emp (3)

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                                   HOW NORTH KOREA COULD DESTROY U.S. WTH SINGLE NUKE 

                                                                                     By     

                                                                       Daniel John Sobieski

 

As both Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has stated, the Clinton-Obama era of “strategic patience” with North Korea is over. The usual suspects in the mainstream media have been warning that Trump is provoking Pyongyang into war on the Korean peninsula. The counter is that the administration isn’t willing to wait till North Korea ha the operational capability to nuke an American city like Seattle or Honolulu.

What is not being discussed is a much bigger and more imminent threat which makes action imperative, an existential one for the United States. 

The nightmare scenario of an America sent back centuries in time before electricity, refrigeration, and smart phones has grown unnervingly closer with the presence of two North Korean satellites with orbits over a blissfully unaware American populace and an Obama administration indifferent that was to the apocalyptic threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

On Feb. 7, 2016, North Korea launched a second satellite, the KMS-4, to join their KMS-3 satellite launched in December of 2012. In an article in the Washington Times on April 24, 2016, R. James Woolsey,  former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Peter Vincent Fry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security as well as director of the Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, warned of the dangers of an apocalyptic EMP attack that these and similar satellites pose:

Both satellites now are in south polar orbits, evading many U.S. missile defense radars and flying over the United States from the south, where our defenses are limited. Both satellites — if nuclear armed — could make an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could blackout the U.S. electric grid for months or years, thereby killing millions.

Technologically, such an EMP attack is easy — since the weapon detonates at high-altitude, in space, no shock absorbers, heat shield, or vehicle for atmospheric re-entry is necessary. Since the radius of the EMP is enormous, thousands of kilometers, accuracy matters little. Almost any nuclear weapon will do.

Moreover, North Korea probably has nuclear weapons specially designed, not to make a big explosion, but to emit lots of gamma rays to generate high-frequency EMP. Senior Russian generals warned EMP Commissioners in 2004 that their EMP nuclear warhead design leaked “accidentally” to North Korea, and unemployed Russian scientists found work in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Woolsey and Pry, along with former Reagan science adviser William R. Graham, chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, Ambassador Henry Cooper, director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief negotiator at the Defense and Space Talks with the USSR; and Fritz Ermarth, chairman of the National Intelligence Council; warned of the North Korean EMP threat an article in the February 12, 2016, issue of National Review:

Naïve reliance on their transparent disavowals could end up costing millions of American lives.

North Korea launched its second satellite on Saturday, yet the national press continues to ignore this existential threat. The White House has not recognized that a nuclear-armed North Korea has demonstrated an ability to kill most Americans with an electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack. And White House spokesmen and the media have misled the public with unjustified assurances that North Korea has not yet miniaturized nuclear warheads for missile or satellite delivery.

We, who have spent our professional lifetimes analyzing and defending against nuclear-missile threats, warned years ago that North Korea’s Unha-3 space launch vehicle could carry a small nuclear warhead and detonate it a hundred or so miles over the United States to create an EMP, leading to a protracted nationwide blackout. The resulting societal chaos could kill millions.

The image of an America gone dark, an America suddenly transported from an era of IPads to an era of horse and buggy travel, recently depicted in the NBC series “Revolution” is not science fiction but a very real possibility.  As Investor’s Business Daily described the threat in an aptly titled April, 2013 editorial, “How North Korea Could Destroy The United States”:

The three-stage missile North Korea launched last December that also orbited a “package,” which experts say could be a test to orbit a nuclear weapon that then would be de-orbited on command anywhere over the U.S. and exploded at a high altitude, releasing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). That would fry electronic circuitry and the nation’s power grid.

This concern recently has been reinforced by a little-publicized study released in May 2011, titled “In the Dark: Military Planning for a Catastrophic Critical Infrastructure Event,” by the U.S. Army War College that said a nuclear detonation at altitude above a U.S. city could wipe out the electrical grid for hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles around.

The satellite launched by Pyongyang coincided with a third round of nuclear tests described as a “nuclear test of a higher level,” most likely referring to a device made from highly enriched uranium, which is easier to miniaturize than the plutonium bombs North Korea tested in 2006 and 2009, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea.

Such an EMP device would not have to be particularly high yield. It would not be designed to create a big explosion, but to convert its energy into gamma rays, that generate the EMP effect.

Any nuclear weapon detonated above an altitude of 30 kilometers will generate an electromagnetic pulse that will destroy electronics and could collapse the electric power grid and other critical infrastructures — communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water — that sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.

As the Heritage Foundation reports, an EMP attack with a warhead detonated warhead 25 to 300 miles above the U.S. mainland “would fundamentally change the world. Airplanes would fall from the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services, and even cyberspace would collapse.”

Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world’s only superpower and the world’s largest economy, would come to a screeching halt as a country dependent on cutting-edge 21st century technology regresses in time almost a century instantaneously.

