Nah, their field of effect for one readily transportable size (small enough to fit inside a panel van) would probably be measured in terms of hundreds of meters at best, which is actually desireable if you’re trying to take out a localized target or an armored column.
Stranger
The BLU-114B Soft Bomb can destroy electrical supply infrastructure, by scattering conductive fibers across distribution systems, transformer farms and the like. Far easier to take out all the power to a city by blowing the distribution network than relying on EMP generating weapons.
Si
Cite?
Who are the people telling you?
How did they find out?
If you know, why don’t lots of people know?
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-114.htm describes the weapon and it’s use. Using this technology which actually works (as seen in Serbia) versus an EMP weapon which has not been demonstrated or proved (and can be easily defeated by some basic design) seems to me to be fairly straightforward.
Si
There were some muddled up stories from the first Gulf War derived from the use of a special kind of, technically, nuclear weapon. Specifically, the first large scale use of depleted Uranium ordinance (Uranium is twice as dense as Lead and therefore makes a good bullet). Some claimed that soldiers were being made sick from exposure to the vaporized Uranium (it was even one of the suggested causes of Gulf-War Syndrome). Nothing really came of it.
The BBC have a couple of articles on this.
thanks,
tim