Furious. Livid. Disgusted.

The labour government and the apparatus of power that they have corrupted to filth beyond recognition of twelve years ago are utterly, totally without redeeming features. I quite literally cannot express my revulsion at what has come out from a court case, and a simple accusation speaks for itself, so this will be brief.

A dead soldier’s mother had talked to the media about the lack of protection for her late son from a snatch Landrover. The MoD sent someone to see her, she thought to comfort and assist her. That representative, and MoD press officer is now suing the MoD for being put in the position he was. He was not sent to comfort; his instruction was to “shut that woman up”.

I am ex-mil. I was Navy, but worked with the Army and my brother is ex-Army. I am not sure that matters though. I suspect that all those of you who have eyes open to the real world will feel as I do.

Mrs Smith, I feel deeply for you, for the loss of your son. I hope you feel he died as the soldiers I knew lived, doing the job they loved and feeling as they did that they were doing good. The British squadies I knew were good men, if rough, and you should be proud of him. My best wishes to you.

Update on the Apocalypse

This update is just really to explain why I wrote the previous post (apart from the fact that I enjoy such little scratch calculations), about EMP attack concerns, how it fits in with my general theme of scepticism. It is in a new post as it got a bit long.

Dr Forstchen’s PhD is not in any science. He is a professor of history (lecturer as we might say in the UK, I don’t know if he is as senior as what we would call a professor) and an author. He has researched this topic for several years according to the potted biography in the article for his book “One Second After”. Apparently the book has been cited in US Congress as a realistic portrayal of the after-effects of an EMP weapon.

Yet not only do I think he got the magnitude of the effect wrong, in the article he makes basic errors, some of which I identify below.

This article is more hype than science, like most catastrophism including more popular recent themes like global warming and population catastrophe. It is a man who has no doubts, and I suspect has hunted out evidence for a catastrophe he knows is going to happen, rather than first questioning whether it could happen.

It took me maybe 20 minutes to come up with a realistic mean energy density in Dr Forstchen’s scenario, yet in his four years of research he appears not to have tried to find out how power is defined and measured, let alone checked that a nuclear detonation from a third-world bomb would have the energy to do the damage he claims.

He compares the production of EMP to a pebble rolling, hitting a larger one, in turn starting off larger ones to start an avalanche. That is a ridiculous analogy, even ignoring the fact that an avalanche is snow. If a pebble starts a rock fall or land slip the energy comes from the act of gravity on each rock, it is not all contained in the original pebble. No source of energy for the EMP other than the nuclear explosion is suggested.

He talks about “… power that could range up to hundreds of amps per square yard …” but not only are amps per square yard not a measure of power, it is a largely meaningless measure. It certainly will not tell you that damage will be caused to anything but sensitive, unshielded electronics. Even then a lot more needs explaining as to what medium these large currents are running in, because given the same EMP a much higher current will be produced in metal than in topsoil, let alone rock or concrete.

“a high tension wire miles long will absorb tens of thousands of amps”, but cables don’t absorb current, they transmit it. Again a meaningless statement.

“All electricity travels, of course, at the speed of light”, no it doesn’t. I remember at university calculating the speed of a wave in a co-axial cable. That did turn out to be c, the speed of light in free space. In other media it travels at different speeds, and speed can depend on frequency of AC, which an EMP would produce.

I am not sure how “hundreds of amps per square yard … will not affect you directly, at most you'll feel a slight tingling …”. Let us say a large person is facing the current direction, sectional area maybe a square yard. They have hundreds of amps flowing through them! I am not sure how the good professor ever thought that something that fried all electronics, even the shielded ones in a car or an electrical substation 1500 miles away, wouldn’t hurt at least some of the people 300 miles below, who were receiving 25 times the power.

“Commercial airliners today are all computer driven … When the pilot pulls back on the "stick" it is no longer connect by wires stretching all the way back to the tail and the elevator assembly. Instead, his motion is read by a computer which sends a signal to an electrical servo - motor in the tail, which then moves the tail” would surprise Boeing, and in fact all Boeing pilots, many of whom like the fact that they are not fly-by-wire. Of course no commercial airliner has controls connected by wire, or has for decades. This man is a pilot, and doesn’t know that?

By the way I reckon some aircraft might have a problem. However I have flown through storms, and been hit by lightning and not even known until the engineer identified the notch on the flap as lightning damage. Metal, as Dr Forstchen says, takes most of the current. The present generation of passenger aircraft are still primarily made of metal. That generally protects the electronics, and would certainly provide some cover from an EMP.

Catastrophe Postponed?

