How Russia, China and North Korea Could Use EMP Weapons to Win a War Against the U.S.

America has never been at greater risk of destruction at the hands of its enemies than it is today.

(Author’s Note: This article was originally published in The National Interest on June 10, 2018.)

This past year, the United States has witnessed a greatly increased threat from North Korea. U.S. intelligence has now confirmed that North Korea not only possesses up to sixty nuclear warheads, but it has developed the miniaturization technology required to mount them atop a number of different types of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which it has tested over the past year.

Dr. Peter Pry, who served as chief of staff to the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, which Congress unwisely chose to disband late last year, currently serves as Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. He told Congress that there is the possibility that Pyongyang has deployed two “super EMP” satellites in low-earth orbit over the continental United States which, if detonated over the country without warning, could kill up to 290 million Americans within a year. Pry also estimates that Russia currently possesses at least three times more nuclear weapons than the United States. In addition, communist China recently admitted having built three thousand miles worth of underground tunnels where it may be concealing hundreds of mobile ICBMs with 1,600–1,800 nuclear warheads, according to Col. Gen. Viktor Yesin, a former commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces. That number is considerably more than the number that the United States currently has deployed.

Meanwhile, Russia has tried to build underground towns and command centers from which its political and military leadership could fight—and possibly win—a nuclear war with the United States. Russia has also deployed a massive national-defense system, which the late former Defense Intelligence Agency and Central Intelligence Agency analyst William T. Lee documented in his excellent book “The ABM Charade—A Study in Elite Illusion and Delusion.” That defense system may be capable of shooting down most U.S. warheads launched in response to a hypothetical Russian nuclear first strike.

America has never been more threatened by existential threats than it is today. Yet there are many liberal claims that President Trump is imagining threats from Russia and Communist China despite his laudable “America First” National Security Strategy. On the other side of the political spectrum, many Republicans mistakenly believe that the greatest threat Americans face today is from Islamic terrorists whose numbers have greatly multiplied due to ill-considered U.S. military interventions in the Middle East, which has left the U.S. military with a readiness deficiency unseen since the Carter administration.

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© David T. Pyne 2019

David T. Pyne has a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University and currently serves as the Deputy Director for National Operations for the EMP Task Force for National and Homeland Security He previously served as National Security Policy Director for United States Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), as a vice president of the Association of the U.S. Army’s Utah chapter, as an International Programs Manager on the Department of the Army Headquarters Staff and as a consultant to the Missile Defense Agency.