Posted 04/04/2013 06:55 PM ET
National Security: The administration moves an advanced missile defense system to Guam because it knows a single low-yield nuke detonated at high altitude could send America back in time a hundred years.
The announcement Wednesday by the Defense Department that it would soon deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD), a missile defense system inherited from the Bush administration, to Guam underscores the seriousness of the threat from North Korea, whose actions, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel rightly said, "present a real and clear danger."
This move comes after the Obama administration reversed its previous scuttling of Bush administration plans to increase our ground-based interceptor force in Alaska and the deployment of two destroyers equipped with Aegis missile defense systems, the Decatur and the John McCain, to the region.
Some observers dismissed it as familiar bluster when North Korea's 28-year-old raging runt, Kim Jong-un, signed an order for North Korea's strategic rocket forces to be on standby to fire at U.S. targets in front of a map that included Austin, Texas, as a target.
But other observers are concerned that a specific target may not be what the possibly imploding North Korean regime may have in mind.
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.
Thankfully, the Obama administration seems to be taking the North Korean threat seriously.
Even more thankfully, it has those "billion-dollar destroyers," alleged "Cold War" relics like the B-2 and "Star Wars" weapons like THAAD developed by prior presidential administrations to rely on.
The announcement Wednesday by the Defense Department that it would soon deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD), a missile defense system inherited from the Bush administration, to Guam underscores the seriousness of the threat from North Korea, whose actions, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel rightly said, "present a real and clear danger."
This move comes after the Obama administration reversed its previous scuttling of Bush administration plans to increase our ground-based interceptor force in Alaska and the deployment of two destroyers equipped with Aegis missile defense systems, the Decatur and the John McCain, to the region.
Some observers dismissed it as familiar bluster when North Korea's 28-year-old raging runt, Kim Jong-un, signed an order for North Korea's strategic rocket forces to be on standby to fire at U.S. targets in front of a map that included Austin, Texas, as a target.
But other observers are concerned that a specific target may not be what the possibly imploding North Korean regime may have in mind.
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.
Thankfully, the Obama administration seems to be taking the North Korean threat seriously.
Even more thankfully, it has those "billion-dollar destroyers," alleged "Cold War" relics like the B-2 and "Star Wars" weapons like THAAD developed by prior presidential administrations to rely on.
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