I’d like to say that it fell apart because it requires an evildoer country (always North Korea, in the stories) to acquire both nukes and pretty awesome missiles, but to decide to make its suicide nuke run at the US with a single EMP rather than just lobbing a dozen at each of our cities. “Yeah, our country’s about to get glassed… but at least we did widespread if patchy damage to their electrical infrastructure.”
But I’m not so naïve as to think these things go away because of actual reasons–or for that matter spring up in the first place.
