Bitcoin Forum

What will happen if worldwar happens and some countries use EMP bombs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

http://www.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb.htm

No internet, No phone, No BITCOIN

Somehow, I think thats going to be least of our worries.

The issue is that most of our infrastructure is computerized. There will no power and most important no communication. 

lol  ;D

I think a big solar flare is a bigger threat. The effects from that would be global and not restricted to one or two regions.
And it WILL happen sooner or later.

As long as my debit card still works. Or I can go to an ATM and get my money out of the bank I will be fine.

In one small part of the world.

Bitcoin is global.

Since we would all die in a nuclear war it is not really a concern. Cockroaches do not need bitcoin.

What if there will be no nuclear attack? only EMP..

It would need to be literally world-wide to affect Bitcoin, and if the internet went down, bitcoin would be the last thing on anyone's mind (at least, in the areas affected).

Alright, let's play with this a little bit. Just to show how absurd even CARING about currency is in that situation. Bitcoin is small cap. The major fiat exchanges would be momentarily wiped out as well.

But who cares?

For these devices to work without widespread radiation poisoning and a humongous shockwave, they have to be airburst at rather extreme altitude. This will require a spread of either FOBS or ICBM missles. Since early warning satellites and radars cannot tell that the missile showing the profile of a nuclear launch is an EMP device (since it would be riding exactly the same vehicle as a MIRV capable ICBM or FOBS) The monitoring systems would go to DEFCON 1 or it's equivalent. That means nuclear war IS ON.

The most common counter plan is a counterpunch. General launch on the infrastructure, military, and political targets of the launching nation. That means a devastating counterstrike with a large portion of everything the counterstriking country has. Land, air, and submarine based. And RIGHT FUCKING NOW, becuase in the best case scenario they have 14 minutes to respond before riding out the initial strike.

This is the basis of the Mutually Assured Destruction argument, and ALL current nuclear powers subscribe to it, with the possible exception of North Korea.

EMP is a transient effect. Sure, it's damaging, but not for very long. It can be recovered from. It's only real use would be if they were somehow confident that they could achieve a first strike ahead of the pre-programmed counterstrike. In 1956, that was a possibility. Now it's not. The robots would fire the missiles.

The only real variables in nuclear warfare are whether some madman starts it, and whether anyone is sane enough to stop it after the first wave.

Well, actually there is a third. Whether or not any life remains above ground after the exchange.

This, this is the best reply, congrats man you have won a 100$ worth
lolipop, which you will never get from me.  :D

EMP will not destroy my local network. Bitcoin will continue to function. I will only need backup generator, maybe when war will break out I could build small hydro station on nearby river without any paperwork.

WWIII would result in the end of humanity for sure.

How do you know it for sure?

Probably not the end. We're a remarkably resilient species. But it woud definitely set us back a ways.

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
   -- Albert Einstein

What an awesome quote!!

One can never tell the age of forum members, so I'll just flat out state that I grew up believing the world was going to go up in a mushroom cloud before I was 18. I'm just barely old enough to remember those stupid "duck and cover" drills.

But strangely enough, both the Soviet Union and the United States managed to relax their Nuclear trigger fingers, and even stranger Israel managed to restrain themselves. By 1986, the world had cooled down quite a bit. Probably because my generation and the one just previous to it had studied this shit to death, and found that there is NO EXCUSE for a nuclear exchange. Only madmen build these weapons, and only madmen would pull the trigger. Initially they didn't understand the long term dangers. They don't have that excuse anymore. Unfortunately you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

EMP bombs are a proposal by the madmen. There is NO SUCH THING as a limited nuclear war. As I noted in my previous post, and as Myrkul has noted above via Einstein.

Reread my first response here. It's a pretty accurate overview of SAC/NORAD's STANDARD response to a nuclear first strike. And again, please note that the delivery system for a "pure" EMP bomb is a Fractional Orbit Bombarment System missile carrying several Multiple Entry Reentry Vehicles, each carrying a ten to fifteen kiloton nuclear bomb fused to explode just above the breatheable atmosphere. The EMP burst is a SIDE EFFECT of a nuclear chain reaction. Ya can't have the one without the other. The difference between an ELINT blackout attack and the destruction of a city is a few thousand feet, not the type of bomb.
Yes, I know they have refined them somewhat, but not that much.

The biggest point here remains that the early warning systems, on all nuclear armed sides, CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE between an EMP attack and a full on first strike. Again, madmen's choices. If you don't strike back you commit suicide. If you do strike back, you commit suicide. Even the deep shelters and long term planning of civil defense agencies and individual preppers are no guaranty. Nuclear war offers only ghastly uncertainties and the prospect of a world devastated beyond repair.

One final point is that only nation states ever come up with such ghastly weapons. They are not content to eat your flesh and drink your blood, they want the ability to destroy all life.

Some day, some mad fuck is going to push the button. We NEED to get off planet colonies if the species is to both survive AND keep it's accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Frankly, after a nuclear exchange, in the unlikely event that you survive, clean water, food, and lead for rad shielding will probably be the main currencies of exchange for the two or three percent that survive.

Unfortunately, the type of launch system for an EMP is different than an ICBM.  An EMP can be placed at the right altitude say from a boat in the Gulf of Mexico using SCUD level rocket technology and NO other guidance system.

that puts a pretty big footprint on the ground out of commission as far as electronics and power is concerned, say 500 mile diameter.

I agree though that the Carrington event, the solar flare, is far more serious because it could affect the whole planet or a big part of it.

It actually is possible to generate an EMP without a nuclear blast. As you point out, though, the delivery systems would be pretty similar, and a nuclear blast is, I think (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), the strongest way of generating an EMP currently available. Certainly the effect would be identical, to anyone not in direct line-of-sight of the event: A missile launch, and then a few seconds later, they lose contact with a large swathe of countryside.

Thus, if one is worrying about world-wide EMP, one is also probably worrying about world-wide nuclear war, and at that point, the inability to access your bitcoin wallets is the least of your problems.

yes, that's a FOBS system. In a way, it's worse. The 14 minute DEW alert is based on ICBM's which have a much higher and longer orbit. Against a FOBS attack, the interval to decide NOT to launch a retaliatory strike (which is the way the response is structured) is MUCH smaller. Maybe five minutes.

My biggest point on this, other than the irrelevancy of bitcoin or any other currency, is that in the interval between launch and response, there is literally no way to determine whether that missile is aimed to launch an attack against electronics or kill a city.

In terms of financial devastation, a monster solar flare is probably more of a concern as it's effects would be at least half the globe, depending on duration. But other than creating chaos, it would hardly be a world stopping event. Any fool who thinks they can pull off an EMP strike without direct nuclear reprisal just hasn't done the math. Unfortunately, a whole hell of a lot of politicians on all sides aren't too good about the math. By some strange fortune, none of the real looney-tunes have gotten hold of the launch codes yet.

Of all the nuclear powers on earth, I fear North Korea the least, because they have such primitive delivery systems. Our warning against them would be pretty good, unless they tried to pull off a FOBS attack from a boat, and frankly I think China would then erase them from the map before anyone else responded. I also think that the current "dear leader" is young, but not stupid. He knows this. They are playing a game of brinkmanship and it will end badly, but probably not horribly from a global standpoing. China is unlikely to use their nukes as anything but a deterrent. Russia and the USA likewise, unless McCain somehow gets hold of the launch codes. India probably falls in that category. That basically leaves two major wildcards. Pakistan and Israel. Pakistan is much like North Korea in that respect, so probably less of a threat than most, except for their love of pissing off India. Israel is the nuclear power than frightens me the most.

Israel has never openly admitted to having a nuclear arsenal and are not signatory to the non proliferation agreements. They have hinted, more than once, that they would be willing to use nukes against their neighbors. That they do have them, and what numbers, is an open secret. Their arsenal is not huge, but they could absolutely devastate much of the middle east. They could also easily reach Russia and China, and a great deal of Africa. This is not even counting their submarines. In my view, the only thing that restrains them is that they are not suicidal, for the most part. But they do have itchy trigger fingers.

Despite a great deal of chest pounding by the bastards that rule my country, Iran is not a threat. Even if they could or have developed some small scale weapons, they have no real way to deliver them against anyone but their neighbors. And they are painfully aware of how easy it would be for Israel to remove them from the map with their large and modern nuclear arsenal.

I have been and remain a proponent of nuclear electric power, but the bomb needs to go. Somehow, we as a species need to figure out a way to put an end to the existence of these weapons. They serve NO military purpose. They are and always have been a purely political terror weapon. While in a given area, poison gas has a longer and more devastating effect, there's no chance of such weapons ever going global, and mitigation is trivial by comparison.

