seamusTX wrote:rzym20 wrote:Respectfully, that's only partially true. I used to do RadHard work at Motorola Semiconductor. Radiation-hardened electronics are perfectly capable of surviving an EMP attack. Military communications grids were designed with this in mind. As for the rest of society, yeah they'd be having a bad day.
I would hope that the military is prepared for an EMP event.
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- Jim
When I worked in military procurement in the mid 1990s, EMP requirements were dropped from a lot of avionics and communications contracts since the threat was deemed much lower after the East Bloc collapsed; this enabled the military to take advantage of commercial electronics, which made things
much cheaper and often/usually rendered better performance. In GPS in particular, unit costs of equipment dropped radically both due to this and the natural prices drops as an industry gets more experience with a new product.
I assume/believe that certain systems, e.g. nuclear weapons systems, probably certain comm systems, retained rad-hard requirments, but I believe that most other systems went to commercial electronics if at all possible. I don't know if this has changed in the last few years, but there will be a lot of non-EMP protected components out there for years to come.
