dd,
let me help you out here. you are aware that emp is constantly bombarding the earth? coming from the sun.
we get 'radiation' spikes which are actually electrical impluses that strike the earth all the time. it disrupts communications all the time. but it doesn't wipe anything out. nothing.
when you come up with someone who has actually popped an emp device up 200 miles above the earth and set it off, post it. otherwise it's all speculation.
The report you posted starts with...
ABSTRACT
Several potential adversaries have or can acquire the capability to attack the United States with a high-altitude nuclear weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP). A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication...
WITHOUT HAVING A HIGH LEVEL OF SOPHISTICATION? uh hello, what kind of sophistication does it take to put a nuke in a spot 200 miles above the USA? A LOT.
Further down, it says...
Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result.
AND...
EMP effects from nuclear bursts are not new threats to our nation. The Soviet Union in the past and Russia and other nations today are potentially capable of creating these effects.
AND...
Rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran, may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States, and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter.
AND ...
Certain types of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons can be employed to
AND this one is the most telling, because even when the Soviet/US tested nukes at the 400 kilo range above earth, you know what kind of 'damage' occured? I'll bold it for you so you don't have to go looking for the answer...
EMP and its effects were observed during the US and Soviet atmospheric test programs in 1962. Figure 1 depicts the Starfish nuclear detonation—not designed or intended as a generator of EMP—at an altitude of about 400 kilometers above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. Some electronic and electrical systems in the Hawaiian Islands, 1400 kilometers distant, were affected, causing the failure of street-lighting systems, tripping of circuit breakers, triggering of burglar alarms, and damage to a telecommunications relay facility. In their testing that year, the Soviets executed a series of nuclear detonations in which they exploded 300 kiloton weapons at approximately 300, 150, and 60 kilometers above their test site in South Central Asia. They report that on each shot they observed damage to overhead and underground buried cables at distances of 600 kilometers. They also observed surge arrestor burnout, spark-gap breakdown, blown fuses, and power supply breakdowns.
And yet, with all that said and done, they basically didn't have any catastrophic failures that 'brought the country to it's knees'. This report then goes on to say we can prevent this from happening by...
The first order of business is to prevent any of these attacks from occurring... In case these measures do not completely succeed, we must have vigorous interdiction and interception efforts to thwart delivery of all such weaponry.
Kind of like the arguments being made about concealed weapons carry. All the liberals scream bloody murder saying that 'blood will run in the streets and people will get into gun fights over a parking spot'. Well guess what? After more than twenty years and 34 states allowing concealed carry weapons, not ony did all crime drop in every state that allow CCW by at least 1/3, but there were no incidents of 'blood in the streets' or 'gun fights over parking spots'.
It's like I said, this whole report is FULL of shoulda, woulda, coulda, might, maybe, can, if etc. NO REAL HARD PROOF of what they say will happen. Speculation built over and above what has actually happened EMPIRICALLY during the 1962 tests. They take a little tiny thread, spin that into a giant ball and then throw that giant ball up and shout 'the sky is falling'.
On page 11 of this report, it says...
STRATEGY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
It will not be possible to reduce the incentives for an EMP attack to an acceptable level of risk through defensive protection measures alone. It is possible to achieve an acceptable level of risk and reduced invitation to an EMP attack with a strategy of:
1) Pursuing intelligence, interdiction, and deterrence to discourage EMP attack against the US and its interests
This whole report is written by the military. apparently you either can't or don't wish to 'read between the lines'. in the above statement i bolded the part that the US military would be required to perform. which is basically them saying 'if you want us to protect the USA, then you gotta give us tons more operating capital (increase their budget)' so THEY can attempt to do the "intelligence, interdiction and deterrence" part...
to prove this, further down on page 11 they discuss the 'cost', saying...
The cost for such improved security in the next 3 to 5 years is modest by any standard—and extremely so in relation to both the war on terror and the value of the national infrastructures involved. Costs at later times may be adjusted to deal with the then-apparent threat and future levels of effort required.
i'm not going to bore eveyone else by continually posting the rest of this report, because it basically says exactly what i said it would say BEFORE i read it. basically it says 'maybe, can, if, etc' and to be 'protected' from emp we must give the military all sorts of money so it can protect us from something they can't protect us from. they will TRY to do certain things (intelligence - oxymoron - military intelligence) to keep us safe.
too bad there actually nothing they can do about it. if one of those 'rogue states' that hates our guts decides to attack the USA, i personally doubt they are going to 'shoot blanks'. exactly how many nukes does n. korea have? enough so they can 'experiment' by wasting one by attempting emp? china or russia, maybe, but iran or n. korea? not a freakin chance. they have so few that if (and that's a HUGE if) they do decide to destroy their own country by launching nukes against the USA they won't be wasting any of them.
hope that helps you out. the one thing i learned as a wordsmith (journalist) was how to parse a word so it COULD mean many things. just like this report. they never say 'this WILL HAPPEN'. something hard, cold and definitive. THEY JUST DON'T SAY IT. NOT ONCE.
so i'll say it again. kindly point us in the direction of ANY emp device set off 200 miles above the surface of the earth and THEN tell us the empirical evidence of the results. until then, you got nothin. zip, zero, nada.
at least the report posted by mcguyver states empirically "System failures or upsets will depend upon the most intricate details of current paths and interior electrical connections, and one cannot analyze these beforehand."
too bad we don't have that kind of honesty in the report you posted. but hey, it was written by a bunch of guys who want money from their congress critters. and how do they go about getting said budget increases? by attempting to scare the bejesus out of people who know even less than they do...
this is a report written by the military, for the congress, who no doubt hailed it as the end word on emp effects. this is the same body politic that gave us the 'magic bullet' theory in the death of President JFKennedy. that's the people you are going to trust to give you the truth. fine by me. but perhaps you might do your own research, with no need to get a 'budgetary increase' so that you might 'save us' from the big old bad emp attack. which you can do no more than the US military can.
the only thing i can figure is you posted a 62 page report and i guess you figured no one would read it. I DID. and it says exactly what i said it would say BEFORE i read it...
peace
jim