Given the larger picture, I see any worry about whether a currency, whatever it's merits, might survive a nuclear attack to be insultingly trivial.

I've gotten behind on the technology, unfortunately. But to my knowledge an EMP generator that will have an effect great enough to do anything other than piss off some people on the ground still requires a nuclear blast. You can make a very small device that would be an interesting battlefield weapon, as it would fry unshielded electronics in it's line of sight, but that really wouldn't do anything to major electronic infrastructure. It might stop a charging tank, though. Then again it might not as most modern mechanized infantry is shielded by transuranics which would mitigate if not completely negate such a small pulse.

Such a device would be pure fun in a traffic stop, though :)

No kidding?  And you left this out in your first post?

Next, you'll be annoyed that I must point out that in the case of a launch of an EMP weapon from a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, there would be no immediate traceback to the perp - and so rather than a decision to be made, there would be no decision to be made, and thus the discussion about decisions to be made is moot.  You get the EMP attack and you absorb it.  And some months later, after divers had located the sunken boat and sifted through evidence, and after comm traffic had been analyzed, some organization or country would indeed have hell to pay.

But that wouldn't be the end of the world.  This article has a quite a bit of interesting facts concerning EMP.

http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/empprotection.htm

So, they can track missile launches on the other side of the planet, but not in their own back yard?

Who is the THEY?  Air traffic radar?  Nope.

That is why the subs all track and follow each other, there is a high national interest in always knowing the location of the subs.  Then if one launches rockets, you know whose boat it was and who to retaliate against.

NORAD.

And certainly no one could rent a small Cessna then fly it into the Soviet Union and land in Red Square.  Nope!  Nyet!

:)

Your point?

EMP isn't as powerful as you think. Companies will appear which offer emp shielded cases.  It's a problem only if you don't prepare for it.

Also I don't think Emp would shut down the electric grid but I'm not in a position to say. I would hope they have invested in the right kind of equipment.

The key word here is boat. If a missile is launched from mainland North Korea, it'd be pretty obvious that the missile belongs to North Korea. But a boat in the Gulf of Mexico could belong to anyone. It could be North Korea. Or maybe China, or Russia, or literally any other country that owns both boats and missiles. That's why submarines are such a critical part of nuclear strategy: they can go almost anywhere in the world without being detected and then fire their missiles without anyone knowing which country was responsible.

No, it will result with an end of western capitalistic elite, zionism and jews. They are not the whole humanity.

WW1 was won by latvians.
WW2 was won by communists, capitalists, jews and freemasons.
WW3 will be won by aryan people again. At least I hope so!... or it will bring progress to humanity like World War 2 did. Einstein was one smart jewish rat, he was not apolitical and said some things on purpose.

Anyway I don't care about death of other people or my own possible death in war, the victory of ideology and destruction of enemy is all that matters. The heroism of previous wars heroes will be with us! Because things are so bad that it should not continue this way. Capitalism, inequality of people, multiculturalism, mass surveillance. I better see WW3 than such things taking place in society.

Stop posting bullshit about end of life. USA have detonated about one thousand nukes on US soil and we all are here posting crap on internet. If I had nukes I would need about one third of that delivered to target to force USA to capitulate. And I won't be using ICBM missiles for first strike but I would place them in space orbit in fail-deadly configuration to prevent from them being tampered by enemy. (No expected encrypted signal received from ground station equals going after preprogrammed targets on earth.)

It will. Watch the film "Trinity and beyond".I remember that one. Back then russians were more willing to press trigger to shoot down the intruding civilian aircraft than USA personell are willing to make decision about unknown dot on radar screen. I don't think the USA will launch second strike counterattack even if the launch is detected. Because political situation does not suggest that anyone with that capability are willing to attack them. And disbelief and human factor will play significant role that everyone is excluding from their scenarios.

Why would you be worried about browsing the internet when bombs are falling from the sky?

When in nuclear fallout shelters internet is very important. This will make the fallout shelter just like your home and nobody will care about war as long as you can play games and chat online. :D

I can't even imagine what WWIII would look like, but I wouldn't be concerned about EMP bombs as there are already ways to strongly reduce the impact of EMP.


It seems everyone wants to have more and we don't even realize how much we have right now (especially if you live in the so called 'first world'). Maybe at some point a war is needed to open our eyes.

