North Korea Nukes - A 'Real" Problem?

I’ve heard a great deal of disbelief come from contacts of mine regarding nuclear weapons and N. Korea.  If we listen to ‘the media’, it sounds like they’re just making a lot of noise with no real threat of truly hurting us here in the U.S.  But it’s just a matter of how you ‘translate’ the information as to whether you believe N. Korea is a threat and to what degree.

A few years ago they were doing testing with their rockets and at least three of them blew up at around 40 miles up.  The consensus was that N. Korea only produced junk and that they were not a real threat.  After all, with their rockets traveling a short distance (horizontally) and blowing up only 40 miles high (too low for orbit), what damage could they do?

James Woolsey is the ex-CIA director and was on the EMP commission a few years ago.  He pointed out that a 40 mile high trajectory was sufficient to do significant damage with a rocket if it had an EMP on it.  That altitude would take out a large part of the U.S. electrical grid!  A 100+ mile altitude EMP attack would pretty much kill all three power grids in the U.S.

A week ago N. Korea fired off a rocket and it only traveled 800 miles toward Japan, but reached an altitude of almost 300 miles!  Consider for a moment that if you wanted your enemy to think of you as dumb, you could ‘lob’ a rocket high and then allow it to come down ‘short’ leaving your opponent to thinking you still don’t know how to make rockets.  Although not a rocket scientist, my assumption is that the same rocket could travel a lot further with a ‘better’ trajectory. However Mr. Woolsey has spoken on this particular subject as recent as July 2017 in a CNBC interview.

One has to wonder who the dummy is at this point, especially considering that congress approved a bill to pay for the hardening of the grid over seven years ago?  But have we since addressed the problem?  No..?  The public should wonder..?!