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Radiofrequency Weapons
BWJones writes "Global security is running a fairly detailed and interesting story on E-bombs (not email bombs, rather electronic microwave weapons) taken from the IEEE Spectrum Online.
We have long known (since the 1940's) about the effects that high energy weapons can have on electronic components from nuclear blasts, but this class of weapons is designed to exclusively attack electronic infrastructure. "
All in favor of using Lindon, UT as the test range, say aye. AYE!
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
To celebrate, let's rob a high-profile casino using the most convoluted scheme possible. Plan should ideally include witty banter and excessively smug con-men.
Nice, now we got weapons that can destroy everything electronic (tank control system, missile guidance, radio, powerlines, etc.) without killing people (other than those with pace-maker). This shall revolutionize warfare, disintegrating it into one side with big guns fighting the other side who just got knocked into the stone age (maybe iron age if they're lucky).
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Where are those sentinels things?
Not so sure if this is going to work in any of the situations we seem to have the idea of putting ourself into anytime soon... Destroying mass amounts of electronic infrastructure seemes counter-productive to rebuilding efforts in urban environments.
Hmm.. maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree on a subject that I'm not too familiar with, but as I recall most military applications are shielded against EM pulses (to protect against the EMP effects of nuclear weapons). Wouldn't it then stand to reason that "e-bombs" would be more useful on civilian infrastructure/targets? I.e: You can take out that TV station (like we may have done in Iraq?), but you (probably) won't be able to fry the radar on that MIG-29.
With that in mind, could these weapons then become like chemical or biological weapons? Deadly to civilian populations but mostly useless against modern first-world military forces? If Saddam had gassed our troops it might have caused a few casualties and slowed us down... but it wouldn't have stopped us. If he had gassed the NYC subway system.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Every time our early-80's GE microwave kicks in, the TV goes all fuzzy. TV's infrastructure. I smell prior art...or is that burning popcorn...
Please help metamoderate.
I can see the yuppies kneeling over their
deceased iPods and Clies with tears in their
eyes and a look of utter despair on their faces.
Why!!!! Whyyyyyyy!!!!
Yep. And in numerous other movies.
And here is another nice article on the threat they really are.
~$400 to take out a small city? Scary.
we have phasers (not handheld versions yet but i'm sure there'll be a time) where's my photon torpedoes and warp drives? *_*
If good things come to those who wait...why work now? Procrastinate!
Alfred Bester envisioned the same in "The Demolished Man", calling his weapon a 'harmonic gun'.
Essentially, sound wave would hit mass, causing it to vibrate at a certain point to cause molecular instability and breakdown.
Quite nasty effect on organic material, moreso if the material was still alive. Bester was very graphic and detailed in that area.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Modern wars are fought mainly between irregulars armed with AK-47 and mortars. No, it won't revolutionize these conflicts and it doesn't matter against partisants.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Are these much different from the HERF gun previously described on slashdot?
The main difference I see is ina HERF gun is a focused blast (like narrowband), whilst an EMP bomb will likely be area damage (ultrawideband).
A cool thing, and perhaps a balance to the technology wars (what good is a tank/fighter when one guy with a laser 10km away can down it?), but can't we already assembly things like these in a our basements (if not, somebody please point out the different, other than power)
Really? I'd like to see how millions of dollars of hightech electronic equipment can defend agaist people who are willing strap bombs to themselves and bomb just about anything that get in their way.
The real fight the US faces is NOT relatively high-tech foes like the Soviet Union, but low-tech guys armed with home-made bombs scavanged from artillery rounds and AK-47s.
What good is this kind of technology against these foes? It's almost impossible to think we even face an enemy capable of fielding a large force for a stand-up battle, let alone one easily immobilized by EM. Even the North Koreans, on anyone's short list for potential combat, likely rely heavily on WWII-era or older combat communications unaffected by EMP.
Some of those bombs could give new meaning to "slashdotting a server".
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
I wouldn't be calling this very non-lethal if it managed to get aboard a plane at 20,000 feet ... or in an air-traffic-control room ... or on an ocean liner several hundred miles from land ... or in a subway ...
... it's the civilian ramifications that are scary.
I'm not worried about the military aspects of this device
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
As I understand it, this technology got big when there was a need to simulate the Electromagnetic Pulse from little nukes, but treaties forbade it. There were four ways to simulate this discharge of energy, one used capacitors and coils, one used a chemical reaction, and I forget the other two. According to TV reports, some of the cruise missles Clinton used on Bagdhad between the two golf wars had originally been fitted with these warheads, and they had to be re-armed with conventional explosives prior to launch. So unless it was to scare the Iraqi's, why announce these weapons as news?
