Analyst: North Korean satellites pose a threat to U.S.

Homeland security expert Peter Vincent Pry joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Adriana Cohen Show” yesterday to talk about North Korea and the possibility the country could launch an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States.

Q: Is it possible that North Korea already has one or two satellites that may be weaponized with an EMP capability to harm our nation?

A: Yes. Both of them could be weaponized.

We don’t know what’s on those satellites. The North Koreans have got two satellites, one called the KMS3 and another called KMS4, which are orbiting over the United States several times a day at the optimum altitude, including the EMP field down over North America.

We don’t know if they are nuclear armed or not.

The EMP Commission has recommended shooting those satellites down because it’s a potentially intolerable threat.

Ninety percent of our population could die in a year from starvation, disease or societal collapse if the electric grid is blacked out that long.

Q: And how is it that we don’t know what’s on these satellites? Do we not have technology to be able to pick up if they are indeed weaponized? Is it just out of our capabilities to ascertain that information for sure?

A: The North Korean launch facility is so high, it’s also very suspicious because they conceal everything about what goes into this satellite, the space launch vehicle and all the rest of it.

A former NASA engineer visited that facility and wrote an article in “Space Review” warning about his concern that the reason for that secrecy could be that they’re weaponizing their satellites.

And the short answer to your question is no, we don’t have the technical means to easily find out.

There are things we could do. There are things we could do to discover whether there are nuclear arms or not, but I can’t get into the details of those national technical means of how we do it.

Q: Knowing how serious and real any EMP strike is against the United States, why on Earth would our government dismantle the great work of the EMP Commission?

A: The short answer is I don’t know, but I can just speculate, and there are a lot of forces in Washington that don’t like the message that the EMP Commission has been bringing for 17 years ... the North American Electrical Liability Corporation doesn’t want to spend money hardening the grid, they don’t want extra government regulations to force protection of the grid.