Frank Gaffney: North Korea Could Take Out Entire U.S. Electrical Power Grid

On Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow to discuss dictator Kim Jong-un’s unwelcome contribution to this year’s Fourth of July fireworks: the test launch of what may be North Korea’s first true intercontinental ballistic missile.

“It’s unprecedented in the sense that it’s performed the feat of demonstrating the capacity to deliver a payload over longer range than ever before,” Gaffney said. “This missile flew for about 40 minutes. In this particular case, they chose to fly it almost directly straight up, and then pretty much straight back down.

“It went to about 2100 kilometers, we’re told, perhaps somewhat longer. The length of time and the amount of distance covered suggest that if the trajectory were flatter, it would reach intercontinental ranges, at least to Alaska and perhaps beyond in the continental United States.”

“In any event, what it really indicates is that this is a regime that intends to continue to refine, and perfect, and expand the capacity to threaten the United States, which is bad enough even without this long-range missile,” he continued.

“As we’ve discussed before, one of the things that worries me the most about the North Koreans is they have been beavering away at, it appears, a technique called electromagnetic pulse attacks.”

Gaffney explained that such attacks do not require precision targeting, miniaturized nuclear warheads, or reentry shielding, which seem to be areas where North Korean technology remains lacking. Instead, an EMP attack could be carried out with “a single nuclear weapon, perhaps not even a very sophisticated one” detonated in orbit somewhere over North America.

“They could conceivably take down the electric grid of the United States, and with it our country,” he warned. “That’s the worrying threat to me, irrespective of the length of the missile’s range.”

“We’re being encouraged to believe they haven’t figured out how to miniaturize nuclear weapons, or how to make them with these kinds of ballistic missile delivery systems. If that’s true—and I’m suspicious.

“I must say, because they’ve been working hard at it for a long time, with a lot of help from former Soviet and Russian engineers, as well as probably Chinese and I would guess Iranians, for that matter,” Gaffney observed.

“Either way, again, even if they don’t have the capacity to put a small package in a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding the heat of coming back into the atmosphere, by simply putting a fairly crude nuclear weapon on a satellite—which they have I believe now two orbiting the Earth, including overflying this country regularly—at about the optimal altitude for one of these so-called EMP electromagnetic pulse attacks.

“They’re already in a position, I think, to threaten mortal damage to this country,” he judged.

Gaffney called it a bitter lesson of history that “problems like this, threats, generally don’t get attenuated by the passage of time—they tend to become more and more serious.”