities caused by the just-in-time stocking and delivery mechanisms we operate in our society that make systems fragile in the event of even limited failures, and the degree of interdependency with single points of failure and reliance on sources of materials and energy that have no easy alternatives or options for rapid replacement in the event of supply problems.

Let”s solve the real problems before we let ourselves worry about snake-oil salesmen peddling stories of scary boogeymen.

The truth is, that an in-atmosphere EMP has very limited range, and a ”small nuclear device” would be alomst wholely ineffective – about 10 miles range, if you were lucky enough to actually trigger an EMP event, with succh an approach.

A continent-busting EMP would need a payload lifted to altitudes higher than the orbit of the International Space Station. In all likelihood, it would require an extremely large payload, too: atom bombs are heavy. So, you”re probably looking at a launch vehicle with capabilities similar to a Saturn V.

Furthermore, the EMP doesn”t do the damage; the ionisation of the atmosphere does, and achieving this ionisation in the correct way is not easy. It is much more likely that your energy will be disipated by the very medium you are trying to ionise. Magnetic conditions pertaining within the atmosphere over your target at the time, are as much a feature of how successful an EMP burst is, as the actual weapon used. The Starfish Prime result was a fluke (in an age when atomic weapons were being detonated on an almost weekly basis) precisely because EMP effects are not easy to achieve.

My main concern remains that in the UK at least the protection of our critical national infrastructure is inadequate against a whole number of different potential problems.