North Korean has also been working on a submarine launched ballistic missile,  which would put the continental U.S. with striking distance. While North Korean submarines are not yet that sophisticated as our ballistic missile submarine fleet, it would only take a sub modified to launch a single missile, or even one launched fromm a disguised container cargo ship off our West Coast to pose an apocalyptic threat.

As Woolsey and Pry note in the March 29 edition of The Hill, the threat of North Korean sending the U.S. back to the Stone Age is real and imminent:

The mainstream media, and some officials who should know better, continue to allege North Korea does not yet have capability to deliver on its repeated threats to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. False reassurance is given to the American people that North Korea has not “demonstrated” that it can miniaturize a nuclear warhead small enough for missile delivery, or build a reentry vehicle for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of penetrating the atmosphere to blast a U.S. city.

Yet any nation that has built nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, as North Korea has done, can easily overcome the relatively much simpler technological challenge of warhead miniaturization and reentry vehicle design….

…on October 7, 2015, (Admiral William) Gortney again warned the Atlantic Council: "I agree with the intelligence community that we assess that they [North Koreans] have the ability, they have the weapons, and they have the ability to miniaturize those weapons, and they have the ability to put them on a rocket that can range the [U.S.] homeland."

 In February and March of 2015, former senior national security officials of the Reagan and Clinton administrations warned that North Korea should be regarded as capable of delivering by satellite a small nuclear warhead, specially designed to make a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the United States. According to the Congressional EMP Commission, a single warhead delivered by North Korean satellite could blackout the national electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures for over a year—killing 9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse.

Deploying THJAAD missile defense systems in South Korea and Alaska, developed under Republican administrations, is a start, but more force or other moves might be necessary.  Fortunately, unlike President Obama,

President Trump is unwilling to keep  whistling past our own graveyard.

 

          Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.               

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ADMIN

by: Pat Henry

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I have been asked before by friends how I got started with prepping. It seems the concept can be pretty daunting at first for some people. I can understand how it is when you start to think of the literally hundreds of important items that you need to consider for your family. My first list of “needs” took up an entire sheet of paper. On first glance, this undertaking can appear to be a giant behemoth and some people throw their hands up immediately and give in. I have heard excuses from not having enough money to not knowing where to start. While I agree that some prepper items require money (sometimes a lot!) often there are alternatives in to spending a ton of money, but knowing where to start should never be an issue.

The uncertainty of knowing where to begin could stem from the motivation that is driving you toward emergency preparedness. If your desire to be prepared is driven by some external threat that seems real and tangible like living in Tornado Alley, the place to start might be easier to find. If the motivation to be more prepared is due to what I would call common sense; which is telling you to be prepared for anything, the sense of urgency being lower in some cases might make the choices about where to start and what to do more complex.

POLL: Is Common Core indoctrination or education?

In this article, which will broken into a few different parts,  I will try to lay out what I consider is a basic guideline for how to start prepping with a list of areas that I have placed in order of importance. This is just an example of one methodology, but your personal needs, resources or experience might shuffle some of these around. This list was designed for the perspective of the person who is brand spanking new to prepping and is looking for a template of sorts they can follow to get their homes prepared for most emergency situations listed above (within reason). This does not address bugging out but is designed primarily for sheltering in place. My wife loves lists and something like this breaks everything into nice little chunks that is easier to digest and then she can cross off one at a time, so this type of list is designed for people like her.

Step 1 – Priorities

First things first, before you do anything it is important to understand a few things. This is also known as “So you want to be prepared, now what?” For me, it started with a gut feeling for lack of a better word back in 2008. I have said before that I believe someone was trying to get my attention so I started to listen. There was no driving natural threat like earthquakes or hurricanes, wildfires or mudslides that prompted me. I do not worry about the poles shifting too much or aliens attacking from planet Niburu (look that one up) but I did have a sense that society as we know it now is too fragile. Within this fragile society we are dependent upon systems and processes that are created to address the problem of Just in Time inventory management and if those systems break down, so does society. When society breaks down, so do people. When people break down, all hell breaks loose.  As Gerald Celente says; “(when) People Lose Everything, They Have Nothing Left to Lose, And They Lose It.”

The example that gets used pretty frequently is natural disasters so I will stick with that for a moment. Looking back at Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Katrina, the people in both of those situations saw how quickly society could come crashing down. In both Katrina and Sandy, gas shortages, grocery stores wiped clean and looting happened almost overnight. Power outages of course happened right away and within 24 hours people’s lives were turned upside down.

