EMP Threats With Steve Stratton
Are you prepared for EMP threats? Today, host John White dives into the shadowy world of
Steve Stratton. Discover what EMF and EMP are, how they can devastate modern electronics, and the tools you need to prepare for these invisible dangers. Stay tuned to gain life-saving insights and access your free action guide, equipping you to face today's unprecedented challenges.
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EMP Threats With Steve Stratton
Protect Yourself From EMP Disaster
Introduction To EMP And Its Effects
We have a guest named Steve Stratton, who's an expert in EMP. He's going to tell us all about it and how to prepare. Welcome to the show. Steve, how are you?
I'm great. Thanks for having me on.
This is good because the first show we put up was about cyber and we've got a great audience loving what you did. Describe EMP and define it. What it is, what it does a little bit so this audience gets a heads up on it.
The traditional way of thinking about EMP is that somebody would use an altitude burst or explosion of a nuclear device, maybe 250 miles above the Earth, and that ionizes the atmosphere and essentially causes a lightning-type effect to happen on circuitry. It has no human effects at all, and it's been studied quite a lot. For example, they did a test back in the '60s where they exploded a device over Johnston Island Atoll out there in the Pacific.
Eight hundred miles away in Honolulu, lights went out, fuses blew, and the telephone system was interrupted just because of the power behind that radiation. It will actually burn a circuit board because that circuit acts like an antenna. The scary thing is somebody might think to use that because it's not as crazy as actually detonating a nuclear device over Mooresville, North Carolina, or DC, that kind of thing. There's a bunch of science about it, but really, it's almost like having lightning hit your electronics. Electronics are so dense and fragile nowadays that they burn out. It's like lightning hit them.
What does EMP actually mean?
Electromagnetic pulse. It's a form of radiation. As I said, it really acts like lightning to our electronics, especially our very dense, highly compacted together electronics in our cell phones, radios, and even our cars nowadays. It will surge so much radiation that it will short-circuit that equipment and burn circuitry and things like that.
Do the EMPs also come from solar flares and those things as well?
Exactly right. When we get a big flare off the sun's corona, that can also have that effect. Most of the time, the distance and the atmosphere take care of that for us, so it doesn't burn up our electronics. It may make the cell system a little crazy. It will cause interference in radio systems, but they don't usually burn out.
Does it work just on a digital? Was it analog or digital or both or what?
Potentially anything with a circuit. If you've got an older motorcycle or you like 1950s cars, it's not going to be a problem, really. It's the newer stuff where we've got chips and integrated circuits that really are affected. I know several people that keep an older car just in case, an older Jeep or something like that or a pickup because, that way, it's less likely that it would be affected.
The gas pumps won't be working, will they?
Protective Measures Against EMP
No, probably not. You probably have to have a hand pump or a battery pump idea. There are several ways to combat the potential issue of EMP. One is to completely shield the equipment. In the military, when we talk about EMP, we shield them in hard cases of metal and ground them and things like that. The charge would flow around the end of it and go to the earth. You can also buy things for newer cars that will really are almost like surge protectors.
If you think about a surge protector in your house, they make surge protectors for EMP that you can put in different places on your car to protect the electronics, your car or truck. There are vendors out there who do that. You can also get that done at your house. If you already have a generator, it might make sense to make sure you have that protection on the generator so it can start up when the rest of the power is out.
Somebody can go out and buy a gadget to hook to their car and if there's an EMP, the car will not be affected by it.
Less likely. I won't say 100%. If you're right over the middle of Kansas where they detonate this device, it may or may not work. They test these things with very high, very quick transient voltages. These companies have good reputations. They've gone through a lot of testing with the Department of Energy to make sure that these things work.
We need to find some of those things and probably tell our audience maybe an action guide about that stuff. Remember when the Chinese floated that balloon over the US?
Yeah.
I don't know if that was an EMP or just them trying to test our metal. What do you think about that idea?
I don't believe there was an EMP component to that. It was really doing surveillance and information gathering. It was a different attempt instead of maneuvering a satellite. Every time you move a satellite, it has a cost because you're spending that jet fuel and there's not much of it you can carry up into space. Having a high-altitude balloon gave them a long, low, slow ride over America. If they were smart, they're just collecting that information and immediately transmitting it off the balloon somewhere else. Eventually, when the Air Force takes down the balloon, you haven't lost all the data you collected. It was an ingenious way to get a view of some sites they normally wouldn't get a view to at a low-cost way. Now, they've converted to using drones.
That's a whole nother thing. Have you been watching what's going on in New Jersey?
Yeah. A good friend of mine read a book series that started with some drones over San Diego and naval air stations. It's like life imitating fiction.
I don't know much about it. I thought it'd be a great idea for a worldwide threat because the video I saw on it was that these things are the size of a car. I don't know what that means, but there's a bunch of people, including the governor, getting a little unglued to these things flying over their state.
When they're that big, they're a danger in the airspace. It's not hard to have a modular unit where you connect four pieces, the motors and the arms that are going to fly this big thing around. It can have a very sophisticated payload for collecting information. One Chinese gentleman was caught. There are a few people who are testing what we'll do and seeing what our response is. That's all important information for the bad guys.
Going back to the EMP. If an EMP goes off, will you feel anything physically?
