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Building a Better Bomb
dr who and the darlix writes "There is a nice article here about carbon composite warheads being tested. They destroy their targets while minimizing collateral damage."
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I'm still waiting for a bomb that doesn't destroy its target while maximizing collateral damage.
...when human lives are abstracted almost entirely out of the discussion of weaponry. What makes it so difficult for them to say, "a bomb that kills the enemy more efficiently and minimizes the loss of innocent civilian's lives?" Guilt, perhaps?
I minimize "Collateral Damage" by not renting the dam movie in the first place. Yet, it IS a bomb; this is not off-topic.
Great title michael. You forgot to use the words Terrorist, Airplane and President in the title too.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Somebody set up us the bomb.
All your base are belong to us.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/story.shtm l
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
but
a) It doesn't do any good if you hit the wrong building.
b) It doesn't do you any good if you mean to hit the 'wrong' building.
Furthermore, if a civilian happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, this still won't help... such is the nature of war I guess, though.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
So does this mean there will be bombs that only kill one person and cost 20 billion to make. ALRIGHT!!
--Matt Fisher
At last... we can kill all the fucking arab and saudi terrorists without damaging the oil wells.
Allah be praised!
Does "collateral damage" still mean maiming and killing people these days? If so, why is US media so afraid of saying so? Or is that just something the evil doers do?
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
"I'm still waiting for a bomb that doesn't destroy its target while maximizing collateral damage."
Farts.
"In the present effort, a Livermore team led by engineer Michael Murphy"
They've got Murphy involved already...
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
Well that's part of it. But it also includes the destruction of buildings, property, cables, pipes, etc. So the killing of people just is too specific; it's but a subset of "collateral damage".
Nope. Sorry, doesn't work that way. As long as there are people out there who can think independently, there will be some who want to kill you, take your home, rape your children, whatever. As long as human beings have free will, there will be people who wish you harm.
This has nothing to do with what you do or do not do. You can make more people dislike you through your choices, but you can never make no people dislike you. You can never be loved by everyone. Sooner or later, somebody's going to come along who hates you, hates your way of life, and wants to kill you.
Societies that fail to defend themselves from these kind of people inevitably fall to them... or wake up and start hammering their plowshares into swords.
The best way to guarantee a war is to be unprepared for one. And the best way to prevent a war is to be absolutely, undoubtedly ready to wage one if called upon to do so.
Welcome to Earth. Enjoy your stay.
Nope. Collateral damage means just what it says: damage that's collateral, in other words damage that wasn't intentionally caused, but rather came as a side-effect of whatever caused the damage that was intentional.
Sometimes people, such as yourself, like to paint military jargon as being full of euphemisms for killing and whatnot. Ain't so. Military jargon is exactingly precise. We say "collateral damage" because that is precisely what we mean. We say "civilian casualties" because that is precisely what we mean. ("Casualty" means a person killed or injured. Which is why we don't say "people killed.")
It's just precision of language. I'll give you a non-military example. My wife's a surgeon. Sometimes she works in the emergency room. When somebody wrecks their car, the incident is referred to as an MVC: motor vehicle crash. It used to be called an MVA, for motor vehicle accident, but the fact is that when somebody comes in from that kind of thing, you have no idea whether what happened was accidental or deliberate, act of God, whatever. So "motor vehicle crash" is more correct.
Why not simply "car crash?" Because a boat wreck is an MVC, too. So are motorcycle accidents. MVC's aren't limited to cars.
It's about precision of language, not euphemism.
Thanks for trying to slip a shallow and thoughtless political remark into the discussion, though. Appreciate you trolls keeping the rest of us on our toes.
as being very expensive, implanting this technology into every bomb *will* become painful to us tax-payers. And we are not getting these money back just because of a decrease in collateral damage.
And how bad is really some collateral damage?
A decrease in collateral damage means fewer innocent civilians getting killed or wounded. How much money is that worth?
Casualties makes the enemy frightned and less willing to fight.
Really? Sure doesn't look that way...
And the enemy should expect some collateral damage when they start a war, collaterall damage will in fact make them less willing to start a war next time.
Who exactly started the war with Iraq?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
...on spammers?
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The defense establishment tried to sell the virutes of the neutron bomb with this pithy point: "It destroys humans but leaves buildings intact," minimizing collateral damage. Aping this thought, in college, some of my acquaintances developed a powerful alcoholic mixture that they dubbed "neutron punch." Their rationale? "It destroys your mind but leaves your body intact," they said.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
A few months back, I saw a tech article about another type of bomb they are working on, that is very related - Small bombs!
