I read one of those disaster porn books on an EMP attack. It was a pretty good story, but I tried to look into the real effects of these things, as I didn't think it sounded very plausible to create that much destruction.
I don't claim to have done extensive research, but I got the distinct idea that we really don't have any idea what the effects of a large-scale EMP attack would be. Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast and then tried subjecting modern cars and computers and phones and such to them. As far as I can tell, it tends to affect things with long antennas and lengths of wire most strongly. Would we expect it to disrupt a modern car? Cellphone? Cellular base station, broadband base station? Hard to say for sure.
I have worked with shielding electronics from EM interference, where interference can sneak in through unexpected routes. Not sure if EMP style effects could penetrate in the same way, though. Cars seem like kind of a tricky case - there are some moderate length wires, like 6-8 feet probably, but they may be somewhat shielded. Could they pick up enough energy to damage essential electronics? I don't think anybody knows.
Part of the book's premise was also that the weapons were launched on rockets loaded onto anonymous cargo ships and timed to detonate at the same time over the continental US and Western Europe. Sounds pretty implausible to me that anybody could pull off a complex attack like that without a lot of mistakes and/or obvious preparation work. How long did it take us to get SLBMs working right? And I don't think even the rouge states would be willing to use a untested Rube Goldberg delivery system to launch an EMP attack whose effect on the target nations will be unknown.
I don't claim to have done extensive research, but I got the distinct idea that we really don't have any idea what the effects of a large-scale EMP attack would be. Nobody's bothered to try to figure out how to create a small-scale EMP without a nuclear blast and then tried subjecting modern cars and computers and phones and such to them. As far as I can tell, it tends to affect things with long antennas and lengths of wire most strongly. Would we expect it to disrupt a modern car? Cellphone? Cellular base station, broadband base station? Hard to say for sure.
I have worked with shielding electronics from EM interference, where interference can sneak in through unexpected routes. Not sure if EMP style effects could penetrate in the same way, though. Cars seem like kind of a tricky case - there are some moderate length wires, like 6-8 feet probably, but they may be somewhat shielded. Could they pick up enough energy to damage essential electronics? I don't think anybody knows.
Part of the book's premise was also that the weapons were launched on rockets loaded onto anonymous cargo ships and timed to detonate at the same time over the continental US and Western Europe. Sounds pretty implausible to me that anybody could pull off a complex attack like that without a lot of mistakes and/or obvious preparation work. How long did it take us to get SLBMs working right? And I don't think even the rouge states would be willing to use a untested Rube Goldberg delivery system to launch an EMP attack whose effect on the target nations will be unknown.