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Why is this problem and solution different from say EMP's from nuclear blasts?

How are the solutions and protection different also? Would things like Faraday cages protect critical infrastructure?

http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/empprotection.htm

http://www.endtimesreport.com/faraday_cages.html

http://www.aussurvivalist.com/

See you there.

Another "myth" that seems to have grown up with information on EMP is that nearly all cars and trucks would be "knocked out" by EMP. This seems logical, but is one of those cases where "real world" experiments contradict theoretical answers and I'm afraid this is the case with cars and EMP. According to sources working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, cars have proven to be resistant to EMP in actual tests using nuclear weapons as well as during more recent tests (with newer cars) with the US Military's EMP simulators.
One reason for the ability of a car to resist EMP lies in the fact that its metal body is "insulated" by its rubber tires from the ground. This creates a Faraday cage of sorts. (Drawing on the analogy of EMP being similar to lightning, it is interesting to note that cases of lightning striking and damaging cars is almost non-existent; this apparently carries over to EMP effects on vehicles as well.)

I am pretty sure planting a few hundred hydrogen bombs a couple of miles below the surface of the planet at strategic locations, and detonating them, would make the world uninhabitable.

How so? What, exactly, do you think would happen? Nuclear winter, that bogeyman of the 70s and 80s? You could wipe out civilizations with them, but hardly make the world uninhabitable, and even that would be difficult.

http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/factsvsmyths .htm

A link to start with, do some other searching - I hear that "google" thing works well...

"1) Nobody who actually planned how a nuclear war was to be fought has actually told us; 2) no nuclear was has ever been fought; and 3) wars never turn out exactly as planned, so I doubt you're in a position to make this assertion."

The assertion is based on the simple fact that if the US hit Russia first, Russia's weapons (except for submarines) would be toast. If Russia hit the US first, all of the US's SECOND-STRIKE weapons would be toast (unless our ABM defenses proved extremely effective, which is doubtful.) The US first-strike weapons would presumably be launched on sufficient warning.

In either case, MOST of the world's weapons would be destroyed in the first hour. The submarine weapons would be one-megaton at best (and the following references indicate 500 KT or less) and directed at specific targets - not spread all over the continent. Any notion of "massive indiscriminate retaliation" is nonsense.

A quick Google finds this paper:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp. html

Which I quote:

(1) Targeting. The TTAPS paper uses a baseline case of 5000 megatonnes (MT), supplemented by a wide range of other scenarios which also lead to nuclear winter effects. Though in general terms some of the scenarios appear reasonable, no detailed strategic rationale is offered for any of them[22]. A cynic might say that the key characteristic of the scenarios is that they produce sufficient smoke or dust to produce nuclear winter. This is illustrated by the 100MT scenario, which is often misinterpreted as 100 bombs on 100 cities. Actually it involves 1000 bombs and the burning of a vast number of cities each of just the right size. It is easy to misinterpret the results for this scenario as showing that any 100MT war is enough to trigger nuclear winter, whereas any militarily realistic targeting of 100MT would cause relatively few cities to burn and probably produce little cooling according to present models.

If the scenarios had been designed to produce a spread of soot injections rather than a fairly constant soot injection for different megatonnages, the result of nuclear winter would have seemed more sensitive to variations in targeting.

Ehrlich et al. concentrate on a 10,000MT scenario which generates more severe environmental effects than either the Ambio scenario[23] or the TTAPS baseline case. They state that they take the TTAPS 10,000MT 'severe' case as their reference case because of policy implications[24]. (According to Michael MacCracken, TTAPS in their draft paper presented a 10,000MT baseline. After receiving comments, they corrected an error of a factor of 2 in the smoke density and also reset the baseline to 5000MT. These two changes counteracted each other, leaving the baseline consequences unchanged. Ehrlich et al. considered a maximum but to them plausible scenario which, after the factor of 2 adjustment, turned out to be the TTAPS 10,000MT scenario[25].)

This survivalist Web site
http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/factsvsmyths .htm
also refers to a number of myths about nuclear war, including the nuclear winter scenario. They cite the following:

"Non-propagandizing scientists recently have calculated that the climatic and other environmental effects of even an all-out nuclear war would be much less severe than the catastrophic effects repeatedly publicized by popular astronomer Carl Sagan and his fellow activist scientists, and by all the involved Soviet scientists. Conclusions reached from these recent, realistic calculations are summarized in an article, "Nuclear Winter Reappraised", featured in the 1986 summer issue of Foreign Affairs, the prestigious quarterly of the Council on Foreign Relations. The authors, Starley L. Thompson and Stephen H. Schneider, are atmospheric scientists with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They showed " that

A lot of people go "OMG! teh nukes!" like Fallout is what would happen after a nuclear war :)

Nuclear myths

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European zine. Guns, hacking, survival

Read this... The Dangers from Nuclear Weapons; Facts versus Myths It shows that even if the US and Russia had gotten into nuclear war, the probability of life ending on earth is pretty much zero. It would be incredibly devestating for sure, but it wouldn't be the end of life as we know it. It wouldn't even be the end of human life as we know it. I didn't know any of this until you mentioned it. I got curious and looked up some info on it.

According to this article, the metal frame of an automobile acts as a faraday cage and is therefore immune to EMP blasts.
http://www.aussurvivalist.com/nuclear/empprotectio n.htm

Of course this wouldn't be the case with cars built with plastic frames.