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[Ovid]

SEOUL—North Korea said it has ”succeeded in making a more developed" hydrogen bomb and mounting it on the tip of a long-range missile, and threatened a high-altitude nuclear blast that experts fear could wipe out electrical networks in the U.S.

Leader Kim Jong Un witnessed a hydrogen bomb being mounted onto a new intercontinental ballistic missile while visiting the Nuclear Weapons Institute, North Korea's state media said Sunday. The state media also published what experts said could be the North's first photos of a purported hydrogen bomb.

...

While the claims couldn't be immediately verified, the report, which didn't specify the date of Mr. Kim's visit, is likely to raise expectations of a sixth nuclear test or another long-range missile test by North Korea.
The White House, the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

...

”There are a lot of things that are plausible about it...but we don't have X-ray vision, so we can't see into that," said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., who said she believed the North was showing off the device in advance of a possible test.

...

According to the North's report on Sunday, Mr. Kim watched a newly upgraded hydrogen bomb being loaded onto a new long-range missile. The bomb has explosive power that can range up to hundreds of kilotons, the North Korean report said.

Mr. Kim also specifically cited the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack. Fears of an EMP strike by North Korea have circulated for years among some U.S. policy makers, though others have openly dismissed the possibility of Pyongyang launching such a strike.

In an EMP attack, North Korea would conduct a high-altitude nuclear detonation over the continental U.S. The detonation could emit a brief but powerful electromagnetic signal capable of disrupting swaths of the U.S. electrical grid, experts say.

Ms. Hanham said while such an attack was theoretically possible, the North's goals made it more likely that Pyongyang would try to follow through on its threat to send a nuclear-tipped missile into a large American city.

wsj.com

 

[JCHandsom]

Well on the bright side we won't have to worry about global warming wiping us out if we do it to ourselves first!

 

[Ri'Orius]

Wait, I thought nuke EMPs didn't extend much farther than the blast itself, thus rendering anything EMPed also, y'know, blown up.

Does detonating in the atmosphere reduce the boom or enhance the EMP somehow?

 

[Epsilon-delta]

Wait, I thought nuke EMPs didn't extend much farther than the blast itself, thus rendering anything EMPed also, y'know, blown up.

Does detonating in the atmosphere reduce the boom or enhance the EMP somehow?

Yes.

An NEMP warhead designed to be detonated far above the Earth's surface is known as a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) device. The explosion releases a blast of gamma rays into the mid-stratosphere, which ionizes and the resultant energetic free electrons interact with the Earth's magnetic field to produce a much stronger EMP than is normally produced in the denser air at lower altitudes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elect...8NEMP.29_and_high_altitude_nuclear_.28HEMP.29

 

[BrahReally]

I see that Kim is taking a page out of the Modern Warfare 2 playbook apparently.

 

[TarNaru33]

EMPs via Nuke does not even matter. An EMP that is delivered in such a way would trigger MAD, no country is going to wait until a ballistic missile is blown in their atmosphere to see if its an EMP before launching their own nuclear arsenals lol.

I personally don't get why anyone would bother worrying about it being an EMP.

 

[HowZatOZ]

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=1427660

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