US would be crippled by an EMP attack, which we pioneered nearly 60 years ago

[JacksinPA]

https://thehill.com/opinion/technol...emp-attack-which-we-pioneered-nearly-60-years

In 1983, a young Matthew Broderick played a young hacker named David Lightman who accidentally discovers a military supercomputer and gets it to play “Global Thermonuclear War” with him in the movie ‘War Games.’ The computer stages a first strike involving hundreds of missiles, bombers and submarines, and the U.S. military, believing the Soviets are attacking us, prepare to respond with real nukes.

Fortunately, global thermonuclear war is averted by the end of the movie. But the perpetuation of the belief that complete and total destruction will be the result of massive nuclear strikes continues to this day. And it’s wrong.
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In 1962 the Air Force detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb code named 'Statfish Prime' was around one-hundred times more powerful than Hiroshima 900 miles southwest of Hawaii from a height of over 240 miles. The resulting Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) had unanticipated catastrophic results. The power grid in Hawaii was knocked out along with the phone system. This type of attack used in a first strike could render us helpless without doing significant damage to facilities, structures or infrastructure & without the problem of residual radioactive fallout.

 

[Mr Person]

Fortunately, global thermonuclear war is averted by the end of the movie. But the perpetuation of the belief that complete and total destruction will be the result of massive nuclear strikes continues to this day. And it’s wrong.

I think it's more that if the US and Russia alone emptied their nuclear arsenals, the combination of fallout and crop-devastating nuclear winter would guarantee the complete collapse of civilization, followed by all non-Keith-Richards human beings. Except I suspect that even Keith is susceptible to starvation.

Some life would likely survive, at least some bacterial life. And maybe, just maybe, as the sun approaches the end of its useful life, a new intelligent civilization might arise.....and perhaps behave better given the inarguable need to develop an escape plan in some hurry.