No.
A) We engineer for ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) today whereas we did not even just 20 years ago ...
B) The effects of EMP are overstated. (read the EPRI paper above). Starfish Prime effects on Hawaii were really minimal.
Just wondering considering we’re so “chip heavy” as compared to 1960.
I think just like many things, we would be looking at bell curve type results.
There would be some areas very heavily hit where nothing electronic works. Not the grid, not the cell towers, not computers or even most transistorized radios.
But there would in all likelihood be other areas where the damage would be much less severe.
A study of the whys/wherefores is something that could only be done following the event.
Yes, and there appear to be some inaccuracies in the commonly referenced Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Still, the detonation was 250 miles up, 500 miles away, and was not a "designed" or optimized EMP attack. Given the distance, the effects are moderately impressive to me.
OTOH, by inverse square law alone, it would seem that an EMP could have some serious local effects. The paper you link to does say something like this, just before the conclusion, while neglecting the kind of cascade effects sometimes seen in widespread power and other outages. Then again, of course, if you are really local to a 1.4 megaton blast, you are in serious trouble anyway!