Could North Korea Attack the U.S. with an EMP Weapon?

For most Americans, the threat that North Korea represents militarily for now seems rather remote, unless you live in Hawaii, which is in the range of existing North Korean long-range missiles.

So far, the Hermit Kingdom has had five nuclear tests and launched dozens of missiles, some of which have flown successfully and others of which have failed shortly after takeoff — either exploding or falling harmlessly into the sea near the Korean peninsula (or in some cases, worryingly close to the main island of Japan).

But most experts agree that it’s likely only a matter of time before the North Koreans are able to field an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that can reach any part of the U.S. — including the East Coast — and carry an atomic bomb small enough to fit in an ICBM nose cone. Photos have been circulated of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un posing near a disco ball-sized device that many analysts say could be a prototype of such a miniaturized bomb.

However, according to former CIA Director James Woolsey, Americans might actually want to be much more concerned than they are currently. The reason why is because a “conventional” nuclear attack on a U.S. city with a missile may not be the North Koreans’ goal.

Former Director Woolsey says that there’s another kind of attack that could be enabled by two existing North Korean satellites, which could have a far more devastating effect on the U.S. homeland. Devastating — because, rather than killing hundreds of thousands of residents in a single urban area, the purpose of this alternative type of attack would be to impact tens of millions of U.S. citizens via the use of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, an EMP is a byproduct of most types of nuclear blasts; it’s produced by gamma rays that cause unpredictable voltage and current surges through electronic equipment. While typically, for most nuclear blasts, EMP effects are contained to an area of a few square miles, if a nuclear device is tweaked correctly and it explodes at the right altitude, these effects can be spread over a much larger area — say, for thousands of miles.

The effects of an electromagnetic pulse can knock out all types of electronics that contain transistors. This includes radios, televisions, cars, computers, smartphones, appliances and pretty much most of the existing power grid. Essentially, 95 percent of all electronic equipment would be affected by an EMP within a certain number of miles of an atomic detonation.

By detonating a weapon at a higher altitude — say, 45 miles up, instead of a mile or two, the harmful EMP effects of a weapon can be spectacularly magnified by the less dense air. Perhaps no immediate deaths would be recorded below from such an event, but the electronics in question over an extremely wide area would be knocked out — virtually permanently.

If one stops to think about that for a minute, imagine if all vehicles built after 1970 with electronics and electric starter motors (essentially 99.9 percent of today’s automobiles and airplanes — including Air Force One) suddenly could not operate without major, gut-level repairs. Imagine that all computers, televisions, cell phones, electrical equipment and the Internet were suddenly permanently disabled, or at least until they had major, circuit board-level repairs using parts that would have to come from outside the zone of an attack and be soldered into place. Imagine that the electrical power grid — which might have experienced just one blackout or two lasting a day or so in the last three decades — now is non-functional, very possibly for years.

Society as people know it would come to a standstill. It’s almost a given that residents would panic, and a New Orleans-post-Hurricane Katrina-style anarchy would probably take root. If the detonation occurred in the right location, a domino effect could take out 90 percent of the entire power grid of the U.S., with as much as 60 percent in need of months- or years-long repairs before it was functional again.

Food, water, medicine and essential supplies would suddenly become as valuable as gold, and guns would likely become highly important for survival. Studies have shown that the entire East Coast or West Coast could be crippled by just one or two strikes of a certain intensity in the right places.

While all this may sound like science fiction, it’s been recognized for a long time that EMP blasts of sizable power potentially represent a far greater threat to U.S. lives than the mere detonation of a nuclear weapon (however powerful) in the heart of a major city. Short-term casualties from the blast itself might be few, but long-term, the material, economic and psychological effects of an EMP would be catastrophic.

Because until recently, the EMP angle of a nuclear attack was judged to be less likely to be used, it was not given much attention by the military or defense establishment. However, in the last 20 years, as this possibility has been discussed with greater frequency on the Internet, the Pentagon and Congress have realized that the U.S. needs to armor the majority of its infrastructure to protect against such an eventuality.

