GSN March 2016 Digital Edition

tronic
devices for hundreds of miles.
North Korea’s larger cyber-warfare
efforts, which have so far been mainly
focused on gathering intelligence by
hacking South Korean computer networks
and devices.
According to NIS, North Korea
Russia and is now developing its own
on
against anything electronic, from
telephone wires to the power grid to
the computer chips that control cars,
planes, and smartphones.
Nuclear bombs like those dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki create
a huge amount of gamma radiation
when they explosively fission atoms.
This gamma radiation ionizes and
strips electrons away from atoms in
the atmosphere, creating a huge mass
of free electrons. These electrons are
then deflected by the Earth’s mag-
900 miles away in Hawaii. Kilotonyield
nukes would still be very effec-
and Apollo“, Science, March 21, 2012;
www.wired.com/2012/03/starfishan-
nuclear weapon to be fission, rather
than thermonuclear fusion devices. If
most of the electronics within 1,000
miles.
early 1960s, disabling hundreds of
miles of telephone wire and burning
down a power plant. In 1962, the
producing nuclear tests in space over
Kazakhstan (Jerry Emanuelson, “Soviet
Test 184”, Futurescience; www.
futurescience.com/emp/test184.
a populated, large land mass and at a
location where the Earth’s magnetic
field was greater. The damage caused
the level of this damage was commu-
Effects of Hurricane Katrina
on New Orleans are an example of
the effects of an EMP
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina
struck the city of New Orleans,
providing the best model for studying
hurricane and subsequent flooding
disabled the city’s power and transportation
infrastructure. Similar to
the population was not able to leave
the disaster zone where power and
transportation critical infrastructures
had been disabled. When New
31
Orleans’s levees failed, the area lost
power and chaos broke out. Federal
as well as local disaster response did
not anticipate the near-immediate
and complete breakdown of the social
order. Fuel could not be delivered,
shutting down emergency generators
for cell phone towers, shutting down
communications. Electrical failure
resulted in widespread looting and
the spoilage of food supplies throughout
the city. Disabling of both power
and transportation created a catastrophe
of unprecedented proportion and
threatened to destroy one of America’s
major cities. Federal, state, and local
governments failed to adequately
respond to Katrina during the first
attack, the entire country’s disasterresponse
capacity may collapse.
George Lane has 25 years of experience
in the development of chemical
security systems, conducting research
as a NASA Fellow at the Stennis Space
Center and as a NSF Fellow. Lane was
air quality SME for the University of
California at Berkeley Center for Catastrophic
Risk Management during the
BP Oil Spill. Lane is currently chemical
security SME for the Naval Postgraduate
School Maritime Interdiction
Operations in the Center for Network
Innovation and Experimentation.