Right now, the "standard" US bombs are 500 lbs, 1000lbs or 2000lbs. Bombs this big were needed so that the blast/schrapnel would take out the target even if you hit 10-20 yards from the intended target. (talking blast effect here)
As the latest generation of bombs got more accurate, they started to realize that this was SERIOUS overkill. If you can hit the exact building you want, there is NO need for a bomb that big. So, for the first time since Pre WWII, the USAF is working on designs for bombs in the 50-100 lb class.
It gives them a BUNCH of advantages
1)Less colateral damage - yep, I'll be blunt - we kill less of the people we don't want to kill
2)Less danger to our own troops working close
3)The odd one - if we develop new load racks, you should be able to carry approximately 10 times more 50 lb bombs than you could 500 lb bombs
You see, even back during "Gulf I", we had to send multiple aircraft against one target to destroy it - it didn't make sense to worry about it. Now, we actually task one aircraft to destroy multiple targets. If you can carry 10x more bombs, you could (in theory) attack 10x more targets per mission. In reality, the fact is that the bombs have NOT become so accuate that each 50 lb bomb will hit exactly on target, and the kill radius is small enough, that even a small miss wont work. So they will probably task 2 or 3 bombs to each target, so figure each aircraft can attack 2-3 times more targets per sorte
Like it or not, it's interesting technology. You may not like what it's used for, but it is "cutting edge"
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I agree completely. Ever considered yourself to be one of those exercising that free will?
Just a thought.
The JDAM is the most cost effective weapon now, and incidently, its one of the more accurate since it doesnt require a laser or any visability. its a $20k piece of hardware on an otherwise dumb (and cheap) bomb.
One of the advantages is the accuracy tends to produce lower collateral damage by itself. The primary benefit being the locals tend to rise up less when you don't kill lots of them, which is a good thing when you have to hang out for a few years.
There is also some degree of usefullness when the enemy knows you can program in coordinates x y z and the type and depth of penetration for the bomb, and make the bad guys eat it. The best bomb is one powerful and accurate enough that you don't have to use it. Using collateral damage as a form of control of the masses is one of the things we try to frown on now that we are all civilized, since it smacks of terrorism itself, although I would not rule out bombing civilian facilities myself, under certain circumstances.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
For a second, I thought this article was gonna talk about a sequel to 'Gigli'.
Bowie J. Poag
These bombs aren't being designed because people like to live next to military outposts. People don't wander into potential bomb sites to look at the big guns...
What does happen is that certain militaries will deploy their equipment where the most collateral damage will be caused. The civilians are being used. When they die the occupying power can come on TV and rant about the US "murdering innocent civilians". Never mind that they stuck an AAA battery in a residential neighborhood, that's not important.
I think these bombs are a good curiosity to have but would be too expensive for general use. I hope that these bombs will make a commander think twice about using civilians as a shield. Unfortunately I think the effect will be the opposite, and military installations will get even more integrated with the populace for defense. Sometimes cause and effect really sucks...
In Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger (the book, not the movie), they had bombs with a cellulose casing to eliminate shrapnel. They used them when they wanted to make a single-bomb surgical strike look more like a car bomb.
I don't know if we really had munitions like that at the time when that book was written, but considering Clancy's attention to detail I wouldn't discount the possibility. Either way, the idea of a shrapnel-less bomb has been kicking around for a pretty long time.
~Philly
> Anyone know how the approximate cost of a current steel-and-explosive shell?
I don't know about artillery shells, but for ariel bombs there's a nice chart in the February 2003 issue of Scientific American. Range varies greatly, from about $1000 for a dumb bomb to $700,000 for a cruise missile.
The JDAM "strap-on" combo uses a $20,000 guidance kit on a $1,000 - $3,000 bomb. There are other more expensive systems listed in the table as well, e.g. various types of cluster bombs cost $14,000 - $300,000 before you add a smart guidance system.
Modern warfare is expensive.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And if you look at any other recent, "real" war, you'd see how amazing that low a figure is. Compare that ~7000 figure to pretty much any other ground campaign in recent history - you'll see that it's really quite low. That's assuming their figure is accurate, too, which there's no real proof of.
War isn't safe. It isn't fun. It's hell for everyone involved. But the fact is, sometimes, it really is the last option left (in this case, I'm not sure it was, though). Would you prefer to go on living the dream that war is just something that the evil US is responsible for, or would you like to try to save innocent lives through better weapons technology?
