re: #434 Varek Raith
Dear wingnuts,
Any EMP attack on the US would involve nuclear weapons. It’s the only way, barring Boeing’s new device, to generate an EMP of the magnitude needed for wide-scale outages.
Boeing’s little exploding capacitor is a cute but natural outgrowth of well-known physics and is not in any way some sort of magical superweapon. Any other first-world nation could have them if they wanted. They are emphatically not a wide-scale weapon, but a different method of attacking point targets.
Setting up strong and widespread electromagnetic fields requires a lot of energy, and you’re not getting nuclear-weapon amounts of energy from a small electrochemical source. It’s basic physics.