From the article:
Underwater Sonar used by submarines (ultra low frequency one) can already harm marine life.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
I wonder if instead of massive shielding, the military is increasingly interested in optical computing for reasons like this.
Don't know why the link didn't work.
r cr aft/air-ea6b.html
Here's the whole thing:
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/ai
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Nonlethal to whom?
The diabetic who relies on refrigerated insulin?
The CPAP user who must have electronically-regulated pressurized air to sleep, otherwise they stroke out?
The preemie in the hospital, who lives only if their incubator works?
Nonlethal to soldiers, maybe, but veyr lethal to civilians.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Nuetron bombs are effective because those they don't kill immediately, they kill slowly. Many soldiers could survive the initial blast, just to become a burden on the rest as they lay dying of radiation poisoning.
Viruses also work like this, however they are much less predictable and harder to contain since radiation does not spread. There's a specific term for this type of military strategy (slow killing versus quick casualties), but I don't know it.
Regardless, it is considered inhumane and is specifically condemned by the Geneva Convention due to it's needless infliction of suffering beyond the normal realm of warfare.
Hammer of Truth
Unlikely. Most of those old rocket launchers don't have any electronics at all -- they're simply RPG's which are generally no more electronically advanced than their bazooka predecessors.
It would, however, destroy any "smart" projectiles, even those as simple as a Stinger missile -- which is valuable as well given just how prolific those things are.
Of course, if you wanted such a defense to be useful you'd want to be able to mount an emitter on potential targets (like, oh say, a commercial airliner) and have it produce a high power semi-directed impulse. I don't know if that's possible (IANAPhysicist). But you'd want to take out anything launched at you from a reasonable distance (>500') without screwing your own systems in the process (most modern commercial jets are fly-by-wire as well).
Honestly, our computers where I work at are so frigging old that I wish Al Qaeda would EMP us! People, you have to think this through. If a terrorist attacked the company that I worked at with a local EMP bomb, we would have to buy 100 new computers and we'd be back in business in a few days. Thus, it would be an inconvenience, but, not really that damaging.
If a terrorist attacked the United States with an nuclear power emp bomb, then, Bush would probably nuke the rest of the middle east just for spite. Bush would launch everything at any place that flies the Crescent flag, and probably France too just to be on the safe side.
So, even though we'd be back in the stone age until we got our new computers from Dell / HP / Whoever (which would take a year perhaps), the rest of the world would be a giant crater.
Hitting economic infrastructure is less and less likely to work in any war because we can produce so much stuff so quickly that the disruption would hardly be noticable.
Even in World War II the Allies were oft astonished at the recuperative power of the German Army -- they always had plenty of bullets and planes, and in the end, it was an actual lack of fighting age men that did them in.
Today the recovery capabilities of any modern economy are too awesome to admit. Office buildings can be thrown up overnight. Network cabling can be run quickly. The United States and other modern economies are almost Borg like in their ability to recover from local terrorist attacks. The WTC was a terrible loss, yes, but because of the 3000 people that were killed - not the buildings and physical stuff. To turn the country into a police state for threats that don't really mean that much seems stupid.
This is my sig.
It can. High doses of microwave radiation can make a vegetable out of you with no problem whatsoever. So it is not harmless at all. Actually, human brains will definitely go before properly shielded equipment.
If you do not believe me, look around, make sure that there are no animal protection activists anywhere in sight and stick a rat for 5 seconds into a standard 800W microwave oven. Make sure it is set to max as most of them do not have a real power adjustment and lower power levels are achieved by turning the invertor on and off.
Observe the effects (not for the fainthearted).
P.S. It is rumoured that in some ex-soc countries MW components were wired into alarm installations instead of sirens. Have not seen it, but the thought is scary...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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The scene where the guys set off an EMP from the back of their van and the chaos that ensued from it?
A big enough EMP blast could theoretically take out a LOT of electronic gizmos. Even if the area of effect was only a few blocks, in the middle of manhattan or chicago, this could cause some major headaches.
Yes, many places would get their sites back up quickly, but what about pacemakers? Get 20 or 50 people to all have their hearts stop workikng at once hear the same hospital and suddenly you have a major medical emergency as they try to handle ALL of the cases.
But wait? How do the people get there when all the autos are munged up because THEIR electronic components just had a stroke? Lotsa two ton blocks of metal just sitting there, neding a lot of pushing.
TVs and radios? oops. Communications are now down. That PBX system that runs the phones? Fried like an egg. Cell phones? right. find a working tower, sparky.
Dont even start to think of the implications of setting one of these things off at O'Hare at 8 o'clock in the morning would have, not to mention the poor fuckers that are just geting off the ground when the onboard computers in their 757 all pop at once.
"Hey, did you hear thaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAHJESUSFUCKINGCHRIST!"
Big problems. BIG.
