The explosion made for some dramatic viewing as well, creating a bright high altitude aurora visible for thousands of miles. (The possible effects of an EMP were of enough concern to the Soviets that they conducted their own series of test explosions in space, but both sides stopped such testing when it was prohibited by the Partial Test Ban Treaty, in 1963). The detonation was responsible for damaging and eventually permanently disabling six communications satellites, one of which was Telstar, the first communications relay comsat I should mention for the sake of clarity that this was not due to the EMP, but to a belt of radiation produced by the test. The explosion produced very unexpected visual effects, but it also created an EMP powerful enough to knock out 300 street lights in Hawaii and disrupt telephone communications as well. The explosion took place almost directly over Johnston Atoll, the launch site, and was expected to generate a very visible fireball – so much so that hotels in Hawaii, about 900 miles away, threw viewing parties on their rooftops. I made this joke to my older son, a confirmed sci-fi enthusiast, and he said, without looking up from his book, "Frankly, 'Optimus Prime' sounds like Optimus Prime's stripper name.") (Also, c'mon, "Gipsy Danger" sounds like Optimus Prime's stripper name. This seems hilariously implausible, to say nothing of inaccurate to put it mildly, but hey, we're talking about giant robots fighting giant monsters. Supposedly, the reason the Jaeger called Gipsy Danger is unaffected by the EMP is because "Gipsy's analog!" as one character shouts. Another is the underrated, subtle, character-driven dramatic masterpiece Pacific Rim, in which one of the monsters, or kaiju, can actually generate an EMP that can be used to disable the Jaegers, or giant fighting robots, sent to destroy it. One of my favorite examples is the "pinch," as they call it (this is not entirely fiction, the Z-pinch, or zeta pinch, is in fact a thing), which Danny Ocean's crew uses in Ocean's 11 to temporarily knock out the Las Vegas power grid (for a suspiciously exact period of time) while not also simultaneously causing every aircraft for miles around to make energetic contact with terrain. The idea that an EMP can disable sophisticated electronics is a much-used trope in the movies, on TV, in manga, and pretty much anywhere else you need to narratively zotz electronics. After indulging in this pleasure myself for many years, I finally got curious about whether or not it's actually true, and here's what I dug up. "Oh, sure, quartz is more accurate," the conversation goes, "but you know what? What if there's a nuclear war? Then what?" There is a pause for dramatic effect and then, "Your quartz watch is fried, my friend, fried" – the assumption being that the electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, generated by the detonation will be energetic enough to disable anything that relies on an integrated circuit and that this failure will be permanent. One way in which this manifests itself is in the human capacity to worry about the inconsequential in the face of life's bigger and more unsolvable problems, and in the watch world, this has taken the form, for many years, of the assertion in some quarters, that one of the inherent superiorities of mechanical watches over quartz watches is that a quartz watch will be "fried" by the electromagnetic pulse produced by a nuclear explosion. People are funny (this is a banal observation, but it seems more apropos this year than ever).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |