This is a page about some of the things that individuals can do to prepare for an electromagnetic pulse attack. I'm an electronics engineer who has been thinking about the EMP problem for more than 3 decades. I even have an ancient Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4P that has been retrofitted with a complete electromagnetic shield. It's just a personal antique, useless for anything but a personal reminder of how long I've been thinking about this problem. That early-model personal computer didn't even have a hard drive.

I've spent much of my career working with radio and television transmitters on high mountaintops where there is a lot of lightning and other kinds of severe electromagnetic transients. Many engineers who spend their careers working in fairly benign electromagnetic environments don't realize the fragility of our technological infrastructure. On this page, I'm going to concentrate on a nuclear EMP attack, but much of this also applies to natural events such as intense geomagnetic storms resulting from extremely large solar storms.

The threat of a sudden EMP attack that causes a widespread catastrophe is certainly nothing new. Consider this Cold War era quotation from a widely-read and highly-respected publication more than 30 years ago: "The United States is frequently crossed by picture-taking Cosmos series satellites that orbit at a height of 200 to 450 kilometers above the earth. Just one of these satellites, carrying a few pounds of enriched plutonium instead of a camera, might touch off instant coast-to-coast pandemonium: the U.S. power grid going out, all electrical appliances without a separate power supply (televisions, radios, computers, traffic lights) shutting down, commercial telephone lines going dead, special military channels barely working or quickly going silent." -- from "Nuclear Pulse (III): Playing a Wild Card" by William J. Broad in Science magazine, pages 1248-1251, June 12, 1981.

The situation would be much worse today than in 1981 due to our profound and ever-increasing dependence upon electricity and electronics for the basic maintenance of our lives. In addition, the last remnants of the pre-electrical infrastructure, and the knowledge of how to use the components of that infrastructure, is slowly and completely disappearing. Some people have said that the long-term loss of the power grid would send us back to the 19th century. That belief is quite false because we have no 19th century infrastructure and very little 19th century knowledge. A long-term loss of the power grid would send us back to the middle ages for a number of years.

Although much of what is written below is about protecting one's own personal electronic items (especially regarding communications), it is important to remember that the greatest threat, by far, to the life and well-being of you and your family comes from the damage to electrical and electronic systems that are outside of your personal control: the national critical infrastructures.

The bulk of your EMP protection efforts must be directed toward protecting yourself from the results of the loss of the critical infrastructures that support our everyday lives. All of our national critical infrastructures are dependent upon the electrical grid and our electronic infrastructure.

This is necessarily a rather long article because of the large amount of things that must be addressed when confronting the loss of national critical infrastructures, and this article is only a primer. It does not cover everything.

the rest: http://www.futurescience.com/emp/emp-protection.html