I second Dave's request. At this point, separating the political and ad-hominem would require copying and editing several posts. Let's all keep to the subject (however fanciful it may be) of interrupting current flow.

 

My vote is a laser, cut that wire!

I seem to remember high intensity magnetic fields can impede current flow, but that is a guess.

 

Q-photon,

I have been pondering this same question from a different angle.

A lightning strike gives off a massive yet short EM pulse.

If a charge could be directed thru a lens i.e. Glass or silica or ceramic then it could be directed so as not to disrupt other electronics in the area. if the discharge is large enough and with the right focus to the lens even the hardening of the wires would be irrelevant.

 

An optical lens wouldn't work, and an EM lens would require uncomprehendable power..

 

No, just unimaginable luck to have the lens positioned such that the lighting bolt struck on the correct side of the lens and that the target was at the focus. EM lenses, especially at higher frequencies, aren't that hard to make.

But it's easier to generate a destructive EMP with off the shelf hardware.

 

Beenthere, describe the EM lens.

When the resistance of the Glass has been overcome does it render it useless for any subsequent bursts ?

 

The size and composition of a lens for RF depends on the frequency of the EM radiation. One such, the Luneberg lens, has been in use for some time - http://www.answers.com/topic/luneberg-lens.

Other RF EM lenses are described (vaguely) as Fresnel structures, with materials having dieletric properties that produce the focusing effect.

The structures are sized according to the wavelength of the incident radiation. That means that it's a lot easier to make a lens for microwave and higher frequencies than for the lower portion of the RF spectrum simply because of the size of the structure.

A glass lens would work just fine for those frequencies in the visible portion of the EM spectrum. I've seem references to lenses that work up in the X-ray region.

Lightning is pretty much a big spark, so the EM radiation is at all frequencies.

 

First, the question "How would you stop electron/charge flow in a DC unshielded wire?" is incomplete. You don't stop current in a wire, you stop it in a circuit. So what's the circuit?

If it's a battery, switch, and two wires out to a detonator, the only way to stop it remotely is to shoot the terrorist before he closes the switch. EMP pulses, etc., wouldn't block that circuit. If very, very strong, they might induce enough current in the wires to trigger the detonator even though the switch is open. That could be a good thing if you know where the bomb is - but it would also microwave-cook everyone in the vicinity, so you could only use it when you had such specific information that you could solve the whole problem with low-tech techniques like shooting the guy with the switch...

If it's a radio-detonated bomb, then jamming the radio could be effective - if you knew exactly what to jam. But that's not stopping the current flow in the wire, it's blocking the cell phone or other radio transmission. (Cell-phone detonators have been used often enough in Iraq to bring about serious discussion of putting a cell-phone jammer in our patrol vehicles. Trouble is, if you just jam everything, the terrorists can use the jamming signal as the detonation trigger: detect signals all across the cell phone band, wait a few seconds for the convoy to come up to the bomb, BOOM!)