14 
That’s what the Defence Select Committee told ministers, asking them to wise up to the threat of a rogue state setting off a nuclear bomb in space, which would cripple the UK and is considered “quite likely”.
The resulting gamma rays and electromagnetic pulse would fry anything that wasn’t properly “hardened” against such attacks. It would kill off satellites in orbit and destroy infrastructure on the ground, disrupting power and water supplies, as well as the UK’s defence systems leaving us totally open.
James Arbuthnot, the chair of the Defence Committee warned that setting off a nuke in space would be more devastating to our little island nation than one set off on UK soil due to the widespread damage it would do.
Apparently there is a partial solution that needs to be thought about and that’s just replacing the entire network with hardened systems. Mr Arbuthnot suggests this should take place as part of routine maintenance, but honestly, if it’s such a massive issue, shouldn’t we be doing things a tad more proactively?
The scariest bit about the whole thing is that Mr Arbuthnot considers a nuke in space quite likely. Hell, even Hollywood has been dreaming of it, just look at Goldeneye. Maybe it’s time to start moving back out of the cites into the countryside; using cars without electronics, and stockpiling fuel and food? Now that really is a terrifying thought. [BBC]
Image credit: Space from Shutterstock
This Is What Nuking an Earth-Killing Asteroid Looks Like
Your Old iPod Might Kill Off Currys
Physicists Claim It Would Be Impossible to Nuke an Earth-Killing Asteroid
If a country like Iran or N Korea fired a long range nuke at us, do we have the tech to disable it while it’s still in flight?
Nope, but we do have Trident to send a swift and brutal response to such a thing.
I saw something about our puny little EU-wide missile shield the other day. So maybe.
But wouldn’t this, in effect just cause it to detonate in space, over whatevery country it happens to be over at the time?
Very unlikely – nukes have failsafes to prevent early detonation, and unless they are all disengaged the explosion would more likely kill the rocket and dismantle the warhead.
Actually as far as individuals are concerned they can protect all their stuff by just turning it off rather than spending huge amounts of money on hardened systems. For infrastructure, if you knew when the EMP was coming it would be fairly trivial to turn everything off by pulling the plug at the power stations. You might want to wrap intensive care units and their back up power generators in tin foil of course but other than that its fairly easy to survive EMP.
I’m going to assume that unless it is a nation state like North Korea and a missile involved we probably wouldn’t get enough advanced warning to turn off our stuff.
However, if it was terrorists then it would probably be easy to track them down afterwards as they’d be the only ones with working electrical gadgets in the affected area.
But a lot of electronic devices keep working when they’re off. Would it be enough to protect a laptop or a smartphone by shutting it down, or would you have to take the battery out? I must know!
Wrap everything in chicken wire, not tin foil… chicken wire creates a faraday cage, much more effective
I believe that turning a device off will not prevent damage from an EMP, as the associated EM fields are powerful enough to induce a sizeable current in the conductive material inside the device. The resulting effect is a current much larger than the capacity of the device to withstand, with the resulting heat causing the electronics to fry!
@Woody Unfortunately, the fields generated by an EMP have a very high frequency, and can pass through the gratings in chicken wire. The idea is sound though, as a Faraday cage is just a conductive enclosure. So just wrap your device in as many layers if the chicken wire as you can, and hope that there aren’t any holes left!
Indeed, turning devices off to protect them from an EMP is the realm of sci-fi artistic licence. The damage arises from currents induced in the device, and being turned off doesn’t magically shield the wires. It would have to be a pretty sizable EMP to knock out the electronics in phones etc as the wires are so small, but since there would be no national grid your phone would be a brick in a day anyway.
Goldeneye? Why resort to fiction when there was an actual experiment?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
I just saw the poster for Goldeneye the other day and the Skyfall vid reminded me of it.
Any reason why the recent trend of nuke-related posts on Giz recently?
It’s just in the public consciousness right now I think. Lots of news concerning nukes. No particular reason on our part.
Hmm could it be to do with the crazies in Iran and their pursuit of nuclear weapons and associated terrorism?
I don’t think any of the current ‘Rogue States’ are that smart!
So it’d be like in MW2 where price detonates a nuke in orbit to take out all electronics in the entire west coast giving the americans a fighting chance against the invading russians.
scary
I imagine a couple of countries around have nukes floating above us.
I believe the CTBT expressly prohibits nukes in space, so very unlikely.
Just like Space Cowboys
This is a load of scare mongering bollocks. The government is looking for more reasons to go to war for oil!
For Iran or N Korea to threaten the west would be suicide, what would they gain from that! Besides for either to be able to develop something that can enter space isn’t reality.
And… For us to have Nuclear power or weapons and then prevent others from developing is pure hypocrisy. Cleaner safer energy is the way forward.
It would be nice if we spent time helping the poorer nations of the world rather than looking to war once more!
‘For Iran or N Korea to threaten the west would be suicide’
- Afraid they already have threatened Western states, most recent being the threat by Iran’s government to destroy Israel.
If you mean attack us, which I assume you do, I agree that it would be suicide.
Unfortunately suicide is now a rather common tactic in warfare – it’s easy to do if you think you’re in the right and have an afterlife backing you up.
I do agree with you on the hypocrisy, it is hypocritical that we have these weapons and others don’t, but it is a balance that has been evolved over sixty years, and upsetting it is a risky business.
Sorry but I don’t class Israel as a western state. Despite how you may or may not perceive it to be, I would class it ha occupied land, but hey.., that’s a different debate altogether, for a different day and one which will never end… .
And what about helping the poor, would you not rather see the money spent on weapons used to get rid of poverty in the 3rd world?
Personally I think Britain should look after Beitain and not get too involved in disputes abroad, look at Canada as an example, very similar to America in many ways but never faces criticism due to its foreign policies, it our foreign policy that brings us trouble..
Sorry… It’s not easy spell checking on this iPhone.
I’ll concede the Israel point, you’re right that it is a different argument.
As for the money for nukes going to the poor, you’re probably right that the money would be better spent, but the same could be said for all weapons budgets – and I guarantee if we had no military that someone else would have a pop at us. So in that case, it’s not looking after Britain’s interests – contrary to what you say.
I’d love to see the money going to reversing poverty personally, but poverty is a complicated issue. It’s pretty counter-intuitive but just throwing money at poor people does not make poverty go away. Capitalism as a system ensures that. They would need jobs, infrastructure, investment etc.
At the moment the world is set up to improve the life of a few individuals over the masses, unfortunate but true.
And your point about us not getting involved works both ways. If we don’t intervene we condemn people who are suffering, whether under poverty, famine or brutal government, and in the end we have to deal with the mess.
As far a condem goes we need to be consistent. Take General Augusto Pinochet the Chilean Dictator as an example, a man responsible for torturing 80,000 people including women and children as well as killing thousands. This evil individual was a friend of Thatcher and given Asylum in more recent years, this was despite the fact the Chilean people wanted him trialled, one could argue this man was as bad as Saddam if not worse.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet
And since we have to be so righteous , not… let’s not forget about Diego Garcia!
As a nation we do have much to answer for!
http://www.diegogarcia.co.uk/
I’d probably agree with you on most of that. The fact is, since most of the middle east was British Empire territory that we left to fend for itself after years of rule, a lot of what’s happening in that area we can consider at least partially our fault.