/sarcasm it's late
Posted on 10/12/2002 8:34:40 PM PDT by USA21
Massive attack
The "e-bomb" is to the digital world what kryptonite was to Superman: rare, elusive and deadly. The e-bomb, as developed by engineers in the United States, Britain and Russia doesn't kill people or destroy buildings. Rather, it uses either electromagnetic pulse, microwaves or radio frequencies to destroy electronic circuits from a distance.
In friendly hands, it offers the tantalising prospect of winning wars without hurting people. In enemy hands, it threatens a nightmare scenario of instantly blacked-out stock exchanges, hospitals, airports - even whole cities.
Although reports of US Air Force e-bomb tests have leaked out since 1993, the Pentagon, as of September 11 last year, takes the same maddening "neither confirm nor deny" stance it assumes when talking about nuclear weapons.
"Our guys would love to talk about it, but we can't," says Conrad Dziewulski, of the Air Force Research Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, where scientists are working on both the offensive and defensive aspects of e-bomb warfare. But the Soviet army reportedly tested e-bombs as early as the 1940s and the British defence firm Matra Bae Dynamics last year announced it had developed a battlefield e-bomb that uses radio frequencies to cook enemy electronics.
American generals have been worrying and dreaming about electromagnetic pulse weapons ever since Test Shot Starfish in 1962, when the US burst a 1.4-megaton hydrogen bomb 400 kilometres above the Pacific Ocean and unexpectedly knocked out radio communications and satellite equipment across thousands of kilometres.
"A member of the Russian Duma recently told me, 'you know, if we really wanted to hurt you, we would set off an atomic weapon at high altitude above your country and produce an EMP that would destroy your entire electrical power grid, computers and telecommunications infrastructure - including satellites,"' says Roscoe Bartlett, a US Republican politician from Maryland.
Using a hydrogen bomb to take out electronics, though, is like using a chainsaw to cut your toenails. Hence the search for a more delicate tool. E-bombs are particularly attractive to the military in the era of ubiquitous media coverage. As a pair of US Air Force officers wrote in the journal Air Power,
"the CNN factor" makes limiting collateral damage and keeping casualties to a minimum almost as important as vanquishing the enemy.
The US Air Force let some Iraqi MiGs go unbombed during the Gulf War because Saddam Hussein had tucked them beside ancient monuments the Pentagon wasn't willing to damage. E-bombs could have fried their circuitry while leaving antiquity unscathed. They also, incidentally, offer the prospect of a battlefield where TV cameras don't work.
Unfortunately from a defensive point of view, an e-bomb is a lot easier to build than a nuclear bomb, and they don't have to be delivered by sophisticated missiles.
David Schriner, a former civilian electrical engineer for the US Navy, told Congress in 1998 that he'd assembled $US500 worth of automobile ignition coils, batteries, fuel pumps and other assorted hardware in his basement and in one week he'd built an e-bomb that could make a running car hiccup at 15 metres by overloading its electricals. Congress was sufficiently frightened to give Schriner a million-dollar contract to see if he could build a truly effective e-bomb out of readily available materials.
"Until you have one that can take out a whole building," says Schriner, "you don't have a credible weapon." He has since built a "building within a building" at his Ridgecrest, California, engineering firm and, with a more powerful device built around a telephone-poll transformer the size of a desktop printer, successfully shot through walls to scramble a collection of IV pumps and other electronic medical equipment.
The US Congress has ordered the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to appoint a commission to study the EMP threat.
Before you get too panicked at the thought of impending e-bomb warfare, keep in mind that defence against e-bombs can be as low-tech as the bombs themselves. "It's pretty easy to shield equipment," says Schriner. "Sometimes the fix is a 10-cent device like putting a ferrite doughnut around the mouse cord.
"But until people know about the threat," he says, "they can't do anything about it."
/sarcasm it's late
How big?, bigger than a car?.
We've got a governor here in California that was able to destroy the entire power grid with a mere stroke of his pen. Boy, are those guys in Russia behind the times or what.
Regards,
Boot Hill
Aviation Week magazine (known around the Pentagon as "Aviation Leak") ran a number of articles in the early 90's that included details regarding U.S. EMP weapons development and deployment. DOD concern over these disclosures reached a peak when AW published a report in 1993 that the U.S. had field tested these EMP weapons in the June 1993 cruise missile raid on the computer complex at Iraqi Intelligence Service's (IIS) principal command and control center in Baghdad. According to AW, the raid on the IIS included 20+ Tomahawk missiles. The first of these missiles to arrive on target were configured with EMP warheads. The effectiveness of these warheads was confirmed by SIGINT satellites monitoring IIS computer operations. While physical damage was almost nil, the IIS computers had been destroyed. The remainder of the missiles were configured with conventional warheads whose sole purpose was to leave big enough holes in the facility that the Iraqi's wouldn't question what had destroyed their computers.
It has been over 9 years since we first developed and deployed these warheads in field tested operational weapon systems. The idea that we might not deploy them in the up coming campaign in Iraq is ridiculous. But don't expect the DOD to be issuing any after action reports of their effectiveness.
Regards,
Boot Hill
Aviation Week and Space Technology = Aviation Leak and Space Mythology.
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