“An EMP attack … only requires but one nuclear weapon, detonated 300 miles above the middle of the United States. One bomb.”

The Silver Bear Cafe has an article by William R. Forstchen, PhD on electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat to the USA. If you don’t know what EMP is then watch Goldeneye, but basically it is a sharp pulse of electromagnetic energy that damages electronics. A widespread EMP can be caused by detonating a nuclear weapon in the lower reaches of space, and the article suggests that is a real threat, and that a single bomb exploded a three hundred miles above the USA would effectively wipe out the country.

That seemed a little pessimistic to me, so I did a quick Ask Jeeves calculation. I looked up the energy in TNT, a little over 4kJ per gramme, multiplied to a million tonnes to give the blast energy of a one megaton bomb (i.e. a big one) being about 4 million gigajoules. However that is the thermodynamic blast energy, and it is radiation we are interested in. According to Forstchen it is the gamma rays that cause EMP, and from our friend Jeeves we can find that 85% of the energy from a nuclear bomb is blast or thermal, and 5% gamma, so the gamma energy is around 250,000 gigajoules. Assume all the energy is converted to EMP, as I don’t know the rate but suspect it would be high.

I divided the energy by the the rough area of the contiguous USA, estimating 8 million square kilometres that is around 30 megajoules per square kilometre, or an average of 30 joules per square metre. But of course more than half the energy goes up into space, so that landing averages less than 15 joules per square metre. Of course it would be far more intense just below, but most of the US population lives on the seaboards where intensity would be far lower if the bomb was over central USA.

Sorry, Dr Forstchen, I am not buying it. The article suggests that a car hit by this energy will no longer work due to fried electrics, but a car hit by lightening still works, and far more EM energy is produced. The car is a Faraday Cage, and although not a perfect one for the cabin the engine electronics are well protected. Of course a fibreglass sports car might have some troubles, but TVR drivers probably know how to cope without the car.

Yes EMP is a hazard and a potential threat from a rogue state, but far more localised than Dr Forstchen suggests. Ironically Goldeneye was far more realistic in that sense. This does mean more should be done to plan for it, as a plan could be effective, which it could not in the case of national destruction.

Can anyone see a flaw in my reasoning? It is only a rough calculation, but the order of magnitude should be right as far as I can see.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

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Edit: just to add a link to a follow-on post.

Cut and Shut Helicopter: Defending the MoD

Having seen a few bloggers writing about the Chinook flying in Afghanistan which has a tail section from an Argentine machine I feel that, much as I really, I mean really, hate to defend the government and the MoD, especially on the issue of airborne transport in Afghanistan, it is my duty to do so just this once. This is probably a non-story. Sorry.

As I wrote here most stories in the paper I can assess are wrong in important ways. In that post I mentioned working in an industry which generates a lot of press. That industry is aviation. As the MoD said, it is common practice to use parts from one aircraft to repair another. With a typical holiday jet the most major component likely to be swapped would be the engines (which have a maximum lifetime, or might have to be rebuilt due to damage), but many non-structural elements like fairings, panels, avionics and machinery plus doors, gear components and some other smaller structural elements might well be.

I was never in the RAF proper or involved with the Chinook, and know little specific about its construction except that it is fairly conventional. However it is an excellent aircraft with a fantastic safety record. Maintenance in the military is generally good, and the repair which involved Boeing the manufacturer and Fleetlands, the military helicopter repair facility was probably done very well. After all the aircraft has flown many hours safely since.

Half the UK Hercules fleet has been cut in half and fitted back together. A section was added to extend the length of the aircraft, and done perfectly safely, with an excellent record since. This sort of major repair work is possible to complete safely, but in a car is sub economic so the car would be written off. Hence a cut and shut car is poorly repaired, and a serious hazard. Aircraft are far more expensive to buy, so sound repairs can be made.

Sorry, people, the government is probably right on this one. Save your indignation for where it is justified, there is no shortage!

More Unintended Consequences

Or at least I assume so. Maybe I am naïve, and should be even more cynical. I give Labour very little credit, but even I don’t think that when they said that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was intended to be used to counter terrorism they saw it being used to spy on those who had been hurt fighting terrorism. It is fairly obvious that the law was going to be used for surveillance with no connection to terrorism, otherwise the rules would have been more tightly written.

Politically, however, this is far worse than councils watching bins. The government’s relationship with the military has been bad since May 1997 but is terrible now, and continuing the meme of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, as the MoD does in this case, is not going down well in public.

As I have said before and I am sure I will say again, parliament needs to scrutinise legislation better. Ideally after more time has been taken to draft it. This government is all about panic reaction and guillotined debates.