EMP, interesting! I'd never thought of that in the context mentioned here! But too, I don't have any electronic locks employed except in my vehicle! Yet our homes, workplaces and public transportation systems are all highly vulnerable to certain EMP emanations.
Such EMP emanations aren't only from nuclear blasts. Our very own Sun emits them frequently in what we popularly call "sunspots". When they are of sufficient intensity, they can play havoc with heavy industrial electrical circuitry (which is almost never sufficiently shielded). Indeed, they can shut down entire elements of our electrical grid systems. Until recently, it was thought that such as microprocessors were relatively immune from such Solar occurrences. (Not nuclear ones however.) Some lines of thought are now changing as miniaturization continues.
Really this whole subject is nothing whatsoever to sneeze at! Fortunately (actually thank God) most of these 'sunspots' aren't the mega variety and those that occasionally occur aren't often vectored directly toward Earth and a ‘miss is as good as a mile’. But the combo of sufficient size and vectoring would be the Apocalypse in our 'connected' world!
When a sufficiently big one occurs, the possibility of an electronic lock being damaged or destroyed certainly seems possible. I am several light years beyond my competence in discussing this subject, but it would seem to me a good news/bad news situation in the event of such a potential damaging event. On the one hand, the metal safe might provide shielding from the effects as in a Faraday Cage. On the other, it might simply act as a wonderful antenna to focus the pulse energy! In such case it might also create transients to act rather like a microwave 'cooking' the contents anyway!
Well, I'm now clearly getting too wild and weird in my 'free thinking'. Moreover, now also miniscule relevance to this forum!
I have no answers here, but I do applaud the 'outside the box' thinking.
A closing 'Whew' and...
My take.
