I grew up on a farm with no electricity till I was seven. Then we had running water and lights. Some neighbours didn’t take electricity till mid sixties. Everyone still knew how to live with the old ways.
The preppers of today are a joke. They think it would be a camping trip. Existence would be brutally hard for most. I lived it and at my age am not sure I would survive. You can start preparing by only having one bath a week and sharing the water.
I think people badly underestimate the sheer scale of the impact of something like an EMP pulse.
People think in terms of their own house. No TV, no phone, no internet. But if you pause to think in terms of supply chain, things get really really bad.
As an example, I work for a company that makes beer.
Our process is:
Grow barley and harvest it
Stick the barley on a train and take it to the maltings
Malt it
Stick the malt on another train to a brewery
Brew beer
Put the beer on a train, or a truck, to the distribution center
Put it on another truck to the grocery store
Customers drive to the store, stick it in their car, drive it home and enjoy an ice cold beverage.
Think what an EMP pulse does to that process. None of it is hardened.
The barley grows, but the combine and the tractor won't start so it rots in the field.
If you harvest it somehow, the trains can't run, so it rots in a silo
Magically get it to the malt house, well that ain't running without an electricity grid.
Same story for the brewery.
Then the trucks aren't working either.
Even if there's food in the store, most Americans don't live within walking distance of their grocery store, plus no electricity means no cold storage, so everything rots on the shelves.
The story is the same for every food stuff in every developed nation. Our entire supply chain for every good is solely dependent on electricity and electronics. Retooling away from that in a situation where we'd suddenly gone back to 1900s tech and had absolutely no logistics capability as a result would be a nightmare.
Bread, livestock processing, dairy products, canned goods. Even stuff grown domestically will be gone, let alone all the import goods.
What population density can the US sustain through hunting and small scale subsistence farming? 50 million, maybe? Considering it was only 23 million in 1850 and that even in 1950 we'd barely broken 150 million it may be even less.
Tap water can't be treated or distributed using current infrastructure without electricity. Sewage can't be treated. Garbage can't be removed. There's only minimal medical care. No pharmaceuticals, no hospitals. Houses can't be heated, or cooled. No electricity grid and no electronics means no fuel refineries and no Haber process, so no gasoline, no plastics, no lubricants, no natural gas and no fertilizer.
Without this infrastructure you can't even produce replacement microchips or parts to start getting things running again. Even if you could, the planes aren't going to work and neither are the container ships. The nearest reliable source of many of these specialized chip components is Taiwan... if they can get their own factories and supply chain up and running first. Rebuilding will take years, decades even.
Yet 60% of Americans live in big cities that are totally dependent on this infrastructure to not be complete death traps within a few weeks.
The first few days would finish off the terminally ill and some rioters. The first week sees people run out of water. The first month, they run out of food. The first winter, people start freezing to death. The next summer, the diseases set in. Money is inaccessible, and even it it could be accessed it would be worthless. Then there's the civil unrest.
In the event of a worldwide solar flare knocking out all electronics I fully expect that you'd lose 1/3 of the US population within a year, probably more like 2/3. Most other nations, except maybe African ones, would be just as badly off.
This is why no one is eager to be the first to try out EMP weapons. It's MAD on exactly the same scale as a nuclear exchange and thankfully no one has yet been that stupid.
