*********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 9/6/2002 at 1:42 PM Al Rowland wrote:
Okay,
If we're going to go off the deep end here, how about the effect of a small yield air burst over $importantplace? Not designed to maximize casualties/damage but rather EMP? A large number of senior military officials got that 'deer-in-the-headlights' look a few decades back when a deserter supplied "Soviet state of the art" fighter turned out to have tube based electronics. :)
Said tube electronics were apparently more survivable against EMP effects. Or was that the point you were making? I think the real surprise was a toggle switch that Belenko said was supposed to be flipped only when told over the radio by higher headquarters. It changed the characteristics of the radar.... sort of a "go to war" mode vs. the standard training mode. An interesting, if not totally professional evaluation of something like this is in Steven Coonts book "America" where terrorists take over an American nuclear submarine armed with a new type of Tomahawk warhead - an EMP warhead. One of the early targets is AOL HQ in Reston, VA., (I almost cheered). Coonts has an inflated idea of what an outage there would do the the internet... but there is a lot of other stuff fairly nearby, isn't there? -- Jeff Shultz Network Support Technician Willamette Valley Internet 503-769-3331 (Stayton) 503-390-7000 (Salem) tech@wvi.com ...most of us have as our claim to fame the ability to talk to inanimate objects and convince them they want to listen to us. -- Valdis Kletnieks in a.s.r