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. "

Test range

All in favor of using Lindon, UT as the test range, say aye. AYE!

Yay...

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.

Re:Yay...

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.

Re:Don't they have these in the Matrix?

Yep. And in numerous other movies.

And here is another nice article [popularmechanics.com] on the threat they really are.

~$400 to take out a small city? Scary.

World first non-lethal weapon of mass destruction

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).

Irregular armies

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.

Re:World first non-lethal weapon of mass destructi

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.

Already used to extort banks

Folks used something similar: retired military gear that was used to simulate soviet field radar installations. 25Kw to 50Kw microwave units that would get put into the backs of trucks by the enterprising bandits. What did they do? They would blackmail British banks. What did they do? They would drive past the computing facility for the bank, switch on the radar, scrambling the computers, forcing a temporary shutdown of the bank. They would then call up the security office of the bank, saying that something similar would be happening in oh, 15 more minutes. When it happened exactly as threatened, they would call back demanding cash. Mysterious computer crashes affecting whole computer centers? Bank shuts down for hours at a time? Our reputation will get clobbered. OMG What could be causing it? No one in the industry is willing to confess to what sort of payments were made. I have heard rumors of one bank coughing up 10 million pounds, with several others forking out 1 to 2 million pounds. Hiding the unit inside some vehicle that looked like an every day delivery van made it invisible to folks trying to protect their facilities. Having more than one would defeat folks counting license plates.

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.

Re:rocket launcher

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).

Re:Neutron Bombs are better

> 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.

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 :)

Hmm...

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.

Re:Hmm...

Unless the people building the "destroy" device also have the contract to "rebuild". Then it makes perfect sense!

military use?

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.....

Re:military use?

Psst, let me let you in on a little secret...

90% of the military tech is commercial off the shelf (COTS).

It's cheaper and more reliable to use COTS vice a propritary tech.

HERF Gun

Are these much different from the HERF gun [slashdot.org] 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)

Not arming ourselves for the real fight

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.

Re:Not arming ourselves for the real fight

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.

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.

Go Optical!

I wonder if instead of massive shielding, the military is increasingly interested in optical computing for reasons like this.

Computers are too cheap for this to work

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.

Anyone remember Cryptonomicon?

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.

Great, and what do I do?

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!

Just like CB radio .....

A QRM bomb!

RFIDs?

I vote we detonate them in the first store which fully switches over to RFID and starts tracking people. That'll show those fuckers.