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E-Bombs: Technology Update
vaderhelmet writes "'In these media-fueled times, when war is a television spectacle and wiping out large numbers of civilians is generally frowned upon, the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks, yet harm neither hide nor hair. Such a weapon might shut down telecommunications networks, disrupt power supplies, and fry an adversary's countless computers and electronic gadgets, yet still leave buildings, bridges, and highways intact. It would strike with precision, in an instant, and leave behind no trace of where it came from.' (Story from IEEE Spectrum Online)"
The problem is that most of the generals wear pacemakers, and these bombs would kill them, thus causing the US to respond with nukes. You might not think it's possible, but what if an ebomb was detonated near Washington? How many senators have pacemakers? The President likely has one. It would be a nightmare to all, if such a thing happened, especially the innocent.
Technologically inclined countries would suffer the most from such attacks.However, terrorists would rather use low-cost/high-bodycount methods, like hijacking a plane and flying it into a building; no cost to Al Queda (they just had to pay for training and carpet knives).
Yes ebombs would be horrible if detonated on American soil, but switching to them is currently against terrorist doctrine. And the US wouldn't bother with them because there aren't any circuits in AK-47s, and the collateral damage is too great. Might be good to take out surface-air rocket launchers, and other big baddies, but you end up setting back the country you're attacking technologically on an even scale; there is no target descrimination.
It might make the general population of "liberated" countries like Iraq, even more hostile if you blow up their computers and Internet connections! Nothing worse than a horde of angry Iraqi children denied their Quake time.
First, the geek in me says: "Cool!" I know the military has been working on these kinds of weapons for decades, and it looks like they're getting closer. Anything that adds to the arsenal is a win in my book.
Now, it's too bad we didn't have this weapon last year for use in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Imagine the effectiveness of such a weapon! We could have annihilated the entire high-tech infrastructure of Afghanistan far more quickly than we could have using conventional weapons. The invasion would have been far more effective if the Taliban's high-tech, integrated command and control technology could have been disrupted from the start. I'd just like to see those camel-jockeys try to coordinate their attacks without their iPaq's and virtual reality headsets! Good luck with that one, Ahmed!
However, I'm a little concerned with the effectiveness of this type of weapon from a ratings point of view. How exactly do you keep the audience entertained without any explosions or visible signs of destruction? I really don't think people are going to stay tuned through the commercials for this. "After these exciting messages from our sponsors, watch all the lights blink off!" Great... Perhaps, as part of this research, they could integrated a conventional weapon with an E-weapon. I guess what I'd like to see is a combination E-Bomb/MOAB. Then you still get the visual effects, sure to scare the poop out of Terrorists (and their camels), with the added bonus of disrupting their sensitive, high-tech infrastructures. It's a win-win! Just make sure the next invasion is during sweeps week.
e-bomb eh? Well, I guess that's better than an i-bomb.. Already have too many i-bomb's on the market as it is..
i-surrender!
Just reading the story made my teeth tingle.
"Most types of matter are transparent to microwaves, but metallic conductors . . . strongly absorb them, which in turn heats the material."Maybe somebody with better physics can help me out here, but I think I'd rather be shot than have all my fillings melt.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
It would strick with precision, in an instant, and leave behind no trace of where it came from.' (Story from IEEE Spectrum Online)"
That's why they didn't have any EMPs at Zion - they were still waiting for IEEE Compliancy.
The government's moral compass is controlled by GPS.
In times of crises, they alter it to suit their needs.
would create the perfect shadow environment for good old fashioned guerilla warfare.
It might just be better to leave the lights on.
It would also strike all hospitals, causing loss of life. Which is particularly bad, because the Geneva convention forbids attacks against medical facilities, which shall be marked with a red cross, and the e-Bomb *would* attack such.
(8-DCS)
Don't tell that to Rockstar games!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
It'll look a lot less impressive if the truck just slowly comes to a halt rather than have the entire bridge blow up.
