Vulnerbilities of Interconnection

Jeff Shultz jeffshul at wvi.com
Fri Sep 6 21:01:24 UTC 2002




*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 9/6/2002 at 1:42 PM Al Rowland wrote:

>Okay,
>
>If we're going to go off the deep end here, how about the effect of a
>small yield air burst over $importantplace? Not designed to maximize
>casualties/damage but rather EMP? A large number of senior military
>officials got that 'deer-in-the-headlights' look a few decades back
when
>a deserter supplied "Soviet state of the art" fighter turned out to
have
>tube based electronics. :)

Said tube electronics were apparently more survivable against EMP
effects. Or was that the point you were making? I think the real
surprise was a toggle switch that Belenko said was supposed to be
flipped only when told over the radio by higher headquarters. It
changed the characteristics of the radar.... sort of a "go to war" mode
vs. the standard training mode. 

An interesting, if not totally professional evaluation of something
like this is in Steven Coonts book "America" where terrorists take over
an American nuclear submarine armed with a new type of Tomahawk warhead
- an EMP warhead. One of the early targets is AOL HQ in Reston, VA., (I
almost cheered). 

Coonts has an inflated idea of what an outage there would do the the
internet... but there is a lot of other stuff fairly nearby, isn't
there? 

-- 
Jeff Shultz
Network Support Technician
Willamette Valley Internet
503-769-3331 (Stayton)
503-390-7000 (Salem)
tech at wvi.com 

...most of us have as our claim to fame the ability to talk to 
inanimate objects and convince them they want to listen to us.
		-- Valdis Kletnieks in a.s.r




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