EMP Nuclear OPTION by North Korea against the United States; Don't look up, they're too far up to see, but they are two nuclear EMP weapons working above the United States, designed to kill millions of Americans;
North Korean terrorism against the United States has been going on for decades, helped along by China and Russia, and even Bill Clinton, the winning cards of battle are above us today.
“We should not be tolerating the North Korean satellites that are orbiting over our country. There are two of them. And the intelligence community is still silent about those,” said Pry.
The expert was referring to the KMS 3-2 and KMS-4 earth observation satellites launched by North Korea in April 2012 and February 2016 respectively. The KSM-4 was launched one month after North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, prompting a debate about sanctions at the United Nations Security Council.
Nuclear (NEMP) and high altitude nuclear (HEMP) A nuclear EMP is the abrupt pulse of electromagnetic radiation resulting from a nuclear explosion. ... The intense gamma radiation emitted can also ionize the surrounding air, creating a secondary EMP as the atoms of air first lose their electrons and then regain them
“The EMP Commission has officially been warning about those satellites especially now that the (intelligence) community admits that North Korea can miniaturize warheads,” Pry stated. “Our argument all along has been that they could make weapons small enough to put on those satellites that pass over the United States on the optimum trajectory for an EMP attack on North America.”
“And they would obviously be a basis for a surprise EMP attack if North Korea wants to commit aggression against South Korea. Or to blackmail us if we were going to intervene to deliver on our security guarantees for Japan, South Korea or the Pacific.”
A few seconds after 11 p.m. on July 9, 1962, streetlights on
the Hawaiian island of Oahu blinked out. About 300 went out in total, but,
happily, it didn't matter.
The skies over Hawaii were lit up nearly as bright
as day for the same reason that the streetlights stopped working: The test of a
thermonuclear weapon nearly 1,500 kilometers away over Johnston Atoll.
The streetlights were knocked out not by the explosion or by
the shock wave of the blast.
They were rendered inoperative after getting hit
by an electro-magnetic pulse created by the detonation.
Electro-magnetic pulse damage was a topic of conversation in
both of the Republican debates on Thursday night. Rick Santorum, one-third of
the warm-up debate, warned of the possibility of an EMP being used as a weapon,
a "devastating explosion" that would "fry out" anything
with a circuit board.
"Everything is gone," he said. "Cars stop.
Planes fall out of the sky." If Iran got a nuclear bomb, he warned, they
could explode one in the atmosphere over the United States and break every
phone, car, computer and anything else electronic underneath.
During the main debate, Ben Carson raised the same issue.
"[W]e have enemies who are obtaining nuclear weapons that they can explode
in our exoatmosphere and destroy our electric grid," he said, adding,
"Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue at that point?"
You've probably seen the aftermath of an EMP in popular
culture. Remember in "Ocean's 11," when they gang needed to shut
power off in Las Vegas to break into the casino's vault? They used an EMP,
hidden in the back of a cargo van. Or in "Broken Arrow" -- an EMP
knocks a helicopter out of the sky.
That's fiction, though. That's not how it works. And as it
turns out, the scenarios proposed by Santorum and Carson are pretty close to
fiction, too.
Dr. Yousaf Butt is a senior research fellow at National
Defense University who has written about the threat posed by EMPs. Such as it
is. When we spoke by phone on Friday, Butt didn't seem particularly alarmed at
the idea that Iran was planning to incapacitate every car on Interstate 80.
"I'm not trying to minimize the vulnerability. The
vulnerability is there," Butt said. "I'm just saying the threat, if
it's being cast as a rogue nation or a terrorist trying to do this, it seems
like a difficult way for them to achieve harm."
Here's why. An EMP requires a very specific combination of
things coming together in order to be effective. It requires a nuclear
explosion with a payload of "hundreds of kilotons or megatons," per
Butt -- substantially larger than the recent test in North Korea, for example.
It requires a missile that can deliver the bomb to a precise point in the
atmosphere. And it requires a willingness to bear the brunt of the action.
When a nuclear explosion occurs in the atmosphere, it gives
off gamma rays. Those gamma rays hit nearby atoms, knocking loose their electrons.
