Balloons carrying EMPs?

This came up my mind too. Have read that a high altitude EMP bomb would cause havoc on modern infrastructure.

Not sure about the details though. Hope someone knowledge can chime in.

“EMP” is mostly a Hollywood thing. Not that is entirely fabricated or anything, but it’s almost entirely popular science articles and action movies, very little real weapons systems, and the movies create a lot of misconceptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_warfare is the closest related thing.

What you would actually do is see if you could jam its comms, hit it with a laser (these exist as actual practical weapons these days), or engineer tiny high altitude anti aircraft missiles, either something that already exists or small mods to existing tech for the use case.

The US has done tons of research on high energy lasers to the point we had weapons that could target ICBMs. Now for anti-missile they weren't terribly practical, but for a large slow ballon its possible they could be. I've not found any research on lazing balloons, but I guess it exists out there somewhere.

How do quickly can those lasers be repositioned and fire? Couldn't China just launch a ton of these from many locations and let those disperse further, and make them extremely reflective in the relevant wavelengths? Also, not sure if a few small-ish holes would actually bring one of these down, they don't have a big pressure differential at altitude.