An attack of sufficient power and coverage kills ALL unhardened electronics.
So ... no civilian comms like cel phones, most land line phones, radios. People are in the dark. NEwer cars won’t even start. Starbucks cash registers won’t operate. Anchor women and anchor men have no teleprompters.
Electrical grid largely shut down in the distribution lines and step down transformers. Ya got little or no civilian power
Food doesn’t get delivered. You can’t pump gas. You can’t call 911 (like that would help anyway)
The risks are a rapid loss of social order, starvation, collapse of economy .. pretty much a Charlie Foxtrot of Democratic proportions.
The challenge is getting that powerful EMP explosion as a series of airbursts or low earth orbit detonations OF SUFFICIENT POWER.
It’s a real threat. Maybe tougher to make good on than the threat-mongers will say.
Read about Faraday Cages. Many things that lots of folks think won’t work (cars, gas pumps) are actually not as vulnerable as one might think. A car is basically a big Faraday Cage, so is a gas pump, encased in metal.
Also, in my research on this, I was surprised to find that EMP attacks are more localized than I was originally led to believe.
I did a bit of research on this, as I’m lately on a survivalist kick and I’m trying to prepare for any eventuality I can think of.
And our gov’t, whose primary responsibility is providing for our defense, won’t take this seriously. Bill talks about that, too. The show was supposed to be about Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, and this should have been a show of its own.
A few years back Popular Mechanics had an article that was more or less a guide of “how to” create an EMP. Most often it’s thought of in terms of after a nuclear blast, however, an EMP can be generated in other ways, at least per the article. (Why they would publish this is an entirely different matter....)
I’m usually not an optimist, but on the “bright side” of things, it would also take out the electronic database of health records currently being pushed through in porkulus. And, teleprompters for _all_, not just the news anchors!
On a serious note, as others have pointed out, an EMP won’t kill people— at least not outright. It’s the cascading effects that will.