According to French press agency AFP, South Korea's intelligence services claim that North Korea is using Russian technology to develop nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons aimed at paralyzing Seoul's military electronic equipment.
Seoul's National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a recent report to parliament that the North had purchased Russian electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weaponry in order to develop its own versions of the weapon, for possible use against South Korea.
EMP weapons are detonated at high altitudes to damage computers and other electronic equipment across a very large territory, effectively sending the affected area into the Stone Age without directly killing anyone.
Arutz Sheva analyst Mark Langfan, who has been warning of the EMP threat for a long time, notes that North Korea and Iran have long been cooperating in the nuclear field, and that technology that reaches Pyongyang can be assumed to have reached Iran as well.
Langfan recently predicted that Iran will use an EMP bomb to take control of the Shiite-majority areas of eastern Saudi Arabia where almost 100% of Saudi oil is located.
One Iranian EMP bomb can knock out the Saudi and American defenses in Saudi Arabia, he noted.
Former CIA Director, Ambassador R. James Woolsey, and Dr. Peter V. Pry, warned in a recent article that EMP “is a dimension of the cyber threat that is not usually considered a cyber threat in Western doctrine, but is in the playbooks for an Information Warfare Operation of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.”
“Our cyber and information warfare doctrines are dangerously blind to the likelihood that a potential adversary making an all-out information warfare campaign designed to cripple the U.S. electric grid and other critical infrastructures would include an EMP attack.”
The Washington Times reported last week that the commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific said that North Korea’s KN-08 missile — a new road-mobile, intercontinental-range weapon — is a serious threat with the potential to hit the United States with a nuclear warhead.
The comments by Navy Adm. Samuel Locklear were made as a report provided new details on the six KN-08 missiles — initially thought in 2012 to be mock-ups — that now appear to be hard-to-locate and easy-to-fire mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
“From a military planning perspective, when I see KN-08 road-mobile missiles that appear in a North Korean military parade, I am bound to take that serious, both for not only the peninsula, but also the region, as well as my own homeland, should we speculate that those missiles potentially have the technology to reach out,” Adm. Locklear said.