Electromagnetic pulses in history - Telegraph The first recorded damage from an electromagnetic pulse came with the solar storm of August 1859, or the Carrington Event. It was the largest solar storm in recorded history. Sunspots and flares could be seen on the sun. It was followed by a huge geomagnetic storm. The Northern Lights could be seen across the world, and were bright enough to read a newspaper by. Telegraph systems in Europe and North America threw sparks, set light to paper and gave their operators electric shocks. A similar, but milder, storm occured in March 1989. It knocked out power supplies in Quebec, jammed radio signals and weather satellites and caused aurora as far south as Texas - leading some to believe a nuclear attack was underway. A test the same year by Soviet scientists in Kazakhstan triggered power plant fires in the city of Karaganda. The United States set up a commission to assess the threat from an EMP attack in 2001. It concluded that North Korea, Russian, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Cuba understand how such an attack could work - and that many countries believe the US is able and willing to make an EMP strike "under a broad range of circumstances." In 2010 Dr Liam Fox, then the defence secretary, warned that North Korea and Iran may seek to detonate a device high over Britain in order to disrupt electronic equipment. Liam Fox warned that Korea and Iran could seek to use EMP In fiction, the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye saw the villain, a rogue MI6 agent, plan to use an EMP weapon to rob the Bank of England and trigger a financial crisis.