Is North Korea Secretly Planning An EMP Attack?
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.
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is the chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission. Speaking on this reporter’s talk radio program, 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.
Pry was referring to the KMS 3-2 and KMS-4 earth observation satellites launched by North Korea in April 2012 and February 2016 respectively.
He warned: “They are positioning themselves as sort of a nuclear missile age, cyberage version of the battleship diplomacy in my view. So that they can always have one of them [satellites] very close to being over the United States or over the United States.
“Then if a crisis comes up and if we decide to attack North Korea, Kim Jong Un can threaten our president and say, ‘Well, don’t do that because we are going to burn your whole country down.’ Which is basically what he said. I mean, he 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.”
“If you wanted to win a New Korean war,” added Pry, “one of the things you would certainly consider doing is taking out the United States homeland itself.”
Pry surmised the North Koreans may be taking the idea from a Soviet plan 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.
Pry spotlighted recent North Korean nuclear and missile tests minimized by the news media for reported failures. When viewed through the lens of potential preparations for an EMP attack, Pry warned, the tests were actually successes.
Pry wrote about some of those tests in a Newsmax piece last week: “On April 30, South Korean officials told The Korea Times and YTN TV that North Korea’s test of a medium-range missile on April 29 was not a failure, as widely reported in the world press, because it was deliberately detonated at 72 kilometers altitude. 72 kilometers is the optimum burst height for a 10-Kt warhead making an EMP attack.”
“The April 29 missile launch looks suspiciously like practice for an EMP attack,” Pry wrote. “The missile was fired on a lofted trajectory, to maximize, not range, but climbing to high-altitude as quickly as possible, where it was successfully fused and detonated – testing everything but an actual nuclear warhead.”
Comey Refuses To Comment On Loretta Lynch Document
During last Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI oversight, FBI Director James B. Comey refused to publicly address significant questions about the reported existence of a document written by a Democratic operative allegedly indicating Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have protected Hillary Clinton in the e-mail probe.
According to a report last month in the New York Times, the FBI had information that the alleged Lynch document had been hacked by Russian intelligence, leading Comey to fear that Moscow could leak the document to call into question the independence of the U.S. government’s Clinton email probe.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) questioned Comey about the purported document. Each time, Comey refused to answer the question, saying he can only address the matter in a classified setting.
Last month, the New York Times reported on the alleged document. The newspaper described “a document written by a Democratic operative that seemed – at least in the eyes of Mr. Comey and his aides – to raise questions about [Lynch’s] independence.”
The newspaper wrote: “During Russia’s hacking campaign against the United States, intelligence agencies could peer, at times, into Russian networks and see what had been taken. Early last year, F.B.I. agents received a batch of hacked documents, and one caught their attention.
“The document, which has been described as both a memo and an email, was written by a Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far, according to several former officials familiar with the document.
“Read one way, it was standard Washington political chatter. Read another way, it suggested that a political operative might have insight into Ms. Lynch’s thinking.”
The Times reported that concern about Russia releasing the allegedly hacked document changed the calculus of Comey’s thinking and led him to take the public lead instead of Lynch’s Justice Department in how to handle the Clinton e-mail probe.