On a more serious note, what about tactical bombing - you blow up bridges to deny the enemy choice within the battlezone. You attack dams to deny the enemy water, etc.
Somehow I think there'll still be big explosions in any up-and-coming war... Of course, it could be an E-bomb, targetted at a nuclear reactor...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
But what will it do against a single person with an explosive belt who is determined to die and take as many people with them as they can?
Nothing!
The United States doesn't know how to fight against an idea, it only knows how to fight against a militia...
And in these times when men are willing to sacrifice their lives by crashing planes and strapping bombs to themselves, that EMP won't do you much good. How does an EMP stop the guy in a heavily populated area from emptying an M16 into a crowd, or blowing up a U-Haul full of kerosene and fertilizer? So long as people are dedicated to their cause, they will fight, with or without their Palm Pilots. The Romans did.
do not read this line twice.
Ever seen a rat after 15s in a microwave?
Yeah, the batter gets all mushy. They're better deep fried.
Trolling is a art,
"'and wiping out large numbers of civilians is generally frowned upon'
not if you're al qaeda. that's their primary goal."
That's not their goal, it's the means to an end. They have no interest in killing except that it is the best method they believe they have to achieving their goal (destruction of the USA and its allies, radical 'Islamification' of the world).
It's no different than any other war, except that the targets are civilian instead of military units. The goal in most wars is to topple a political power or achieve independence, the fighting is just the method by which nations attempt to get there, not the 'goal' itself.
GL
Wow, so what you do for a hand grenade through your front door? Grimace menacingly?
the future's bright, the future's ginger
These wouldn't be, at the moment, effective weapons for the U.S. to use, but they would be highly effective against U.S. forces.
The potato it is uninformed.
Don't. Make Me. Repeat. Some of the. Speeches. They Would Give.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
> the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks,
> yet harm neither hide nor hair.
Nope. The perfect weapon kills all of your enemies. 'What if' we killed no Iraqis in Bush's war? Instead of 50,000 insurgents, how many hundreds of thousands of guerrilla fighters would we be facing now? Guerilla fighters do not need electronics, just weapons and the ability to talk to each other face-to-face.
Death is preferable in so many things. Suppose you accidentally drive over a pedestrian. Your civil suit fines will be much higher if you maim the person instead of kill him because you're paying for pain & suffering to cover the rest of his life.
Back to war... if you don't kill your enemy, he lives to fight another day and teach his children to hate you too. War is about killing and always will be. If you can't stomach it, don't play that game.
No. It merely eliminates niceties like computer-aimed artillery, guided missiles, guided bombs. It does nothing at all to pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades, manually aimed howitzers, ballistic missiles, etc.
Hmpf. Funny. These are the very tools being used to great effect in Iraq right now. An e-bomb wouldn't do squat against most of what is being used against occupyers and their supporters.
This sort of weapon is nice nonetheless, so long as you are up against a conventional force. You could take out SAMs, advanced tanks (not older models that rely on human aim), and other computer-heavy armaments. This reduces the relative effectiveness of a modern conventional force. It just doesn't do squat to unconventional forces.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Drop one of these on the house of file-swappers, that will teach em. 8)
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
High Technology always loses! Hasn't anyone ever seen Stargate? Camel-riding nomads will always destroy their teched-out overlords!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Where it wouldn't work is a place like Afganistan, where a local irregular knows how to use a camel and a kalashnikov. (Unless this device melts guns).
So, in summary, it seems like the perfect underdog weapon, where the underdog is not the US, but, say, Palestinians or Baathists. Terrorists could use it in the US, and we would be virtually defenseless, and it would render our expensive, high-tech army useless overseas.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
On a more serious note, what about tactical bombing - you blow up bridges to deny the enemy choice within the battlezone. You attack dams to deny the enemy water, etc.
You attack and destroy a dam and most likely you are going to cause a natural disaster short of a nuclear explosion.