When that happens, the electrons give off a radio pulse. The gamma rays and
electrons and radio pulses travel toward the ground essentially at the speed of
light, and when they arrive, electric circuits in our devices -- phones, chips
in cars, etc. -- act as antennas for the pulse. "It deposits energy very
quickly," Butt said. "It has a lot of power in a very short timescale
and that heat cannot be dissipated, so it in effect fries the
electronics."
It's sort of like this, where the tennis balls are the radio
pulses. The dog's doing alright at first, and then he isn't.
There are different types of pulses, we'll note. What's
described above is an E1 pulse. It happens almost instantly after the
explosion; it's what happened to Oahu's streetlights. There's also an E3 pulse,
which arrives substantially later and does damage to electrical infrastructure
like transformers. And, as you might expect, there's E2, which is slower than
an E1 and essentially acts like lightning -- making it less risky, since many
electronic systems are capable of handling lightning surges.
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What's important about how it works is that it dictates
where the explosion needs to happen. Too high, and the process of dislodging
electrons can't work. Too low, and the area that's affected is smaller. In this
illustration from a 1989 assessment of the Oahu incident, you can see how the
Johnston Atoll test, named "Starfish Prime," affected the Hawaiian
Islands hundreds of miles away. Had it been lower, the energy would have hit
the ground before reaching Hawaii.
So Iran or a terrorist would need a missile capable of
delivering a large bomb to a precise point in the sky. As Butt wrote for Space
Review in 2010, that's just not feasible. Rogue nations don't have nuclear
capabilities of that kind or, according to Butt, the means of delivering them.
If such a strike were to happen tomorrow, with a newly-built hydrogen bomb on a
new type of missile, whoever launched it would be relying on an awful lot of
luck that everything would go right. And it wouldn't take us long to figure out
who did it.
Anyway, if you want to damage the United States, it's far
easier to drop a nuclear bomb in the middle of Manhattan than to detonate it in
the atmosphere. "Putting yourself in the mindframe of a terrorist that
just wants to cause harm," Butt said, "it doesn't make much
sense."
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He agrees with Santorum, though, that we should indeed
harden our infrastructural systems. But not because of a nuclear threat.
Because of the Sun.
Pry said the satellites are orbiting at the “optimum height for putting an EMP field over all 48 contiguous United States.”
Pry warned that deploying satellites for the purpose of an EMP option against the U.S. “is exactly the kind of thing that he (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un) would do. It would make strategic sense to do it. We do know that Kim Jong Un is a risk-taker.”
Pry surmised that the North Koreans may be utilizing the satellites for an attack plan pioneered by the Soviets during the Cold War to attack the U.S. with an EMP as part of a larger surprise assault aimed at crippling the U.S. military.
Unlike the Soviet plan, Pry opined, the North Koreans may be seeking to use an EMP attack to target “our electrical grid and our civilian critical infrastructure. And they only need one weapon to do that.”
Pry continued:
The North Koreans basically I think got this idea from the Russians. They had called it the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System. … The idea was that you would use a peaceful space launch vehicle to launch what would appear to look like a peaceful satellite. And it would even fly away from us on a South Polar trajectory so that it wasn’t coming toward the United States. But it would really be a nuclear weapon. And the reason it would come up from the south is because we don’t have any ballistic missile early warning radars facing the south and no interceptors. We are blind and defenseless from the South.
The first thing we would know is when the [North Korean] satellite detonated at high altitude over the United States at about three hundred kilometers which is the orbit of these satellites. The optimum height for putting an EMP field over all 48 contiguous United States. In the Soviet plan, the idea was to paralyze command and control, our bombers, our missiles so that they would then be able to launch a massive disarming strike that would then come across the North Pole and strike us. The North Koreans don’t have enough missiles to do something like that, and their object is not to paralyze our strategic forces as much as it would be to kill our people.
Pry faulted the U.S. intelligence community for its supposed silence on the threat. “This is such an act of irresponsibility for both the intelligence community and … the mainstream media. To leave the American people pretty much in the dark about this. Because if we did get an international crisis where we were gearing up to intervene on our security guarantees it would be an enormous shock for people.”
He added: “People will be psychologically unprepared for that at all levels of the government from the president all the way down to the man on the street. So, the failure to at least talk about this possibility is actually helping our enemy
