A North Korean electromagnetic pulse attack could wipe out 90% of US population, expert warns Congress

North Korea could wipe out the US's electricity and food supplies, and destroy up to 90% of its population with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, experts have warned the US Congress.
EMPs, transported via warheads above the earth's atmosphere, emit rapid and invisible bursts of electromagnetic energy that could jam an entire continent's entire power grid, phone lines, and internet.
And because EMPs spread in a radius of hundreds or even thousands of kilometres, such attack wouldn't require as much accuracy to hit a target than other weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, said a congressional report, titled "North Korea Nuclear EMP Attack: An Existential Threat."
EMPs would jam the US electrical grid and destroy the online and telephone infrastructure that currently supports the US's 320 million population. Airline and air traffic control electronics would also be destroyed.
"Airliners would crash killing many of the 500,000 people flying over North America at any given moment," Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA analyst and one of the report's authors, told Forbes.
He added that the country's food supplies would be decimated by radiation and up to 90% of the
population would die within a year.


Many other experts, however, have doubted that North Korea was capable of an EMP attack.
In May, Jeffrey Lewis, a California-based analyst who monitors North Korean propaganda for clues on Pyongyang's nuclear development, laughed for seven seconds when asked whether North Korea had the capability of launching such an attack.
Last month, the US Department of Defense also withdrew funding from the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, which Pry headed.
Pry's report warned, however, that "massive intelligence failures" had underestimated Pyongyang's long-range missiles, and that the country should start getting serious.
"After massive intelligence failures grossly underestimating North Korea's long-range missile capabilities, number of nuclear weapons, warhead miniaturization, and proximity to an H-Bomb, the biggest North Korean threat to the US remains unacknowledged — nuclear EMP attack," the congressional report said.