So far, Russia’s threats of escalation against Ukraine have been largely interpreted as a veiled reference to the use of traditional nuclear weapons. But there is another tool which Vladimir Putin may be considering: a tactical electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, strike. These weapons — designed to create a powerful pulse of energy which short-circuits electrical equipment such as computers, generators, satellites, radios, radar receivers and even traffic lights — could disable Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure at a stroke and leave the country without light, heat, communications or transport.
EMP attacks have been amply explained, and even clamoured for, on Russian state TV talk shows. A Russian colonel has demonstrated on air, with maps and charts, how such a blast over the Baltic Sea might work. It may well be that Putin and his generals have been warning us about this possibility all along, with their enigmatic threats to unleash unspecified “military-technical measures”.
A tactical nuclear weapon used to create an explosion would most likely be ineffective against the mobile, dispersed combination of guerrilla and conventional warfare that Ukrainians are deploying to reclaim their territory. But the use of a nuclear weapon for electromagnetic warfare is a different matter. The signature of this type of attack would not be a fireball and mushroom cloud but a weird electric blue medusa orb pulsing directly overhead, followed by silence. At that altitude, the sound will not carry.