Magnetic Field Reversal

[Yorkie]

If the EMP was created from an airburst by a nuclear missile, then yes going underground would offer some protection as you are distancing yourself from the source - the high atmosphere - so attenuating the effects of the EMP.

Regards

Mention of nuclear missiles is evocative of the cold war era and the UK government's farcical 'Protect and Survive' series of public information films. 1975 isn't so long ago - I was 36 and our kids were 11 and 7. I just saw that camapign as propaganda to scare the public witless and to justify the arms race, the defence budget and the logic of deterrence and equality of arms at the time.

Some people were indeed scared witless and even built underground fallout bunkers. Had such an event have actually happened, the risk to personal safety would have transcended radiation, and would have stemmed from civil disobedience, the breakdown of law and order and the survival of the fittest. You only have to consider what happens in America when natural disasters occur. Despite having just about the highest per capita income in the developed world, when something like Katrina happens, the national guard has to be called out in a vain attempt to try to prevent looting, violence and chaos. (Hence, the cult of 'survivalists' in the US).

The 'Protect and Survive' films presented a surreal air of calm rational thinking and behaviour, with people forming orderly queues for water and what not - 'after you old chap - no - not at all, I think you were before me'...I didn't find the films either alarming or reassuring and I didn't bother with getting in all the emergency supplies and making a 'safe place' just in case. However well-intentioned this stuff was, really, they should be laughed off the face of the planet. A life lived in fear is no life at all.

During the 'cold war' era in 1969, I was local manager for British Gas in Spalding and for historical reasons due to the location of the offices, the air raid warning sirens for WW2 were sited on the building. We had to test the 'Red Alert' and 'All Clear' sirens at a given time each week in readiness for the 'Four-minute Warnnig' in the event of a nuclear attack. I'm not sure when this requirement started or when the tests were abandoned, (we moved to Grimsby in 1970), but having heard the sirens as a child during the war until I was six in 1945, and spent many a night in air raid shelters, like many of my generation, the sounding of those sirens did rather give me a touch of the heeby jeebies!

http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/196...rnings.htm

Sorry to drift right off topic from magnetic field reversal onto 'what to do if something did happen'?