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U.S. Air Force Developing Microwave Weapon
Makarand writes "A weapon that uses an intense microwave pulse to fry electronics in computers
and communication systems is being developed by the US Air Force
according to this BBC News article. This weapon is totally harmless to people and could be used in
situations where hitting targets could result in civilian casualties.
This weapon could be carried by an unmanned drone or a cruise missile." EMP weapons have, in general, been under discussion and research for a very long time.
At least when the army are out on maneuvers, they can cook up their own rations with it :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
How is disabling electronics completely safe for civillians?
Just imagine this being used near a busy traffic intersection, or near a hospital.
EMP weapons have, in general, been under discussion and research for a very long time.
What are reasons not to use them yet?
I was thinking. Wouldn't it make alot of sense to use these things in the defence shield the US is building? They seem to be having a lot of problems hitting the incoming missile with a convential exploding warheads, but something which could kill the electronics in the missile from within 300m could work better. (I must admit I don't know what sort of radius the convential warheads can destroy missiles over)
Sure, unless you're a small wet kitten.
cooking the cat from the previous item.
Hey, as long as they don't allow it to be called over the Internet, it might just do something to the whole 2 countries that use computers instead of paper for their terroristic activities.
[insert witty comment here]
Anyone want to bet how high a percentage of ordinance dropped on Iraq is going to be good old-fashioned, dumb heavy lumps of metal filled with explosives? This and other media fluff about smart weaponry seems to be designed to present war as a videogame...
people with pacemakers, or anyone nearby on life support or similar would still be affected.
now the ufo community has some real basis for the cattle mutilation via microwave cannons, etc.
Those stories have been around for years... perhaps they are not all crackpots?
This weapon is totally harmless to people and could be used in situations where hitting targets could result in civilian casualties
I don't think any army has ever been overly concerned with civilian casualties. The real boon for this is that it leaves strategic buildings intact for use by the bomb's owner.
this is like the third time i've seen this article posted here.. sjeez
http://www.virtualconcepts.nl/
On the other hand, the scary robot plane in the picture is COOL.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I seem to remember reading about a Soviet 50 megaton nuke. A warhead of that size wouldn't be usable against ground targets, as the force of the blast would cause it to bury itself and reduce the actual damage--or something. I'm no physicist.
Anyway, the upshot was that these things would be far less economical in terms of distributed damage than lots of small MIRV'ed warheads.
Instead, supposedly, a Soviet nuclear attack would have been designed to blanket the US with a nationwide series of mega-EMP pulses prior to actual ground target attacks.
I couldn't find a good link, but a description of some Russian/Soviet delivery vehicles is here
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Much of the work into developing this next-generation weapon is being done at the High Energy Research and Technology Facility.
The $9m lab is located in a canyon in the Manzano Mountains, part of the remote Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.
I wish they would check their figures before releasing stories. Could you possibly build a lab like this for 9 million dollars?
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
By remote control...how devestating!
This not quite an EMP weapon which usually destroys by causing induction and other similar effects. It's more of a maser (m(icrowave) a(mplification by) s(timulated) e(mission of) r(adiation)) which is tuned to silicon instead of water (microwave oven at home). The implied precision that is needed again indicate more in the nature of a uni-directional energy weapon (laser, pulse laser and ilk) rather than a pulse surge weapon system (HERF gun, e bomb, nuclear EMP warheads, dazzlers).
USAF research department issued a new book: "100 new ways to cook a human".
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Surely some form of tempest hardening - shielding the equipment in a faraday cage - would effectively protect the equipment (and cats). The article points out a microwave oven, thats just doing the reverse, putting the energy inside a faraday cage. I know that some buildings are shielded in Ottawa, but that has more to do with spying than than anything else.
Semper ubi sub ubi
High power radio frequency emissions, especially at microwave frequencies, equals heat in flesh. Especially since it has water and that heats up, a lot.
Don't beleive me? Stick a slab of bacon in your microwave. That's likely 500 - 2000 Watts.
EMP weapons are typically hundreds of megawatts (million watts), and the high end ones are in the gigawatt range (billion watts). Throw in that they'll be using an extremely directional antenna, and the effective radiated power could start at hundreds of megawatts into even the low terrawatts (trillions of watts).
You can take a common fighter aircraft's radar, aim it a nearby bird and in a few seconds it will fall out of the sky, dead. And that's 5 - 40 KWatts, effective is of course more.
Harmless to humans. Yeah, okay. Go ahead and stand near one of these, go for it! Be a gerbil.
OOPS! That's what the US government uses the military for! Couldn't forget about that, could we?
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Despite the emphasis on "totally harmless to people", it should be obvious that this isn't a true smart weapon either--imagine an accidental flyby over a hospital, airport, pacemaker, or computerized traffic light.
Still, this is a valuable weapon, and better than carpet bombing. I just don't want to see it (like sanctions) become a supposedly "bloodless" way to achieve foriegn policy goals.
Finaly, they are attacking at dawn. It is possible that i die, I will never se my wife again, or my kids. Our country will go under, and many people will die.
But I will be able to warm this damn old food! (this just had to be said)
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
...unless you're fighting with propaganda.
A Faraday cage is the cheap defense... but what it doesn't defend against is the propaganda.
This is a little like Catch 22's glue gun isn't it?
Oh no! how long before the Hilary Rosen from the RIAA starts developing weapons like this to use against evil music pirates...
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
The article itself is very light on information and does not offer anything other than pure speculation: "A micro-wave weapon may be under development... This weapon may be completely harmless to humans", yadda, yadda, yadda.
I think the United States are kind of pushing up one notch the "psychological warfare" and disinformation on Iraq.
This is not a troll: if you were going to launch a war soon, you'd want your enemies to believe you have several new, exotic and deadly weapons in your arsenal.
In the first Gulf War, Some Iraqi soldiers surrendered as soon as they saw unarmed drones. Drones are now armed, and dangerous, and some Yemenis terrorists learned this the hard way (meaning they were blown to smithereens by a Predator-launched missile.
Add some rumors -- before the conflict -- on how some drones may now carry some super duper microwave weapons and watch even more Iraqi soldiers surrender real quick when a drone flies over them...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The next generation of battlefield will be one where each side tries to take out their guidance systems, command and control systems, game boys, etc. The victor in such a battlefield will be the boys with the best toys, which is the point of development programs like the one in this article.
However, military planners should remember places like Afghanistan (vs USSR) and Vietnam (vs USA), where superior technology didn't mean certain victory. In fact, guerrilla operations by the natives of those contries killed and maimed a great many young men from the "2 world powers". The natives were armed with nothing more than assault rifles, low yield explosives, a few RPG's, and ALOT of desire to succeed.
When you build a system like this, it had better be protected on the back end, or some 17 yr old enemy sapper with a death wish will blow your control systems to hell. Also, you run the risk of thinking that your enemy thinks about these systems the same way you do. Maybe he builds these systems knowing you'll attack them, so he lays a trap.
And, while you are busy figuring out why that command center was undefended, you have a couple thousand guerrilla fighters rush your base of operations. Checkmate.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
Tell that to the people inside the now-not-responding plane, or in the flight path of the now-not-navigating missile! It's not like microwaves are going to make these things disappear, is it?
Geez, and we're after a Saddam for being a monster.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...must remember to leave the door open on the microwave and see how my food's doing ;-)
I would imagine these things could change the face of conventional warfare. Imagine as a squadron of enemy fighters or bombers is heading your way - launch one of those things at them and watch them drop from the sky like lame ducks.
Of course, if the other side had them then maybe we effectively return to the days of WWI combat technology.
Everyone has heard of "Bunker Busters". Imagine if terrorists cooked off one of these on Wall St. Of course, making a nuke is probably much easier than building one of these but it could have a devastating impact without the messy media images of fried bodies.
I hope we havn't invented the means of our own destruction.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
... intelligence reports that the Chinese are developing a new, high tech armor code-named "Redenbaucher"
For all the technological development over the last few years, it's worrying that the technology we rely upon is vulnerable to something like this. Having said this, I guess this idea would be of limited use in less developed countries such as Afghanistan and to a lesser extent Iraq, where there are likeley to be less electronic devices and communications infrastructure. Though the article hints at using them to disable weapons, I guess even these are going to be more primative than those used by the US? The low-collateral damage aspect.... For all it's use, it's relatively high collateral if it takes out my toaster, vcr, etc. I'd rather keep my TIVO & give away the weapons the traditional way :)
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
I want one to fry the engine management in the cars that keep screaming past my house.
Everything I learned about battle, I learned from Blizzard's *Craft series.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
This weapon is a disaster! Every pacemaker, ironlung and all other midical equipment in the given radius will go down as well! Why should sick and innocent people suffer?
EMP "rifle"
http://www.plans-kits.com/
Know all those speed cameras? Congestion charging cameras? CCTV cameras? Whap, they don't work anymore.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
... indicate that the chinese have already been experimenting with defenses against microwave weapons. So far the most reliable is a metal spoon ...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
How about 95% in the first 5 hours, just for CNN's sake, and then 0% for the rest of the occupation? Sound correct?
Thousands of people died in a day.
In ONE battle (the Somme) 60,000 Allied forces died on the first day. This doesn't include the numbers that the Axis lost.
Part of the point of weapons such as this is to disable the military and reduce the number of dead, this leads to a less pissed off defeated nation than one that has just seen a large portion of its population killed.
Of course given that Iraq use Scuds which have bugger all electronics in them, and North Korea still appear to be point and fire propulsion rockets this would be really effective against the British and the French should they decide to attack the US.