Currently, the only way to shield against this type of attack is to use special transistors, which would protect circuits from the harmful magnetic effects that can disable them permanently. To fully protect U.S. infrastructure, all electronic devices would have to be fitted with new transistors at the place of manufacture. Essentially, the entire electronics industry (and many attached production types, such as the auto industry) would have to change manufacturing at a root level.

Anyone examining this issue can quickly see that the scale of the problem is monumental; the vulnerability of the U.S. is such that Congress has determined that EMP protection strategies need to be studied and funded as quickly as possible. A Congressional EMP Commission was formed in 2001 to do just that, but so far, all it’s done is issue reports.

A groundbreaking work of fiction titled One Second After by writer William R. Fortschen is based around a theoretical North Korean-Iranian EMP attack on the U.S. and has been credited with significantly contributing to the active “prepper” movement in the United States post-2010.

Making matters all the more critical, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, the head of the U.S. EMP Commission, has stated that the weapons and types of tests the North Koreans have been executing lately all have the markings of the development of an EMP type of attack, rather than a conventional nuclear strike.

“During the Cold War, the Russians had a secret weapon they called a fractional orbital bombardment system,” Pry explained. “And the idea was to do a surprise EMP attack against the United States by disguising a warhead as a satellite because a satellite trajectory is different from an ICBM trajectory that’s aiming to go into a city. You know, for accuracy on an ICBM, you launch it on a lower-energy, 45-degree angle that follows a classic ballistic trajectory. Like a rifle. To land your missile on a city.” But according to Pry, an EMP attack takes a different approach:

If you put a satellite in orbit it follows a different trajectory. It doesn’t have accuracy, but it puts the satellite up there, so it stays in permanent orbit — so it looks different in terms of the trajectory. And guys watching their radar screens tend not to get alarmed when they see a missile being launched on that satellite trajectory. Because they assume it’s for peaceful purposes.

So, the idea was to put a nuclear weapon on a satellite. Launch it on a satellite trajectory toward the south, so it’s flying away from the United States. Orbit it over the South Pole, and come up on the other side of the Earth so that it approaches us from the South. Because we didn’t during the Cold War — and even today we still don’t — have ballistic missile early radar warnings looking South. We don’t have any national missile defenses to the South; we’re blind and defenseless to the South. We can’t see anything coming from that direction. Then when this gets over the United States, you light it off so it does an EMP attack.

The [Russians] were mainly interested in paralyzing our strategic forces, our strategic command-and-control and communications so that we couldn’t talk to our forces. Maybe take out some of the forces themselves. And that would give them time to then launch their mass attack across the North Pole to blow up our ICBMs. So, kill them once with the EMP. Kill them twice by blasting our bases by using their long-range missiles. That was the Russian plan. But the cutting edge of the plan was this surprise EMP attack.

Because as Pry says, North Korea “doesn’t have enough weapons or sophisticated missiles to blow up our missile bases and bomber bases. What they seem to be doing with the satellites is the EMP part of the Soviet plan.” According to the Korea Times newspaper, the April 29 test of a North Korean missile may actually not have been a failure because it detonated at a height of 45 miles — the optimum burst height of an EMP weapon.

Tetsuro Kosaka, a writer for the Japanese Nikkei stock exchange, stated, “Pyongyang could be saying, ‘We could launch an electromagnetic pulse attack if things get really ugly.'” Pry said that “The April 29 missile launch looks suspiciously like practice for an EMP attack. The missile was fired on a lofted trajectory — to maximize, not range — and climbed to high-altitude as quickly as possible, where it was successfully fused and detonated — testing everything but an actual nuclear warhead.”

While the government may be highly aware of what’s necessary to be done in the eventuality of an EMP attack, it seems clear that next to none of such steps have been taken thus far. Suffice it to say that it seems only very recently that most members of Congress (and hopefully President Trump) are awakening to the possibility that North Korea and/or other states may be realistically planning devastating EMP attacks.

While nuclear blasts close to the Earth are certainly terrifying, in terms of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the non-nuclear categories of weapons such as EMPs have the potential for much greater harm in the long-term than conventional atomic bomb attacks.

This is an area that needs to be addressed from both a military and civil defense perspective as soon as possible; whether such a timeline allows for adequate protection against a North Korean threat of this type is unknown, but for the moment, the answer would seem to be “No.”

~ American Liberty Report


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