Now, imagine your family and what you would be faced with if you were in a similar situation. But I don’t live anywhere near the ocean you say. OK, now forget about tornadoes earthquakes, fires, nuclear meltdowns, comets with aliens living in them and all of the other natural disasters. What if there is a major fluctuation with the price of gas and the grocery stores are no longer filled by the trucks that drive down the street every day? What if the trucks were rolling, but with the high price of gas, they were only able to come half as often as they were in the past? What if there is a terrorist attack at the port of Los Angeles and shipments are delayed for months? What if there is a stupid basketball game that doesn’t go right and there is rioting on your street? What if the police declare martial law because a bad guy is running around and they prevent you from going out of your house for days or weeks?

The point I am trying to make is that there shouldn’t be one single reason you are preparing for. You should want to be prepared for anything. The chances of any one single event happening to you are too small, but the chance of something happening at all that could disrupt your life is much higher. To understand what you need to be prepared for, think less about the event that could cause disruption and more about the potential for disruption and what you would need to live comfortably through that disruption.

There is a saying called the rule of 3’s and it goes like this. A person can live 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. We will use these as a guideline for prepping going forward. In some cases, the rule of threes can drive what you need to focus on.

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ADMIN

“EMP 101” A BASIC PRIMER

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By

 
William R. Forstchen Ph.D.
 
Author of “One Second After”
 
 
 
WHAT IS AN EMP?
 
 
            EMP is shorthand for Electro Magnetic Pulse.    It is a rather unusual and frightening by-product when a nuclear bomb is detonated above the earth’s atmosphere.   We all know that our atmosphere and the magnetic field which surrounds our planet is a thin layer which not only keeps us alive, but also protects us from dangerous radiation from the sun.    On a fairly regular basis there are huge solar storms on the sun’s surface which emit powerful jets of deadly radiation.    If not for the protective layer of our atmosphere and magnetic field, those storms would fry us.    At times though, the storm is so power that enough disruptive energy reaches the earth’s surface that it drowns out radio waves and even shorts electrical power grids. . .this happened several years back in Canada.
            View the detonation of a nuclear bomb, two hundred miles straight up as the same thing, but infinitely more powerful since it is so close by.  
   
            As the bomb explodes it emits a powerful wave of gamma rays.    As this energy release hits the upper atmosphere it creates a electrical disturbance know as the Compton Effect.    The intensity is magnified.  View it as a small pebble rolling down a slope, hitting a larger one, setting that in motion, until finally you have an avalanche.
            At the speed of light this disturbance races to the earth surface.     It is not something you can see or hear, in the same way you don’t feel the electrical disturbance in the atmosphere during20a large solar storm.
   
            For all electrical systems though, it is deadly.
 
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THIS “PULSE” HITS THE SURFACE?
 
            Those who might remember ham radio operators, or even the old CB radios of the 1970s can recall that if you ran out a wire as an antenna you could send and receive a better signal.    The wire not only transmitted the very faint power of a few watts of electricity from your radio, it could receive even fainted signals in return.    As the Pulse strikes the earths surface, with a power that could range up to hundreds of amps per square yard, it will not affect you directly, at most you’ll feel a slight tingling, the s ame as when lightning is about to strike close by, and nearly all the energy will just be absorbed into the ground and dissipate.   The bad news, however, is wherever it strikes wires, metal surfaces, antennas, power lines it will now travel along those metal surfaces (in the same way a lightning bolt will always follow the metal of a lightning rod, or the power line into your house.)     The longer the wire, the more energy is absorbed, a high tension wire miles long will absorb tens of thousands of amps, and here is where the destruction begins as it slams into any delicate electronic circuits, meaning computer chips, relays, etc.    In that instant, they are overloaded by the massive energy surge, short circuit, and fry.    Your house via electric, phone and cable wires is connected, like all the rest of us into the power and communications grids.    This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays.    In far less than a milli second the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.    
 
WOULDN”T CIRCUIT BREAKERS AND SURGE PROTECTORS STOP IT?
 
            This is where the effect of EMP starts to get complex.    All electricity travels, of course, at the speed of light.    The circuit breakers that are built into our electrical system or the ones you buy to plug your own computer in to, are designed to “read’ the flow of current.    If it suddenly exceeds a certain level, the breaker snaps and takes you off line, thus protecting everything beyond it.    More than a few of us have found out that when you buy a cheap surge protector for ten or twenty bucks sure it will snap off, but the surge has already passed through and fried your expensive plasma television or new computer.    Unlike a lightning strike, or other power surge, an EMP surge is “front loaded.”   Meaning it doesn’t do a build up for a couple of mirco-seconds, allowing enough time for the circuit breaker to “read” that trouble is on the way and shut down.    It comes instead like a wall of energy, without any advance wave building up as a warning.   It therefore slams through nearly all commercial and even military surge protectors already in place, and is past the “safety barrier” and into the delicate electronics before the system has time to react.
 
WHAT ABOUT CARS?
 
