It doesn’t, really. The wire vaporizes into plasma, and if the pulse is fast enough, the Lorentz force hold the plasma together. The rest is non-trivial high-voltage engineering. The original ...

When currents in wires run parallel, the wires attract due to the magnetic fields from the currents and the Lorentz force. The currents can also be run anti-parallel, making the wires repel. Place the ...