Free Republic

On April 30, South Korean officials told The Korea Times and YTN TV that North Korea’s test of a medium-range missile on April 29 was not a failure, as widely reported in the world press, because it was deliberately detonated at 72 kilometers altitude. 72 kilometers is the optimum burst height for a 10-Kt warhead making an EMP attack. … According to South Korean officials, “It’s believed the explosion was a test to develop a nuclear weapon different from existing ones.” Japan’s Tetsuro Kosaka writes in Nikkei, “Pyongyang could be saying, ‘We could launch an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack if...

In May of 2009 North Korea’s controversial nuclear weapons tests were dismissed by global intelligence agencies as failures due to their low explosive yield. But EMPact America President Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst, had his own assessment. It appears, according to Pry, that while the yield from the nuclear tests was weak with respect to destructive power in terms of the nuclear blast itself, the tests indicated the weapon was “capable of emitting enough gamma rays to disable the electric power grid across most of the lower 48 states.” It’s been referred to as a...