James Woolsey, CIA director under Bill Clinton and a senior adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, said in a CNN interview on Monday that Iran may be a “relatively short time away” from developing nuclear weapons.
“Iran is a very serious problem already and will be a much bigger one very shortly,” he warned.
Woolsey was alarmed by recent developments in North Korea as well, recommending a show of American strength in the region, along the lines of a carrier battle group deployment. He worried that America may have developed a reputation as a “paper tiger” that would make any less impressive demonstration insufficient.
“I think that the situation with North Korea is worse than a lot of people realize,” he said. “Because they can orbit a satellite, and they can fire a nuclear weapon. They have nuclear weapons. If you can detonate a satellite with a nuclear weapon in it, up above the Earth in certain locations, you can knock out the electric grid underneath. That’s, to put it mildly, a very big problem.”
As it happens, former NASA mission controller Jim Oberg sounded this very same note of alarm a few weeks ago at The Space Review. Oberg warned that North Korea’s satellite program, conducted at great expense with seemingly very little to show for it, might have always been intended to deliver an EMP weapon into orbit. Such a strike would require very little precision and have no need of re-entry protection for the weapon, two areas in which North Korea lags conspicuously behind.
Woolsey said North Korea may be the most urgent threat, but Iran was a more “fundamental” threat. READ MORE
