David Shenk looks at How To Survive an EMP Attack:
The nightmare scenario is this: A rogue nation like North Korea or a stateless terrorist like Bin Laden gets hold of a nuclear weapon and decides not to drive it into a large city but rather to launch it on a Scud-type missile straight into the atmosphere from a barge off the East Coast. With sufficient megatonnage and sufficient altitude, this single EMP attack could debilitate electrical and computer systems over half the United States, including the entire Eastern Seaboard. No one would be killed by the explosion itself, but tens of thousands could die quickly from electrical malfunctions in hospitals and elsewhere. And while no one can say for sure in advance, many think that the electrical grid could be disabled for months or even years. In an instant, the world’s superpower could become a candle-powered 19th-century museum.Don’t try to compare this to an ordinary blackout, when an end is always in sight. You have to imagine a s t r e t c h b l a c k o u t—months or years. ATMs, computers, and cars would be parked indefinitely. Cash, bicycles, and bottled water would become the currency of the day. Bloggers would switch to pens and poster board. Families with emergency reserves of cash, food, water, medicine, etc. would be breathing a lot easier than the rest of us. Even when electricity returned, most hard drives would not: Only nonmagnetic backups (paper, CD-R, microfiche, etc.) and specially shielded hard drives would be sure to survive a massive EMP attack.
So, how to you prepare for such an attack?
Short of installing your own ethanol generator and shielding your entire house in lead, what can an individual do to prepare for an EMP or cyberattack? Less than you think. This is a case where we have to rely on the professional paranoids—the software wizards in anonymous Virginia and California office buildings who are devising defenses against all the clever electronic assaults they can imagine. Still, you can take a few precautions. Start with the same disaster kit you should already have handy for other emergencies: nonperishable food, water, flashlight, radio, batteries, medicine, cash (small bills), and so on. Now throw in a regular computer backup—ideally onto a nonmagnetic medium such as CD-R.
I’m not sure his advice is much help.