"This is the apocalypse North Korea wants to unleash"

news.com.au

DAY ZERO

Nuclear weapons analyst Dr Peter Pry, who testified before a US Homeland Security committee earlier this month, says his work validates past warnings that an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack could immediately wreak nationwide havoc.

It’s a side-effect of nuclear warheads that are exploded in the ionosphere — an area high in Earth’s atmosphere filled with particles charged by the planet’s magnetic field and radiation from the Sun.

A gamma-ray pulse, produced by a nuclear blast, causes the ionosphere to ‘short-circuit’ with the ground below. And this — like a solar-flare — can bring entire economies to their knees in a few hundred nanoseconds.

The more advanced the economy, the more dramatic the effect.

The nuclear blast itself isn’t likely to kill anybody, or irradiate anything.

But up to 500,000 people would be dead within minutes.

That’s how many people are in commercial airliners in US skies at any one time.

With their avionics fried, they’d fall from the sky.

High-speed rail vehicles would cease to be guided. Cars would stall.

The lights would go out and computers would die — and so would every piece of medical equipment in a line-of-sight of the nuclear fireball, high in the sky.

Then there would be the fires. Gas pipelines feeding cities and industry could ignite from fried control systems, unleashing widespread firestorms.

How many would die in the first day is anyone’s guess.

But that would just be the beginning of the end.

AN INDIRECT KILLER

Dr Pry, a strident critic of the Obama administration and a long-term advocate of the EMP threat, insists it’s disturbingly easy to send a nation back to the stone age.

“Rogue states or terrorists can blackout national electric grids and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures, topple electronic civilisation, and kill millions from sea to shining sea, with a single high-altitude nuclear detonation, generating an EMP field covering North America,” he says in a commentary published by The Washington Times.

It’s actually easier than directing a nuclear warhead into the heart of Washington itself.

All it would take, he says, is for something like a timer, a GPS receiver or an altimeter to be paired with a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

Once the warhead reached an altitude of 300km, its pulse could fry the electrical grid of all 48 mainland US states.

“The US can sustain a population of 320 million people only because of modern technology,” Dr Pry told Forbes. “An EMP that blacks-out the electric grid for a year would remove the critical infrastructure necessary to support such a large population.”