TEL AVIV – While the international community and news media focus on North Korean missile tests and the country’s nuclear program, one expert warned on Sunday that North Korea may be secretly assembling the capability to take out significant parts of the U.S. homeland via an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.
.. Pry pointed to two North Korean satellites that are currently orbiting the U.S. at trajectories he says are optimized for a surprised EMP attack.
.. But if you put a satellite in orbit it follows a different trajectory. It doesn’t have accuracy but it puts the satellite up there so that it stays in permanent orbit so it looks different in terms of the trajectory. And guys watching their radar screens tend not to get alarmed when they see a missile being launched on that satellite trajectory. Because they assume it is for peaceful purposes. …
So, the idea was to put a nuclear weapon on a satellite. Launch it on a satellite trajectory toward the south so it is also flying away from the United States. Orbit it over the South Pole and come up on the other side of the earth so that it approaches us from the south.
Because we didn’t during the Cold War and even today we still don’t have ballistic missile early radar warnings looking south. We don’t have any national missile defenses to the south. We are blind and defenseless to the south. We can’t see anything coming from that direction. Then when this gets over the United States you light it off so that it does an EMP attack.
.. “I think what they are mainly going for is the unhardened electric grid,” Pry surmised. “Transportation, communications, all of the other civilian critical infrastructure that we depend upon to keep our population alive.”
.. “I think what they are mainly going for is the unhardened electric grid,” Pry surmised. “Transportation, communications, all of the other civilian critical infrastructure that we depend upon to keep our population alive.”