Effects of EMP ATTACKS!

I have been reading  One Second After by William R. Forstchen.


It discusses the result of an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the United States. Without going into the merits of the actual story, it does portray a frightening scenario of an attack on the United States using nuclear weapons burst 200 miles above the United States.

The effect of one of these bombs would be to release a very quick electromagnetic pulse over a very broad area. As noted in the book, just three bombs would cover the area of the United States. The effect as portrayed by the Author would be to knock out all electrical and electronic systems (not using old style vacuum tubes) immediately. What is immediately obvious in the story is that all of the modern cars are and trucks (built after 1980 with their on board electronics) are fried.

But the  Official Report goes into details as to the immediate effect on vehicles. Automobiles that were turned off showed no damage, automobiles that were running cut off 10% of the time, but were immediately able to restart after coasting to a stop. In the case of trucks, one of the thirteen tested did have to be towed. While obviously disruptive, this is a far cry from the thousands immediately stranded on the highways. Further, it notes that the effects on most electronic medical devices would be limited.

As noted in the report, the primary damage from an EMP attack would be to knock out the electrical system. This would be devastating of course, but requires a different set of protective measures than trying to build a Faraday cage around your car.  The books website does reference the report on a separate tab.  Possibly it was not available to the Author at the time the story was written.

Mississippi Mounds

The Mississippian Mound Culture is one that I would like to learn more about.  It is one of the many disappeared cultural groups that can be found throughout  pre-history.  They suffer from a lack of respect and a lot of pseudo factual speculation.

In looking around the web, I see a lot of discussion of them as a "Chieftain Culture".  But when you look at the geographic spread of the culture this seems hard to justify.

Having a corn based culture, and this same corn would have come recently from Central America, it seems rather obvious that there was a least some derivative connection with the Temple Builders of that area.  But since they used the building materials most available to the area, there is enough dissimilarity to question the extent (and possibly even the fact of) the influence.  I have seen some glancing mention of human sacrifices associated with the remains.

Another common assumption is that the Mississippi culture is the forerunner to many of the latter groups that the Europeans were more familiar with.  However, it is not clear why a collapsing agricultural society is a good candidate for forerunner of anything.  When the Hittites collapsed in back in the biblical times, they remained completely unknown until their architectural remains were found.  There is one remote successor group mentioned in the bible, and that is about it.

Maintaining a complex cultural identity takes a lot of time and energy.   When "things get simple" most of that appears to go out the window. 

Loans for Consumption

In the 1920s and into the 1930s one response to the increased production capacity of the modern industrial assembly techniques was the beginning of consumer finance.  At that time it generally took the form of installment payments.  China, with the a bubble driven production capacity faces similar difficulties today.

Relevant to this issue, Michael Pettis does another fine piece on the Chinese economy.  This is actually only a small portion of it.

Have We Underestimated Chinese Consumption? Aug 27th, 2010 by Michael Pettis

How do we know that China has an under-consumption problem? To answer that question it is unnecessary even to look at the consumption statistics. All you need to know is that China has a very high investment rate (perhaps the highest in the world) and a huge trade surplus.

Every country produces goods and either consumes or invests those goods. This is not quite an accounting identity, but it becomes one if you take into account the trade balance. Why? Because if it produces more than it consumes or invests, it must run a trade surplus. If it produces less, it must run a trade deficit. In other words by definition what ever you produce is equal to what you invest plus what you consume plus or minus the trade balance.

China has an extremely high investment rate, perhaps the highest ever recorded for a medium or large economy. Countries with high investment rates should normally run trade deficits, since there is so little left over of their production for them to consume that they must import the balance. This is what happened, for example, to the US during most of the 19th Century.


But China has probably the highest trade surplus ever recorded. This means that an extraordinarily large portion of its production is invested, and another extraordinarily large portion is exported. So what about consumption? The only way a country can run an extraordinarily high investment rate and an extraordinarily high trade surplus is if consumption is extraordinarily low.


So almosot by definition we know that consumption in China is extraordinarily low as a share of its total production. It is unnecessary to check consumption statistics to prove this.


In fact official statistics do prove it. They show that Chinese households consumed a little less than 36% of total GDP last year. This is an unprecedented number, much lower than the 65-70% typical of the US and Europe and even far below the 50-55% typical of other low-consuming Asian countries.

Fairly commen sensical but people cannot seem to get there without the help of Michael Pettis.

 The USA was the high surplus and net lending country going into the Great Depression.  It did not work out very well for us. Germany was the previouslly expansionary populist nationalistic country.  Didn't work out real well for them (or anyone else) either. The Chinese bubble just really cannot turn out well.

Defense Critical Infrastructure Program (DCIP)

Defense Critical Infrastructure Program (DCIP) is a Department of Defense (DoD) risk management program that seeks to assess, and prevent the potential and actual loss of Defense Critical Assets (DCA) and Task Critical Assets (TCA).

In practical terms the people assigned to this task go out and find the weak points within both the immediate military environment (for instance the utility switching station that supplies X base with power), to the more esoteric (the one factory within USA that builds the logic circuit needed to construct air-to-air missile type X). In theory it than tells the key decision makers of these issues and they use this information to guide their actions.

A non-classified presentation on this program can be found here: link1

The initiating directive is found here: link2

It is hard to get a handle on the verbiage at times, but essentially this is one of the primary proactive programs that the DoD uses to avoid problems before they occur. So when thinking up hypothetical disaster scenarios in one’s mind, it is important to understand that even if nothing has obviously been done with regards to some future disaster scenario, it is not necessarily because no thought was given to it.