Every single bit of modern electronics would potentially be damaged: all TVs, radios, car and truck ignition systems, telephones, and pretty well everything else. Without working transportation, food can't be distributed and without power, most food can't be preserved for any length of time.
EMPs eat solid state circuits. The NKs know that an EMP would be a crippling, humiliating blow. Our military stuff is designed to withstand an EMP but the civilian infrastructure is not.
“Every single bit of modern electronics would potentially be damaged: all TVs, radios, car and truck ignition systems, telephones, and pretty well everything else.”
This article notes minor damage to automobiles in testing:
Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control scholar, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2013, “(the) EMP Commission exposed 37 cars and 18 trucks to EMP effects in a laboratory environment. While EMP advocates claim the results of an EMP attack would be “planes falling from the sky, cars stalling on the roadways, electrical networks failing, food rotting,” the actual results were much more modest. Of the 55 vehicles exposed to EMP, six at the highest levels of exposure needed to be restarted. A few more showed “nuisance” damage to electronics, such as blinking dashboard displays.”
And who would be stupid enough to actually attack us in such a manner?
NK is a lot of bluster and hot air. If they are stupid enough to actually attack us, they will cease to exist (assuming we have a POTUS who will not cower in fear).
A lot of worrying for no practical reason.
If the balloon goes up, hundreds of millions of humans will die all over the world. No different from the situation we’ve been in my entire life. When I was a child, I worried about these things a little, but in the end, there was no point in being constantly frightened of the possibilities that faced us concerning nukes.
Life is too short to waste a lot of time and energy worrying over these potential attacks. It will happen, or it will not happen. Worrying about it is pointless, IMO.
For that simple fact, the NKs know that they can enjoy humiliating us for a few minutes before the whole of NK becomes a radioactive ashbin.