Analyst's note:  This article provides an interesting, if not troubling, counter-point to what we now hear on the evening news and from this untrustworthy administration regarding the matter of North Korea and the all out war they recently announced on America.  Think about our national circumstances and the possibility of yet another war with Messrs. Barack Hussein Obama acting as President, Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and John Kerry, Secretary of State "leading" this nation in such matters.  To top it off we have John Brennan now leading the CIA.  This alone should be enough to make you uneasy.

An electromagnetic threat is in my opinion the greatest strategic threat we have to this nation ... it can come from nature or by man.  A single electromagnetic pulse could disable the entire United States, destroy America's critical infrastructure and reduce the US to a state of starvation and anarchy overnight. I highly recommend you read The Club-K: A Deadly Pandoras Box of Cruise Missiles  and do an internal site search on the term "Electromagnetic Pulse".  You will also want to read America has AT MOST 33 mins from launch to impact: Then total silence by The Heritage Foundation and A Game-Changing Weapon ... ~90% dead in months

For additional perspective I recommend

War clouds gathering over East-China Sea?

A Nation Forsaken - EMP: The Escalating Threat of an American Catastrophe

NASA: Cosmic 'super storm' more crippling than 20 Katrinas

EMP could leave '9 out of 10 Americans dead''Huge threat to power grid'

EMP threatens power shutdown for months

Plan to protect D.C. from nuke EMP attack

U.S. still naked to EMP attack

Scientist to Congress: U.S. risks 'catastrophe' in nuke EMP attack

Congress examines EMP threat

Iran '1 step' from atomic bomb

Iranian missiles can carry nukes

Ahmadinejad to Iranians: Israel 'will be removed'

'Atomic Iran' warnings prove accurate

Iran leader: Islam to 'rule the world'

Iran leader's messianic end-times mission

Iran to resume uranium enrichment

Iran military journal eyes nuclear EMP attack on U.S.

Iran plans to knock out U.S. with 1 nuclear bomb

North Korea is threatening to destroy the United States with a nuclear missile strike.  Yet there appears to be a consensus among the Obama administration and Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees that such an attack is beyond the capabilities of North Korea.  The American people are being assured by their political leaders every night on every news channel not to worry about the possibility of North Korea making a nuclear attack on the U.S. mainland.

At this dangerous juncture, it may be useful to remember Pearl Harbor and some other lessons from history.   

On December 7, 1941, Imperial Japan delivered a devastating attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.  Prior to the attack, President Roosevelt's administration imposed economic sanctions on Japan, intended to cripple Japanese aggression against China, and dismissed bellicose protests from Tokyo as empty rhetoric.  The U.S. Navy was confident that it could prevail over Japan in any conflict because the U.S. had more battleships.  But Japan's innovative use of aircraft carriers, a decisive new military technology underestimated by the U.S. Admiralty, enabled Tokyo to sink U.S. battleships in their crushing attack on Pearl Harbor, achieving strategic and technological surprise.

Congressional hearings on the military and intelligence blunders that led to Pearl Harbor informed the National Security Act of 1947 that established the Central Intelligence Agency.  Everyone agreed that the United States could not afford another Pearl Harbor in the nuclear age.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Intelligence Community has a long history of underestimating the nuclear capabilities of potential adversaries, and even of friendly states too.  The CIA was taken by surprise by the first Soviet A-bomb test in 1948, by the USSR's H-bomb test in 1953, and by Soviet development of the first intercontinental missile and satellite launch in 1957.  Israel and South Africa both developed nuclear arsenals without nuclear testing--in Israel's case a highly sophisticated nuclear arsenal--right under the nose of the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Not until the defection of Israeli nuclear weapons expert Mordechai Vanunu did we learn, as reported by the respected Wisconsin Project, that Israel has developed miniaturized nuclear warheads for delivery by missiles and artillery, powerful thermonuclear warheads, and neutron warheads--all without nuclear testing.  The U.S.  Intelligence Community was surprised by nuclear tests and rapid weaponization by Pakistan and India in 1998.  The U.S. Intelligence Community was surprised to discover that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was only six months away from developing an atomic bomb when the U.S. defeated Iraq in the First Persian Gulf War.  This intelligence failure may account for U.S. intelligence overestimation of Iraq's nuclear weapons program that contributed to the Second Persian Gulf War in 2003.

 

[....] Whose ox gets gored if the CIA tells Congress that North Korea can make a long-range nuclear EMP attack against the United States today?  Acknowledging North Korea as a fully fledged nuclear weapons state would discredit the Obama administration's hope that Pyongyang might eventually be persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons by a combination of sanctions and negotiations.  Failure of such policies to disarm North Korea would also explode their credibility as a realistic means of denying nuclear weapons to Iran, as promised by the White House.  If the Intelligence Community has underestimated the nuclear threat from North Korea, how can we have confidence in their estimate that Iran is a year or more away from crossing the "nuclear redline"?  Finally, President Obama's dream of achieving Global Zero, a world without nuclear weapons, already seems dangerously naive, and logically should be replaced with modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent to cope with the twin nightmares of a nuclear armed North Korea and Iran.        

Congress should, at minimum, launch a new Congressional Commission to make a more realistic assessment of the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, before faulty intelligence and wishful thinking misleads America into a nuclear Pearl Harbor.

 

 

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both Congressional Advisory Boards, and served on the Congressional EMP Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA. He is author of Apocalypse Unknown: The Struggle To Protect America From An Electromagnetic Pulse Catastrophe and Electric Armageddon, both available from CreateSpace.com and Amazon.com