No. I used to joke that it would maybe make my teeth spark because I've got a few silver fillings or something like that. No, it's not like that. I don't believe you would feel a pulse. All of a sudden, the lights that probably go out and your cell phone's going to be dead, anything that's not protected. Buy some of that equipment we talked about for the cars or you can also buy backpacks and headbags and duffle bags that are EMP-proof. There are companies like Silent and others that produce this equipment. I just bought a backpack to put a generator, some radios, and other things in as a communications contingency in case there's that problem.
Preparing For An EMP Event
What would you believe would be a good step-by-step process for the average family or business to do to protect themselves from this? You've been going to it a little bit with these gadgets. Even as far as watching what's going on in the news or whatever, solar flares, because you're in this, what would you think would be something we could just share with people that they could put on the front of their minds instead of it being a black swan where it's just out of their mind about how to take care of this?
There's still value in paper copies of things. We've got birth certificates and all kinds of paper in our life, and there are good reasons to keep copies of that in fire-safe enclosures and things like that. Instead of turning in your old cell phone, you could actually keep one. I've got two of them right here, an old iPhone and an old Android phone, that I will be putting in that Faraday bag.
It's likely that the communications might not come on, but if the GPS is on, then the phone is still valuable as a GPS device. I'll put them in that bag with a couple of handheld radios so that my family can communicate, myself, my wife, and the kids and things like that. We have a communications plan. Even if, for example, it's a very bad, if it's a solar flare or a very bad weather event. You want to have the ability to communicate. Cell might be out, and even landlines might be out, so different options like that to consider.
Have a communications plan. Even if it's a solar flare or a very bad weather event, you want to have the ability to communicate.
If there is an EMP, let's say somebody dropped one over Colorado or put it up in the air above Colorado and it went off, how long would that frequency affect things?
It would kill all the electrical devices. It doesn't matter what frequency you're on at that point because literally everything with a circuit is dead. There would be systems that the military has backup systems and systems that are hardened against this. The military is going to be able to still communicate, but even then it would be degraded. It's almost like a one-and-done. A lot of people have written stories about this. The one thing they get right is after EMP, then you might be able to get the landline working again. There may be some limited communication, but it'd have to be somewhere that EMP didn't reach out and torch and disrupt that circuitry.
I don't know how true this is, if it's just a conspiracy theory, that if there's a globe or a national EMP go off in the United States, within a year, 90% of the population would be gone, dead. It's because there's no groceries, there's no water, there's no nothing.
No way to get money. If you don't have money set aside, how are you going to pay things for things? What is the value of money at that point? Actually, you can create an EMP with a suitcase device. It doesn't have to be a high burst. There are other threats to credit card processing or banking or the ATM network that could happen because all that data is centralized at some point.
The best thing to do is make sure you've got some money set aside along with your food supplies and then some alternative ways to communicate. You don't have to be a prepper or anything like that but one of those steps might be getting your ham radio technician license so that you can operate some of these phones.
You can buy these radios and listen on the handband, but technically, it's against the law to transmit. If we have a big EMP event, the government's not going to worry if you're transmitting , as long as you're not running over the people who are trying to respond to the event. There are plenty of alternatives there. There are some good folks online who can have the documents and processes to walk you through this without costing you $2,000 for a Faraday duffel bag.
Overview Of "Gone Native" And Related Resources
What's good about this is what we're trying to do, and you know this from being on this show before, is what we're trying to do is make people aware of what the possible threat is and ultimately give them some peace about how to protect their families or businesses and so forth. That's what our action guides are all about. We'll be putting content in there about what you have to say and your ideas and that. My last question is, and I don't know what you've written about this, but give me a two-minute recap about any books or writings that are even any papers you've written that really talk about this.
Actually, I wrote a short story where a six-person unit, because there's a female in the unit, is doing some cold weather training in Wyoming when the commander is talking to one of the people and the radio goes silent. He calls to his communicator, who carries a backpack full of radios and says, "See what's going on. Nobody can talk."
He checks his radios that are connected to much higher military commands and they're all dead. Instead of just driving airplanes up and dropping paratroopers out like in Red Dawn, the way that story starts with an EMP. If somebody needed resources, especially food, as much as we generate, they would probably explode an EMP and then try to invade because it would disrupt us so much.
We'd have so many people, like you said, so many civilians in our herd, would the military be able to do what they should do? Lots of interesting stories like that. They're fictional. They're fun to write. The likelihood of that happening is a whole lot less than a fiction writer like myself might make it out to be. We have more to worry about from a solar flare disrupting our systems. Natural disasters like what happened in your state of North Carolina, those are the things to really prepare for because they're more likely to happen than the big EMP, World War III invasion.
We have more to worry about from solar flares and natural disasters disrupting our systems, like what happened in North Carolina. These are the events to prepare for, as they are more likely to occur than a large EMP attack.
What did you title that short story?
Gone Native.
Can you get a copy of that now? Is it anywhere out there?
It's in an anthology of short stories called Apocalypse in Pieces. Apocalypse in Pieces is a bunch of us who wrote short stories and put them together, and my good guy in my books is Crow Indian. Gone Native, the fact that you have to go native after the EMP goes off, all those things that fit. Fun write.
Is that up on Amazon?
It is. It's available on Amazon.
I think I'll get it.
It's got that World War III vibe, and it's just different stories from all over the world and the United States.
That's good stuff. Brother, I really appreciate you sharing with us again. We will be creating an action guide and putting your content in there and pointing to those creative writings. I hope that you and your family have a great Christmas season. We will be back in touch.
Thank you very much. It was great to see you again.