Sort of like the Stealth Fighter, Iraq has bugger all radar that is any good but Stealth Fighters and Bombers still fly at 30,000 feet because Iraqi air defences don't reach that high. But to the British Navy's Radar a golf ball flying at 30,000 feet and 500mph is still at target that can be blown out of the sky.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
For about 55 to 60 years now, one of the biggest threats in the world was the threat of a nuclear attact. One bomb that could wipe out a city in one shot. Just imagine the impact of a wide-spread EMP attack. Obviously it doesn't come close to the devestation of a nuclear weapon, but how much would our lives change? I'm not up much on the technicals of EMPs, but, would this basically wipe out almost any magnetic storage medium we use for computers? Imagine an entire city, like Washington for example, wiped clean of all it's data, this could set back a country during war-time a lot.
tourettes
My father repaired aircraft during the Vietnam War. There was once an accident on his base involving one of the recon aircraft (do not recall its name at the moment). It seems the high-powered microwave transmitters had been left operational when a technician went to service the plane, and he was badly injured (burned) as a result of stepping to close to the underside of the plane.
So even if the microwaves are supposedly tuned to silicon instead of water, I am highly sceptical of any focused microwave energy being 'mostly harmless.'
I agree, this can't be harmless to humans.
Even a microwave doppler radar can fry your eyes and balls especially. Don't bother to choose which ones to cover either.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
that the article mentioned that we could use these weapons in the war on Iraq...I didn't realize that we are at war with Iraq yet...
SIGFAULT
I'm generally opposed to murder in all it's forms (death penalty, war; holy, political or both) so it's good to see people spending time on weapons that essentially don't hurt anyone.
I'd much rather live in a future where police are armed with neutralizing weapons a la Minority Report, rather than walking around with god damned AK-47s like the police in many countries do today.
If I had to choose, I'd rather be made to puke with a vomit stick by accident than be shot through the heart over a simple Halloween misunderstanding...
for great justice, this sig has been moved
Well I've heard of high power microwave anttennas on aircraft when beng on causing light bulbs in nearby buildings to explode. Thus the stuff is supposed to be turned off when taxing around the tarmac.
However, I'd think if it can zap the enemies electronics, then the reflected beam back to the aircraft would damage the electronics on the weapon system. Thus, zappin itself. This wouldn't seem a practical weapon. Moreover, to sustain this type of power it would work on a chemical process and can only be used once like the flying laser system.
As for power, most airport radars currently work in the 1-2 megawatt region and in the C, Ka microwave bands. So far we don't see commercial aircraft dropping from the sky as they as they takeoff or land next to the radar due to the onboard electronics being zapped.
Most of this high power stuff was used in Vietnam to be able to see what lies below the jungle canopy since most foilage canopies absorb or reflect microwave energy thus the reason to use a lower frequency transmitter. As a result as the frequency goes lower, it takes a bigger transmitter with alot of "drive" power to attain a certain transmission power rating and thus the heat dissipation requirement goes up.
However, if it is a one time chemical weapon used as a bomb or missile then who cares about the heat, or the reflected high power beam since the device won't be around to see or feel the affects!
The Electromagnetic Bomb
Partridge-fartridge, go away and take your lame anti-americanisms with you.
AFAIK, Tesla was the first to think about EMP as a weapon (I think he called it Death Ray). He even came up with the idea of an EM shield which act as an impenetrable wall against any kind of attack.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Basically in both cases the default configuration is to be nonlethal, but it wouldn't take a whole lot to change that in a hurry.
A balistic weapon traveling at 4,600 MPH can't change direction much in 300M
No, a ballistic weapon can't change direction at all once it's fired. That's what separates a ballistic weapon (bullet, shell, dumb bomb) from a 'smart' weapon (guided missile, smart bomb); the guided weapons are just that, while a ballistic weapon relies soley on it's own momentum from firing and gravity to put it on target (remember projectile motion from Phys101?). 'ballistic missiles' aren't technically truly ballistic, with final-stage guidance on the MIRVs, but the launch to suborbit is.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Yes, when I was a kid (80s) the Scientific American used to quite often have articles about new theories in how to launch nuclear strikes. The EMP idea was frequently put forward as a way to destroy communications and prevent a counterstrike, along with many fascinating theories on whether anything would survive the initial fallout from the EMP warheads, and whether a 95% reduction in the strength of the counterattack would allow anything to survive on the attacking side.
It was very depressing.
I'm glad we've forgotten all about that cold war stuff now, and just concentrate on going around starting fights while more and more countries build nuclear weapons.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Am I the only one seeing a new cold war coming to our home doors. First it is the nukes of us and NK then this article proclaims that NK has giant mecha leader and couple days later we hear that US is building a anti Kim Jong II device.
;-)
Have we gone too far? If this is what is the prime of civilization, I do not want to be part of it.
DISCLAIMER: Read the Onion article before thinking that I wrong about new cold war
In dream society, people could be given the ability to mod replies. In real life, it would be disaster.
"U.S. Air Force Developing Microwave Weapon"
I think that the CIA KNEW those microwaves would need killin' at some point, but they kept pouring money into them like it was nobody's business!
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
Of course, this was all done in the remake of Ocean's Eleven, wasn't it? If Hollywood has thought of it, it must be good idea!
How many casualties have you actually seen in the news these days? From afghanistan or elsewhere?
Watch for casualty pictures in the news during the next gulf war (I hope not, but I'm a pessimist these days). Chances are, you might hear about casualties, but look for any actual dead bodies. They will not show them, because then it makes the war "real", and dirty, and unpopular.
"is being developed by the US Air Force according to this BBC News article."
well according to TIME magazine theses weapons have apparently already been developed and plan on being used in iraq. there was a little article in the recent issue about them titled "america's ultra-secret weapon". frankly if this is considered ultra-secret i'd hate to see what they consider double-ultra-secret!
fact: microsoft > linux
Sure, it's all fun and games until you poke somebody's eye out!
bius sig file. This is a moebius sig file. This is a moe
"CBC's reporting tends to be less enthusiastic about things military."
Sure. That's because they're canadian and therefore cowardly.
If the US wouldn't defend you, you'd probably be part of Nazi Germany.
Really interesting link
"Totally harmless to people" ... but surely they can solve that problem!
... cluster bombs are any less inhumane?
A national guard officer told me, back in the eighties, that the US Army had experimented with a "microwave oven bomb", essentially cooking the enemy. Experiments were discontinued, because the device was deemed "too inhumane". And I thought
-kgj
Are we forgetting that there are people who carry around things like pacemakers ? And what if this thing goes off and it hits a nearby hospital or something. They don't ask you to turn off your mobile phone for nothing in those places.
:)
Excellent way to stop the Terminator though
Yeh great idea, use and EMP to piss off your nuclear enemies by destroying all there electronic. They get pissed but do not have an EMP weapon to destroy our equipment. What do they do...they blow up a nulcear weapon in the upper atmosphere creating there own EMP, destroying some of our electronics and polluting the atmosphere to boot.
That's a great idea.
At least with conventional weapons the equal response doesn't give the whole population cancer. And since we are relativley safe from conventional attack that's okay.
IMHO
www.fotoforay.com
Wow, Slashdot one ups the reports on last years discovery channel news again!
truthfully,it is really only a microwave oven.of course,its going to cost millions each.BUT,just think of the looks on the faces of those muslims as we sling previously frozen martha stewart pork roast t.v. dinners at them.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
As any starcraft player can attest... EMP Pulses are a real pain in the ass. You need a science station... which means an upgraded research lab, a machine shop, and a zillion drones mining crystal and gas.
Don't forget that we got half of the help in WW2 from the Soviet Union, without that political intentions any better...
the RIAA. Ever put a CD in the microwave? Ms. Rosen will be putting these into a fleet of Ryder trucks and rolling out to the homes of Kazaa users.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I was reading through my Amature radio book and found the resonance frequencies for random human body parts.. The thought then struck me. Why don't we use the resonance frequency of the testicle as a weapon.. Put the enemy soldiers (male) out of service and we can pick them up along the way through.
Then there's this whole geneva(sp) convention thing that probably stands in the way of that.
Heh, nevermind, I'm just tired after working all night...
"Perl 6 gives you the big knob" -- Larry Wall
is that REALLY the best that you can do?
FACT: During the weapons inspections iin the mid 90s enough Antrax and chemical weapons were found to kill the worlds population 3 times over.
FACT: At the time this was found, Iraq said that it had NONE.
FACT: Iraq is the only country to have used Nerve agents/gas in combat. (vs Iran) The effects are still being seen today.
FACT: Saddam ordered the gassing of his own citizens in Northern Iraq.
FACT: Iraq consisently denied a Nuclear weapons program throughout the 90s until the former head of said program defected and laid the evidence before the world.
FACT: During the inspections in the mid 90s, inspectors caught Iraqi officials in the act of driving parts of a Calutron out the back entrance of a facility as the inspectors came in the front. Calutrons are used to refine materials for nuclear reactions.
Also, see the following link Cdi.org for more information.
If you have information that contradicts that posted above then please provide it. If not, then please accept the fact that Saddam is not the cuddly teddy bear some would make him out to be.
WoodSmoke
Sounds like one of the pulse tank thingies from House Atriedes.
And have been used in former Yugoslavia by the US as well. Rather small payloads have been used to 'destroy' power plants. Very successfully. Powerful EMP blast can probably take out all microcircuits in your environment. Bye bye computer.
In a way I'm sort of proud of this.
Up until the Gulf War, pretty much all combat was about the human resources and their *cough* expenditure. The World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam--they were all about how many bodies the various sides could claim from the opponent.
In a weird sort of way it makes me happy that we're now developing a tool designed only to take out their tools. Instead of "our army can kill your army" it's "our machines can kill your machines".
The next obvious step, of course, is the Ender's Game scenario. Send robots to do ALL the dirty work, and train a crack squad of button-mashers to pilot them.
There is a one megaton threshold of "usefulness" for nuclear weapons. In a surface detonation, the blast from a thermonuclear is powerful enough to send some of the atmosphere above ground zero into space. Once 1MT is crossed it seems that most of the excess force powers this effect leaving less energy for the blast wave and radiation to destroy things OUTWARD of the blast. It isn't as counterintuitive as it seems. Most of the energy output of a bomb is X-rays and gamma radiation. A bomb going off in space is little more than a bright flash and a little puff of gas from vaporized bomb components (It still sucks to be anywhere in the vicinity.).
