New Experimental Weapon Systems....

[Lost Cause]

Fuck Nuclear EMP, and ground kickin' munitions. Just put a high altitude HPM over a country, hit it, and watch it stop! Hey Osama, do you feel a little tingling?

*Sound like a good idea to you? It could eventually lead to a vitually deathless war, where power would be out, and the right neural pulse can knock out thousands on a battlefield like a big fucking taser!

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HPMs are man-made lightning bolts crammed into cruise missiles. They could be key weapons for targeting Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. HPMs fry the sophisticated computers and electronic gear necessary to produce, protect, store and deliver such agents. The powerful electromagnetic pulses can travel into deeply buried bunkers through ventilation shafts, plumbing and antennas. But unlike conventional explosives, they won't spew deadly agents into the air, where they could poison Iraqi civilians or advancing U.S. troops.

The HPM is a top-secret program, and the Pentagon wants to keep it that way. Senior military officials have dropped hints about a new, classified weapon for Iraq but won't provide details. Still, information about HPMs, first successfully tested in 1999, has trickled out. "High-power microwave technology is ready for the transition to active weapons in the U.S. military," Air Force Colonel Eileen Walling wrote in a rare, unclassified report on the program three years ago. "There are signs that microwave weapons will represent a revolutionary concept for warfare, principally because microwaves are designed to incapacitate equipment rather than humans."

HPMs can unleash in a flash as much electrical power—2 billion watts or more—as the Hoover Dam generates in 24 hours. Capacitors aboard the missile discharge an energy pulse—moving at the speed of light and impervious to bad weather—in front of the missile as it nears its target. That pulse can destroy any electronics within 1,000 ft. of the flash by short-circuiting internal electrical connections, thereby wrecking memory chips, ruining computer motherboards and generally screwing up electronic components not built to withstand such powerful surges. It's similar to what can happen to your computer or TV when lightning strikes nearby and a tidal wave of electricity rides in through the wiring.

Most of this "e-bomb" development is taking place at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M. The Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland has been studying how to deliver varying but predictable electrical pulses to inflict increasing levels of harm: to deny, degrade, damage or destroy, to use the Pentagon's parlance. HPM engineers call it "dial-a-hurt." But that hurt can cause unintended problems: beyond taking out a tyrant's silicon chips, HPMs could destroy nearby heart pacemakers and other life-critical electrical systems in hospitals or aboard aircraft (that's why the U.S. military is putting them only on long-range cruise missiles). The U.S. used a more primitive form of these weapons—known as soft bombs—against Yugoslavia and in the first Gulf War, when cruise missiles showered miles of thin carbon fibers over electrical facilities, creating massive short circuits that shut down electrical power.

Although the Pentagon prefers not to use experimental weapons on the battlefield, "the world intervenes from time to time," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says. "And you reach in there and take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might use it."


Pick a guy you wanna fry!

 

[Silverluna]

sounds like something out of a james bond movie? pretty cool sounding anyway...

 

[busybody..]

Lost Cause...read this!

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Friday, August 16, 2002 issue.

Directed-Energy Weapons: Possible U.S. Use Against Iraq Could Threaten International Regimes

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Defense Department might use high-power microwave (HPM) technology, now under development, in an attack on Iraq, bypassing the traditional Pentagon approval process for using new technologies, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier this month.

“You never know,” he said at a press briefing Aug. 9, adding that there is already precedent for deploying weapons still under development.

Some human rights and international legal experts have expressed concern that the weapons might cause unnecessary human suffering or destroy civilian infrastructure, which is prohibited by an international arms control agreement. The United States has faced international criticism in recent months for what some critics perceive as a U.S. pullback from multilateral arms control agreements.

A 1977 protocol to the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war prohibits weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering and that are indiscriminate in their effects. It requires countries to assess the legality of a new weapon in light of the protocol and other international conventions. While the United States has not signed the protocol, it has indicated that it recognizes those principles as customary law and legally binding.

