North Korea On Special Alert Over Military Drill

The top command of North Korea’s Korean People’s Army ordered all nationals and military forces Monday to be on “special alert” over a joint U.S.-South Korean military drill that began the same day, the official Korean Central News Agency said.

The order from the Supreme Command, whose supreme commander is North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, suggests an unusually tough stance on the Ulji Freedom Guardian joint military exercises, which run through Aug. 27.

North Korea will retaliate against any military provocation with “a merciless and prompt annihilating strike at the aggressors with all offensive and defensive means including nuclear deterrent involved,” the KPA’s top command was quoted by KCNA as saying.

Along with all military forces, the top command ordered militia groups such as the Worker-Peasant Red Guards and the Young Red Guards to “closely follow all the moves” by the U.S. and South Korean forces with “high vigilance” and “make an immediate strong attack on perpetrators of any hostile act” against North Korea.

North Korea calls the U.S.-South Korea drill a prelude to an invasion, but Washington and Seoul refute such a claim, saying it is purely defensive.

The top command urged all nationals to “bring about a new leaping forward” in North Korea’s “150-day campaign” to step up the building of a prosperous and powerful socialist nation, KCNA said.

In the campaign, which will run through Sept. 16, North Korea plans to lift the economy by developing four key sectors — power generation, coal, steel and metal, and railway transport.

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Pentagon – Russian Subs Near US Coast Pose No Threat

Russian submarines patrolling off the US east coast are not cause for concern and pose no threat to the United States, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

“So long as they are operating in international waters as, frankly, we do around the world — and are behaving in a responsible way, they are certainly free to do so and it doesn’t cause any alarm within this building,” press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a Pentagon news conference.

US Northern Command issued a brief statement earlier that it was monitoring the submarines, which Morrell said were several hundred miles (kilometers) off the eastern coastline.

Morrell said he was unsure if Moscow gave Washington advance notice but the US military “had the means to derive where they were going.”

Morrell played down the episode, saying: “While it is interesting and noteworthy that they are in this part of the world, it doesn’t pose any threat and it doesn’t cause any concern.”

He acknowledged that US submarines have operated off the Russian coast “from time to time” as well, in international waters.

The New York Times first reported the presence of two Russian nuclear-powered, Akula class submarines off the American coast, the first such move in years that carried echoes of Cold War tensions.

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Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S.

A pair of nuclear-powered Russian attack submarines has been patrolling off the eastern seaboard of the United States in recent days, a rare mission that has raised concerns inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies about a more assertive stance by the Russian military.

The episode has echoes of the cold war era, when the United States and the Soviet Union regularly parked submarines off each other’s coasts to steal military secrets, track the movements of their underwater fleets and be poised for war.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union all but eliminated the ability of the Russian Navy to operate far from home ports, making the current submarine patrols thousands of miles from Russia more surprising for military officials and defense policy experts.

[...]

According to Defense Department officials, one of the Russian submarines remained in international waters on Tuesday about 200 miles off the coast of the United States. The location of the second remained unclear. One senior official said the second submarine traveled south in recent days toward Cuba, while another senior official with access to reports on the surveillance mission said it had sailed away in a northerly direction.

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The Danger of EMP, Electro Magnetic Pulse Attack

EMP is shorthand for Electro Magnetic Pulse. It is a rather unusual and frightening by – product when a nuclear bomb is detonated above the earth’s atmosphere. We all know that our atmosphere and the magnetic field which surrounds our planet is a thin layer which not only keeps us alive, but also protects us from dangerous radiation from the sun. On a fairly regular basis there are huge solar storms on the sun’s surface which emit powerful jets of deadly radiation. If not for the protective layer of our atmosphere and magnetic field, those storms would fry us. At times though, the storm is so power that enough disruptive energy reaches the earth’s surface that it drowns out radio waves and even shorts electrical power grids…this happened several years back in Canada.

View the detonation of a nuclear bomb, two hundred miles straight up as the same thing, but infinitely more powerful since it is so close by.

As the bomb explodes it emits a powerful wave of gamma rays. As this energy release hits the upper atmosphere it creates a electrical disturbance know as the Compton Effect. The intensity is magnified. View it as a small pebble rolling down a slope, hitting a larger one, setting that in motion, until finally you have an avalanche.

At the speed of light this disturbance races to the earth surface. It is not something you can see or hear, in the same way you don’t feel the electrical disturbance in the atmosphere during20a large solar storm.

For all electrical systems though, it is deadly.

William R. Forstchen is the author of this report and the book, “One Second After“. If you have not read it, we highly recommend it. More information is available at Amazon.com.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THIS “PULSE” HITS THE SURFACE?

Those who might remember ham radio operators, or even the old CB radios of the 1970s can recall that if you ran out a wire as an antenna you could send and receive a better signal. The wire not only transmitted the very faint power of a few watts of electricity from your radio, it could receive even fainted signals in return. As the Pulse strikes the earths surface, with a power that could range up to hundreds of amps per square yard, it will not affect you directly, at most you’ll feel a slight tingling, the s ame as when lightning is about to strike close by, and nearly all the energy will just be absorbed into the ground and dissipate. The bad news, however, is wherever it strikes wires, metal surfaces, antennas, power lines it will now travel along those metal surfaces (in the same way a lightning bolt will always follow the metal of a lightning rod, or the power line into your house.) The longer the wire, the more energy is absorbed, a high tension wire miles long will absorb tens of thousands of amps, and here is where the destruction begins as it slams into any delicate electronic circuits, meaning computer chips, relays, etc. In that instant, they are overloaded by the massive energy surge, short circuit, and fry. Your house via electric, phone and cable wires is connected, like all the rest of us into the power and communications grids. This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays. In far less than a millisecond the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.

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N. Korea: U.S. Plotting Pre-Emptive Nuclear War

The rhetoric out of North Korea continues…

North Korea criticized the U.S. on Monday for positioning missile defense systems around Hawaii, calling the deployment part of a plot to attack the regime and saying it would bolster its nuclear arsenal in retaliation.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he ordered the deployment of a ground-based, mobile missile intercept system and radar system to Hawaii amid concerns the North may fire a long-range missile toward the islands, about 4,500 miles away.

“Through the U.S. forces’ clamorous movements, it has been brought to light that the U.S. attempt to launch a pre-emptive strike on our republic has become a brutal fact,” the North’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.

The paper also accused the U.S. of deploying nuclear-powered aircraft and atomic-armed submarines in waters near the Korean peninsula, saying the moves prove “the U.S. pre-emptive nuclear war” on the North is imminent.

The commentary, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, said the North will bolster its nuclear arsenal in self-defense.

The North routinely accuses the U.S. of plotting to invade the North. But the U.S., which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, has said it has no such plan.

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