Match that with the fact that CNN will fly in an unaffected helicompter in and suddenly the world konws about it. They all start calling into an area that is blacked out to check up on their loved ones. We all konw how the unwashed masses will react to this - Panic, Panic! and PANIC!
Lets not forget that all our console games would flip out, removing any way of passing the time while this all sorts itself out... assuming we have electricity.
it's about more than computers, folks. Remember the fuckitued that ensued when new england lost power? THat was just loss of power, they didnt have to worry about everythign being just plain BROKEN.
s'wut i sed.
I have titanium artificial hips. Good to know that I'm going to have my hips melt on me and fry me from the inside when one of these things goes off nearby.
Kentucky fried theolein!
Try again. Don't forget about the difference between energy and power. A high energy microwave weapon may not have enough total power to hurt you, but it probably will induce enough electrostatic voltage to pop a few gates in most new CMOS devices.
If you read the article, you'd notice that power supply issues are relevant here. The interest is in very high energy weapons, but relatively low power. We can't afford to power these things with the Hoover Dam, you know...
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
A QRM bomb!
You've (both) missed the point of "neutron bombs" (a.k.a. enhanced radiation weapons).
The goal was never to drop the things on cities to "kill the people and save the buildings". The lethal radius from the burst of neutrons is on the same order of magnitude of the lethal blast radius, typically a few hundred meters. Wrong weapon for wiping out a city. (Which is fine, because wiping out cities isn't what they were designed for.)
Where neutron bombs would have had great effect would have been in wiping out large columns of tanks, presumably Russian, clustered together as they were funnelled through places like the Fulda Gap in an invasion of Eastern Europe.
In those scenarios, NATO forces didn't have sufficient conventional weapons to deliver on the tanks to make a difference. And because tanks are pretty blast-resistant things (crunchy shell, soft center), the only way to wipe them out en masse would have been to nuke them.
With 100,000 tanks bearing down on you, you've got two options:
(0) Surrender. Not an option.
(0) Fight conventionally, die anyway, because you're outnumbered and outgunned. Not an option.
(1) Blow 'em up. Carpet-bomb the countryside with 20-megaton blasts spaced 2-3 kilometers apart, because that's the kind of blast power it's going to take to crack the hard crunchy steel shells. Then discover your own troops are up to their armpits in icky long-term fallout, to say nothing of the fact that you've killed 20-30% of the civilian population living downwind, and that whoever wins the war can forget about farming for, oh, I dunno, the next decade or two.
(2) Fry 'em. Drop kiloton-yielding neutron bombs over the same area. Low explosive yield, low collateral damage, low fallout, just instant bursts of neutrons that rip through the crunchy steel shell and (in the space of minutes) incapacitate and kill the soft juicy tank crews at the center.
Once the burst of neutrons is over - literally a period of milliseconds - the mess is largely gone. (Yes, you have some neutron-activated substances near the blast site, but we're not talking huge quantities of fission daughter products, which are the real bad news to the survivors of a nuclear conflict).
Meantime, the Russian advance is stuck dead (literally :) in a traffic jam of tank-shaped coffins. Casualties in the area are pretty severe, but the affected area is pretty small. Most of the casualties are military, not civilian. Your troops can move through the bombarded area in relatively short order, and whoever wins the war can feed the surviving population, because you haven't blanketed half the arable land in Europe with long-term fallout.
None of the options in a nuclear conflict are that great. But enhanced radiation weapons were actually one of the best options available to commanders of either side during the Cold War. It's a shame that the FUD surrounding them went so out of hand. (Then again, maybe not. Deterrence turned out to be the best nuclear policy option of them all :)
Anyone who has designed military hardware (which I have), knows that COTS was just a buzzword that was paid lipservice but never implemented. This was just a way for the military to say to america: "Hey, we are spending your money wisely!"
Military stuff is made to much higher standards of process control, reliability, and performance. Sure you might start with a COTS vendor and product, but at a minimum you pile a buch of MIL-SPECS on thier product, ending up with what amounts to a custom product anyway.
This goes for electronics such as op-amps and connectors, to mechanical parts such as bearings, paint, adhesives, etc.
Also, learn some manners. Don't post with such a smug, smartass, know-it-all tone, when you haven't a clue.
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Let me re-iterate this: America DID NOT sign the Geneva convention. At least, most of those conventions that govern the use weaponry. I posted something like this earlier, but some idiot moderator decided to mod it down as "overrated."
America did sign various agreements about the treatment of prisoners (altough some argue they have not complied with them post 11 september 2001.)
America has not signed into the international criminal court, or the banning of antipersonnel land mines.
America did sign the original 1944 (59 year old!) treaty, but DID NOT not sign the Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977.
