WASHINGTON – The U.S. anti-missile nuclear defense system established to defend against a North Korean missile attack is plagued with technical flaws that make it inadequate, a new U.S. government report concludes.
However, even if the technical problems were resolved, former Strategic Defense Initiative director Ambassador Henry Cooper warns in a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin that a North Korean satellite could come over the undefended South Pole and detonate a high-altitude nuclear weapon, causing an electromagnetic pulse event for which the U.S. is virtually defenseless.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office report said there are serious technical flaws in the anti-missile interceptors in the U.S. defense system, which focuses on an attack from the north, raising U.S. vulnerability to a North Korean nuclear attack.
The report said that all 33 interceptors now deployed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and in Alaska have one or more of the technical defects. This includes some eight additional interceptors which are to be delivered later this year.
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"The fielded interceptors are susceptible to experiencing … failure modes," which would result in "an interceptor fleet that may not work as intended," the GAO report said. The flaws could disrupt sensitive on-board systems that steer the interceptors toward an enemy missile in space.
Even prior to revelation of the defects in the interceptors, Cooper said the U.S. anti-ballistic missile system is inadequate because of the limited number of defense systems positioned to assume an attack from over the South Pole region.
In addition, anti-missile defense systems on the East Coast similarly remain inadequate, with virtually no missile sites located in the southern United States.
Highly vulnerable
The current posture, coupled with newly discovered technical flaws in the existing anti-missile system, make the U.S. highly vulnerable to a North Korean attack.
Cooper said North Korea already has launched and successfully orbited three satellites which, in effect, could be orbiting nuclear weapons.
"With these satellite launches," Cooper said, "North Korea has demonstrated a FOBS capability."
"The first Fractional Orbital Bombardment System," he explained, "was developed by the Soviets in the 1960s to attack the United States from over the South Pole, in contrast to their ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) that were designed to be launched over the North Pole."
Cooper pointed out that the satellites weighed only 220 pounds each.
"If North Korea can build a viable nuclear warhead weighing 220 pounds or less, then they already have the proven means for delivering it to detonate at the optimum altitude over Omaha to produce an EMP that covers the entire continental U.S.," Cooper warned.
Get the rest of this report, and others, at Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.