High-altitude balloons, such as the one China has floated over mountain state military bases this week, are considered a key “delivery platform” for secret nuclear strikes on America’s electric grid, according to intelligence officials.

Spy balloons, used by Japan to drop bombs during World War II, are now far more sophisticated, can fly at up to 200,000 feet, evade detection, and can carry a small nuclear bomb that, if exploded in the atmosphere, would shut down the grid and wipe out electronics in a many-state-wide area.

The threat of balloon-launched electromagnetic pulse attacks was warned about by a congressional EMP commission and inside the military several years ago.

In a 2015 report for the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote extensively about the threat balloons carrying bombs pose to national security.

“Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.,” he wrote in the report.

“A high altitude balloon could be designed, created, and launched in a matter of months. There is nothing to prevent several hundred pounds of weapons material from being delivered to altitude,” he added.

On Friday, he told Secrets, “China’s recent balloon flyover of the United States is clearly a provocative and aggressive act. It was most likely a type of dry run meant to send a strategic message to the USA. We must not take this for granted.”

Now in the private sector, Stuckenberg, a national security expert and scientist who led the Defense Department’s EMP Task Force and chairman of the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, pointed to Japan’s World War II “Project Fugo” that targeted the U.S. with balloon bombs as an example of the threat.

“Not since WWII has North America faced a threat of this nature. Project FuGo in Japan used balloons to float bombs on the trade-winds across the Pacific to the U.S. and Canada,” he told Secrets.

EMP experts have warned that China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran have programs to hit the U.S. grid with electromagnetic pulse weapons that would cut the cord for a year or longer.

A congressional report has warned that a blackout that long could result in millions of deaths. Stuckenberg cited the research of the late Peter Pry, who headed a congressional commission on EMP and reported on the potential of a balloon-launched attack. (SOURCE)