The devasting effects we associate with nukes comes from the effects this radiation flux has on the atmosphere. It's like a vastly oversized thunderclap. The radiation instantly heats up a large amount of atmosphere and this is what creates the blast wave and starts a lot of the fires. Of course, there's lots of radiation left over to flash fry things further out. Heat a quantity of atmosphere up enough and it's going straight up in a hurry.
That isn't to say that there are NO noticable effects of making the bomb bigger but from a military point of view the law of diminishing returns kicks in with a vengence. There is another threshold around a gigaton or so that makes a bomb a planetary threat with some different effects involved (similar to a large asteroid collision) but who wants to set a Backyard Bomb off? It's called a Backyard Bomb because it doesn't NEED a delivery system. You set it off in your backyard and it fries your enemies anyway.
The 50MT Soviet bomb was the biggest public relations stunt in history. Khruschev literally told Sakarov to make something to "scare the ^$#@ out of the Americans" in time for a conference. It also came from a touch of Texas in the Russian mentality. The worlds biggest church bell sits on the ground somewhere in Russia because no one wanted to build the matching bell tower. It is Tsar Bell (the King of Bells). It is an impressive gesture that is practically useless. Tsar Bomba is same thing: a militarily useless ridiculously oversized weapon intended only as a gesture.
I could've sworn Germany used nerve gas, but it could've been a 'more humane' biological agent.
:p
:p)
At any rate, so Iraq used nerve gas. Go figure - the US is the only country to have used nuclear weaponry - and *not* in combat.
If you have information that contradicts the fact that we sent a few million Japanese civillians screaming into the afterlife (with many of them writing in pain for a few years first), then please provide it.
If not, well, Saddam sure isn't a cuddly teddy bear, but the US isn't a big fluffy stuffed animal of any sort.
'sides, weapons of mass destruction have nothing to do with it. Oil. Oil, oil, oil, oil. Anyone who says otherwise needs to wake up and realize what the entire country depends on.
(Of course, most of the anti-war dolts are the same people who would whine if we started massive drilling operations in Alaska, sparing us the need to kick Iraq's ass and take their gas.
The former soviet union built airplanes (MIG-somenumber, I think) with (radio) tubes instead of sillicon. It was designed to be immune against EMP. A tube does not die if it is hit by EMP, maybe there are some sparks inside, but that's all.
So at least those planes should be immune against that microwave gun. And perhaps even circuits based on germanium instead of sillicon, because the microwaves are tuned for the wrong material.
Denken hilft.
it's not very difficult to shield against the effects of this weapon.
Just for a rough sanity check...
Decent rigid coaxial cable offers about 100dB of shielding
. One-million watts = 90dBm, so that would drop it down to -10dBm interference in a shielded signal. Not enough to damage anything, but definately enough to interfere. Bluetooth and 802.11b run at a max of 20dBm and no cars crash outside when I key up the old bit blaster.
The absorbtion of the radiated power is also an issue. Different circuits absorb different frequencies better than others. If this was a fairly narrowband emission, it would wreak havoc on some things (soft tissue maybe) but not others. If it is very wide band, then you have to jack up your total power so that many different freuquencies have a potent allotment of power.
It would just be a lot easier to interfere (jam) with guidance systems and radar. And GPS is easy jam. At least that was the FCC's standpoint with respect to UWB. But that's another thread...
1) Every description so far makes it sound like its just a case of stockpiling Faraday cages. Surely it can't be that simple to protect against?
/. posters suggest, and a simple bit of work with some metal in (1) doesn't protect against them, how powerful a battery-powered one can you fit in a 40ft container on the back of a lorry on Wall Street, in the centre of London, or even, say, a suburb of Redmond as an example? This strikes me as a far more useful weapon of Terror than those messy chemicals and biological agents that Frys or Radio Shack wouldn't sell you.
2) If a high power EMP device is as simple to make as several
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Scenes We'd Like To See dep't.:
A ground-based air-defense system swings its emitter toward where the enemy aircraft has been detected. Mighty capacitors discharge, and a focused pulse of microwave energy lashes out at the airborne intruder.
Its avionics fried, the aircraft's hapless pilot ejects and parachutes to safety as the plane, now a multimillion-dollar piece of junk, slants into its slow death spiral...
(Of course, I know perfectly well that modern aircraft have their electronic guts protected with Faraday cages and whatnot...but it'd be cool to see a "soft" kill like this.)
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
It's more money in the military and less for the American people!
Such guerillas also favor weapons like the Kalashnikov. Sure it might be a little less accurate and a lot less whizbangy but that is what makes it so favorable. A Kalashnikov will still fire even if it's been thrown down in the mud. The parent poster is correct. It is much easier to disrupt sophisticated weaponry than it is to design it.
That doesn't always hold though. The Afghan rebels didn't have any trouble finding the best way to use Stinger missiles. Still that's pretty much a fire and forget weapon that doesn't have to be maintained once fired. Guerillas won't go in for anything that requires lots of care and feeding. They will gleefully monkeywrench anything that does though.
The problem is the level of shielding needed to protect against low level radiation leaking out of a building is very different from that required to protect sensitive electronics from very high energy radiation.
The other problem becomes apparent when you think of what tactical targets this may be used against.
The first stage of any modern war is to blind your enemy and disrupt thier communications - this means they cannot effectively detect your invasion and coordinate a counter attack.
Currently this is done by an initial attack wave - use radar seaking missiles to destroy air surveilance equipment, cruise/smart bomb/iron bomb to take out communication centers like radio realays and phone exchanges. Maybe use special forces to ensure destruction or imparement of key facilities.
The problem with all of these is you have to physically destroy the equipment - and this means any person near it.
Now if you could use an EMP pulse to destroy electronics then you could argue that that presents a lower risk to humans in the target areas.
The reason that you can't shield this stuff is that radar needs its scanner unshielded to hear its return pulses, radios need unshielded antenna to work, telephone exchanges need miles of unshielded phone cable.
The way to defend against this is to have backup systems in shielded enclosures that are safe from the initial attack, and then connect and use them after it has passed. This is what was done for the civil defence bunkers in the UK - and I presume elsewhere. If it works anything running or connected at the time is toast.
So this is where tactically these weapons can be used - unmanned drones can sneak into the terrotary and destroy comms and survielence systems.
I don't think you could easily get this into a cruise missile - you are going to need a lot of power, probably stored in a capacitor bank to generate a high energy short duration pulse from a directional maser system. Something like the Golden Hawk may do as you have capacity and a large jet turbin to tap for power.
One thing I don't agree with is that these are 'safe' weapons - no weapon is 'safe' it depends on its tactical use. As outlined above it could be used very effecticely - and of course another attraction is that its multi use rather than trhowing away cruise missiles at half a million dollars a shot.
One thing I disagree with in the report (and I'm in the UK) is that it would be good for taking out chemical weapon facilities. No its not.
For a start small scale clandestine chemical weapon manufacture could be carried in small labs by hand - destroying a few PCs, telephones and multimeters doesn't win you anything.
If you target a large automated plant (if the chemical agents are being made in secret at some generally normal chemcial plant) then you had better hope the control systems are totally failsafe, other wise you are going to release those agents, and other noxious substances, in potentially massive quantities.
I mean, look at it this way - would you believe that a safe way of disabling a nuclear power station would be to instantly and simultaneously switch off every control system, every safety system, every hardwired multiple backup system - because that is what a weapon like this will do if it works.
The Russians tried something like that at Cherynobyl - and I think we learned something there.
> Partridge-fartridge, go away and take your lame anti-americanisms with you
Go away and take your lame pro-americanisms with you
From the article: ..useful in a wide variety of missions where avoiding civilian casualties is a major concern.
One would think that with the US being the "Good Guys" that avoiding civilian casualties would be a goal of all missions.
It's more than likely an effective way of preserving the real estate.
A neutron bomb without the residual radiation problems and nuke escalation issues.
Megawatts of microwaves?
It would be too awful to brag about their new weapon in terms of frying people like a hot dog in the radarrange
but I'm sure that's what Gen. Amana has in mind. How could they resist?
It my understanding that modern thermonuclear devices are designed in such a way to make them difficult to "explode".
I don't have the links around any more, but there is a fascinating discussion of nuclear triggers that shows how this is done and why.
Anyway, the point being, if you had a directed EMP type device and you saw an incoming ballistic missle, wouldn't it be easy to fry the electronics of the missle so the thermonuclear device wouldn't detonate? Sure, you'd have a lot of destructive problems with the missle itself, but I think it would preferrable to have a 10 ton hunk of aluminum dropped on a city than a 10 megaton H-bomb, right?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The cost of 'smart' weapons (mainly GPS-guided bombs) has come down (thanks to Moore's law) significantly.
Why doesn't that make me all warm and fuzzy inside?
Somehow I don't find affordable smart bombs due to economics of scale is a positive development...
Well, I guess it's inevitable.
Can't wait till every two bit madman and wanna-be warmonger can have their own guided munition without going bankrupt.
At least, until now you have had to be a one of the major players to play with those toys.
In our shiny new world anyone with a few bucks to spare will be able to knock over a few buildings on a whim.
The famed "9/11" was a one trick pony, but within a decade people won't have to pull off elaborate suicidal plans to make a big bang.
Just press the button!
And, guess what?
There are always plenty of angry people with a score to settle and nothing to lose.
Well, guess there is nothing to be done about it, so I'll just quit whining now...
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Here is my "opinion" about our war with Japan:
1. ANY loss of civilian life is tragic and should be avoided.
2. If I remember correctly, they started the conflict with us not vice versa.
3. If you kick a bear in the ass, and then proceed to cut at him with a sword, don't bitch when he uses his claws.
4. Had those 2 nukes not been used the loss of life, on both sides, would have be much higher. The amount of lives already lost was staggering.
