After successfully testing a missile capable of launching a satellite, Pyongyang works toward a nuclear warhead small enough for it to carry an electro-magnetic-pulse weapon of our worst nightmares. When North Korea orbited a failed satellite in December aboard an Unha-3 long-range missile, it was treated in some quarters as a stunt of no real significance or threat. The last Stalinist regime on earth had no deliverable warhead small enough to place on this missile which itself had no great accuracy. Serious observers, however, noted that any nation capable of putting an object in orbit could deliver an object to any point on the plant, and the ability of North Korea to develop a missile warhead would be a question of when, not if. The announcement by Pyongyang that it is readying a third round of nuclear tests and that a "nuclear test of a higher level" would be carried out, most likely refers to a device made from highly enriched uranium, which is easier to miniaturize than the plutonium bombs it tested in 2006 and 2009, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea. Stanford University professor Siegfried Hecker, who was shown the North's modern uranium enrichment facility during a visit to the country in November 2010, has warned that a third North Korea nuke test could put it on the road to the miniaturization necessary to create a missile-capable warhead. "If North Korea conducts a third nuclear test, that will be very risky," Hecker told a forum in Seoul. "If another of the North's nuclear tests is successful, I believe that North Korea will succeed in the necessary miniaturization within a few years." Even so, skeptics say, the U.S. already has in place the missile defense, the once-maligned "Star Wars" technology of President Ronald Reagan's dream and developed by prior administrations, to shoot down a solitary missile with a solitary warhead aimed at the U.S. But would we shoot down another "harmless satellite"? Such a satellite might not be so harmless at all, and even if carrying only a low-yield nuke, might be capable of a devastating attack in a single orbit at relatively low altitude as it passes over an unsuspecting U.S. by using a technology known as electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. North Korea's nuclear tests thus far have been dismissed as failures by skeptics because of their low yield. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst and president of EMPact America, a citizens lobbying group, believes they bore the "signature" of the Russian-designed "super-EMP" weapon, capable of emitting more gamma radiation than a 25-megaton nuclear weapon. According to Dr. Pry, North Korea's earlier tests were capable of emitting enough gamma radiation to disrupt power grids over much of the lower 48 states. EMP is similar to the disruptive effects of solar flares, only much more intense and much more permanent. As the Heritage Foundation reports, an EMP attack with a warhead detonated 25 to 300 miles above the U.S. mainland "would fundamentally change the world. Airplanes would fall from the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer, and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services, and even cyberspace would collapse." Nobody is harmed or killed right away by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world's only superpower and the world's largest economy, comes to a screeching halt as a country dependent on cutting-edge 21st century technology regresses in time almost a century instantaneously. It would seem we are no more ready to deal with this possibility any more than we are ready to stop Iran from developing its own nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Where will you be when the lights go out? http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...th-korea-readies-new-nuclear-tests.htm?p=full
What about Stalin and them there Ruskies? After all they detonated the biggest ever Nuke " The Tsar Bomb" if my memory serves me correct
The Fed will nuke us first, then maybe Iran but nothing to worry about from North Korea? I didn't even know the Fed was working on nuclear weapons.