Over the past couple of months, North Korea has been issuing threats of nuclear war against not only its neighbors, but also the United States.

The ever-increasingly hostile North Korea has failed to follow through with UN-sanctioned denuclearization procedures and has now performed three successful nuclear tests, one as recent as February of this year.

Currently, there are two and possibly more upright missiles on North Korea’s east coast line with fueled and ready-to-fire-at-will Musadan missiles that have a range of 3,000+ km, putting South Korea, Japan and US military bases in the Pacific such as Guam and Hawaii within range for a missile strike.

Recently, North Korea has had a successful satellite launch in December.

Now what does this all mean to the United States?

This means that North Korea does have the capability of attaching a nuclear warhead to a missile and that if North Korea is able to somehow figure out how to put a nuclear weapon onto an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM for short, the United States could be facing a very dangerous scenario.

The very way of life that you as an American live is now in jeopardy.

If North Korea is either provoked to a point where they retaliate with a nuclear weapon attached to an ICBM launched into orbit and detonated over the continental United States, it will send our nation back to the Stone Age quicker than the assault on Bagdad took. Nuclear weapons release radiation when detonated and also send out a surge of highly charged energy into the atmosphere that is capable of destroying any electronic device in range.

Here is how an Electromagnetic Pulse works.

There are two types of Electromagnetic Pulse bombs: Nuclear and non-nuclear. When a Nuclear bomb is exploded it sends out vast amounts of radiation known as gamma radiation. Normally, when a nuclear bomb is detonated low to the ground within earth’s atmosphere, the EMP is contained within the area of the blast due to gravity and atmosphere absorbing most of the radiation.
But let’s imagine a nuclear bomb was detonated 300 miles above the earth’s surface, also known as low orbit; there isn’t as much resistance for the gamma rays to come into contact with, making a the nuclear EMP able to umbrella out and cover a greater area.
An EMP has the capability of knocking out satellites orbiting in the area and attacking infrastructures on the ground such as radio towers and electronic devices that used closed circuits. What would that mean for us on the ground?

Here is what will happen: imagine you are at home and you are relaxing after a long day of work. Suddenly, your television, your lights and your Internet go out. Thinking it’s only a power outage, you go to your cell phone to call someone across town to see if they are experiencing the outage as well.

When you go to turn your cell phone back on from its sleep mode, you realize that even your phone is dead. You decide to go over to your local gas station and convenience store to buy something to tide you over until the power comes back up. You make it to your car, only to find that even your car won’t start.

In fact, you look around and there have been several accidents because all the cars have been shut off. You walk to the gas station only to find that even the gas station lights are turned off.

That’s when you realize that it wouldn’t matter if you tried to buy anything because if you lost all the power to your phone, household appliances, car, and all you have on you is your debit card, it wouldn’t even matter because every dollar that you made on last week’s check in the bank that you have been saving is gone. All your financial prospects are now gone.

Since everything has gone digital in the world, all electronic data in the United States is gone. Hard drives with birth certificates, Social Security numbers, your grades for school, and how much money you had in your bank is now gone.

You suddenly become no one.

You begin to think about your grandmother who has been on dialysis for over a year in order to live. It’s guaranteed that if the power is off she will ultimately die in just a few hours or less. Many others will die within just a few hours in hospitals; the first being those individuals on life support.

With all the power out, water pumps will stop working, causing fresh water to be scarce. Grocery stores will not get fresh produce, and freezers inside will begin to thaw. Looting and rioting will take place in the streets, creating a scenario that only the strongest will survive.

Many American’s believe that we have the technology to take out a missile if it were to be launched at us, but the truth is that our Ground-based Midcourse Defense systems (GMD) are only successful at destroying incoming projectiles fifty percent of the time. The other thing to realize is that missiles are small powerful rockets that are capable of reaching speeds of 1,644.4 km per hour, and then taking into effect trajectory, weather conditions, gravitational pull, how high up the missiles path is, and earth’s natural turning speed, a missile can reach a top speed of what ever the top speed of the missile is plus the speed of the earth’s spin which is 66,660 miles per hour (107278.87 km/h).

It would take less than forty minutes for an ICBM launched from North Korea to reach its target destination over the continental United States, and we would have only around 45 seconds to around five minutes to coordinate a shoot down plan, and that’s also assuming that our missile hits on target the first time.

We as a society don’t realize how dangerous this situation with North Korea really is, and this is not a situation that you want to experience in your lifetime.

We need to hope that North Korea hasn’t thought up this scenario and will not carry out this plan of attack on our nation’s soil.
In the past couple of weeks, North Korea’s boisterous talk and war-like aggression has eased a bit on the Asian peninsula, but we are far from safe at them moment.  All it would take would be a miscalculation, a provocation, or a threat of our own to send North Korea’s missiles right to our doorstep.