Amusing that this article is going out as Europe is being hammered by ransomware on unpatched Windows computers.
If the US wanted to take out all EU computers, presumably they'd use an airburst nuke, and target all the electronics, not just the Windows boxes. Of course, if things got that bad, presumably the "logical" course of action would be to scour the continent, rather than let a pissed off high skilled population live to join Putin.
War is not about killing your enemy and breaking his things. That is the job of warriors, but not how you win a war.
It would immensely benefit the US in a war with Europe to silently snoop on all those systems and act like we couldn't. Use the information to perform lower cost higher gain military operations.
Killing the populace En masse makes nothing but enemies, but leveraging information can make you friends. Imagine if the US used is massive infiltration to find people sympathetic to its cause and gave them guns and bombs with Russian labeling. Those people do most of the damage in the country and we swoop in with targeted precision bombing and cost effective troop deployments to arrest huge amounts of heads of states and legislatures. We could defeat Europe in a year and at least some portions of Europeans would thank us. Then we move on to the part the US sucks at, occupying.
If the US wanted to take out all EU computers, presumably they'd use an airburst nuke, and target all the electronics, not just the Windows boxes. Of course, if things got that bad, presumably the "logical" course of action would be to scour the continent, rather than let a pissed off high skilled population live to join Putin.