IMHO the primary survival lesson from the EMP discussion is that while there are real-world survival issues. But there are also people and groups, some of them well funded, that seek to exaggerate and distort perceptions of the issue instead of educating and informing.
There is an entire industry of professional media consultants and hired gun advocates who will shift any issue any way you wish. As long as you're willing to pay. The people hiring such organizations on this issue are motivated by potential financial gain, a desire to steer international relations, and, often, to drum up unfocused fear, uncertainty and distrust that can be leveraged for political advantage.
IMHO the EMP issue has been demagogued to the point that the real issue has been lost. At its core there is something of an issue. The DoD has studied it for better than fifty years in one form or another. At first as just a minor side effect of an nuclear explosion. Later, on its own, as a possible attack modality. But the military has admitted that they are not entirely sure how to create or use such a warhead. It has never been done. Starfish was not intended to create an EMP. Above-ground testing stopped before the effect could be studies at any depth. Even today they don't understand how such a device would be built or how it would fit into any strategy.
The benefit to a third party or terrorist group expending the resources to design and build what has to be an experimental design, a design that uses up a perfectly good nuclear bomb, that potentially might not do much more than provide a nice light show is, to say the least, unclear.
A few insights into the subject, who is behind the subject coming up again and again, who is manipulating the issue and why:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/17/the_boogeyman_bombhttp://www.alternet.org/story/25738/http://www.alternet.org/media/143455/neocons_salivating_over_their_next_great_exaggerated_%22threat%22%3A_electromagnetic_pulse_attack/?page=1
Various hazards and dangers have been demgogued at one time or another for fun and/or profit. Weapons of mass destruction are always popular for such manipulations. The facts around EMP, direct nuclear attack, dirty bombs, bio-weapons, energy weapons, nano-weapons, chemical attacks and widespread flaws in computer systems have all been exaggerated or otherwise manipulated at one time or another. There is every expectation that these, and any other hazards that can be bent to serve, will be seen again.
All that said the basics of Faraday cages and what is need to shield vulnerable devices are all pretty well known. It also has to be pointed out that EM pulses were unknown by any but a few engineers and scientist fifty years ago. Now anyone in their right mind plugs their computer into a surge arrestor. And every time a copper line is replaced by fiber optic line an EMP become less of an issue. USB is due to be gradually replaced by fiber in the next ten years. More people are using wireless and fewer use copper telephone lines. Even as more copper lines get protection.
All that means that the consequences, effectiveness, of any warhead as a EMP weapon is ever more uncertain. The alarmists claim 90% of all Americans dead as a result. This seems very unlikely. Others, engineers and scientists, claim it might not work at all or that effects could be minimal.
I don't see anyone wasting a perfectly good nuclear weapon on such an uncertain outcome. Not when you could use the very same weapon closer to earth and get a very pretty mushroom cloud. Going for an exotic and theoretical soft-kill option when you could get a big boom seems too cute by half.
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