Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I'm still waiting for a bomb that doesn't destroy its target while maximizing collateral damage.
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
Not guilt. PR.
Do you think Bush's approval ratings would be so high if everyone knew that we've killed 6,000 civilians in Iraq? I vote "no."
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
Bombs are rarely used for the purpose of killing people these days. They're used to destroy facilities, bridges, buildings. That kind of thing.
Consider the bombing of Baghdad. Generally speaking, most bombing raids were conducted during the middle of the night, local time. Why? To avoid surface-based defenses? Partially. But our forces are essentially immune to ground-based attack. We could bomb any time we wanted. We did it in the middle of the night so we could destroy buildings without killing people.
Bombs are designed to destroy, not necessarily to kill. Killing's an important part of war, but not the only, or even most important, part.
"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.
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.
Let's reverse the question. Why hamper a technical discussion about bomb efficiency with irrelevant issues and issues of morality? There are certainly times and places for discussions of the morality of weaponry, and this is not one of them.
Not a couple hundred years ago, if someone mentioned evolution, someone would pop up and ask why you aren't inserting the word "heretical" into the discussion. And if they aren't...well, is that because of guilt? Fear of God? Same thing you're doing here, different topics involved.
May we never see th
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.
...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
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!
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...
I do think it's rather amusing that despite all the "9/11 NEVAR FORGET" patriot propaganda plastered everywhere, killing twice as many civilians as died on September 11th is completely acceptable for us.
And we wonder why terrorists are trying to kill us?
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.
> It doesn't seem like anyone really cares about Iraq any more. The protests were heavy and numerous leading up to the war, but once it began everyone seemed to abandon the cause all but entirely.
There's a curious phenomenon at work here. IIRC, a couple of weeks before the war started the only way you could squeeze > 50% US public support out of the polls was to qualify the question with "with UN authorization", and even then the support was only about 60%. Without UN authorization it was somewhere down around 40%.
Those aren't very good numbers for a democracy to embark on a war with.
However, as soon as the shooting started the "support the troops" meme kicked in, and approval skyrocketed. I suspect it's something to do with guilt, i.e. the naive notion that not supporting the war must equate to wishing our troops harm.
> This is in stark contrast to the Vietnam war, which as far as I can tell (I could be wrong) resulted in protests through its entire duration.
I think there were no protests at all early on, though they grew to an avalanche as "the cause" caught on. And as for Iraq, there doesn't seem to be much point in protesting a done deal.
However, since the "deep support" (i.e., before the shooting started) for the Iraq war was not all that broad, and since the promised wonder of a native democracy overseeing US-built schools and hospitals and rebuilding itself with oil revenues doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight, this could still turn into a Vietnam-style political issue if the killing and dying continues. (Recall how delightedly the media were announcing four consecutive days without any combat deaths just a few days ago, and compare that to the gloomy tone of the news tonight.)
IMO things have gone much better than we had any right to expect so far, but unfortunately the fat lady hasn't sung yet. If things are still going like they are now when the elections come around next year you can look to a lot of "peace with honor" campaign rhetoric, i.e. how fast can we get the hell out without admitting we're giving up on it.
And that is where the Vietnam analogy fits in. During the Vietnam war the public was treated to a steady stream of glowing reports about the phenomenal casualty ratios, but ultimately it didn't make any difference. There's a heck of a lot more to winning a war than killing lots of people, high-tech warheads or no. Especially in a democracy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
"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
Very good, who told you that? Look there. Amazing technology. This shows what a bomb really does and the effects are very well known and intended. The damage to humans is so immense, would the real effects shown on TV, people in US would not support this.
Why do you think that napalm-like fire bombs are developed and used? Probably to surgically melt down bridges and buildings at night;)
I find it interesting that in almost all press reports in USA only US losses are counted and never the total count of injured and killed humans is mentioned. Could it be that the numbers would not look very good?
It is talked about 60-something billion $'s of cost for this war - the total material cost of destroyed infrastructure, building, bridges, equipment is completely unknown.
Human losses are not publicized either the www.iraqbodycount.net tries to get number but those are only civilian deaths. How many are injured and to which degree is unknown.
The total count of humans killed in this escapade is intentionally kept quiet, or maybe the corpses of "other" soldiers dug under somewhere are not even counted.
I guess, it would be simpler, to lock the "leaders" causing wars into a room and only let them out again, once they get along. This would save all this stupid and destructive war making and weapons developing.
Come on, this is flamebait and not at all funny. /. IS too Americentric (though why America would want to kill people is beyond me).
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
"Why do you think that napalm-like fire bombs are developed and used? Probably to surgically melt down bridges and buildings at night;)"
s /story .jsp?story=432201
... you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."
Napalm was used in the recent Iraqi war:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/america
---
"We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches," said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. "Unfortunately there were people there
---
The Pentagon said it had not tried to deceive. It drew a distinction between traditional napalm, first invented in 1942, and the weapons dropped in Iraq, which it calls Mark 77 firebombs. They weigh 510lbs, and consist of 44lbs of polystyrene-like gel and 63 gallons of jet fuel.
Officials said that if journalists had asked about the firebombs their use would have been confirmed. A spokesman admitted they were "remarkably similar" to napalm but said they caused less environmental damage.
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