After watching the pilot and the first episode I asked myselves: What is known about "the pulse"?

- Terrorists detonated a nuke 80 miles above the US. What kind of bomb was it, an ordinary high-yield hydrogen bomb or even a special EMP type? How was it deployed? Missile, satellit..?
- The explosion created an EMP frying all chips etc. in the area 1000 miles around ground zero. And for sure that wasn't the only effect. Look what happened with Starfish Prime...
- Basically, everything in the US east of the Rocky Mountains was blacked out and the rest suffered badly from the results. Just take St.Louis as ground zero and draw a circle.

IMHO that's not very far from reality. Maybe the 80 miles are a little bit too low.

Read here:
HEW
FAS
FAS again

- Terrorists detonated a nuke 80 miles above the US. What kind of bomb was it, an ordinary high-yield hydrogen bomb or even a special EMP type? How was it deployed? Missile, satellit..?

It doesn't need to be a "special EMP type" bomb. Any nuke generates an EMP. Having spent 17 of the past 18 years as a defense contractor, I can tell you that we had to both rad-harden and EMP-harden our computer systems. Any high altitude nuke burst puts out a large pulse of gamma radiation, which electronic devices can pick up (the wires act as antennae), and puts a humongous voltage spike through the system.

The gamma ray pulse is electromagnetic (EM) radiation, hence the phrase EM Pulse (EMP).

A high altitude burst like what's described is most likely a missile of some sort, possibly a Scud. IIRC, the WWII era V-2 could reach that altitude.

What I want to know is how terrorists got their hands on a ballistic missile? I guess they got it from Iraq.

It doesn't need to be a "special EMP type" bomb.

I know. What I meant was that there is maybe some advanced type of bomb with increased EMP effect.

Thinking about it, you'll need only a dozen big EMPs to safely create a worldwide chaos. MWUAHAHAHA!!!!!

Firing a missile from the outside at the US could cause an unwanted reaction, even if the new ABM system works. Maybe a high altitude research rocket got a special payload? A nice thought...

Or perhaps they smuggled a missile inside of US boarders, or stole a US millitary missile and fired it off, good luck trying to fire back at that one.

I don't know if it's easy to reprogram a ballistic missile from going to Moscow to detonating in the upper atmosphere over the US in the certainly limited time until the GBU-28 arrive. But who knows, maybe those terrorists were "terrorists"...

We're lucky that the old Spartan ABM are already out of service. They would have certainly created a nice EMP with their 5 Mt warhead.

I think making it detonate in the upper atmosphere is one of the easier things to do (if you manage to steal the thing) just figure out how long it will take it to reach a certain altitude and set a timer to go off at that time. Or have a triggering device that is wired to something that senses altitude.