And for the record, the EMP weapons are being developed with opposing the United States in mind.
“The risk of an EMP attack on U.S. infrastructure is very high, particularly in this international environment,” Sam Kessler, a geopolitical adviser at North Star Support Group, a multinational risk-management firm, said recently, The Epoch Times reported.
Kessler's comments come as Beijing is said to be developing a first-strike nuclear capability after decades of officially adopting a 'no first use' policy -- but that was back when the country had only a rudimentary nuclear arsenal and nothing so modern and capable as the U.S. or Russian arsenals.
The outlet went on to explain the concept of an EMP weapon and attack:
An EMP is a burst of electromagnetic energy that disrupts communications and damages electronic equipment. An EMP can be created by nuclear missiles, radiofrequency weapons, and natural phenomena such as geomagnetic storms.
While any nuclear weapon can create an EMP, specialized EMP weapons such as so-called super-EMP bombs generate particularly strong gamma radiation that multiplies the effect of the pulse, extending the destruction over a greater range.
If such an attack centered, for instance, over New York City, the entire northeastern United States would be impacted, according to Peter Pry, an EMP expert and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory body, in a statement to Congress.
In a 2018 slide deck, Pry noted that an EMP explosion at high altitude would instantly destroy nearly 75 percent of all U.S. power generation capability, which would lead to a months-long loss of electrical power and have debilitating effects on the country's ability to grow and store food, water, heating and air conditioning, eventually causing tens of millions of deaths. Cities without power, for instance, would immediately lapse into untenable concrete jungles 100 times worse than even the worst post-George Floyd riots of 2020.
“EMP weapons offer Russia, China, and the ICBM-armed rogue states a fast, cheap and effective means to make most Americans feel immediately the horrors of war, making them attractive to enemies who seek to create pressure on the U.S. leadership to capitulate or negotiate,” Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told The Epoch Times.
In a 2020 report, Pry predicted that China already has super EMPs in its arsenal. He went on to suggest that Beijing could deliver them via indefensible hypersonic weapons.
“Taiwan military intelligence in open sources credits China with having a Super-EMP nuclear weapon—based on design information stolen from the U.S. nuclear weapon labs,” the report states.
“China is on the verge of deploying or has already deployed hypersonic weapons that could potentially be armed with nuclear or non-nuclear EMP warheads, greatly increasing the threat of surprise attack against U.S. forces in the Pacific and against the United States," the report added.
The Epoch Times notes further: "Two congressional commissions, known as the EMP Commissions, were established to research the destructive potential of EMPs, starting in 2001. The first report from those commissions came in 2004 and found that 'China and Russia have considered limited nuclear attack options that, unlike their Cold War plans, employ EMP as the primary or sole means of attack.'"
Other experts are also sounding the alarm.
“When I ask [North American Electric Reliability Corporation] officials about EMP protection, they informed me, ‘We don’t do EMP, that’s DOD’s responsibility,’” George Baker, professor emeritus of applied science at James Madison University, said.
“The Department of Defense tells me EMP protection for civilian infrastructure is DHS’s [Department of Homeland Security] responsibility. And then when I talk to DHS, I get answers that the protection should be done by the Department of Energy, since they are the infrastructure’s sector-specific agency," he added.
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