North Korea has continually sparked fears of World War 3 because of Kim Jong-un’s insistence to create a deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The rogue state restarted its missile testing last week, firing an ICBM higher than it has ever been fired before.
Mr Barlett has warned the US and President Donald Trump they must “wake up” to the threat of an EMP attack on the country, which would wreak havoc to the entire power grid.
Experts have previously warned that an EMP attack could jam a country’s power grid by unleashing a devastating blast of electromagnetic energy above it.
Fears have also been raised such an attack could also cause severe damage to food supplies due to the impact of radiation.
Mr Bartlett warned the US is still not prepared for the threat of an EMP attack on its infrastructure, despite the possibility of Russian attack in the late nineties.
He said if a country wants to “really wanted to hurt” the United States, they would launch an EMP attack.
Such an attack would render the USA’s power and communications grid “useless for six months”, according to Mr Bartlett.
He said: “ At one point, Vladimir Lukin looked up. He said, ‘If we really wanted to hurt you, with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM from the ocean, detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country and shut down your power grid and communications for six months or so.’”
In a 2008 Congress report, in which Mr Bartlett features, the former Representative quoted a book called One Second After, which is about an EMP attack on the US.
Mr Bartlett said: “At the end of the year, 90 per cent of our population is dead; there are 25,000 people only still alive in New York City.”
While the figures being from a fiction book, he adds: “I understand that this is a realistic assessment of what a really robust EMP letdown could do to our country.”
A witness at the hearing, Dr William Graham confirmed that the figures could be seen as realistic and that several sessions had been held with Russian scientists to discuss the danger of EMP attacks.
He said: “The Russians had developed what they called the ‘super-EMP’ weapon that could generate fields in the range of 200 kilovolts per meter. And we had seen in other open literature that the Russians appeared to be using that figure as an upper bound for the kind of EMP that could be produced by nuclear weapons. So, we weren’t surprised, too surprised, to see it.