Yousaf Butt that Broad cites in his article
Yousaf M. Butt is at the National Centre for Physics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Rebuttal To
Yousaf M. Butt’s
“The EMP Threat: Fact, Fiction, and Response”
by
Dr. William Radasky
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry
http://www.survive-emp.com/fileadmin/White-Papers/EMP-Resources/articlebuttrebuttal.pdf
Sadly they’re right and he’s wrong. The EMP threat is grossly overplayed. The big thing the people who worry about this forget is how much longer vertical distances are than horizontal. They see the cute little map that says a burst 300 miles up could blanket the country and think “my car can go 300 miles on a tank, holy crap”, but straight up that’s LEO, that’s where the space shuttle used to hang out. Yeah within line of site EMP is bad, yeah a few countries could pop one in territory that would really mess us up, but given the difficulty of taking out more than a couple of blocks with one blast it really isn’t that high on the threat list.