Milli-Nukes, Let's Roll!

{The following is from early in  a discussion on Milli-Nukes on Let's Roll Forums just prior to my banishment in another thread for addressing the admin with a mister honorific.}

To fill every one in who might be joining this discussion late, nuclear devices have four adjustable design factors: yield of blast wave, yield of heat wave, electrical magnetic pulse (EMP), and radiation.

An EMP is emitted line-of-sight from the detonation point and induces high currents in certain metals. Those high currents can lead to high temperatures that then burn off things like paint and plastic door handles, if it doesn't start to soften the metal itself. Electronic devices are susceptible to its effects, whereby integrated circuit chips and whatnot can get zapped quickly.

Distance and shielding/shading are factors in mitigating EMP. An open-air detonation would have more EMP side-effects than an underground one, whereby the latter have almost no EMP effects outside the kill zone. In the case of the 9/11, the towers presented structure and content that would have limited any EMP, except for window slits or parts of the structure that were removed by other means. Other buildings and things also would have reduced wide-spread EMP side-effects.



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The place to look for EMP damage would have been in electronic devices carried by people.

I could be wrong on the timing of this, but it seems to me that after the 2nd (supposed) plane, they were evacuating all of the buildings in the WTC and pushing people away from the complex by a block or more away. (They were pushing people back several blocks away from WTC-7 as foreknowledge of its demise.)

My point is, the low elevation of the detonation that happened within buildings coupled with people being pushed back would have introduced shading and blocking of line-of-sight EMP side-effects to personal electronics, which again diminished in intensity based on distance.

I'd would be curious to learn if the EMT who observed the cars lighting on fire for no reason and was hit by a car door popping off of its hinges and out of its socket to hit her discovered any of her personal electronics (e.g., cell phone) not working anymore. And if so, to what did she attribute their failure?