about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.

It's definitely not good, and there's a reason we all agreed not to do that anymore, but it's really more about the damage it does to satellites that hurts everyone, and the damage being too unstructured to be worth investigating too far.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

That was before we had microchips in everything, and the internet.
Today, an EMP would have vastly different effects.

[–] groet@feddit.org 3 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

If I remember correctly, EMP doesn't really work on very small devices. You need a "antenna" that is long enough to induce a strong enough current to fry your electronics. So anything connected to a long wire. The power grid is itself a huge antenna and will be completely destroyed but a small battery powered device will be unharmed.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 3 points 2 hours ago

When the power grid is down now, phones are down, the internet is down, mobile networks are down, payment systems and ATMs are down, gas stations are down, refridgeration is down, etc. etc.
Basically, 3 days later civilization is down, irreversably.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Lots of our battery powered devices have a bunch of literal antennas, though. I actually don't know the frequency ranges on which an EMP can be expected to "pump out" significant amounts of energy, but if there's enough in the bands where WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS etc operate that's going to fry devices that don't have some sort of protection built in. I also have no clue how common it is for radio modules used in consumer stuff to protect against voltage surges on their antennas, but somehow I'd imagine it's not very common.