AGAIN, THE DREADED LETTERS – EMP –  AT 10:51 A.M. ET:  There is renewed concern about the ability of North Korea to launch an EMP attack on the United States, which could devastate us as a functioning nation for months.  From Fox:   

For more than 15 years, security and intelligence officials — including former CIA Director James Woolsey — have been raising the alarm bells about the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Only now as tensions with North Korea quickly escalate — with the rogue nation refusing to back down from its nuclear testing and threats of such an onslaught — is the matter really generating attention.

But according to U.S. defense and security officials, while there are players purporting to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure given millions of American lives on the line, the reality is that no one really knows what will happen and what can be done.

“We recognize that an EMP event would have extremely dire consequences for the entire country, but where the challenge comes is in attempting to quantify those impacts,” one high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official, who requested anonymity, told Fox News. “This is not something we have had a lot of real world experience with.”

Earlier this month, state news agencies in the Kim Jong Un-dictated country explicitly cautioned that it could hit the U.S. with an EMP offensive. A hydrogen bomb detonated at a high altitude would create an EMP that potentially could abolish prominent parts of the electrical grid. The higher the bomb’s detonation, the wider the scope of destruction. And given that high-altitude nuclear tests were prohibited as per a 1963 treaty, from the U.S. side, there is little scientific data to understand the devastation of a detonation on modern infrastructure.

COMMENT:  We should prepare for the worst, but probably won't.  This issue first surfaced seriously in the early 1990s.  Since then, we have become a nation almost entirely dependent on computers, so the electric grid is only one of our worries. 

Does North Korea have the capacity to launch an EMP attack?  It would require the ability to send a missile, with a nuclear warhead, high above this country, and explode the warhead at that high altitude.  The electro-magnetic pulse that results could, according to the theory, destroy our electric grid and melt our computer circuits. 

Congress should hold a new set of hearings on the problem, primarily to publicize it and get public and Congressional attention.

September 26, 2017