Thousands would drown in the subsequent water rush. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps. Attacking a dam and releasing that kind of kinetic energy on an innocent civilian populace is the VERY FREAKING DEFINITION OF A WAR CRIME.
Think about it.
By the way, Al-Qaeda could ram a plane into the side of most dams, and all the dam would do is smile at them. Holding back the water is the larger issue than the plane. It would take more than the biggest U-haul truck to blow a dam.
Either way, if you're going to blow a dam, then I would suggest you use nukes. It'll do less damage.
I think it was called Nimda!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
That would depend on who the teroists are. Al Queda are not the only teroist group, and they are considered unusual because they are prepared (even eager) to commit attrocites with a high civilian death toll.
According to conventional doctrine a rational terrorists group will avoid killing large numbers of civilian bystanders in order to avoid aleanating the community from which they draw their support (and funding). For such a teroist group, a weapon capable of causing billions of dollars of economic damage to an enemy, while killing few if any civilians would be quite attractive.
An example of and economic attack would be the IRA (Irish Republican Army) bombs in the City of London financial district, which killed few if any people, (I can't remember the details) but did close to a billion dollars of damage. Had microwave weapons been avalable to the IRA at the time, it is likely that they would have used them.
Like dropping 500 kg bombs on Iraqi homes. Cheap as chips to the US military budget.
Believe it or not, most modern pacemakers are fairly well shielded against EMP. Most of the problems that were had with people being near microwaves, etc. were with older designs of pacemakers. They have to put the warning signs on microwaves because you never know who has an old pacemaker. However, the amount of old (unipolar lead) pacemakers still around is rather small. Any EMP which damages the new designs is going to make every muscle in your body twitch, and do heart damage to those without pacemakers too.
I'm afraid I don't have a link, but I could refer you to the Report of Task Group 34, from the American Association or Physicists in Medicine, section IV. Don't ask why I have that paper lying around my office - it's a long story. The basic gist is, pacemakers are already encased in a Faraday cage.
Shockingly, we are one of the worst violators
There are two versions of EMPs. One is a relativly low powered pulse that would do as you say.
However, the other is the one the military are looking at, and is more of a precision weapon.
Think of the difference between a rifle and a grenade.
You know folks, the scary thing i see about this is... what if the enemy had one of these microwave devices and were able to deploy it around a vital target. The second we tried to bomb the target, that very bomb or cruise missile would be disabled in no time flat, and the bomb would fly off course and blow up a children's hospital... Of course this would also be a very cool way to stop an enemy's missile attack, it would probably make a far better missile defence system than those lasers they have mounted in 747's
The military must prepare for The Next Enemy, whomever that may be. That's how you stay ahead of the curve and assured your not blindsided by something (say Sputnik and the possibility of living under a Commie Moon). Most nations out there have a varied mix of irregular and regular land, sea, and air branches. Predicting their national government, culture and outlook (and their possible hostility towards us and our friends) 40 years into the future is the domain of the State Department and think tanks.
So, yeah, an e-bomb might just gather dust... now. But in 10 years when it's in production? 20? Back in 1983 could anyone here predict the path of events that lead us to now?
Politicians start wars. Armies finish them. The military is just preparing for any contigency our governments decide to point and click them towards.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I wonder what sort of effect this would have on our lives if one just "accidently" gets dropped on the Microsoft campus? Hmmm.
[Grin.]
I'm not in the US until next April. I guess I'll find out then whether the FBI (or whoever) are as paranoid as they're made out to be.
In my defence, I've driven over it a number of times in the past 10 years, and never blown it up once. Honest.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Here's a perfect testing location, a place with many computers loaded with worthless information:
The SCO Group
355 South 520 West
Suite 100
Lindon, Utah 84042 USA
According to conventional doctrine a rational terrorists group will avoid killing large numbers of civilian bystanders in order to avoid aleanating the community from which they draw their support (and funding).
