North Korea's Newest Threat, The EMP, Could Cripple U.S.

The news on North Korea’s nuclear program gets more troubling for Americans each day, but the rogue country’s weapons are not the only worry for the U.S., according to a Fox News report.

For the first time, the KCNA news agency warned, Kim Jong un can inflict another kind of damage – striking the U.S. with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) onslaught, a threat experts say is very real and would have catastrophic consequences.

“The biggest danger would be shorting out of the power grid, especially on the East Coast.” – Harry Kazianis,  Director of Defense Studies at the Center for the National Interest

“Imagine a situation where large sections of the U.S. had no power,” he added, “Imagine New York or Washington D.C. with no power for just a week. The implications would be hard to fathom. The casualty rates would be off the charts.”

An EMP, Kazianis said, delivered by a nuclear weapon would not just burn out power grids, but also carry the destructive power of an atomic device, the report said.

“That in it of itself is going to kill thousands if not millions depending on the size of it and where it is dropped. Also, nuclear weapons carry radioactive fallout that would be spread thousands of miles through the atmosphere and oceans,” he continued. “We would be adding to such a casualty count sadly for decades thanks to cancer cases that would arise many years later.”

So how could North Korea pull off an EMP attack? A hydrogen bomb detonated at a high altitude would create an electromagnetic pulse that would knock out key infrastructure – namely prominent parts of the U.S. electrical grid, Fox News reported.

The higher the bomb’s detonation, the report said, the wider the range of destruction. An altitude of just under 250 miles would annihilate electronics in majority of the mainland, including parts of neighboring Canada and Mexico, analysts have said. North Korea exhibited its capacity to reach such altitudes in satellite launches in both 2012 and 2016.

“An EMP is similar to a lightning strike in some respects, but it acts over a wide area – hundreds of miles,” John Gilbert, a retired Air Force colonel and senior science fellow with the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in Washington, D.C. explained to Fox News.

“There would be widespread and probably long-lasting power outages and wire-line telecommunications systems such as telephone and TV/internet cable would suffer serious damage,” Gilbert said. 

“Individual items such as cars and trucks could also be damaged or disabled and damage could occur to electronic devices in homes and businesses,” he told Fox News.

Source: AFP