 
     Here is more bad news regarding EMP.    =2 0If you own a 1965 Volkswagen bug or Mustange you’re ok. . .there are no solid state electronics under the hood, it still has an old fashion carburetor, the radio still might even have tubes rather than transistors.  However, even that is in question.   In 1962 both we and the Soviets detonated nuclear weapons in space (saber rattling during the Cuban Missile Crisis) and it is reported that a number of cars. . .their ignition systems a thousand miles away from the detonation were fried because of EMP.  (Check out a few of the more “tech head” links on this site for detailed explanations).  From about 1980 on, cars increasingly went solid state and by the 1990s were getting ever more complex computers installed.   Consider a visit to the mechanic today.  He runs a wire in under the hood, plugs it into his computer and within seconds has a full diagnostic, types in what his computer is suppose to do, the problem is solved and you are handed a rather large bill.     Great modern conveniences from airbag sensors, to fuel injectors and all of it more and more dependent on computers.    At the instant the “Pulse” strikes, the body of your car and the radio antenna will feed the overload into your vehicle’s computer and short it out.   
 
Some police departments are even now experimenting with using a specially designed bumper on their car for high speed chases.  If they can brush up against the car they are pursuing the officer just hits a button, and through his bumper a high energy surge will be released, flooding into the car being pursued and shorting out its computer system.     Result. . .whether you are being chased by the police with this new device, or an EMP burst has been fired off. . .your car will essentially be a useless hunk of metal that will slowly roll to a stop.     
In that instant, most of America will be on foot again.
 
 
AND PLANES?
 
     This is a terrifying aspect of an attack that no government report has publicly discussed along with the potential casualty rate in the first seconds after an attack.     Commercial airliners today are all computer driven.   In fact, from lift off to landing, a pilot no longer even needs to be in the cockpit, a computer can do all of it if need be.    When the pilot pulls back on the “stick” it is no longer connect by wires stretching all the way back to the tail and the elevator assembly.  Instead, his motion is read by a computer which sends a signal to an electrical servo-motor in the tail, which then moves the tail.   In short, the entire plane is computer driven.     It is estimated that at any given moment during regular business hours, somewhere between three to four thousand commercial airliners are crisscrossing the skies.  (There is a fascinating site you can find via Goggle that shows typical air traffic around the world during a twenty four hour period.  From dawn til way after dusk, the entire USA is one glowing blob of commercial flights crisscrossing our sky).   All of them would be doomed, the pilots sitting impotent, staring at blank computer screens, pulling on controls that no longer respond as the plane finally noses over and heads in. 
   
      Somewhere between 250,000 to 500,000 people will die in the first few minutes. . .more than all our battle casualties across four years of World War II.
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EMP Attack On US Would Be ‘Catastrophic,’ Congress Told: China and Russia have the Technology

An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the United States, whether manmade or naturally occurring, could result in the deaths of nine out of ten Americans through starvation, disease and the collapse of modern society, warned Dr. Vincent Peter Pry, a member of the congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. 

“A natural EMP catastrophe or nuclear EMP attack could blackout the national electric grid for months or years and collapse all the other critical infrastructures -- communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water -- necessary to sustain modern society and the lives of 310 million Americans,” Pry this week told the House Committee on Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies.

The subcommittee herd testimony from a variety of experts during a hearing to examine the potentially catastrophic impact of an EMP attack on America’s largely unsecured electrical grid and critical infrastructure.

An electromagnetic pulse is a high-intensity burst of electromagnetic energy that is capable of severely damaging or destroying the electronic systems that make modern society possible. Natural occurrences, like a solar storm, as well as manmade events like a nuclear attack, can generate EMP. Either way, the results could be devastating.

“Some would say it’s low probability, but the damage that could be caused in the event of an EMP attack, both by the sun, a solar event, or a man-made attack, would be catastrophic,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas).

In 1859, a geomagnetic storm known as the “Carrington Event” resulted in fires in telegraph stations and burnt out the just-laid transatlantic cable. Since electronic systems were not a critical component of society at the time, the event was not disastrous. Scientists estimate that the same event today would devastate essential infrastructure. They predict that we are long overdue for another geomagnetic storm, and the next one -- the first in the modern era -- would be catastrophic.

“NASA and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a blue-ribbon study independently confirming the warning of the EMP Commission about the threat posed by a great geomagnetic storm,” said Pry, a former CIA intelligence officer. “The EMP Commission and the NASA-NAS reports, and several subsequent independent studies, conclude that if a great geomagnetic storm like the 1859 Carrington Event happened today, millions could die.”

Subcommittee Vice Chairman Scott Perry (R-Penn.) said China and Russia already have the technology to launch an EMP attack, and that Iran and North Korea may also be developing EMP weapon technology.

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http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/daily-news-analysis/single-article/emp-attack-on-us-would-be-catastrophic-congress-told/1b5e33a26545ac5ebf9398f00064dc0a.html

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