Tick, Tock: EMP War Looms

If you want to cry after WannaCry ransomware attacked FedEx in the United States, hospitals in Britain, and telecommunications networks in Spain last Friday, you’ll want to bawl when North Korea hits the U.S. with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Let’s not go there.

Congressional reports and most security experts agree that America’s adversaries—from developed nations like China and Russia to dictatorships like Iran and North Korea—prefer to target our country with a triple threat combination of cyberattacks, physical damage and EMP. And EMP is the greatest threat of the three.

A unique menace in that it can occur naturally (via a geomagnetic storm) or by man (via the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon), EMP is a rapid acceleration of particles that creates a high-power burst of electromagnetic energy.

Electromagnetic pulse attack on Hawaii would devastate the state

On July 9, 1962, Hawaii was hit by a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, which within minutes took down the state’s communications systems and traffic lights — virtually everything that ran on electricity.

The EMP wasn’t an attack by a foreign government; rather the U.S. government had set off a 1.4-megaton nuclear warhead at a height of 248 miles above Johnston Atoll in an operation the military named “Starfish Prime.” The test caused radio disruptions in Hawaii, California, and Alaska, and knocked out six satellites above the Pacific.

Is the US prepared for a nuclear EMP to shut down New York City?

Since Sept. 11, 2001, analysts have been increasingly concerned terrorists might steal, buy, build, or be given a nuclear weapon—and the War on Terrorism would become a nuclear war. The Department of Homeland Security’s National Planning Scenario #1 is detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, in a location such as New York City or Washington, D.C.

Many experts warn an act of nuclear terrorism is not a question of if, but when.