After directly threatening the US with a “sum of all fears” styled nuclear attack scenario, in which an electro-magnetic-pulse air-burst over America takes down most of the nation’s electrical grid, including electronic devices, It seems as if North Korea is practically begging, if not certainly daring, the US to pre-emptively attack their nation.

Moreover, the problem with such an outsized threat, from the Noth Koreans is the fact that in the aftermath of the threat, President Trump, along with the Joint Chiefs, will have little to no practical choice, but to respond and with a mother-of-all-attacks berzerker strike.  

The US would have to quickly put down the rabid little nation, with a major strike, before it can respond in a counter-attack of America’s nearby allies.

The good thing, at least for America, is the fact that Trump is not Obama.

Under the type of threat that the US has effectively never had to deal with, that being a nuclear state run by an authoritarian madman with a narcissism-fueled God-complex, the US, subject to certain Intel cues, has very little leeway in not responding and with extraordinary force.

This merely due to the fact that the North Koreans just now detonated their first hydrogen/thermonuclear device, which they assert can now be employed on one of North Korea’s new long-range ballistic missiles.

This is a first in North Korea’s belligerent history, leaving America with a very limited array of options in how it should respond to protect the nation…~Refocus Notes 

The Wall Street Journal

By Peter Landers

North Korea’s threats against the U.S. now include a tactic long discussed by some experts: an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, triggered by a nuclear weapon that would aim to shut down the U.S. electricity grid.

North Korea’s state news agency made a rare reference to the tactic in a Sunday morning release in which the country said it was able to load a hydrogen bomb onto a long-range missile. The bomb, North Korea said, “is a multifunctional thermonuclear nuke with a great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack.”

The idea of an EMP attack is to detonate a nuclear weapon tens or hundreds of miles above the earth with the aim of knocking out power in much of the U.S. Unlike the U.S. atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, such a weapon wouldn’t directly destroy buildings or kill people. Instead, electromagnetic waves from the nuclear explosion would generate pulses to overwhelm the electric grid and electronic devices in the same way a lightning surge can destroy equipment.

In a worst-case scenario, the outages could last for months, indirectly costing many lives, since hospitals would be without power, emergency services couldn’t function normally, and people could run short of food and water.

Warnings about the threat have percolated for many years, including in a 2008 report commissioned by Congress that warned an EMP attack could bring “widespread and long lasting disruption and damage to the critical infrastructures that underpin the fabric of U.S. society.”

When the U.S. tested a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in 1962, it resulted in lights burning out in Honolulu, nearly 1,000 miles from the test site. Naturally occurring electromagnetic events on the sun can also disrupt power systems. A 1989 blackout in Quebec that came days after powerful explosions on the sun expelled a cloud of charged particles that struck earth’s magnetic field.

Skeptics generally acknowledge that an EMP attack would be possible in theory, but they say the danger is exaggerated because it would be difficult for an enemy such as North Korea to calibrate the attack to deliver maximum damage to the U.S. electrical grid. If it a North Korean bomb exploded away from its target location, it might knock out only a few devices or parts of the grid.

The 1962 U.S. nuclear test, which involved a bomb with a force of 1.4 megatons, didn’t disrupt telephone or radio service in Hawaii, although those who stress the threat say today’s electronic devices are much more vulnerable. North Korea said its hydrogen bomb had the explosive power of tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons.

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