The terrible Iran Deal has been and is little to no help in preventing metastasizing of Iran’s nuclear threat. Indeed it has become a shield behind which Iran is gaining confidence in the deliverable nuclear weapon capability it has pursued for many years in conjunction with its ally North Korea, i.e., via a deliberate path toward nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them—to attack the “Little Satan” Israel and the “Great Satan” America. President Trump: Ditch the deal!! Read Full Story
North Korea claims to have “a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke … which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP [electromagnetic pulse] attack according to strategic goals.” What will we do? Read Full Story
North Korea’s state news agency KCNA News for the first time reported on Sunday that the “explosive power” of the hydrogen bomb was “adjustable from ten kilotons to hundreds kiloton [sic.];” and that the weapon was described as “a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke … which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP [electromagnetic pulse] attack according to strategic goals.” Read Full Story
An old adage is that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Hopefully, that adage is true and can illustrate an apparent existential threat to all Americans that North Korea already poses. It is not a new threat — North Korea years ago demonstrated its inherent capability to deliver that threat, once it gains sufficient nuclear weapons. Now we know Kim Jong Un has the nuclear weapons to execute that existential threat with plenty left over, even while our preparations to counter it seem minimal. We should urgently correct this mistaken set of priorities! Read Full Story
The past couple of weeks, I joined several other contributors to The Hill, which delivers the daily news focused on the interest of Capitol Hill, to discuss the implications of North Korea entering the ranks of deliverable nuclear weapons by ballistic missiles, particularly intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can reach cities in the Continental United States. If you visit congressional offices as well as many other offices around Washington, you will find this daily newspaper on their coffee tables. Given several recent The Hill articles, there’s no excuse for our Senators and Representatives not to understand the threat that is here now. Read Full Story
Critical national infrastructure protection “will require public-private cooperation and partnerships – that, in fact, the electric industry must in the future end their efforts to avoid, misrepresent, dismiss, and minimize EMP and its potential existential national consequences, and play a large role in EMP protection, as must several Departments of the government that have to date also avoided addressing EMP intelligently and effectively, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy, and begin drawing on the knowledge and experience held within the Department of Defense and the EMP Commission.”… Dr. William R. Graham, Chairman of the EMP Commission Read Full Story
“Certainly, we do not want for things to get to a military conflict . . .” but if North Korean leaders “elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action, that option [a military response] is on the table.” ~Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Reuters, March 17, 2017 Read Full Story
Conventional wisdom has held that it will be years before North Korea can threaten the United States with a nuclear attack. That judgement is quite wrong as illustrated in yesterday’s early morning hours when North Korea conducted its 13th ballistic missile test this year — this time on a lofted trajectory that, if straightened out, some experts claim could reach Alaska. Actually the threat is even much greater and more eminent than that. Read Full Story
“The very first missiles we saw in Iran were simply copies of North Korean missiles. . . Over the years, we’ve seen photographs of North Korean and Iranian officials in each other’s countries, and we’ve seen all kinds of common hardware.” ~Jeffrey Lewis, a missile proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Read Full Story
Analysts who write off the possibility of a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack from North Korea as “unlikely” and “science fiction” because they believe the 10 to 20 kiloton nuclear weapons currently possessed by North Korea are incapable of making an effective EMP attack, dismiss the consensus view of “EMP experts who have advanced degrees in physics and electrical engineering along with several decades of experience in the field — with access to classified data throughout that time — and who have conducted EMP tests on a wide variety of electronic systems, beginning in 1963.” ~ Dr. William R. Graham, President Reagan’s Science Advisor and current Chairman of the EMP Commission. Read Full Story
We will be adding key policy briefs as we progress.