According to Chairman Dr. William R. Graham and Chief of Staff Dr. Peter Vincent Pry of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack (really?) that if North Korea launched two EMP’s over the United States that 90% of all American citizens would be dead within a year.
First… I am no expert but our technology has come a long ways over the last few decades. EMP effects are nothing new to us… I find it hard to believe that we don’t have safeguards in place for this sort of attack. And even then… at least, sure, our military assets have protection from this sort of thing?
I don’t know… maybe I outta listen to the experts.
As reported by Ryan Saavedra for The Daily Wire:
Former NASA rocket scientist James Oberg visited North Korea’s Sohae space launch base, witnessed elaborate measures undertaken to conceal space launch payloads, and concludes in a 2017 article that the EMP threat from North Korea’s satellites should be taken seriously:
“…there have been fears expressed that North Korea might use a satellite to carry a small nuclear warhead into orbit and then detonate it over the United States for an EMP strike. These concerns seem extreme and require an astronomical scale of irrationality on the part of the regime. The most frightening aspect, I’ve come to realize, is that exactly such a scale of insanity is now evident in the rest of their space program.”
Graham and Pry referenced writing from Ambassador Henry Cooper – former Director of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, and a preeminent expert on missile defenses and space weapons – who has repeatedly warned U.S. officials about the threat presented by North Korea:
“U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) interceptors are designed to intercept a few North Korean ICBMs that approach the United States over the North Polar region. But current U.S. BMD systems are not arranged to defend against even a single ICBM that approaches the United States from over the South Polar region, which is the direction toward which North Korea launches its satellites… So, North Korea doesn’t need an ICBM to create this existential threat. It could use its demonstrated satellite launcher to carry a nuclear weapon over the South Polar region and detonate it…over the United States to create a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP)…The result could be to shut down the U.S. electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of up to 90 percent of all Americans—as the EMP Commission testified over eight years ago.”