Radiofrequency Weapons 377
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. "
World first non-lethal weapon of mass destruction (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about Sonic weapons (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
EMP bombs have been around a while (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, that gives me a thought. The US has got to have at least a few lying around. Did the Soviets? What happened to them? As most of them weren't actually nukes*, that maybe they slipped away without anyone noticing, eh?
* I believe the early ones _were_ nukes, just 'toned down' so they produced a lot of electomagnetic energy and not that much 'nukage'. OK, nukage probably isn't a word. But you know what I mean.
Re:Don't they have these in the Matrix? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't buy it. Something's missing.
Re:military use? (Score:5, Interesting)
90% of the military tech is commercial off the shelf (COTS).
It's cheaper and more reliable to use COTS vice a propritary tech.
Re:shielding against emp, gauss? (Score:2, Interesting)
From the article:
Re:What about Sonic weapons (Score:2, Interesting)
Go Optical! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:World first non-lethal weapon of mass destructi (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Computers are too cheap for this to work (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Microwave Gun (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Anyone remember Cryptonomicon? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yay... (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
Already used to extort banks (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Not arming ourselves for the real fight (Score:3, Interesting)
It might have been in the case of Viet Nam if Westmoreland had been given the authority after Khe San to chase the NVA further North and into Cambodia. But in Viet Nam we had no qualms about wiping out whole villages based on intelligence of support for the VC. We lack even that level of determination now.
We could have Iraq under control in a matter of days if we were willing to do what is necessary to make it so. This would be politically disastrous but is strategically possible in a purely military sense.
And that's kind of the point -- we *could*, if we were so motivated, run the middle east -- but we'd have to do it the way the SS ran Eastern Europe '39-44 or, for a more palatable analogy, the way Sherman defeated the South. Scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, mass executions, 10 of yours for 1 of mine, and so on.
However, we no longer live in the ethical paradigm that enables us to conquer foreign peoples and use whatever means necessary to subdue them. That, and the current thinking is "hearts and minds", which I think is highly ineffective, but there's little better paradigm.
In terms of weapons systems to meet our current politico-military paradigm, I'd like to see for one, a lot more design and building of things like APCs capable of withstanding roadside bombs and RPGs. That we have Star Trek intel systems but we put our ground forces in unarmored buggies is exactly the kind of poor threat analysis that leads to wasteful spending on EMP weapons. Wrong weapon for the wrong problem.
Re:Neutron Bombs are better (Score:3, Interesting)
>
> (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.