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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. "
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.
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.
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.
actually, its 2 coils with antiparallel b-fields:
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i wanted to include a ascii gfx but the lameness filter didnt let me.
does he really think someone with karma=excellent does dumb spam posts?
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And explosives in the middle. The middle has no bfield, becouse the 2 coils cancel each other. but between them, a lot of enery is stored in a b-field.
Not the explosive is started at one end, burning towards the other end. It presses both coils against each other, squeezing the field into the rest of the gap. Once the deflegration hits the end of the coils, the field has nowhere to go and the whole stored energy is released in a single electromagnetic blast.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
A few measly freedom fighters with some old Russian guns? Please. The reason we are so mired in the Middle East right now isn't that we can't win, it's because we cannot allow ourselves to do what is necessary to win.
We could easily, permanently end the situation in Iraq. Sweep 500,000 troops through the country, shooting everyone they encounter. Or simply nuke it. We can't do these things for obvious political reasons. But to suggest that we are developing these new weapons such as EMP to protect us against these new, "difficult" enemies is ludicrous. They aren't hard to beat. It just requires ruthlessness to beat them, which we are unwilling to exhibit on the global stage.
No, these EMP weapons are most likely meant for use against U.S. citizens when they finally rebel, or against Europeans when they finally decide they've had enough of our bullshit. Any revolution in this country would be coordinated via cell phone, telephone, and internet. A simple weapon to knock all out simultaneously is something the government cannot afford not to have in its arsenal.
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 :)