In 2000 our largest suppliers of Oil were Canada,Venezuela, and Mexico, in that order. I think it would be cheaper to buy from them than to expend billions and risk thousands of lives to fight a war with Iraq. If you toss in the political and religous backlash over this issue it becomes even less attractive.
All in all I still think the original poster that I replied too has his head in the sand.
WoodSmoke
Didn't America use one big conventional bomb (the flairy blossom or something) to kill 5000 fleeing Taliban warriors? I believe this is a weapon of mass destruction aswell.
Although you point to the US "defeat" in vietnam, it was a "defeat" in the sense that the US got tired of it and left.
It was not a victory in the sense that vietnam probably had 10 times as many deaths and casualties as the US, their country was reduced to the 8th century, and their economic base is still ruined.
So tell me again who lost the war?
Now, Afghanistan is interesting in that the Russians fought this as their empire was crumbling; some people think it hastened the end of that empire. Meanwhile, Afgahistan, appears to be even worse off.
I'd argue both countries lost in that war.
How is disabling electronics completely safe for civillians?
Well, safer than beeing blown to smithereens the old fashioned way at least...
I admit that it might not be much of an improvement, but somehow the fact that it is called a weapon goes a long way in terms of telling you that it may not be completly harmless or benifitial to society at large.
Weapons are per definition used to hurt people in some way shape or form.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Just wait and see, soon they're going to use this against P2P networks as well. They will toast any HD containing mp3's and reintroduce LP records :-)
I'm still really sceptical about ability yet to create EMP.And even more sceptical of using microwave as a weapn agains electronics. Well it' works well on people. US Army just want to create a new weapon thats all. That microwave bomb wasn't practical thats why the drop the hammer on it. All those stories about it being too powerfull. Well they are just .... Nuke is much more powerfull. Why they didn't ban it because it just too powerfull. Speaking of nukes. So far it's only device which makes EMP. Still it's not powerfull enough to burn any electronics. It may interupt but can't burn it. Vacuume tubes the ones that are just don't care. So I think all those microwave projects are something else then burning electronics.
When every Patriot missed every SCUD last time around I wouldn't be putting my eggs in the 'shoot them down' basket just yet.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If they sold a hand-held version, we could use it to neutralize these.
The news media can be explained simply in one word. Ratings.
... The way CNN and the rest of that lot is discribing the RQ-1 as a "Hunter Killer" one might be tempted to think the RQ-1 is a super intelligent robot killer lifted straight out of the fantasy world of the movie Terminator II. In reality the Predator is just an RC-modellers wet dream with some very light armaments fitted and a quite limited spectrum of uses on the battlefield.
That is very true. It is almost comical to read what the news media has been spewing out about the RQ-1K/L "Predadtor" recon drone precisely because the reports are so obviously sensationalised to increase ratings. Granted the fact that a UAV or UCAV to be precise has fired weapons in anger under genuine conditions of war for the first time ever is a historiclally significant event. But come on
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Saddam has killed more Iraqis than America ever has or will. Also what was the dancing in the streets a celebration of in Afganistan if America is so evil?
From the article
. htm which says There is a metallic net either inside the plastic panel or inside the glass panel, because the holes of the net are smaller than the length wave of microwave frequencies of about 12,5 cm at 2.5 Ghz. the glass panel is essentially opaque to the microwaves so all the energy of the microwaves is reflected inside the cavity of the oven.
The technology behind HPM is based on that used in household microwave ovens
Now even if the microwave rays are many times stronger and even if you use a directional antenna shouldnt it be easy to stop the rays?
From a google search i got http://www.provincia.venezia.it/comenius/eu_oven2
Or I think you can just use an aluminum foil wrapper around your computer to temporarily stop the rays (atleast till the aluminium starts burning, and then you can have fun) , Anyway how long is a drone going to be able to produce some millions of watts of power ? (746 watts =1 horsepower, I think?)
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
And programmed it to hit this target ;)
Why is the BBC running this article instead of some American press? Is it a bad thing that we get our information on what our military is researching from a source which isn't even based in this country?
The probability that someone is watching you is directly proportional to the stupidity of your actions.
Here's a hint: If the US military considers a project or weapon secret, as they did the F-117 in the mid-80s, you likely won't know about it until the second or third time it's used in combat.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
and metal screens will protect most products. Military, medical and industrial electronic equipment will be unaffected and most modern consumer electronics will survive as well, so I don't see the point in knocking out people's cheap walkmans and radios. Maybe this 'weapon' is sponsored by the RIAA...
*zzzzt*
Fry : Owch, my sperm.
The dancers were Taliban supporters. They were thanking America for their support in the 80s, when the CIA rounded up the most radical Islamic fundamentalists in the world, brought them to Afghanistan, trained them, organized them, told them to hit civilian and military targets in Russia. And dubbed them "Freedom Fighters". But this was in the 80s - we shouldn't let that smear our name now, after all Reagan's goons (Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush Senior) are all gone now.
Or perhaps they were celebrating because they are well-informed, media literate and aware of the precise situation. They aren't as stupid as Western pinko liberals and they realise that America is following God's Path and that it has fuck all to do with oil or military supremacy or showing the world that international law and multilateralism mean nothing and that money for a tiny elite of Americans is worth more than non-white, powerless, voiceless lives anywhere else.
By the way, how do you justify Nicaragua? We supported a brutal dictator there for years. He got overthrown by the Sandinistas, socialists with overwhelming public support. They improved the literacy and health standards, but we couldn't stand the threat of a good example so we organized and trained a terrorist army there. We told them to attack soft civilian targets like buses, and teachers, and nurses, because that would provoke a reaction and we could use that pretext to bomb the place. 3000 children were murdered by the Contras. America was condemned by the World Court and told to stop this illegal terrorist war. America vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all nations to "respect international law". We mined their harbours and imposed trade embargoes, so they would be forced to buy from the Soviets, so we could call them Communists.
6000 children and teenagers had their parents massacred.
Before you object that the Sandinistas were nasty people, do a quick search on who America supported in Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Have a nice day. None of this was reported in the US press. None of it matters now, because we are God's Chosen People, and the people we crush do not deserve our respect.
All together now:
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): The transient pulse of electromagnetic energy generated by the interaction of the nuclear detonation-induced ionizing radiation with the ambient environment.
(not microwaves........... garrrr!)
This from the same Air Force that tried to develop a weapon to smash a hole through the ionosphere in the '60s to disrupt Soviet communications...
So now you bring out the EMP weapons first, and fry all the GPS jammers. Your smart bombs have been de-lobotomized, and can find their intended targets again. This has the added bonus of wiping out the enemy's RADARs, etc.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Obviously Bobby Brown has not heard the Frank Zappa song "Bobby Brown".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey, what kind of backup would be able to survive this? Optical would, I assume. Is there any kind of magnetic that would?
How big are these things, how expensive? Could a smaller, cheaper version (say a one shot, 100m radius pulse) be feasibly mounted in a missile? If so you can use the anti-missile missile to intercept the incoming (a la Patriot) but instead of having to catch the incoming missile with a shrapnel burst, all it needs to do is get within 100m and pulse.
Actually, come to think of it, pack a parachute in your anti-missile missile and it can jettison the 'chute and pulse at the same time. That way you have a potentially reusable weapon that can get incoming equipment way further out than 300m.
Now all we need is huge robots to target these missiles at. Like this http://www.the-nextlevel.com/previews/ps2/rad/scre en2.jpg
A faraday cage will work for anything you can completely enclose. However, most of the really important military things like radio communications and radars by transmitting and, here's the important part, receiving electromagnetic waves. The key here, is you hit the antenna with your EMP weapon and all the electronics are toast. Sure, you could stick the antenna a Faraday cage, but that defeats the whole purpose.
tone
tone
No, I think that the idea is to use the magnetic component of the electromagnetic wave to produce eddy currents electric circuits. The short duration of the pulse means that the voltage spike is too brief to produce heating, but is big enough to blow transistors etc.
Just my 2c of freshman college physics.
This is planted story which purpose will be important in a near future. If the US invade Irak as planned they will face a much bigger resistance as in GW1 because Irakis will fight in their cities really hard. So the invasion campaign will not be as easy and quick as hoped, except if the areas are heavily "depopulated", and the only way to do that quickly is by dropping neutron bombs. These bombs are easily detected by there EMP emissions, unless there is an alternative explanation for the source of the radiation. This story is planted to explain that.
Wartime Accessories for your tank:
Reactive Armor by Orville Redenbacher!
"mmmm... I smell buttery goodness! We're under attack!!" *pop* *pop* *popopopop*
Well, dancing was banned under the Taliban. Perhaps it was out of love of dancing.
They couldn't have been particularly pleased that the Northern Alliance were coming. Last time they were in charge, women couldn't go onto the streets without being raped by soldiers.
If it was on CNN, it must be true and unbiased. Remember the footage of the Palestinian woman dancing after 911? The footage was actually from months earlier and nothing to do with 911.
This seems to be the source from which you form your views. I salute you.
what if they're dual use?
The use of microwave technology in warfare has been dabbled with by the U.S. government since the early 1960's, if not earlier. Studies have showed that extremely low microwave frequencies; in the 6-10Hz range; can disrupt biological functions in mammals and avians without the more common effects such as the burning of tissue. some of these effects include: equilibrium/navigation disruption, heart papilations/attacks, confusion/disorientation, and finally death. This "new technology" is just cleverly disguised cold war black-ops technology with a new label to make it more palatable to the American public who government is eager to extend its global empire.
Wouldn't a little hardening of the electronics be able to stop this?
And if so, wouldn't you have to turn up the power on such weapons ( if it is even possible ) to the point that it would be harmful to civilians / nearby people?
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
"Work is also ongoing on the feasibility and utility of placing compact high-power microwave systems aboard various Air Force platforms."
But what is the damage control if that "Ultra big microwave cooking gun" backfires and hits the boat it was lauched from...wow you just fried my battleship! I don't see how this could not affect humans, let along anything living, with commentary like this:
But whereas a typical microwave generates less than 1,500 watts of power, the Air Force researchers are working with equipment that can generate millions of watts of power."
