September 1, 1859: Richard Carrington was the first astronomer to document a solar flare event. The solar flare disrupted telegraph communications and started fires when sparks ignited telegraph paper. The discovery of solar flares led to the discovery of the Electromagnetic Pulse energy and the damage it can cause.

 

July 8, 1962: The Starfish Prime Test – the test of the effects of a thermonuclear weapon in space – was detonated just before midnight over Johnston Island in the mid-Pacific. Electrical and electronic components in Hawaii, 897 miles away, were knocked out.

 

August 4, 1972: A solar flare disrupted long-distance communications across several states.

 

March 13, 1989: Six million people in Canada are left without power for nine hours due to a solar flare. Some power transformers in New Jersey were melted. This solar flare had nowhere near the power of the Carrington flare of 1859.

 

July 14, 2000 (The Bastille Day Event): So called because it occurred on the French national holiday that year. It caused some satellites to short-circuit and radios to black out.

 

October 28, 2003: This solar flare was part of a string of nine or more major flares over a two-week period. This particular flare overwhelmed a spacecraft sensor monitoring the flares at that time. The sensor measurement of the flare was X28 which is already considered a massive flare. Later analysis discovered the flare had peaked at about X45. (This is the measurement of the strength of a solar flare.)

 

December 5, 2006: This solar storm rated an X9 and disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and GPS systems for about ten minutes.

 

July 23, 2012: Earth narrowly misses a huge solar storm event due to its not being positioned in the path of the solar flare.

 

Currently, the Internet is riddled with DIY articles outlining materials and instructions on how to create a handheld EMP device.

 

The cost of protecting the national electric grid, according to a 2008 EMP Commission estimate, would be about $2 trillion – roughly what the U.S. gives each year in foreign aid to Pakistan.

 

According to Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, the Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security for the Congressional Caucus on EMP, the United States “may never recover” from an EMP attack or event.