But the satellites that coordinate everything aren't.
Yeah, but they're in OUTER FREAKING SPACE.
Good luck getting a camel to hump something that far.
Yeah, no unfriendly nation has the ability to make/buy a vehicle to put something in orbit.
Correct. But in reality, only Russia has the orbital vehicles to spare. China has a number of orbital vehicles, roughly a dozen of them. But not a surplus. A number of other countries have the capacity to build orbital launch vehicles but generally do not for political/economic reasons (Japan, UK, Germany, France, Spain, maybe India). The only country that wants an orbital launch vehicle but cannot build is NK. The number of countries capable of putting EMP weapons in space are fewer than a dozen. The number of countries that theoretically could slip or 'lose' a launch vehicle is two. Gee, that makes plausible deniability a slight difficult.
Satellites are really high. Geostationary orbit is roughly 35,786 km away from sea level. GEO's are moving at about 3 km per second. Makes actually hitting a target in space very interesting when you have insane velocities. Unless they're really smart and have a fair amount of cash to burn making a highly directional EMP device, the pulse will go in a more or less perfect sphere. That means you lose energy exponentially as distance increases. And when you're talking distances of tens of thousands of kilometers... That's a lot of dissipation. Plus, Earth shields a very substantial portion of space when you detonate an EMP device in low orbit. An AF geek wrote a nifty thesis,
A Calculation Model for High Altitude EMP, that details the math. It's a pretty good read.
Satellites are really tough. For the environment in which they operate. You could kill one with a hammer pretty easily. But they're designed to take extreme temperature changes and a significant amount of cosmic radiation. Otherwise, every satellite would have to be replaced every time we had a solar flare. They're not EMP proof, but they're definitely EMP resistant by design. But what about highly directional EMP devices! Well, then you're only going to hit a small area of the sky. Not to meantion that most major communication systems employ constellations, intentionally spread out pretty far.
Best bet is an Exo-atmospheric Kinetic Kill weapon, which are always nifty. Those are generally too advanced for a government to make. Raytheon and LockMart are probably the only corporations that could build them.