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
The Ulam-Teller H-bomb is this Rube Goldberg contraption of a series of effects: a good-sized A-bomb to give off x-rays, a casing to channel the x-rays into Styrofoam, a blanket of deuterium (or lithium deuteride) to be compressed by the Styrofoad given oomph by the x-rays, a central "sparkplug" of plutonium to be compressed and give of yet more neutrons, and finally a U-238 jacket to take all those neutrons and convert them into explosive power.
Is a neutron bomb something as simple as an H-bomb with the U-238 jacket removed? With the plutonium sparkplug (essentially the second A-bomb imploded by the first A-bomb?) removed? Does this thing still work with those modification? If you take off the U-238 jacket and keep the sparkplug, you still have a very dirty bomb with a lot of fission effect. If you take out the fission secondary, are you even able to ignite deuterium to any effect? You can boost an A-bomb handsomly with lots of tritium, but that is an expensive, messy thing with a short half-life to use a lot of.
But the original H-bomb took essentially two, staged fission devices to get anything going with the deuterium (which fuses to produce a lot of energetic neutrons), and the original Teller idea of sticking an A-bomb at one end of a can of deuterium got nowhere -- the thing would have just fizzled. Is it possible that the "neutron bomb" was a fiction? I am thinking that a flood of fusion neutrons from a very low fission yield has to be, otherwise efforts to control fusion for power generation wouldn't be so difficult.
This is Slashdot, you're wasting your breath.
Americans were obstinately isolationist until after WWII. We still are, given a percieved lack of threat - George Bush ran in 2000 on an isolationist platform: bring the boys home, let the world look after it's own ass, the Cold War is over. After being dragged into two World Wars and Soviet expansionism threatening to drag the world into a third, it became US policy to maintain a large standing army forward deployed in Eurasia to actively deter the Soviets and Chinese and to de-militarize European states (and specifically, Germany) by assuming the majority of Europe's defense burden.
America is the reluctant Superpower. We could have had tributary states like the Soviets after WWII, and ruled half the world. We didn't. We chose the Marshall Plan, and helped western Europe and Japan rebuild as liberal democracies. If the world was such a Pollyanna place some people think it to be, Americans would want their sons and daughters back home, permanently, and wish the world to come visit, but leave us alone behind our oceans.
Derek
The USAF already has concrete bombs. They contain no explosives. They use kinetic energy to destroy the target and are useful for attacking air defense sites in populated areas.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Albert Einstein
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
1. Collateral damage is usually NOT produced by bunker-busting bombs that actually hit the bunkers. First of all, there usually isn't much to damage around the bunker, that does not happen to be another target. Second, it's usually produced by things that _miss_ the target -- what in this case will cause the same effect.
2. Last time I have checked, most of bombs that produced huge amount of damage to civilians, were dropped on civilian targets, or poorly protected military ones, to begin with. Often with the primary goal to cause massive damage to civilians.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Less chance of being hit with optically guided missiles was probably a reason why we contacted a lot of activity at night, but there were other signifigant reasons.
The war was conducted in a way that was designed to try to make the enemy give up and run as quickly as possible. Constant neverending attack is an important part of this stratedgy. Never being able to sleep because of constant bombing destroys morale alot faster then actually trying to kill them. Bombs that target at night just as well as they do during the day make every strike seem guided by a unstoppable force.
The morale reason was probably the biggest reason for strikes all throughout the day and night.
Einstein once said something like this: I can't predict what they will be fighting with in World War 3. But in World War 4, they will be fighting with stick and stones.
do you know how many people surfing /. from work are now going to have their browsing activity flagged because they loaded the front page of yr freakin' site. Hel-LO??? Note to self -- don't visit /. for another 36 hours.
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
RTFA -- "casualties" does not encompass damage to buildings and equipment, which is part of "collateral damage". Such damage was specifically mentioned in the article:
After all, most people (including myself) don't know that collateral = accidental.
RTFD. "collateral" != "accidental"
"accidental" would not be appropriate -- collateral damage may be unfortunate, but it is not always unanticipated. When you carpet-bomb a city and civilians get killed and schools get destroyed, I don't think you can say "oops -- that was accident," because such damage, though not your primary goal, was unavoidable, and you knew it and bombed the city anyway. Instead, you'd call it collateral, in the sense that it is "1 a : accompanying as secondary or subordinate : CONCOMITANT b : INDIRECT"
I agree with the AC, even though I hadn't thought about it this way before -- the phrase "collateral damage" is precisely correct for what the military types are trying to describe. If that doesn't fit with your preconceptions of what those words mean, maybe those are what need to be examined.
