Another temptation for terrorists: homemade EMP weapons

Popular Mechanics ^ | Sept 2001 | Jim Wilson

[zeugma]

Popular Mechanics is now in the business of giving detailed instructions to terrorists in how to build devices to destroy civilization?

Yes. In an allegedly free society, people publish things that make other people uncomfortable. They even publish things that evil people can use to wreak havok.

It's not that terribly difficult to build EMP weapons that could be useful in a localized area. This information has been out there for years, yet e don't see thousands of people using them to sow destruction and confusion.

You do realise that the average household contains enough chemicals to produce some really nasty effects, don't you?

I have a copy of the 1903 edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. Using the information in it, I could do many things including make TNT. Are we going to destroy all knowlege in the world to make the world safe from evildoers?

[Willie Green]

BTW, I think that the PopSci editors got snookered on this one.
I AM aware of industrial processes that utilize EMP to form metal, but those are more like bending/crimping processes. Something like crimping a ring onto a shaft, or forming a bulge (or a constriction) in a tube. Yeah, the metal moves and deforms, but it still occupies the same volume and has the same mass. You can't defy the laws of physics, as this article suggests, and compress solid matter to a smaller volume and drasticly higher density. The Popsci article is bogus junk science.

[tortoise]

The article fails to mention that the range of these so-called poor-mans EMP weapons is very, very small.

More or less true. However, US defense contractors bought some newer more sophisticated designs (i.e. not a classic FCG design) from the Russians in the early 90s for something like $11 million (fuzzy memory -- I haven't worked in that industry for years); the Russians were selling off many of their designs to curious defense contractors back then. The US took the sexier Soviet generator design, modeled them in supercomputers and completely re-engineered the materials, and came up with something MUCH more powerful than what you get out of a simple FCG and with much better range and performance than anything the Soviets could build.

The modern US version of the system is sufficiently powerful that it has been tested for use as a single-stage fusion trigger. Obviously though, there is very little in the way of specific details on it.

[blam]

"EMP weapons with any decent range are too large and way too sophisticated to be of any use to terrorists. "

I agree.

[anymouse]

This hoax again? I figured Jim was above this silliness, but then again he still writes for PM, the National Inquirer for nerds. :)

[Cicero]

Yes, when I was a kid I used to make bombs with my chemistry set. I still remember several recipes, including classic black powder and ammonium tri-iodide, but I prefer not to post them publicly at this point in time.

[NoControllingLegalAuthority]

the Flux Compression Generator (FCG).

If we spent more time working on the Flux Capacitor rather than the FCG we could go back in time (ala "Back to the Future").

[Servant of the 9]

You don't need to take out the entire city!
set one off atop the empire State bldg? wall street area?

Set one off atop the Empire State Building and the pulse woldn't reach the ground.

The Back offices of the brokerages are scattered all over New York, New Jersey and Conneticut.
The exchenges have mirrored systems located in salt mines in the midwest, and the brokerages have backup datastores there.

An EMP attack that took out all of Manhatten would take the exchanges down for maybe 15 minutes with no loss of data.

The same is true of the big banks and the Federal Reserve.

So9

[Eala]

Popular Mechanics is now in the business of giving detailed instructions to terrorists in how to build devices to destroy civilization?

I saw this posted on the net not too long ago -- possibly on Slashdot.

[Eala]

From Slashdot, Build a HERF gun.

[HitmanLV]

Well said. Too many 'gloom & doom' predictions look like a 6th graders science project that got a "D."

The Y2K issue was a big one - a legitimate problem that some overstated. Most obvious was the banking scare - that somehow all our savings and checking account records would have been lost at the stroke of midnight when the computers all were supposed to get confused.

I didn't think, for one second, all the banks and lending institutions would have lost all our debt records, which would have gone 'poof' also. Imagine how the banks would have had to explain how our savings records got lost, but they have all our debt information secured. Laughable!

[Psalm118]

Look P.D., I mean NO disrespect to you at all. You say:

"Yes, still a dud. Too much attenuation on those lines for the surge to travel far".

I mean No flame, you have been so informed. But how do YOU know, IOW what are your credentials...are you an EE?.

(Before you type your reply take a deep breath and re-read my first line, okay?

[rubbertramp]

bump

Keep your rollerblades in the car and don't take ny elevators.