Well, I certainly WOULD worry about EMP.  The reason is that it could occur from solar flares reaching the earth, or from a rogue nuclear attack.  I'd worry about asteroids, too.

Anything that might disrupt my supply of morning coffee is worth worrying about.

no but seriously, if we actually get into a real war with china or russia im totally going to do that.

That means no on line porn?

I guess we could go back to live strip shows.

Or our imagination.

No Bitcoin? Then I think WW3 should be made illegal to start! :-]

the emp bombs are used primarily before a nuke attack to disable all the nuke alert / defense systems

Yeah, that. EMP is a "total war" measure.

Actually I would not be so quick to believe that a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, large enough to launch an EMP device able to have a significant effect would not be tracked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-horizon_radar

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Rothr_range.jpg

There is a reason why the drug smugglers are using these now:

http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/drug-smuggling-submarine.jpg

Not quiet right as an EMP bomb can be as small as a brief case for localised jobs or vehicle mounted for capital city deployments.

Sources - don't ask   ;D

But those don't take down the internets.

However they do take down major exchanges and ISP server locations  :)

Deploy them along key data structure eschange points, such as major communication fibre optic or UL/DL trunk line interchanges and you smash 90%. The remaining 10% will struggle to achieve anything resembling the whole internet structure that stood previously...

I think you've made a plausible case there.

This is very true, I agree.

true. However, this would only have a limited, local effect. The scope of the OP was, imao,much larger in scale as to have more than a momentary effect on bit coin or the internet.

fair call

EMP uses an ELECTRO-MAGNETIC PULSE.

If you are familiar with magnetic fields, you'll know that they don't have the greatest range.
Making an EMP with a range of >10 miles is impossible using existing science and technology. Even a powerful home-made EMP would likely have a range of 100 yards or less.

Their most effective use would probably be disabling these from a range of 5-25 feet:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f21qFHDHgos/Tib6WAnAnfI/AAAAAAAADmE/m7o2uRnrqno/s1600/M1A1.jpg

uh...

If you are talking about using large power drain electromagnets, you are quite correct. But the EMP from a nuclear explsion at or above 5000 feet AGL covers hundreds of miles and is capable of destroying MOST active and unshielded electronics. Also can damage or destroy a great many inactive and unpowered devices. This is NOT new information. I was aware of this in the late seventies, and I am not in any way associated with the military.

Devices called "neutron bombs" do this and put out a great deal of lethal but short lived radiation, leaving buildings and non electronic infrastructure intact. These devices are known to exist, at least in three national nuclear inventories, and probably more than that. This is not a trivial weapon by any means.

You are misinformed about neutron bombs. Neutron bombs, as the name suggests, are designed to release most of their energy in the form of neutrons instead of gamma rays. Since it is the gamma rays that are responsible for the EMP, a neutron bomb produces a far less powerful EMP than a conventional thermonuclear weapon. Neutron bombs also do not leave buildings intact: all buildings within the lethal radiation range are likely to be completely destroyed or severely damaged by the blast anyway. The real purpose of neutron bombs is to kill those in armoured vehicles and hardened structures, who would otherwise survive the blast (assuming they're far enough away from ground zero to not be instantly vaporised, obviously).

I remember reading somewhere on a site for mechanical watch enthusiasts about how great it would be that THEIR watches would still be working after a nuclear blast! As opposed to those who were relying on their inferior Quartz watches. I'd laugh, but, well, you know...

Cockroaches will in fact need bitcoin once the're the dominant species on this planet. If they intend on facilitating trade between regions of roach-earth, that is.

On the real though- Everything that has ever been built was once built from scratch, and can be rebuilt, physically and programmatically better. Precautions have been taken. Inevitably, there exists hard drives within Faraday cages belonging to proponents of mutual aid. The next level of postnuclear humans (or cockroaches if that's your flavor) will always stand on the (albeit perhaps crumbled) shoulders of giants.
EDIT:From what I understand, the main purpose of ARPANET- the internet's great uncle- was to allow communications in the event of a nuclear disaster.

After reading this I feel like the SF catastrophe movies are not far from fiction :o

That has always been the beauty and horror of sci-fi. Some of it is pure fantasy, but the really good stuff is rooted in science and the extrapolation thereof.

