Let me supply you with a very reasonable scenario. Iran, whose government maintains some very serious ideologically extreme views, is hard at work to get a hold of their very first nuke. Iran supplies and smuggles in weapons for the resistance in Iraq to tie up coalition troops. Meanwhile, agents of Iran smuggle in a small, portable nuclear device in the hands of suicide bomber. Since the objective is to incur maximum damage and casualties, there is no moral dilemma in the mind of the terrorist. Innocent men, women, children-- even people who agree with and protect their ideology in the US is fair game. This device is planted in a major city like NYC, LA, Boston, Miami, San Fransisco, etc and detonated. The blast decimates a radius of 100 square miles, killing every one in that immediate area. The electromagnetic pulse from the blast disables a much larger area, 1,000 square miles which render anything electric utterly useless. Since, like suckling babies, the United States is completely reliant on the age of technology, and contemporary cars, computers, televisions, radios, planes, ATM's, etc, rely heavily on such technology, the bomb blast will wreak utter chaos and totally cripple a large portion of the United States.
as much as that looks really terrying that puts a blast radius at 5.75 miles realistically in the scheme of things that is a very tiny amount of space. Also the size of the explosion is ridiculously tiny, also probably overly generous as terrorists wouldn't have anything larger then 1 or 2 k tons.
The EMP blas as dangeroues as it is would only cover a 17 mile radius, ironically this is also very tiny in the scheme of things. At most it would only wreck at most a single city, and while that is damaging in the grand scheme of things it is a very small portion of what the US is. also that blast radius is over estimated..
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