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In movies like GoldenEye, they talk about how detonating a nuke in the sky will disrupt all electronics.

My question is: is disrupting all electronics in a significant area (the size of a small city) possible? Or is it just a hollywood/fiction thing? I gave one example method from a movie, but "EMP" is a popular term to refer to this thing. One more example is it happens in The Legend of Korra S4, iirc.

To be a bit more pedantic, I know that nuking a place will destroy all electronics working there. That's not the point. The point is that there's some method of affecting only the electronics (e.g. things using circuits), and not the other things in the area (e.g. not directly killing the humans in the area).

Lastly, I know it's possible to knock out radio/EM waves and interfere with them. But I'm more concerned with knocking out electronics themselves (e.g. every computer on Wall Street).

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  • $\begingroup$ Take a look at this $\endgroup$
    – Rodrigo de Azevedo
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 11:11
  • $\begingroup$ Search for HEMP on the internet. With high enough altitude of detonation, EMP affects entire continent. $\endgroup$
    – Ján Lalinský
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 13:08
  • $\begingroup$ The computers on Wall Street are not performing a vital function to begin with. What would cause much more trouble is that the banking system would go down, which would make salary payments next to impossible. OTOH, since any country hit with such a strike would immediately declare marshal law, economics as normal would seize immediately anyway. The much more troubling part in the short run is that transportation would seize, which would start killing people almost immediately, so the scenario in which an EMP strike would be considered anything but an WMD attack are non-existent. $\endgroup$
    – FlatterMann
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 19:46

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Nuclear explosions produce EMP pulses. A 1.4 Megaton bomb can destroy all unprotected electronics in the continental USA.

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The answer is definitively yes. AT one point it was thought that crashing an entire country's power grid, satellites and telecom capability would furnish a strategic advantage- until the realization that all one's own surveillance assets in that area would be similarly wiped out.

Furthermore, possessing a weapon specifically designed to maximize its EMP yield and then deploying it in the field tells your enemy that you are preparing for a first strike, in which the objective is to neutralize his retaliatory strike deterrent. This is considered highly destabilizing.

Redesigning electronics to resist destruction by EMP is called hardening and it is not a trivial exercise. The US military used to laugh at the vacuum tube electronics in the soviet union's fighter planes and bombers until they discovered that tube technology was far more EMP resistant than integrated circuits were. This led to a crash program to harden our bomber and fighter plane electronics in the early to mid-1960's.

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  • $\begingroup$ "all one's own surveillance assets would be similarly wiped out" — why? $\endgroup$
    – Rodrigo de Azevedo
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 19:40
  • $\begingroup$ Basically all of today's military equipment is EMP hard. It's not all that hard to do. Since causing a general humanitarian crisis would be considered the equivalent of a nuclear strike, the response to an EMP attack would be... a nuclear strike. It has no strategic or tactical value whatsoever. $\endgroup$
    – FlatterMann
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 19:42
  • $\begingroup$ @RodrigodeAzevedo It's electronics that can survive an EMP event. I did a few calculations and circuit simulations based on publicly available data from the 1960s approx. a year ago. Computers are fairly easy to EMP proof. It's mostly a matter of isolating power supplies and networking ports. Modern monitors are a bit harder unless they are being kept in shielded rooms. I don't know if motor control electronics in cars would survive. Probably not. I doubt there would be a cellular network left, either, but you could keep an old smartphone in a metal cookie box, just in case. $\endgroup$
    – FlatterMann
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 19:52
  • $\begingroup$ @RodrigodeAzevedo The sun won't explode for another ten billion years or so and when it does you want to be at least a few hundred parsecs away or dug deep inside Pluto or so. No worries. $\endgroup$
    – FlatterMann
    Commented Jun 11, 2023 at 19:55

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