Earlier this week, the former director of the CIA penned an apocalyptic article in The Hill describing the end of American civilization. The article warns of the threat of a North Korean electromagnetic pulse attack, claiming such an attack would kill "9 out of 10 Americans."

Okay. While North Korea does pose an increasingly serious nuclear threat to the United States, the claim it could kill 300 million Americans by depriving them of electricity is not realistic.

Scientists have known about the threat of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) for decades. EMP is a burst of electromagnetic radiation sent flying through the atmosphere by a nuclear or thermonuclear explosion. This radiation gradually fizzles out, but electrical objects near the detonation can suffer effects ranging from simply being turned off to having their circuitry shorted out.

The test sent an electromagnetic electrical surge as far Hawaii, more than eight hundred miles away.

EMP first caused a stir in 1962 with the STARFISH PRIME weapons test. STARFISH PRIME was conducted to determine the effects of nuclear weapons at high altitude. A Thor missile lofted a 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean, where it detonated off Johnson Island. The test sent an electromagnetic electrical surge as far Hawaii, more than eight hundred miles away. The surge knocked out streetlights, damaged some local telephone company equipment, and reportedly caused burglar alarms to go off and garage doors to open by themselves.

In 2008, a Congressional commission looked into EMP claims. The report stated:

"A single EMP attack may seriously degrade or shut down a large part of the electric power grid in the geographic area of EMP exposure effectively instantaneously. ... Should significant parts of the electrical power infrastructure be lost for any substantial period of time, the Commission believes that the consequences are likely to be catastrophic, and many people may ultimately die for lack of the basic elements necessary to sustain life in dense urban and suburban communities."

Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control scholar, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2013, "(the) EMP Commission exposed 37 cars and 18 trucks to EMP effects in a laboratory environment. While EMP advocates claim the results of an EMP attack would be "planes falling from the sky, cars stalling on the roadways, electrical networks failing, food rotting," the actual results were much more modest. Of the 55 vehicles exposed to EMP, six at the highest levels of exposure needed to be restarted. A few more showed "nuisance" damage to electronics, such as blinking dashboard displays."

Back to The Hill article, which claims an EMP attack by North Korea would kill "9 of 10 Americans by starvation and societal collapse." The first clue that something is amiss with this claim is that, if you trace the link provided in the article, it cites the words of Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, who describes a novel he had read called . Bartlett says:

"I read a prepublication copy of a book called One Second After. I hope it does get published; I think the American people need to read it. It was the story of a ballistic missile EMP attack on our country. The weapon was launched from a ship off our shore, and then the ship was sunk so that there were no fingerprints. The weapon was launched about 300 miles high over Nebraska, and it shut down our infrastructure countrywide. The story runs for a year. It is set in the hills of North Carolina. At the end of the year, 90 percent of our population is dead; there are 25,000 people only still alive in New York City. The communities in the hills of North Carolina are more lucky: only 80 percent of their population is dead at the end of a year."

Bartlett was so spooked by this novel that after he left Congress he moved into the woods and became a survivalist , where he spends his days "cutting logs, tending gardens and painting walls." And just to be clear, the claim that North Korea could kill 90 percent of the American people was directly pulled from a science fiction novel.

There are even more problems with this claim. Nobody knows how large of a nuclear weapon it would take to destroy the U.S. electrical grid. Five megatons? Five hundred megatons? A gigaton? North Korea would only have one shot at this, because any such attack would result in a U.S. retaliatory nuclear strike that would leave everything from the DMZ to the Chinese border one smoking, radioactive crater. America's nuclear arsenal and command and control is hardened against EMP and would survive to dish out a ruthless counterstrike. That in and of itself would deter the North Korean leadership from committing what would amount to societal suicide just to watch Americans eat grass before they ultimately starve.

The claim that North Korea could kill 90 percent of the American people was directly pulled from a science fiction novel.

Furthermore, North Korea does not have thermonuclear weapons. It claims to have tested a thermonuclear device last year but the device was not large enough to actually have been so. North Korea wants nuclear weapons and indeed may some day have them, but that is generally seen as being somewhere down the road. Even then, it would have to develop a rocket capable of delivering an extremely large warhead.

Warning against the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons is a public service. Warning that North Korea could kill 90 percent of the American people with EMP is not. It's even a good idea to warn, broadly, against the threat of EMP: in 1859, a solar storm sent a pulse of energy hurting toward Earth, sending electrical surges through those electrical systems in use at the time, telegraph networks. Telegraph operators received shocks from their equipment and telegraph pylons threw sparks. If it occurred today, the so-called "Carrington Event" could indeed have serious consequences for satellites, electrical grids, and electronic devices worldwide. Tying such a real problem to a fantasy involving North Korea does a disservice to the larger issue.

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