On dinsdag, aug 26, 2003, at 10:09 Europe/Amsterdam, NM Research wrote:
A scenario where all the ecommerce code and routing
code ( paid traffic ) would fail is if the Financial
Capital City of the World is Struck in a light nuke
attack. Are you, or is the code capable of handle
this ?
This is not a matter of code, but a matter of hardware. You need to
have all your hardware in a Faraday cage to avoid the electronics from
being fried by the EM pulse. But even then you're not safe: someone who
is supposed to know about these things once told me that fiber optic
cables have the nasty tendency to explode when a nuke goes off. The
huge EM fields cause induction in the steel mechanical reinforcement in
the cable, causing it to get incredibly hot incredibly fast. I also
gather that radioactivity degrades the transparency of fiber, so that
could lead to trouble even if the cable doesn't explode.
But our current routing protocols will be happy to route around failed
routers and links. No problems there.