I mean jebus! They put a LEAD SCREEN ON THE WINDOW for a reason. Maybe they'll drop ultra thick lead vests with their propaganda flyers beforehand...On the other hand, this could definately boost the cannibalism industry. Shh, it's part of the economy stimulis package we've all been hearing so much about.:)
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
After all, what's the point of war where you don't get to see the US killing women and children?
Isn't this what they used to bring down Wellstone's plane ?
Apparently it will also have a 'reheat' option as well as a pleasant two tone chime to indicate when its done...
It is quite simple
Haiku should not be funny
Try a Senryu
I don't know about the taiwan thing. China is offering taiwan businesses crazy labour and material rates and tempting most buisness onto the mainland.
They pretty much seem to be running a state industry designed to service taiwan with the eventual goal of making it totally dependant on red China. Not to mention offering taiwan the huge chinese market on a platter.
The taiwanese government can't really legislate to stop it, ironically because they are for free trade so taxes, tarifs and price controls are not a done thing.
I guess once that process is complete, China wouldn't need tanks or nukes or guns. The PRC would already own all the factories and centers of production (now safely on mainland china), and taiwan would be nothing more than a gateway to the west... just as beijing wants it to be.
The only thing anybody can do to combat that is to offer material, labour and a market at better prices than the chinese... good luck!
There is no proof of harmlessness of high static magnetic fields.
/. !
Even less so for strong microwaves, which are known since shorter times,a and more difficult to generate or measure.
Given the international situation USA has put itself in, I wonder how someone can take some PR from USAF and literaly quote it on
Actually, the launch to sub-orbit is not ballistic. Until the guidance system kicks in, only the freefall from end of the boost phase is ballistic. Once guidance kicks in, you're non-ballistic again.
Ballistic means only affected by gravity (even air resistance technically makes a 'particle' non-ballistic). The rocket firing makes the ICBM non-ballistic.
I love this definition: relating to or characteristic of the motion of objects moving under their own momentum and the force of gravity; "ballistic missile"
Just because you can use it in a sentance doesn't mean it's correct... Even the dictionary has it wrong, with the definition sitting right in front of them...
Admittedly, I am a mechanical engineer, so I tend to take this kind of thing a little more personally than most.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
This is precisely why I'm glad I know how to fish, start a fire without matches, and otherwise generally survive in the wild.
Imagine if you will your world with no electronic devices. Not a lack of electricity, just a lack of devices that are working currently. No computers, no internet, no car, no stop lights, no elevators, no microwave ovens, no pizza deliver, nothing that requires electronic components.
Could you live in that world were you suddenly thrown into it?
The super market wouldn't have food for very long and of course everyone instantly becomes a looter.
Luckily buildings would still be standing. But could you heat and cool your home?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
This weapon is totally harmless to people
What about people with electronic replacement limbs, pacemakers, hearing aids, EKGs, hospital machines...
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
One step closer to the EMP of the Beast technology.
O_o
Agreed. I was citing the example named in the post that I replied to.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Good point. However, there is another thing we should consider:
:)
At 3.8 million square miles, the idea that we can cover ourselves with an effective missile sheild is pretty dumb no matter how smart the missile.
Well, if there's anything that history has taught us it's that the military loves expensive toys that look sexy. And you can't get much sexier or more expensive than your very own Death Ray.
Most military hardware (at least the stuff produced by the US, Europe, and Russia) is already built to withstand EMPs. No one will ever use a weapon like this to knock planes out of the sky, or stop tanks in their tracks.
What it can be used for is for frying radar systems that are switched on, and for frying passive tracking systems that are switched on. For obvious reasons these cannot be shielded against EMPs (ok - if it's not obvious then reason is that a radar system must be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation in order to work).
Why is this a big deal? Several reasons:
(1) Ground based anti-aircraft systems have become very small, mobile, and relatively cheap.
(2) Iraq has taken to placing such systems right next to things that the US does not want to blow up (hospitals, schools, chemical weapons facilities, etc).
(3) Even stealth aircraft are not entirely invisible to radar. Yes they can slip through a traditional perimiter radar network (i.e. the kind of line of radars that many nations have watching their borders), but they cannot remain undetected if they have to fly right over a radar system, as they would have to do if there is a radar system either at or near to their target.
So now the US has a method of blinding anti-aircraft defenses without destroying the stuff around them. Given US methods of conducting war (i.e. heavy reliance on air power), and the obvious synergy between stealth and EMP technology, these weapons are a big deal, and I might add there is no obvious or easy way of defending against them.
. . . or they'd by EMPing us by the city block.
EMP weapons have been in practical use for years. This is not your mother's EMP weapon, it's a microwave beam.
11*43+456^2
Hasn't this been done before in Golden Eye ? :-)
:-)
Perhaps they've got Alan Cumming writing the software, after all he does say "I'm invincible!!" a fair bit.
Though I'd watch out if Sean Bean, and Robbie Coltrain turn up
Seriously though, considering you have to generate several megawatts of power, you'll have better mounting lasers on sharks head!
What next? A laser on the moon ?!
Geez!
i SWEAR i was watching the discover channel or somesuch last week and there was a show about "The Weapons We'll Use Against Iraq" and exactly this type of weapon was detailed. they showed a computer graphic of a "bomb" (looked like a missile to me) flying over terrain, past a little city, sending out little lightning bolts (microwaves, duh) to fry the local electronics, then flying on, past the city, and terminating in a mountainside. there was every indication that the weaponry was long since conceived, built, and tested -- and that it was war-ready.
maybe i have some detail mixed up. dunno.
No! You've got it all wrong ... another person who posts a reply without reading the article.
This is actually about combat microwaves, which are actually being used by soldiers to reheat their MRE rations in the field.
:-)
I don't know about you but i'd be pretty damn pissed off if my computer suddenly stops working after the military carry out training excercises in my area...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
i want to see the CNN footage when the first of these gets used (presuming the cameras are out of the effective range, and thus unharmed).
the lights blink out, cars stop running, and everyone in baghdad with a pacemaker suddenly clutches his chest and falls over.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
People with mirrors and reflecting corner cubes would be dangerous for the Air Force. A aircraft flys by, fires its electromagnetic gun, the energy is reflected back, and Zap! all the electronics in the aircraft is gone and it crashes. The secret elements of the U.S. government don't mind a loss of $5,000,000 of the taxpayer's money. Even $5 billion is no problem for them.
A lot of these weapons don't actually work. They are only ways for the rich to get richer on lucrative government contracts.
Farley, like the dog on "Fraggle Rock", or Farley as in Chris Farley the dead fat guy, or Farley as in Farley Mowat?
:)
You could imprison any of them in a bamboo cage fer chrissakes.
OTOH, a device remarkably like the one you described exists. It's called a "Faraday Cage", and is named for British Physicist Michael Faraday, the God Father of Electromagnetism.
You can even buy "instant cages" made of mu-copper foil -- the Army has a bunch. These cages are slowly replacing the Aluminium Foil Deflector Beanies that the crazy nutbags out there are wearing as countermeasure for the government's mind control rays. Do a google for HAARP if you're in for a good laugh.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
--what you say is true up to a point, but you leave out some embarassing details. US and europaen conglomerates (with the humans attached to them still being major political and economic forces, especially in the US) supplied iraq with everything they needed. Iraq got shipped the chemicals and biologicals used for weapons, and no way did the people involved think it was for building daycare centers. they knew for a fact what was going on, and encouraged it. they are a huge part of creating the problem in the first place, for profit.
they wanted to make up for losing their profit when their other puppet they put in and supported in iran, the shah, got overthrown, so they built up iraq and encouraged them to attack iran. As to the kurds, the US STILL supports turkey which wipes out as many kurds as the iraqis do. A kurd one foot over the border inside iraq is a "freedom fighter" fighting the e-vile saddam, but one foot inside the turkish border the same guy is a "terrorist". The cia even showed saddams engineers and scientists HOW to use the chemicals and equipment, including effective aerosol dispersal. Iraq was being supplied right up to at least two weeks before the gulf war started. Iraq invaded kuwait after getting the go ahead by the US ambassador to kuwait, calling any dispute between those two nations their business. Iraq tried for two years to appeal to the international community to get kuwait to stop slant drilling on the border and to stop stealing their oil, with zero success. The US dropped megatonnage of chemical warfare agents on vietnam, laos and camboida, and STILL does it daily in south america, including spraying entire villages with their food crops and water supplies becoming contaminated. Because they call it a "herbicide" they can get away with not calling it "chemical warfare". I got friends permanently sick from that stuff, and who knows how many died from the "no chemical warfare" chemicals they sprayed. The US government has consistently lied or obfuscated reality on so many issues it would take a day just to sort out the google links for an adeuate educational surfing experience for all of this. The US also has been conducting chemical, biological and radiological experiments on the civilian US population and on it's various veterans for generations now,and lied about it for the longest time. they even lie about casus belli, try on the phony non tonkin gulf "attack" that was lied about for over 30 years.
Data is perfectly all right to state to make a point, but don't stop looking at your "comfort" zone if you really want "more" of the truth. The US regular people are not predators or wishing other people harm around the world, but the junta cabal that seized total power after world war two, the loosely described "military industrial complex", is quite happy using pretexts to start various wars for profit. They create a "problem" say 9-11, this problem causes a "reaction"-them dirty ayrabs! nuke em all! let's roll!-then they give their "solution" gw's "war that will last 100 years".
One example of many. Use google, look harder, my best advice.
nerve agents have been used by many nations, for example they were used extensively in the yemeni civil war, they were used various places in africa, etc. biologicvals have been used even more, just some of them are "slow", because they don't kill quickly, they fall off most peoples informational radar screens. Do some research on brucellosis and it's linkages with research in the US after ww2 using japanese scientists working for the US and the apparent links to MCD. Check out "mycoplasmas" and a substance called "yellow rain". Research operations like paperclip" and "popeye" just for starters. Type in "fort dietrich" and start reading, then try "plum island" and "west nile".