While I like Space Opera, my favorite authors have always been the "hard" writers like Robert Anson Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, G. Harry Stein, C.M. Kornbluth, and others of that ilk.

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, I (and a great many of my generation) expected the world to end in a nuclear fireball long ago. By some miracle, it hasn't happened.

That being said, the actions taken by the sons of bitches who rule my nation are doing their damnedest to make it happen. Our only saving grace is that their power greed is matched in at least equal part by their stupidity. About the only good thing about a democratic republic is that the elected are mostly idiots. Powerful idiots, but idiots nonetheless.

What I fear above all is that at some point a SMART politician who is mad as a hatter gets the nuclear control codes. The modern Pol is a power hungry sob, but not too bright. They don't seem to understand that deliberately sowing hatred and provocation of every potential enemy has drastic and long lasting consequences. One who did, and could unite enough of the haters, would be the most dangerous thing that earth could face.

This, aside from all my romantic notions, is why I think that we, as a species, need to develop starships. Our survival as a race, Imao, depends on us getting a viable population far enough offworld that one madman with access to nuclear weapons can't pull the plug on us.

The technology is in our grasp. We've had the technical ability to build starships since I was born, other than the necessary computer power for long range navigation. That now exists on most everyone's desktop. At this point, all we lack is the will to do it. Nations are not going to, as it's not in their interest to have free colonies offworld. They might get notions of independence, after all.

But the corporations, whatever you think of them, do have the power if they had the will. I suspect that men such as Sir Richard Branson might have the will, and they certainly have the power.

My father's generation was the first to see a time when humanity had the power to destroy itself, and most life on the planet. That is the legacy we have, and which we must undo. Obviously, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. But we can go forward and find a way to live where these terrible weapons are no longer a threat to absolutely everything.

There is a term in sci-fi and some philosophy that applies. The Nuclear Decision Threshold. The point at which a species that has developed nuclear weapons finds a way past their awful power, or perishes. We have been on that threshold for 63 years. Not a long time, but the threat looms large. And while it is not on everyone's minds and lips as it was just two decades ago, the threat has not diminished. If anything, it has increased because America thinks they can win a nuclear exchange, and there are several new players.

Conventional wars are horrible, but they are nothing compared to a full scale nuclear exchange. Because of the time frames involved, the idea of a limited nuclear exchange is pure madness. If one country launches, the others will too. They have no choice as the system sits. "riding it out" is simply not an option. It's launch on detection, or lose. But there are no possible winners, so it's lose period. Mutually Assured Destruction. When the USSR and the USA were playing their games of brinkmanship, that was always on the minds of the leaders and the proles. Now, it's not so much, especially in the public eye. That, in my opinion, is a more dangerous state of affairs than the two "superpowers" eyeballing each other over gunsights.

I'd more or less disagree, because it's somewhat likely we could colonize Mars.  Zubrin has developed this concept, see "Mars Direct" for the concepts.

Starships might come with advances in physics and energy production, but if we knew how to live in a can in space for a couple decades, there would be many options available here in this solar system.  But we don't know how to live in a can...

As for nuclear exchanges, the highest risk of those is terrorism and small countries, not the old concept of MADD.  That may actually be impossible today.

NOW TO THE IMPORTANT STUFF.

What, exactly, is your problem with decisions about nuclear war being made by the highly skilled and trained leaders of our country?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mUCLHzWiJo

Yes, I'm quite familiar with Zubrin. I have The Case for Mars on my desk :P I think it's a good start. By starships,I don't mean FTL, though I don't believe it impossible. Something that would push at about .9 C would get us to the nearest stars, even though "on ship" culture would probably vary radically from the land bound due to time dilation.

I don't agree on terroirsm being the biggest risk. Well, not small scale terrorism anyway. Nukes are a terror weapon. But the big nuclear arsenals still exist, and they are still targeted on the various perceived enemies of each country that has them. The plans remain in place to destroy everything. I actually think the focus on guerilla warfare (what the modern state terms terrorism) detracts from that awareness, which in some ways heightens the danger.

I'm not on my own computer right now, so I can't watch the video till later. I'll get back to ya on that :)

faster than light is probably imposable but that doesn't rule out the potability of taking a shortcut :P

" I do not know with what weapons World War Three will be fought with , but I know World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones"
[ Someone famous said this but I do not remember who :( ]

Not 100 % on this, but I think it was Albert Einstein.