Describe your feelings when you discover that you can no longer send e-mails or surf because your server is down.
If, like me, you see the internet as your sole source of meaning in the world, you probably take a sudden severance from your server badly.
Imagine, however, if the loss were permanent. Imagine if your server went down and stayed down. Add a total disruption of the power supply and the destruction of countless computers and electronic gadgets. What would you do? Communicate, as Voice of America recommends, by ham radio?
Start learning now or practise shouting because, allegedly, the Net and other electronic networks could all be instantly brought crashing down by a single event: an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
If the term sounds familiar, or even cosy, that may be because microwaves, radios and just about all devices that use electricity emit EMPs, and yet have so far failed to trigger digital doom. But a nuclear bomb could create a giant EMP. In 1962, a 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon detonated 400km above the Pacific in an exercise called Test Shot Starfish did just that.
The pulse which Starfish spawned destroyed satellite equipment and blocked high-frequency radio communications across the Pacific for half an hour. Strings of street lights in Hawaii went out and hundreds of burglar alarms were tripped.