You are confusing Terrorist with Guerilla. A terrorist by definition is doing things to cause a general sense of "terror" in his enemies civillian population. This is best achieved if the targets are essentially random so every member of the population is at potential risk and if the attacks are as horrific as possible. So a bomb in a crowded pizza parlor is an act of terrorism while a sniper targetting a soldier is an act of guerrilla warfare. Either act is a matter of tactics so any particular group can be engaged in both kinds of activities.
Obviously as in the case of the IRA bombing in the City of London a single terrorist act can have multiple advantages. It WAS a terrorist attack in that it killed a number of people that belong to the "opinion class" and thus invokes terror throughout that class. It also did financial damage to a much wider group so they felt it have an impact on their lives personally. The whole point of their terrorism was to demoralize the enemy population so that they would conclude that Northern Ireland was not worth the cost of having to live in fear. A technological attack that did even more economic damage may have been effective but part of what the terrorist wants is the graphic scenes on TV of bleeding civillians running from the blast and the sight of all that damage (the City of London bombing was dramatic). Being TOLD about a bunch of computers being disrupted doesn't move public opinion the way that the random and horrific deaths of large numbers of people *just like you* does.
The disabling all electric devices and motors by an alien from outer space was the gave the title to this 1950s movie, consider among the best in the genre. The alien could show more discrimination in turning off devices than an e-bomb. The movie was considered a metaphor for the cold war, where the alien represented a powerful Soviet Union.
"Gort, Klaatu barada nikto"
Quoth Niccolo Machiavelli: For it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance.
The only path to peace is elimination of enemies. Think genocide will just make more enemies? Ask the American Indians. No one cares about their plight, because there are so few of them left. And becuase of this, they stopped fighting back. We need not fear his vengence.
Does anyone honestly think that somday the Israelis and Palestinians will come up with a really good peice of paper for the to sign that will lead to peace? The only way there will ever be peace in that region (or anywhere) is if one side decicevly eliminates the other.
Dump the e-bomb, hang on to the h-bomb.
* Which raises the issue of the fraction of ordinance that are duds. It would suck to send in the CIA or SF to retrieve/destroy an intact warhead!!
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Having watched my little girl emerge from 8-weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, I don't find the idea of killing computers to be such a wonderful idea.
"In other news, the latest E-Bomb attack on North Korea was, in the words of the Air Force Chief of Staff, 'A resounding success.'
"Initial body counts indicate that civilian deaths , while widespread, were random and uncoordinated; from crashing jet liners to a hospital that exploded when a simple thermostat in the boiler room failed.
"'This is the sort of terror weapon that we've always wanted to have access to.' he is quoted as saying."
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
It doesn't matter how many of them there are. We've got all the force multipliers. They live but through our boundless compassion and grace. If they cannot find a way to be peaceful by the time our paitence wears out, they will, rest assured, be exterminated. And they won't even get museams or reservations.
Seriously, you should get out more. Talk to more working slobs. Even the occasional PhD, MD. Make sure to include a few who fled the holocaust as children. See what they think should be done. There are many people who with their friends, and other company where politness isn't demanded, who'll freely talk about resuming above ground testing in the middle east.
My favorite scenario was a proposal to steal a play from the fudementalist muslim play book, but scale it up. Hold them, their whole world hostage, and give them one year to kill all the asshat, or else. Starting with Mecca, then proceeding through the list of muslim holy cities and population centers. Moving up the timeline in response to terrorist attacks. Brilliant, they're judged on their own morality, by their own morality, according to their methods, but they alone have the power to throw or not throw the switch. Maybe they'd call the West's bluff on Mecca, but after that? If I were a muslim, I'd be all about militantly preaching love. That religion has let itself be dragged out onto the thin ice. How much time is left for the sensible among them to get back to shore before the word comes to kill their God, and punch their tickets en masse?
I don't care about the ethical debate. Not any more. They've spent that charity. Now, while Might might not make Right, it does make the rules. And there is no getting around that.