> I've never actually looked at what an EMP does to kill electronics. Ever see the school experiments where a magnet is waved by a coil of wire hooked to a vol

> I've never actually looked at what an EMP does to kill electronics. Ever see the school experiments where a magnet is waved by a coil of wire hooked to a volt meter which registers voltage and therefor current flow? That is how generators work - spin a big magnet in a big coil of wire and that generates lots of electricity. Moving a wire through a magnetic field induces current flow if there is a complete circuit. Now picture your smart phone, laptop, PC, console, car, etc, anything with wires or conductors - and now wave a really really really BIG magnet next to it. That can induce currents so large that the wiring can melt, semiconductors vaporized or melted, chip bonding wires vaporized, pcb traces vaporized, etc. Basically total destruction via a massive current/voltage spike. I read about an EMP test Russia conducted on a length of telephone wire which was placed next to a nuclear test site hooked to some instrumentation. I do not remember the exact numbers offhand but the EMP induced over 3000 amps on those little telephone wires for a few microseconds before they vaporized.