Neutron bombs cook your Thanksgiving turkeys pretty well. Although, you'd be too busy being dead to eat it. Neutron bombs are actually pretty sweet. I read an article by one of the original designers. It was built as an ethical bomb. There aren't any wounded, just dead. Although, it kind of lacks the pizazz of vaporizing a few city blocks and then incinerating a mile out, followed by collapsing structures with shockwaves for another couple miles, and then collapsing buildings with pressure differences more miles out from that.

The whole magnetic side of things with EMP, thats new to me. You learn something everyday. I guess you better have a Linux LiveCD in the CDROM drive of that faraday cage just in case.

As far as the laser beam project, check out the Laser FAQ, do a google search it'll be in the top 10, there's a bunch of cool stuff you can do with lasers. You can build a 14400 baud modem out of a laser pointer, some radioshack stuff and serial cables. I haven't tried it yet but it seemed like it would be pretty sweet. The Audio over a laser pointer project seemed pretty cool too. I was going to buy a lot of 10 laser pointers on ebay for about $10 and try some of that stuff.