So What’s the Worst that Can Happen?

We’re talking North Korea today, the obvious threat. Mr. Trump’s obsession with baiting North Korean leader, Kim Jung-un, with immature tweets and personal insults is hardly generating any positive results. And while China is Kim’s main ally in the world – its principal trading partner (along with Russia) – that alliance is primarily a marriage of hideous convenience, preventing a Western takeover of the entire Korean Peninsula by South Korea, putting a U.S. military partner directly on the border with the Peoples’ Republic of China. That is an unacceptable result to the PRC.

But make no mistake, China’s incredibly powerful leader, Xi Jinping, truly despises the North Korean dictator, even more than his obvious disdain for the American President. Normally calm Xi was heard to blow his stack when Kim launched missile tests just as President Xi was hosting a regional summit in Beijing, a humiliating embarrassment. China is shutting down North Korean businesses within its borders and making it very clear that if Kim persists with his embarrassing tests, China will turn the screws on him tightly… not to placate the United States, but to make clear that Kim cannot ignore China and her regional goals without suffering terrible consequences.

For Kim, he honestly believes that his very survival, both his life and his leadership of the North, is wholly dependent on maintaining and improving his nuclear arsenal and the necessary weapons delivery systems. Without such deterrents, he feels, the United States and its allies (particularly South Korea and Japan) would bring down his regime quickly. He is apparently willing to let his population, already subsisting on an average meagre 1100 calories a day, literally starve to death, as sanctions mount, rather than relinquish his nuclear adventure. His people, cut off from global information, cling to the belief that Kim can actually defeat the United States and that the United States intends to destroy the North. Many believe that a state of war actually exists between the two nations.

There is a possible stasis in a “relationship” between North Korea and the U.S., much like the mutually-assured-destruction series of treaties with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, where each side lives with the nuclear reality of the other. Kim might just be satisfied with that recognition and acceptance by the U.S. that the North is a nuclear power, but Trump seems to think he can denigrate and bully Kim Jong-un into relinquishing his nukes, a highly unlikely scenario.

What are Kim’s current options if Donald Trump succeeds in goading Kim to fire the first nuclear shot… or worse, if Trump physically attacks North Korean missiles and/or nuclear facilities in that country… and they retaliate? Nobody knows for sure, but clearly Kim has both “garden variety” nuclear weapons capacity as well as the ability to detonate a much more powerful hydrogen bomb. Are they compact enough to be delivered as warheads by the North’s missiles? Maybe but at least eventually. Could Kim detonate or deliver a warhead with nuclear capability to the mainland? Maybe today but pretty much for sure in the future. That could take out a couple of big cities, if our anti-missile systems – still not 100% reliable – fail to take out the incoming missiles.

What can we do? Other than start a nuclear war rather obviously, not much. If Kim continues to antagonize China, there may new PRC efforts in the near future that would, however, benefit the United States indirectly. Worth the wait? Definitely.

If North Korea were willing to plunge itself into an attack that would assure its own destruction, it probably would want to do more than simply take out an American city or two. While they might not yet be able to launch the necessary destructive force to implement this next, rather horrific scenario, the consequences of a massive and powerful electromagnetic pulse released in outer space above the United States, could actually destroy the entire country, killing hundreds of millions within a year of the blast, effectively disabling just about every operating system and destroying our food supply chain. And clearly, this is a technology that North Korea has been developing for some time.

According to an October 12th report issued by a special commission – Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack appointed by the House Committee on Homeland Security – the potential of such an attack is both real and the possible damage would be beyond imagination. Bruce Dorminey, writing for the October 23rd Forbes, explains the report’s most dire risk assessment:

“[That] new congressional report contends that a North Korean electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the U.S. would ultimately wipe out 90% of the population… To date, most discussion concerning the North Korean threat has been on whether the rogue state can accurately hit U.S. cities with its ICBMs. But in an EMP attack, such accuracy is not necessary because the pulse radius would be so large, says Peter Vincent Pry, who recently testified about the EMP threat before a congressional Homeland Security subcommittee. His conclusions are that such an EMP attack would wreak havoc across the whole of the continental U.S…

“Unlike a conventional ICBM which launches and then goes into a suborbital flight before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, an EMP warhead need not re-enter Earth’s atmosphere before exploding hundreds of kilometers above its target. Super-EMP weapons are designed to produce a high level of gamma rays, which generate the sort of high-frequency electromagnetic pulse that is most damaging to the broadest range of electronics, the report concludes.

“And if the EMP device just happens to be part onboard an orbiting satellite, North Korea need only detonate the device remotely via encoded signal. Pry, Chief of Staff of the now de-funded Congressional EMP Commission, told me that at an altitude of 300 kilometers, the resulting electromagnetic pulse would affect all 48 contiguous states.

“A warhead fused for an EMP in a satellite or ICBM could work on a timer, via GPS, or using an altimeter, says Pry, a nuclear strategist formerly with the CIA, who has a certificate in nuclear weapons design from the U.S. Air Force nuclear weapons lab. He says North Korea could even rig the warhead to detonate in the event that it was intercepted by our own missile defenses.

“The consequences of such a detonation would be dire… ‘The U.S. can sustain a population of 320 million people only because of modern technology,’ said Pry. ‘An EMP that blacks-out the electric grid for a year would [decimate] the critical infrastructure necessary to support such a large population.’

“In three days, the food supply in local grocery stores would be consumed and the 30-day national food supply in regional warehouses would begin to spoil, says Pry. In one year, he contends that up to 90% of the population could perish from starvation, disease and societal collapse.

“After generating gamma-rays that interact with air molecules in Earth’s stratosphere, a so-called fast pulse EMP field of tens of kilovolts would only last a few hundred nanoseconds… But in the event of such an attack, aircraft electronics would be fried, as well as electronics in air traffic control towers, and navigation systems , says Pry. ‘Airliners would crash killing many of the 500,000 people flying over North America at any given moment,’ he said.”

Kim isn’t relinquishing his military programs anytime soon, and Donald Trump’s speeches and tweets seem only to have redoubled North Korea’s efforts to accelerate their weapons programs. As the President vocally and repetitively seems to undo his own Secretary of State’s efforts to reach a back door diplomatic détente, most world leaders place the blame for the escalating tensions and the North’s recalcitrance primarily on Donald J Trump. To many, the President is begging for a nuclear confrontation, although many believe Kim Jong-un, equally prone to warmongering, is intelligent enough not to pull the trigger himself. World leaders are not so certain of Mr. Trump.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are exceptionally serious doubts that Mr. Trump has a coherent and implementable policy against North Korea’s potential to attack and perhaps decimate the United States.