You want more the info is out there, just look harder and keep an open mind and never forget that the mass controlled media is controlled at the very tippy top by a handful of people, people who profit from..well..manipulation political reality on a very, very large scale, and who are also part of the aofrementioned military industrial complex, which also includes international banking and the pharmco and mega-construction industries. there's PROFIT in wars, causing wars and lying. Enron is chump change candy stealing. Dig harder.
...but we do have death rays now.
Super. America, where hath your soul gone?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I think it's being developed by Raytheon in Tucson, AZ.
Microwave technology has been developed and tested for weapons for many years now. Same with lasers. This article contains nothing that hasn't been publicly available for at least 5 years. Dateline has had more than one show about it as well as 60 Minutes and others. Not sure what the big deal is.
What I think is a much more interesting use for microwave technology is the study of how we can alter the weather. This falls in the Battlefield Enhancement category and gets quite a bit of funding because of the possiblities.
Imagine being able to cause a lightning storm over your enemies forces, or causing severe flooding, or even a drought. You could even mix and match to your hearts content.
Iraq, you don't want to get your shit together, that's fine, but now you'll get a three year drought followed by heavy rains for 40 days and nights. Supposedly this can be accomplished by focusing microwave energy at a specific spot in the sky. If you send enough energy into a cloud, it will cause the cloud to produce rain. Obviously that's the short and quick version but you get the idea.
There is a lot of info available on the net about this. If your interested, read about the antenna array in Alaska that is supposedly used for Battlefield Enhancement (tm) experiments, and also check into the "radar rings" which happen when doppler radar stations transmit rather than receive. You'll see a bright circle around the radar station on the radar imaging. It usually only lasts a very short while and often the images are deleted from the archives. Thing what you want about that. I'm not one to believe in every conspiracy theory that comes along but it is pretty interesting.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
I would bet that another application is the use of the weapon to prepare freshly popped popcorn. The smell of freshly popped buttered popcorn will probably be enough to cause mass surrender. The only remaining problem: having enough for everybody...
stirring the pot since nineteen mumblty mumble...
I recently came across this site
I dont know if this guy is a crackpot or not, but his ideas sure scare me...
The U.S. Army doesn't "build" such weapons anyway, government contractors do, which are ordinary corporations whose goal is to make and sell products to make a profit and stay afloat. Any old customer will do, so they sell some of these weapons to other friendly nations. Those nations turn around and sell them to somewhat questionable nations. Those turn around and sell them to nations that we would never sell to, such as Iraq (for a huge sum, probably).
So, now, if we and our enemies both have such a weapon, who will sustain the most damage from its use? The U.S. of course! We are more dependent on electronics guidance systems and computers and radios than any 3rd world nation!
Iraq/Palestine/Al Qaeda are probably jumping for joy at this news. Dammit.
The EMP Cruise Missile has arrived. (articles,tech) (rejected) 2003-01-20 15:26:05 [Rejected]
Didn't think much of those EMP Artillery shells? According to Time Magazine, The US military has developed the High Powered Microwave cruise missile, capable of generating 2 billion watts of power broadcast over an area off 1000 feet, perfect for those late night electronic barbeques.
And if the person had actually read his own artical, he'd realize that toasting somebody's pacemaker isn't exactly harmless. the weapon would certainly minimize casualties, but...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I was thinking that a great way to deliver this sort of weapon would be with a giant owl.
Well, not really an owl, but a gigantic owl-shaped robot. It flies in attached to an unmanned drone, and spreads its wings once it is dropped. It then starts to glide, accelerating as needed using a hydrogen-powered rocket which fires from the robotic owl's rear.
Eventually, it finds a big electrical tower (you know, the kind that use four bare wires to channel the electrons), and lands on it. It releases the remaining hydrogen gas, allowing room for the compressed gel packs stored inside it to expand; perhaps absorbing moisture from the atmosphere to turn powder into gel. These gel packs would actually be giant electrolitic capacitors.
The capacitors charge from the power lines, and the owl opens its mouth, broadcasting EMP or microwaves at the surrounding technology. A really realistic owl might even hoot at the same time.
This is why it's really important that the delivery system be a robotic owl. Owls can rotate their heads all the way around, unlike those silly drone airplanes. By rotating their heads while hooting, they will achieve excellent coverage and cause significant disruption to surrounding communications systems, etc.
When the power serving the owl is turned off, it realizes its mission is accomplished, and self destructs by letting go of the electrical wires. Maybe it even has some C4 in its head, so it can blow up the tower. Or maybe the electrolytic gel can be explosive, too.
So now we know why Hans Blix can't find anything -- he's ignoring all the robotic owls.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Me be very happy to hear America is developping
the weapon Me can use against their drones and electronics-packed equipment. Once Us come back
to knifes and swords the true solders of Allah
will show their superiority!
Osama
You misunderstand the moderation meaning, which is easy to do. It might say "+5 funny", while the actual moderations are "+1 insightful, +1 interesting, +1 informative, +1 funny, -1 overrated, +1 funny, +1 funny". This can even give one that is "+1 funny, +1 funny, +1 funny, +1 troll", displaying as "+2 troll". Yes, in detail display, it would show as "+3 funny, -1 troll"... I'm just showing chronology. I haven't read the slashcode, but I think it just shows the most recent moderation reason in the score field. I browse at -1, no moderation displayed, To avoid any possible bias in my own moderation. Hey, on that topic, it sure would be nice if more metamoderators would check the context on odd-looking moderations. Remember, these comments don't happen in a vacuum.
Heya, The 2GW output power is the peak output power. When you realise that an RF emitter has (at best) a 20% efficiency (similar to modern radars) then you realise that this must be a pulse over about a millisecond. This means that the average power out is a small 1KW. This is much more feasible given the space restrictions inside the cruise missle in which it's to be mounted. Also, it should be noted that this is NOT an EMP weapon. It is the voltage field created that destroys the silicon. Iain
---- "I would be careful in separating your weirdness, a good quirky quantum weirdness, from the disturbed weirdnes
...just don't lead em so much...
Man... we must be getting lax on the technology front. I cant belive that I am just now reading about this here on /. For crying out loud my dad and one of his printing equipment salesmen were talking about this yesterday, and he was telling me about it a couple days before that... I never thought my dad would be more uptodate on geek technology stuff than /. ;~)
In other news... the US declares that god is no match for thier superior weapons technology... finger in light socket anyone
I wonder if the case on my TiG4 would bleed off enough energy to survive one of these things.. I know it absorbs 2.4GHz pretty well!
ready...
PULL !!!
FIRE
no microwave oven required.
>The latest technology is a "strap-on" system
....
To some, "strap-on" is an apt description of recent US foreign policy
In the gulf war, we launced tomahawks (that flew through Iranian airspace! but that's a whole other topic) that were equipped with warhead that delivered a payload of very fine metallic strands. These strands would float down and short out power lines, transformers, etc. thereby killing Iraq's power infrastructure. Very effective stuffs, with extremely minimal casualties.
Goldeneye minus the satellite, Russians, and nuclear relativity. Other than that- great idea to avoid civilian casualties while delivering crippling blows to technologically advanced targets.
You see, if you take a 100V 1FD capacitor, and wire a bunch of them in parallel, there voltages will be additive.
IANA-engineer, but I believe that this is incorrect. If you wire capacitors in parallel, the capacitance is additive. If you wire them in series, the voltage is additive (however the capacitance decreases). Some projects I've seen online have used two parallel banks of capacitors wired in series to double the voltage while still having a lot of capacitance. The problem is that it is difficult to make high voltage capacitors that have high capacitance, but ultimately the energy you can output depends on both.
Part of the problem when working with stuff like this is effiently generating the microwave energy. If you discharge a 100V 1F capacitor, that *POW* will be applied to your EMP generator before it ever gets to a target. If not designed right, the only molten electronics will be those in the generator itself...
I guess the secret is out: while the explosive flash of a normal explosive causes burns, the microwave bomb will heat its target unevenly and leave it soggy in the middle.
After the initial hit, you need to rotate the target 90 degrees and hit it again.
I mean it. =^..^=
yeah, you're right, but i was counting boost in the ballistic phase...combination brain fart and early-morning laziness. and my physics book says "air resistance for most ballistic trajectories can be ignored" :P (although i don't know if that would actually matter more than a couple of inches in the field with a 16" shell).
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The air force should really talk to the Marines about this, there already is a base weapon designed for this.
A former jarhead/co-worker of mine was part of the group that was testing new weapons technology back during the gulf war. What they were doing was pointing microwave 'guns' at enemy troops to raise their body temperatures (a squad can only move as fast as it's slowest unit) causing fatigue and disabling soldiers. I had a moral issue about this because you can't really get medical treatment for say an arm or leg that is medium/well done. Cooking people on the battlefield is pretty scary. The weapon went into regular production a year or two ago (I don't remember what it was called or who was producing it) and it reminded me of some of the 'field test stories' I had heard.
I guess if they just made a higher energy version of the same weapon it would probably have the same type of effect on electrical equipment as an EMP type device.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
http://www.conspire.com/haarp.html
According to this article, its been shut down almost 5 years.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Firstly, I truly fail to see how a weapon like this will make that much difference against an enemy that regards Kalashnikows and rocket-propelled grenades as high tech and has had it's most significant success using box-cutters.
Secondly, it seems that this weapon could very well be used against humans if used at similar frequencies to microwave ovens.
Thirdly, all this glory halleluyah for high-tech weapons is more than a little bit sick. In the real world, real people die in wars. Killing and maiming more people will make the USA even more unpopular globally than it is today and will most surely attract more attacks by fanatics who have nothing except their lives to lose.
Fourthly, the most recent use of high-tech biological weapons was in the USA, against Americans, most probably by an American. And, ironically your FBI has yet to name a suspect.
