Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will take a little break from political blogging to discuss scientific matters. Yesterday, your Maximum Leader and his esteemed father-in-law spent the whole day together going to pick up a new fishing boat. (Your Maximum Leader and his esteemed father-in-law are avid fishermen.) Along the way we talked about many things. At one point we discussed a sci-fi novel that your Maximum Leader had read many years ago. He can’t recall the name of it, but the basic story-line was that computers and robots try to take over the world and are succeeding. But a small band of men and women pull off a daring commando raid on a nuke silo in the midwest and launch a nuke into high altitude and explode it. The EMP knocks out the computers and robots and the humans win the day.

Excursus: Why didn’t John Conner do this to bring down Skynet in the Terminator movies? Hummm….

Anyway. Your Maximum Leader and his esteemed father-in-law had to speculate quite a bit on the overall effects of EMP on electronics and such. We both had to admit that we didn’t know enough about EMP to make many theoretical jumps on a number of subjects. So, this morning your Maximum Leader decided to throw this topic out to any minions who may know about EMP.

What sort of sized nuclear weapon would a potential rouge state (ie: North Korea) or terrorist organization have to have to effectively knock out the electronic infrastructure of the United States? Is such a senario even possible?

If you know anything about this, feel free to write your Maximum Leader. Please state the authority from which you derive your knowledge in the message.

Here are some websites your Maximum Leader found on a quick google this morning:
Electromagnetic Pulse

Electromagnetic Bombs.

US Army Corps of Engineers open letter on EMP Protection for Buildings.

Some Non-Proliferation Info from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Some stuff from the Brookings Institution.

As best your Maximum Leader can figure it out from a quick read, it would seem as though to destroy the electronic infrastructure of the US one would need to detonate a number of devices at high altitude. It seems as though the EMP would do serious damage to intruments connected to unprotected power grids. (Which your Maximum Leader assumes would be most power grids.) Your Maximum Leader hasn’t found anything concerning how EMP would affect satellites in orbit. Which would also be a concern.

Anyway… Perhaps if our resident rocket scientist has anything he could add…

Carry on.