Come on, this is flamebait and not at all funny. /. IS too Americentric (though why America would want to kill people is beyond me).
Then it depends greatly on if they can hit their target in the first place, doesn't it?
In the real world, Saddam was capitulating to every single request.
The reasons for war in order..
1. To get Saddam to comply with Weapons Inspections, of course, he did that, soo....
2. To get Saddam to destroy his WMDS', of course, the inspectors couldn't find any, so...
3. To get UN approval to let us go in so we couldn't find them, but we had no suppport, so....
4. To go in and find WMD's, unless, of course, we don't, in which case, we bombed them because we love democracy so much..
Did I leave anything out?
Taken from here.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Do you even know who Eisenhower was? Here's a hint: before he was a President, he was a General.
Yes. That's the point. Real generals don't love war -- notice that the only person in the Bush admin that wasn't too keen on the whole Iraq fiasco was Powell, who realized that it was going to be another Vietnam-style guerilla war. It's easy to support war when your only experience is watching CNN.
Before you try to play the history card, make sure it's in your hand
This is just too funny. Really, had you never heard of the Eisenhower's famous "cross of iron" speech? Here's a longer quote which brings in the stupidity of wasting scientists on designing weapons, thus tying it to the article we're discussing
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
Reducing collateral damage is becoming more and more important as military planners realize that the war is not over once you capture the territory.
You want to win over a people's hearts and minds by changing the regime but not levelling their cities a la carpet bombing Dresden in WWII. Killing citizens does not shorten a war and the London Blitz and Berlin showed that enemy soldiers will fight harder if they know their families are being killed too.
There are lots of different types of bombs that try to reduce collateral damage. The most infamous was the Neutron bomb that limited a nuclear bomb's blast and heat damage to a few hundred yards but killed people through the use of radiation.
The electric power distribution munition(ph), can knock out a whole power grid. This bomb scatters spools of carbon strands over a target. In Vietnam the US developed Hyper baric Fuel Air bombs that used a high pressure wave to kill people in tunnels or create helicopter landing pads in the jungle. The latest improved version is the thermo baric bomb that uses extremely high temperatures to create a blast wave and also suck the oxygen out of enclosed spaces.
War is not glorious but it is necessary from time to time and if you can defeat the enemy without killing non-combatants, I am all for it.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
The High Energy Weapons Archive has a good rundown of neutron bombs. They're a bit more complicated than just taking the jacket off a hydrogen bomb (still needs the jacket to get the fusion going) - see the FAQ for a rundown. The Mk 70-0 nuclear artillery shell was apparently a tactical neutron device (~1kT yield); I dont know if it was ever tested. I wouldn't really call a staged implosion H-bomb a Rube Goldberg device, though..its a bit more complicated than you paint it to be; the tolerances are on the order of a few microns and nanoseconds. See the rest of the FAQ for a hugely in-depth discussion of the physical principles and engineering that goes into one of these things (you need a grasp of thermodynamics and physics, though).
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
He did all his great work around 1905. From then on he was spent. No more great ideas, just religiious critiques of better ideas than his.
Take his comment on WWIII. It's being fought right now. When it's over, the entire world will be better off.
- The world will be safe for American liberal democracy.
- European Corporatism (Fascism dressed in Prada) will be contained.
- Islamic lunatic fundamentalism will be tamed.
- Baathism (Arab Fascism) will be dead.
- Saddam will be dead.
- The Iranian mullocracy will have been torn to pieces by the people it's oppressed.
- Kim Jong Il will not be lobbing nukes at Attu and Kiska; with any luck he'll be pickled in the sauce he loves so much and put on display for dung-flinging competitions
- Ditto the house of Saud.
etc., etc.
WWIII was forced on the U.S., but the U.S. will be standing long after the perpretrators have discovered the joys of pacifism, just like the Japanese did after we paid back Pearl Harbor with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I certainly agree with the parent poster. The US *has* taken a high-handed approach, and *has* been able to convince its own citizens to ignore many of its own excesses and abuses.
What I get from this post is that you're upset at being presented with the fact that *you* may also be guilty of helping along the same killing of civilians that you find distasteful, and would be happier having it not brought up. You find it easier, more comfortable, to avoid it that way.
May we never see th