![]() Decades later, the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack determined as early as 2008 that the U.S. In addition, radiation from the test damaged several satellites in low-Earth orbit, taking them out of service. Over 1,000 miles away, the blast knocked out electricity supply in parts of Hawaii and disrupted telephone service for a period of time. conducted an atmospheric test of a 1.45 megaton thermonuclear weapon, code-named Starfish Prime, 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. The enormous potential of an electromagnetic pulse released by the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon has been recognized for some time. Military and non-proliferation experts are worried about the growing temptation by nuclear-armed countries to engage in a first-strike EMP attack using nuclear weapons that, while avoiding direct casualties, could prove devastating to electric grids and electronic devices from smartwatches to supercomputers. Just over a year ago, a group of American researchers released a report warning that China possessed the capability to conduct an EMP attack against the United States. ![]() "Simply announcing to the world that you find this to be a reasonable approach to deterrence should be enough to mark you out as a dangerous creep," Lewis said.Chinese researchers urged their government to increase the country's readiness for defending against a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. To Lewis, it doesn't necessarily matter whether the nuclear torpedo will be completed or if the descriptions and videos are Russian posturing designed to prevent the US from attacking Russia or its allies. So the fallout from a "salted" weapon blown up above a target could "be many, many orders of magnitude worse than the fallout produced by an underwater detonation." "Most of the fission products and activation products that are thrown into the air during the explosion will be trapped in the water droplets in the water spout and will fall back to the ocean within just a few 1000 feet from the detonation point."īut if a nuclear bomb were dropped from the air, "almost 100% of the source term ends up on the land," Spriggs said. "In reality, the vast majority of the source term will never escape from the ocean as air-borne particles," Spriggs told Business Insider via email in April. In the tests, they burst through the surface, ejecting pillars of seawater more than a mile high while rippling out powerful shockwaves. These underwater fireballs were roughly as energetic as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki in August 1945. ![]() US nuclear tests of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, including the underwater operations Crossroads Baker and Hardtack I Wahoo, demonstrated why. Nuclear physicists say such a weapon detonated below the ocean's surface could trigger a local tsunami, causing great devastation. In a 2015 article in Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear policy at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, dubbed the hypothetical weapon "Putin's doomsday machine." ![]() The Russian government reportedly leaked a diagram of a Poseidon-like weapon in 2015 that suggested it would carry a 50-megaton nuclear bomb about as powerful as Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device ever detonated. The mushroom cloud caused by the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba 57-megaton nuclear test. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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