What if North Korea detonates a nuclear EMP over South Korea's grid?
A high-altitude EMP detonation over South Korea's grid is a nuclear-coercion tail: VIX +19, Nasdaq -8, defense bid as a nuclear taboo breaks and Korean tech/memory supply blacks out. No market analogue exists for a nuclear EMP; it sits beyond any historical template, closer to a war-game than a priced event. Transmission: a Samsung/Hynix grid loss would cascade through global memory and devices. Forward angle: crossing the nuclear-use threshold repriced the entire post-1945 order, so this is a gold-and-Treasuries flight, not an equity-dip trade.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the Tail risk horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. North Korea detonates a high-altitude nuclear weapon to EMP South Korea's grid as coercion. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.