America DID NOT sign Protocol III (1980) or Protocol IV (1995) of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
And from what I can tell from the treaty website, the United States has never ratified the agreements.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
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The reality of the political situation matters. We in fact could NOT drop nukes on Iraq, or massacre unarmed civilians by the tens of millions. There are 1 billion Muslims who might take offense at that, in addition to the fact that it would sever all of our existing alliances and we would be placed on a moral level equal with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. This would OBLIGATE the rest of the world to declare a war on us, a war where there could be no substitute for victory, no pause and no armistice. Even Canada would declare war on us. Even if we won, we would be destroyed, thousands of millions of people could die. Such an act would be a complete and total disaster for the US and the world, and only a moron would actually think such a thing would be a good idea.
True victory is always won in the hearts and minds of the enemy. They must be beaten, in every sense of the word, and coerced to a certain point of view which accomplishes our objectives. This can be done with weapons, with food, with television or perhaps by eliminating key leadership infrastructure with an EMP weapon and replacing it with our own. If we only offer someone certain anhilation in defeat and our only language is violence, they will have no other option than to fight to the end. There isn't any point in winning if we can't win with honor, unless you want to uplift tyranny.
I realize that the parent post is toungue in cheek to a certain degree, but it has been modded up to '5 insightful', which is absurd. Which leads me to believe that many people in this forum are:
A. On crack
B. Weak minded simpletons
C. Cattle who will consume whatever idiocy they are fed.
We could easily, permanently end the situation in Iraq. Sweep 500,000 troops through the country, shooting everyone they encounter. Or simply nuke it.
Whatever justification for the war in Iraq you accept, killing the whole population is not going to win it. The Iraqi people will not be "free" and Iraq will be producing no oil, if it is a nuclear waste land. The 500,000 troops thing is just silly too. Any country is ruled through individual fear. Iraq is no different. The military is always massively out numbered by the civilian population. If US troops start killing everyone, the whole population (20 million plus) would turn on them and slaughter them. If everyone is certain they are going to die they will fight. As it is the majority is scared of getting killed and so does nothing.
But I take your point, EMP weapons are not going to be much use against guerillas since they are unlikely to be using much electronics. However they are very useful in covert inforamtion warfare, such as knocking out TV transmitters etc. in neutral countries to impede the spread of information. Nowdays the US military is as interested in "managing" what its civilian population knows about a war as it is what the enemy does.
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count
Afghanistan US Fatalities
When you induce 5-10 volts AC on every wire inside a computer facility, things don't survive too well. You might just let all the smoke out of the computer, and it won't work any more.
When did this sort of thing happen? Early to mid 1980s. I strongly suspect that most US and UK banks are protected from this sort of damage nowadays. Faraday cages are good. I think International Paper still makes a non-woven carbonized fabric that lays on walls like wallpaper, but protects like copper screen.
The trade magazines covering EMC issues like this have all ceased publication. Or at least the ones I am aware of. Since the end of the cold war, there has been far lower demand for Tempest (folks looking at the emissions of your computers via radio waves) and EMP (the energy given off by nuclear explosions and these electromagnetic devices) protection, which is the sort of thing you would be looking for to defend your company and home from this sort of weapon.
You left out the Iraqi option: Let the tanks in and then start tearing the invaders apart bit by bit. You'll be labeled a terrorist but you'll eventually get them to leave due to the escalating costs and loss of life. Or go the Ghandi way. Don't fight but refuse to cooperate.
>
> (It's not that I think it'll change your mind on the issue, but maybe the opinion from the other side of fence is interesting for you
20 years ago you wouldn't have changed my mind. By now, however, I think history has shown you to be right. The USSR may have been an evil empire, but it wasn't anywhere near as expansionist an evil empire as we Westerners thought it was. (I'm sure Red Dawn provided Soviet generals with hours of side-splitting amusement :) Both sides were fundamentally civilized nations, albeit with significant ideological differences. When massive retaliation stopped being a viable doctrine, both civilized nations quite rationally adopted the MAD doctrine and changed their strategy to fighting WW3 through proxy or client states. Long and the short of it was that the West won and the Soviets lost. Both sides' doctrine made any issue of nuclear warfighting strategy moot.
For what it's worth, the Soviet strategy of surviving an US nuclear assault with sufficient ground troups to take over Europe - contrasted with the US strategy of "what good are ground forces when the world's just ended" would have put them in good stead to "win" any nuclear conflict short of a civilization-ending global thermonuclear spasm. I'm damn glad it didn't happen, but it would have been very interesting to see it played out.
Some day, maybe 30-50 years from now, I'd like to walk into my retirement home to find a very large wargaming simulator on a laptop, a few retired American and Soviet 4-stars, a 40-oz bottle of whiskey, a 40-oz bottle of Vodka, and two very large piles of declassified documents, and let hilarity ensue.