If you’re a doomsday prepper or were alive during the Cold War you may already be aware – and fearful – of an imminent electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event. It’s a disaster scenario that’s captured the imaginations of filmmakers and video game creators, as well as legitimate organizations, like the United States government.
EMPs are brief but powerful jolts of high-frequency electromagnetic waves that can fry electronics – and on a grander scale may have the capability to cripple power grids, leaving millions of people without electricity. It’s been theorized that we’d plunge back into the dark ages, or worse — in 2017, representatives from the now defunct EMP Commission cited comments that a worst-case scenario could lead to millions of deaths.
EMP disasters are the stuff of science fiction, but they’re not beyond reality. We’ve seen massive solar flares — like the one during the 1859 Carrington event — cause electronic systems nationwide to fail (although telegraph lines were the main casualty back then). And knowing how powerful these blasts can be, the United States and Russia found ways to weaponize EMPs during the Cold War via nuclear bombs.
But besides theorizing about the threats that EMPs could pose to civilization, little research has been done on what the actual impact of an EMP event would be, and what we can do to prepare in the event of a disaster.