Fifthly, most of the rest of the world thinks that the USA has no real problem with Saddam, and that what the USA really wants is the oil. The rest of the world will not forget this, nor will they forget the paradox of the USA's treatment of North Korea, a country that has openly admitted having worked on nuclear weapons.
But don't worry. I'm sure that the reality of what is happening will eventually become evident to you as well.
Don't disturb the children.
-------
Incite and flee.
Gold on a metal substrate is a good mirror for everything, not just microwaves.
The Hike hercules was an air defense weapon which was typically deployed in a ring around large urban areas.
I don't remember that they used nuclear warheads and they certainly were not ICBMs.
but i think i would rather take my chances with my car losing all power and coasting to a stop than in getting hit with the shockwave from an explosive blast, or the debris from said shockwave from an explosive blast.
the only 'safe' war will be like the one in the mentioned star trek episode, where war and casualties are all logical, rather than physical, events.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I guess they read /. too :P
it was on a need-to-know basis, and you didnt need to know =)
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
I was under the impression that the Neutron Bomb was created exactly for this purpose. It sends out a massive wave of radiation killing all living things within a radius, and leaving all the buildings and infastructure behind. They are illegal under convention I think.
It sure sounds more like the kind of weapon the RIAA would be developing to finally even the odds in their war against P2P nets.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This weapon is totally harmless to people and could be used in situations where hitting targets could result in civilian casualties.
Perhaps totally harmless to those amongst you, who DON'T have some sort of Pacemaker or ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator) sewn inside of you. I mean, I'm supposed to avoid HAM radio transmitters fer' Pete's sake (who is Pete anyway?). Oh well -- I'm sure that those of us who do are in the minority. So when this "intense microwave pulse" frys my internal electronics, this would likely be viewed by the military as an 'acceptable collateral loss'.
Time to build that shielded bunker I've been saving my allowance for...
WOW - sounds like even the military has too many of these things going around
Now the Tomahawk can fly through a 1 meter square window -- This is not as amazing a feat as you think it is though it is still pretty amazing. A person with a home-built RC aircraft can do this and they can't process a tenth the information a computer can, nor get it; For instance, they don't have any feedback from a gyro. The tomahawk uses aspect tracking and GPS, so it can fly waypoints and then recognize a picture of its target.
So basically, you can fly the damn thing in a window near to someone's datacenter and blow it, it will almost certainly kill everyone in the room with it but it probably won't knock down the whole building, and it's supposed to take out a building's worth of electronics.
Just thought I'd share... Anyone feel like looking any particular part numbers up?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
had a storry on this:
http://www.southwestern.edu/~millerc/e&m/
But the most interessting stuff is that if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will find a link to a Government Report:
[H.A.S.C. No. 106-31]
ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE THREATS TO U.S. MILITARY AND CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE
HEARING
BEFORE THE
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARING HELD
OCTOBER 7, 1999
I guess this is stuff someone forgot to pull of the net...
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Does it bother anyone else that we are getting news about our own US Air Force from the BBC? Shouldn't CNN be reporting on this or some news agency from the states; or is it common practice for the citizens of the world to know what is going to smack them if they misbehave, before we (US citizens/illegal aliens--who can tell the difference thes days?) are told what toys we have to do the smacking?
On another note, I wonder how many bags of popcorn this thing could handle... Imagine going to the moive theatre and just sitting there with a bag of kernels, waiting for the film to start; All of a sudden the whole theatre is blasted by this thing, and BAM! (or POP!, more accuratly) you have nice hot buttery popcorn... I kinda like the idea...
It's not that I am bitter that I submitted this story two years ago, it's just that I'm bitter that I submitted this story two years ago!!!!!
w ea pon.02/
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/03/02/new.
rimhoffd - Troll or Man?
That's all I care about regarding this microwave.
Dolemite
_____________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
please read my comment (#5136986)
Check out HAARP. It is based on the same idea of using microwaves as a weapon only on a much larger scale.
http://www.viewzone.com/haarp00.html
Does anyonme have anything to confirm this? I thought that the initial strikes also included EMPs so that they could have total darkness when the first strikes were launched and it took Iraq like 24+ hours or so to get the power back on.
According to Cybershock (winn schwartau) an EMP payload was used against an Iraqi Air Defense Radar Installation. It was shot from a navy deestroyer in the Red Sea, travelled 450 miles and wiped out the radar center's electronic capabilities.
schwartau testified to congress in june 1991 about HERF guns and EMP/T bombs, mentioning how cheap it would be to build one and take out Wall Street.
Terminator is shielded and grounded, it will not harm him/her.
I think I wil start a company selling new type of cloth: with built-in shields against micowaves. So your pacemaker will be safe. And if you hide your beloved PowerBook under your shirt it would be saved too...
It was developed by the Canadian dude who ended up trying to help Saddam build a giant gun that Saddam _said_ was only going to be used to launch things into orbit. Believed killed by the Mossod, as I recall, but I can't vouch for the accuracy of that part.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Bravo, Slashdot!
"This weapon is totally harmless to people..." said the lead technician, talking through his left head while his newly sprouted right head looked on and smiled. "Since working on this program I've found that I can think twice as fast !"
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Profit!
Namaste
Hasn't anyone here seen "A View To A Kill"? I bet those Iraqis and North Koreans really wish Max Zorin hadn't been thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge by James Bond.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Then you'd get the 12 kg of Pu vaporized and in the air causing cancer for the next million years or so.
actually, airborne PuO (plutionium is pyrophoric, expose fine bits to O2 and they burn right up) is much more lethally toxic than carcinogenic [actually, being an alpha emitter, it's really not that bad at all; the rads are stopped by your skin - gammas cause the most damage from external exposure]; i'm at work so i can't reference, but i believe something like 20ug (yes, MICROgrams) inhaled will cause a horrifically unpleasant internal-alpha-radiation-induced death within a few weeks. Of course, then the PuO is still rattling around, but at least it's sequestered in your dead and buried body. unless you opt for cremation...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Speaking for Canada and the usa's other allies, this is really good news for us. It may actually be safe to fight on the same side as americans again soon! We can only hope...
----- sXe
I will just announce that I have ported Linux and apache to my RFID tire tags, and post a story to slashdot.
Same effect...
Fish? Soon there will be no fishes for you.
For starters, some quality research on this very topic:
Fer De Lance - Briefing on Soviet Scalar Electromagnetic Weapons
Scalar Wars - The Brave New World of Scalar Electromagnetics
And for those with Acrobat Reader...
The Motionless Electromagnetic Generator
"Everything you know is wrong!"
What's a second? An hour? A day?
It has much more to do with
the Earth's rotation than with cesium.
So they can pillage over enemy's equipment? How can microwaves damage equipment but not boil a person from the inside out?
Heh. In the event 'the birds are in the air', would you rather be near the silo, or far away to wander the aftermath. In the pre-appocolypse I hear it's all location, location, location.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
After all, 40 or so years ago guys would get "suntans" by standing in front of the microwave dishes at sensor stations in Alaska. Until they realized that it was killing them rather quickly. Mind you much higher power and duration than this new weapon thingie.
As bush is calling everything a weapon of mass destruction these days. What about microwave weapons. They certainly are indiscriminate! What about loosing control systems for water supply, sewage, hostpitals, pace makers, emergency vehicles, aid agencies, emergency broadcast radios, air raid sirens, etc, etc. All these gone just to take out a SAM site. This weapon effects more civillians than any HE bomb could.
When will "america the unlawful" dismantle it's weapons of mass destruction.
actually, i did know that - the pipes from the gun are still rusting outside of baghdad today. yes, he was believed killed by Mossad - three silenced .22 rounds to the back of the head at his hotel room door, the $25,000 (90?) in cash he had was untouched, and nobody saw a thing. eh well, i can't blame them, that gun would have been great for lobbing VX at Tel Aviv.
shells are still ballistic for all practical intents though; you can calculate to within a few feet exactly where that thing is going as soon as it leaves the barrel, and there's no way to change it.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
What everyone forgets is that all these dictatorships use "old-school" (not really) tubes. Sure, EMP will destroy modern Western solid-state electronics, but keep in mind that most of Saddam's equipment (if he is intuitive) is most likely controlled by vacuum tubes, which are the least effected by EMP of any electronics. Russia and all the formerly USSR regimes use tons of equipment with not one transistor in them. In the case of nuclear blasts, the US infrastructure would be knocked out before theirs.
I'd say this makes more sense as an anti-aircraft tool. But that raises a question....we're not dealing with countries with particularly advanced air forces. If anything, development of such weapons would simply HURT us....Imagine how much harder it would be for our air force to destroy 3rd world militaries. And it's quite a strong terrorist tool, as you can just camp out near a commercial airstrip and point and click with a shoulder-mounted one of these.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
Giant electromagnets!
Yeah, lead isn't ferrous... But I'd love to see a (say) destroyer generating some massive magnetic field to totally screw up enemy ships. Actually, this would work for radar, wouldn't it? Makes hitting the thing easier.
"How are we going to kill the shield frigate?"
"Just drop a few steel ball bearings out of the plane, that'll do it."
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
Well, I guess I should just bring my marshmellows, for the roast.
HA, consider it done
For what it's worth. The North Koreans aren't actually insane. They're just going back to what works.
Their strategy prior to the early 90's was to be irritating and annoying to the point just shy of serious consequences, then offer a deal. Sort of like if I were to poke you with a stick incessantly until you were balling up your fist to kick my ass, at which time I might say, "Give me a quarter and I'll go away." You give me a quarter, I do go away, but, every year, my poking stick and I return.
At the turn of the millennium, Kim Jong Ill: President of the Korean Hair Club For Men, was under the impression, that their good (relatively) behavior had earned them a Presidential visit. Which could certainly be considered very important to a starving country who's hate for America, is the only thing that keeps it from imploding.
What does Bush do, with, apparently, the blessing of his silly advisors? (Condalezza Rice could not know less about Asia if all her information came from the old Kung-Fu series.) He makes a shit list, puts North Korea at number two, and prepares to mobilize for war against number one.
