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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.
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)
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...
The first thing that comes to mind is what they would do to enemy pilots.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
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
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
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?
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.'
While studying wave physics at the university, a (swedish) defence researcher held a lecture about research in EMP weapons. The ones he had studied were supposed to be used in road blocks to stop vehicles, and when they tested it, it worked very well, and the vehicles were beyond repair.
However, when they tried to use it in Bosnia, the vehicles there were so old, it had no effect because it targeted the electronics in the cars, and the ones they used were too old =)
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
"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
Rubbish. EMP's are easy to generate. Some time ago New scientist magazine published details of how to make an EMP bomb out of a metal tube, a long bit of coiled wire, a battery and some explosive. All you have to do is wrap the wire around the explosive, insert it into the metal tube makig sure the two are kept apart by insulators, attach the battery and let it go BOOM. So long as the explosive explodes progressivly from one end to the other, you should get a load of energy quickly compressed into a bit of wire left sticking out of the other end, which then radiates your EMP. Its supposedly fairly easy to built one with a range of a hundred meters or so, which is great for destroying radar, C3 sites etc. Bad at killing people, but that's not what they're for.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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 more money in the military and less for the American people!
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
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
"But in most cases it's safer than conventional weapons: disabling electronics in a hospital, on an intersection or at a chemical plant is better than just pelt those targets with bombs."
Pelting Hospitals with bombs is generally not a good idea anyway, because the UN gets all uppity and starts waving around the Geneva Convention and mentioning 'civilians'.
I suspect that anyone suggesting using HPM weaponry in Iraq is looking more at the 'testbed' nature of the war rather than their effectiveness, given that the state of arms/armament in that region is limited to mostly surplus Russian/American hardware.
The only conceivable reason for deployment would be to attack hardened targets and communications, but you can bet that those things would be protected against induced currents (DefStan mentions three inline arrestors for antenna for protection from nuclear EMP), however, the civilians aren't.
So, instead of simply looking at the lovely byline provided by the warporn reports, it might be interesting to look at the effect of EMP as a whole in terms of the effects it produces. I believe someone mentioned 'pacemakers exploding'.
OD
PS The US has been pumping money into 'non-lethal' weaponry for years, mainly as a means of stressing supply lines rather than working on the conventional method of 'killing lots of troops'. The collatoral/infrastructure damage from indiscriminate use of HPM is going to be more, not less, than conventional arms. The main problem the US (and other developed nations) have is avoiding troop casualties.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
They're not valid targets, they're specifically protected under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
But then, water and power plants are protected under Article 54 of the Fourth Protocol of the Geneva Conventions. Britain and America are both signatories of the protocol, yet they bombed Iraqi water, sewerage and power systems during the last Gulf War. Neither party has been charged with war crimes.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Trucks and tanks are one thing, but what about the dead people - they are much less visible in photographs of the Gulf War. There was a gruesome picture originally published on the front page of 'The Observer' here in the UK. It was an Iraqi soldier still at the wheel of his truck, he had essentially been reduced to charcoal but was still recognisably a human being.
The paper received an enormous amount of criticism from elsewhere in the media and many American news organisations refused to reprint the photograph.
I'm sure its out there on the Net, but it is so disturbing I really don't want to go and find out.
Best wishes,
Mike.
...and what do you think those eddy currents do to "blow" transistors? They heat and break down the semiconductor junction. The pulse causes heating in the living tissue it hits, too. It's just that this extremely high power is present for only an extremely short time. Thus, the amount of energy is negligible. In electronics, the pulse drives currents in the conductors, concentrating the energy, which is dissipated in the circuit in each spot proportional to the resistance of that spot. The base or gate of a transistor has relatively high impedence, compared to the leads. It is also very small, so that heating happens in a very small area. BAM! the nice arrangement of donors and acceptors freely mixes up, or perhaps even gets seperated as the area evaporates. Even at lower energies, RAMs and flash gets rewritten.
I've threatened for years to take an old microwave oven, and dump the output of the klystron at the focus of a parabolic dish (would like to use a deep dish, fully enclosing the focal point, for safety), to both ruin the "boom cars", and make their drivers uncomfortable. I'm going to be watching the army surplus stores.
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.