A security expert is warning that North Korea could be planning to launch an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, attack on the U.S.
A security expert is warning that North Korea could be planning to launch an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the U.S.
Breitbart is reporting that Dr. Peter Vincent Pry with the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a privately-funded group focused on EMPs and other security threats to America, made the comments on 'Aaron Klein Investigative Radio' program Sunday.
Pry said in reference to two North Korean satellites, “They are positioning themselves as sort of a nuclear missile age, cyberage version of the battleship diplomacy in my view.”
He is also quoted as saying that “[North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un] has made threats about turning the United States into ashes and he connected the satellite program to this in public statements to deter us from attacking.”
According to Pry, the target would likely be the electrical grid which, as The Atlantic explained in 2011, is a common theory among other EMP believers like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The idea is that an enemy group could launch a nuclear missile in the atmosphere over the U.S., and the explosion’s aftermath could take out everything electrical, disabling society completely.
Others, like former CIA Director James Woolsey and former NASA engineer Jim Oberg, have also sounded the alarm about the threat of an EMP attack against the U.S.
However, Jeffrey Lewis with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies played down the likelihood of such an event happening, telling NPR last month that it is “the favorite nightmare scenario of a small group of very dedicated people.”
The NPR report pointed out that EMPs are real, but tests conducted by the U.S. military in 1962 and more recent ones have found that the damage after an EMP detonation was relatively minimal.