If we personalize the situation a little, perhaps...?
Let's say I'm the badass on the block (I'm not, but let's just pretend) so I'll be playing the part of the US. You can pretend you're North Korea, an aggressive panhandler. I've just made my shit list, which I've announced publicly, to make myself feel better. There are only three people on it, out of the nearly 200 people in our town. You're number two.
Maybe you find it random, since just like last month, I was nice to you. And we kinda had an understanding. You wouldn't poke me so much with the stick, and I wouldn't be such a hard ass with the whole quarter thing. You're hungry, and financing bolt on hair on a panhandlers budget wasn't easy. But it's still kinda a diss that you're only just behind the asshole petty criminal who snatched that cowering Kuwaiti woman's purse.
Then I announce that I really would like a shorter shit list, so my plan is to beat petty criminal, Iraq, either to unconsciousness and reform him, or to death. Either of those two ends is fine. If other people in the neighborhood want to help, great, I'm sure it'll be cathartic. Then I proceed to train up, so I can really deliver an effective beating. (One where all the violence is one way.)
Now number two, appears as if it'll soon be number one on the shit list. And it's pretty obvious what's going to happen to number one.
Clearly, you're threatened. You've got to find a way, to find some kind of insurance that you can avoid Iraq's fate. And you might have as little as a year. The whole playing cool thing certainly doesn't look like it will work, it got you to number two on the shit list. But worse, it takes time. Time for ye old poking stick. (The one your father handed down.)
This time, you set the poking stick to maximum and seize the moment. What more effective time to annoy me than while I go through my training regimen. You know that it's really important for me to keep my focus on Iraq, and any distraction will be greatly unappreciated. But you don't want the quarter. You'd like the quarter. But what you really want is for me to promise before the whole town that I won't go all Edward Norton on you. To heighten the urgency you make sure you allude frequently to your switchblade (which no one is completely sure isn't of the comb variety). You'd never actually use it (that would be suicide). Maybe you might quietly sell it, but it's important that people think you have it, and selling switchblades is almost as bad as using them. So mostly its just something you think carefully and wistfully about while poking me with a stick.
Perhaps from that perspective, they're not entirely incomprehensible. The wisdom of their choice(s), well that's certainly debatable, and a regime that makes sport of starving it's own people, they're not likely to win debates or popularity contests. But it might not hurt to remember that the multiheaded any direction that seems like it could be promising approach combined with appearent erratic unilateralism, which we have no problem following, probably seems pretty inscrutable to them.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Firstly, referring to women as girls in a derogatory sense has been recognised as sexist for some time now... look at your topic then report yourself for re-education, comrade.
Firstly, I truly fail to see how a weapon like this will make that much difference against an enemy that regards Kalashnikows and rocket-propelled grenades as high tech and has had it's most significant success using box-cutters.
Even al Queda used things like civilian vehicles and radios, which would be sensitive to this sort of weapon. North Korea and Iraq have more vulnerable technology than that.
Secondly, it seems that this weapon could very well be used against humans if used at similar frequencies to microwave ovens.
Microwaves would have to be used at energy levels capable of actually cooking your internal organs to be harmful, that's a whole lot more than you need to induce a current to destroy microelectronics. While these weapons radiate a lot of power (a few gigawatts), they do so for nanoseconds, so the total energy output might be around a kilojoule or less--about the amount of microwave energy a home microwave puts out in a second.
The conventional explosives used to create the microwave burst, or just being hit by the heavy flying object itself would be a far greater danger to humans.
Thirdly, all this glory halleluyah for high-tech weapons is more than a little bit sick. In the real world, real people die in wars. Killing and maiming more people will make the USA even more unpopular globally than it is today and will most surely attract more attacks by fanatics who have nothing except their lives to lose.
The entire point of this weapon is to kill and maim less people when we go to war. Many of the things we bomb these days are infrastructure, if we can destroy them with less risk to people nearby, isn't that a good thing?
Fourthly, the most recent use of high-tech biological weapons was in the USA, against Americans, most probably by an American. And, ironically your FBI has yet to name a suspect.
I'm not sure where you're going with this item... is this a general argument that technology is bad or something?
Fifthly, most of the rest of the world thinks that the USA has no real problem with Saddam, and that what the USA really wants is the oil. The rest of the world will not forget this, nor will they forget the paradox of the USA's treatment of North Korea, a country that has openly admitted having worked on nuclear weapons.
Um. Ok then. Right. HAND.
--
Benjamin Coates
I am sorry but this is simply not true. Microwave frequency (in an oven, I assume) is NOT the resonate frequency of water. It's actually chosen because it's part of the ISM (industrial scientific medical) band. Try microwaving some water with a 2GHz wave. Try again with a 3GHz wave. water heats up too! (one easy way of disproving the "resonate frequency" stuff).
The reason that microwave heats water more than others is due to the polarity of the water molecule, so it turns more easily when excited by the periodic wave. If indeed was microwave resonate to water molecule, then you would expect it to affect ice and water with similar effects, however this, again, is not true as Microwave (ovens) does little to ice - the reason you can defrost with it, though, is that the microwave works on the thin layers of water that's melted on the surface, and use it to propogate the heat down to the center.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Smart bomb drops YOU!
I would have though that the Apollo program was the biggest PR stunt in history. Not that it didn't do extremely cool things along the way, and I'm certainly glad it happened, but...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Seems like the US Air Force have been watching too many movies.
What a smart idea, when you've got all the technology, and the enemy is armed with spears and rocks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I remember hearing about this in the 80's, some guy built a microwave gun that destroyed loud boomboxes that were disturbing him.
Your impression is based on (successful, BTW)propaganda. Enhanced radiation warheads were intended to kill Soviet armor crews and motorised troops who might otherwise survive a tactical nuclear attack.
We've known how to defend against EMP's of this magnitude since Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite in 1752. Homebrew EM weapons are peashooters in comparison.
Taxation without representation is tyranny! Statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands & Pacific Territories!
so considering the time magazine article and your reply i guess it's safe to assume we have USED this weapon in combat? doesn't sound to secret to me...
fact: microsoft > linux
Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.
-General "Buck" Turgidson
Developing multi-array radar for a certain island nation that was in operation lets say around 13 years ago leads me to believe that Stealth Fighters and Bombers are totally useless against 10 year old radar.
You don't even want to know how pointless those billions spent are when trying to evade next-gen radar.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Let me just point out a few flaws in your stick metaphor. You didn't give me a quarter to stop poking you with a stick - you gave me a quarter as a bribe to not buy that switchblade. I went away with my quarter but I *haven't* been "playing cool" I been buying a switchblade with money earned from selling longer and pointier sticks to everyone else in the neighborhood with a penchant for poking you.
You've been counting on the fact that I'm perfectly rational but I *am* known for some incredibly bizarre & risky behaviour (my holiday pastime is kidnapping the children of another neighborhood friend of yours who is much bigger and richer than I). I'm a compulsive control freak that is starting to lose control - you aren't exactly sure *what* risks I might run to regain control. You have to seriously consider if I'm one of those panhanders that was deinstitutionalised. Even if I *am* perfectly rational in my logic you know that my perception of reality is more than a little suspect.
Unfortunately we are at a stand-off, You've been blunt about your disdain for me (something I've always been towards you) and I'm scared about your apparent intention to kick the living shit out of me once your done with one of my stick poking buddies, so I show you my brand new switchblade. You're getting into fighting trim to beat up that other guy and don't really have time for me, and more importantly - I have a switchblade. I promise to throw away my switchblade if you promise not to beat me up and give me another quarter. You're tempted (you don't like the look of that blade) but you know now that I'm a compulsive liar who will just make more switchblades no matter what promises I make. You also know that I'm desperate for money and that my stick selling operation would be a *lot* more profitable if I started selling switchblades too (combined they make excellent spears). I'm a little afraid that one of my customers could knife me with my own product or knife somebody else and get me into trouble - BUT I'm MUCH more afraid of starving to death or losing control. It's really a no brainer, I'll threaten and curse until I get my promise and a quarter - I'm not sure myself but I think I'd even carry out some of my threats if I don't get my way. But even if I do get my way I have NO intention of keeping my promises I'm going to make more and better switchblades and I'm going to sell them when cash gets low. I'm going to make better and longer sticks, tie the blades to them for handy spears, and in the future when I'll be able to get more than a lousy quarter from you when I threaten.
So what do you do? If you roll over you know I'll put you in the same situation a few years hence but next time I'll be threating you with a nice long spear and asking for much more. And you know you'll also be facing all sorts of characters (some not too stable) who will have sticks, knives & spears that I sold them. But if you try to kick my ass and take the blade from me there is a good chance I'll knife you and anyone who helps you in my reach. You can try to get the whole neighborhood to stop tossing quarters in my hat - I'm awfully close to starving to death. But most of my immediate neighbors are too afraid of my switchblade and many don't like you that much anyway.
None of the choices facing you are palatable - It's hard to say definitively which one is the wisest. Ignoring the situation by pretending N. Korea was "playing cool" when in reality it was doing the one thing we were paying them off not to do as well as selling ballistic missiles to anyone with the cash is one option. It has many good arguments in it's favor & even appeared to be working to an extent. On the other hand they are the single biggest source of the proliferation of ballistic missiles to the most desperate and bloody regimes - a problem that gets worse & more destablising worldwide with every sale. Furthermore we have NO reason to believe that nukes wouldn't be on the price list once N. Korea had them - social unrest caused by extreme poverty is a far greater threat to the regime than Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria et al with with the bomb. The near certainty that North Korea will sell nukes has got to be part of the analysis. You could also argue that much of North Korea's "progress" was the result of a change in diplomatic tactics accompanied by Japanese & South Korean wishful thinking more than any substantive change in the nature of the North Korean regime.
Thus spake the master programmer:
"Let the programmers be many and the managers few -- then all will
be productive."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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