The rogue communist regime of North Korea, under unstable dictator Kim Jong Un, launched a ballistic missile Tuesday that landed in Japanese waters.
“We are in the process of assessing the situation and will provide additional details when available,” a spokesman for the Pentagon told CNBC.
The White House said President Trump was briefed about the missile, which reportedly flew about 50 minutes before crashing into the ocean.
Trump later told reporters the launch “is a situation that we will handle.”
“We will take care of it,” Trump added.
The missile apparently was launched from South Pyongan Province toward the Sea of Japan and was detected almost immediately.
The London Daily Mail said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for an emergency cabinet meeting.
It was the first missile launched by North Korea since the communist nation sent one across Japan and into the Pacific in September. It’s just the latest in a series of more than a dozen launches this year. Kim has claimed North Korea needs such offensive weapons to defend itself against America.
CNBC said South Korea responded with a “precision missile-firing drill,” and Japanese officials said the missile appears to have landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, a region designated by the United Nations Law of the Sea.
The Pentagon said it noticed a “probable missile launch” around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
The South Korean Yonhap news agency said the Seoul’s unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, commented that the progress by North Korea on its missile program has been swift.
“North Korea has been developing its nuclear weapons at a faster-than-expected pace. We cannot rule out the possibility that North Korea could announce its completion of a clear force within one year,” Cho told foreign correspondents in Seoul.
Reuters reported Monday that Hawaii is resuming monthly statewide tests of its Cold War-era warning sirens because of the threat from North Korea.
“Wailing air-raid sirens will be sounded for about 60 seconds from more than 400 locations across the central Pacific islands starting at 11:45 a.m. on Friday, in a test that will be repeated on the first business day of each month thereafter, state officials said,” according to the report.
It noted Oahu, “home to a heavy concentration of the U.S. military command structure, as well as the state capital, Honolulu, and about two-thirds of the state’s population, is seen as an especially likely target for potential North Korean nuclear aggression against the United States.”
WND reported last month that North Korea declared it will engage the free world in diplomacy only after it has an ICBM capable of reaching “all the way to the East Coast of the mainland U.S.”
The comments followed shortly after a congressional subcommittee on homeland security heard from two experts who have studied America’s vulnerability to an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack.Â
That’s the threat of a North Korean nuclear attack on the U.S. that would be unimaginably worse than turning a city like Chicago or Denver into ashes, they testified. If just one of the nuclear weapons North Korea is now known to possess could be directed toward the heartland of the U.S. and detonated in the upper atmosphere, it could fry the electrical grid with an electromagnetic pulse, paralyze communications and transportation nationwide, instantly plunge the country back into a 19th century-style existence and cause 90 percent of Americans to starve to death in one year.
CNN quoted a North Korean official affirming Pyongyang’s dedication to acquiring a long-range ICBM.
Diplomacy remains an option, the official told CNN, but “before we can engage in diplomacy with the Trump administration, we want to send a clear message that the DPRK has a reliable defensive and offensive capability to counter any aggression from the United States.”
The CNN report did not identify the official.
The apocalyptic scenario of a nuclear blast and the cascading failure of America’s essential infrastructure was delivered by William Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the U.S. from an EMP Attack, and Peter Pry, chief of staff to the commission, to the homeland security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency.
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Graham and Pry said permitting the U.S. to become vulnerable to such an attack could be one of the gravest oversights in the history of American security.
It’s a warning Graham has been delivering to Congress for a decade, as first reported by WND in 2008.
The difference today, however, is that North Korea, at least theoretically, has the ability to carry out the relatively simple, low-tech attack.
North Koreas has tested an H-Bomb that could produce a devastating EMP attack, even issuing a public statement about it a year ago: “The H-bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons, is a multi-functional thermonuclear weapon with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack, according to strategic goals.”
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In 2004, two Russian generals, both EMP experts, warned the U.S. EMP Commission that the design for Russia’s super-EMP warhead was “accidentally” transferred to North Korea. They also said Russian scientists were in North Korea, as were Chinese and Pakistani scientists, helping them with its nuclear weapons programs.
In the kind of EMP attack the commission fears, no one is killed. It’s possible most Americans would not even be aware that it happened, unless they were following the news. The impact is felt in the electrical grid when circuits are fried. Power could be down indefinitely – certainly up to a year. With America’s transportation and communications systems down, food shortages would be seen within days. Within weeks, people in cities would begin to starve.
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See the complete report on the threat from EMP.
In 2013, WND Books published “A Nation Forsaken” that detailed the specifics of the EMP threat to the U.S., as well as the way the U.S. government was ignoring it. Now this prophetic book is more timely than ever.