Safety Concerns

High-power microwave systems are designed to produce high-density bursts of energy capable of damaging or destroying nearby electronics, including those in vehicles, weapons and air defense and communications systems. HPM weapons could provide U.S. forces with a unique advantage, enabling them to swiftly knock out Iraqi command and control systems and possibly prevent Iraqi leaders from communicating effectively with their forces, military analysts have said.

Analysts have expressed concern though that the weapons might, in addition to destroying military targets, destroy nearby hospital equipment, heart pacemakers, and possibly systems in airborne civilian aircraft causing them to crash. According to a story in Aviation Week & Space Technology last month citing an unidentified official, the Israeli military has largely put off development of such weapons — except for possible use in missile defense — out of concern they would be mired in internal, Israeli legal reviews over the prospect of unanticipated collateral damage.

William Arkin, a senior adviser on military matters to Human Rights Watch, has argued for a rigorous legal, political and humanitarian evaluation of HPM weapons before they are deployed.

“Like blinding lasers, like anti-personnel land mines, like cluster bombs, there are weapons out there which are on the edge of whether or not they cause unnecessary suffering or are indiscriminate or fail to comply with our obligations under international humanitarian law,” he told Government Executive magazine earlier this year.

The U.S. military has indicated that it envisions high-power microwave and other directed-energy weapons to be a humane option for warfare.

“We will strike deep in the enemy’s territory at the speed of light, with little or no collateral damage or loss of life, crippling his ability to wage aggression,” the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate Web site says, prominently describing its “vision of the future.”

“The dangers to people are less from laser, microwave or EMP [electromagnetic pulse] attacks than from conventional attacks,” a 1992 U.S. Army infantry field manual says. “Their terminal effects are less violent and destructive than those of conventional kinetic or chemical energy munitions.”

A similar Army manual advises U.S. forces about side effects of prolonged exposure to high-power microwaves, saying soldiers might experience symptoms of pain, erratic heartbeat, fatigue, weakness or dizziness, nose bleeds, headaches and disorientation. HPM weapons, however, tend to require only rapid, not prolonged, bursts of energy to destroy electronics.

Assessing an Army war simulation involving HPM weapons, a 2000 report by the RAND think tank advises the military to develop clear policy on how the weapons would be used.

“HPM [weapons] would certainly have damaged civilian infrastructure in the [simulated] city. Such use may be construed as violating international law and could cause adverse public opinion. The U.S. government needs to develop clear and comprehensive policy on the use of such weapons,” the report says.

U.S. Requirements

According to Defense Department regulations, the Pentagon’s general counsel is required to review new weapons to determine whether they are consistent with U.S. and international laws and treaties before putting them into the field.

“Before microwave weapons are incorporated into the operational community, the Air Force general counsel must first review the weapon system and make a recommendation, which includes considerations of the medical and biological effects as those relate to the ‘pain and suffering’ that the weapon system may inflict,” Air Force Colonel Eileen Walling wrote in a February 2000 paper.

“If approved after a rigorous review, the Air Force lawyers and program managers must prepare for a review that will be conducted at the Department of Defense,” she wrote. The process is time consuming and can last more than nine months “but it assures that programs are thoroughly investigated before the program is formally initiated,” she added.

How the Weapons Might Be Used

Some national security experts have said they see no fundamental legal problems with using HPM weapons.

“On first blush, I don’t think this is an inhumane form of conflict, though it could have, as all weaponry does, inhumane consequences,” said John Holum, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security during the Clinton administration.

Questions about collateral damage, Holum said, “are part of the broader difficulty of conducting a war where your principal adversary is hidden among the general population, making it very difficult to distinguish between targets.”

“You may be talking about a weapon here that is sort of the ultimate [for] saving people, that is, putting weapons systems out of operation while not killing the people,” said professor John Moore, who directs the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia.

The United States used a more passive form of electromagnetic warfare during the Kosovo conflict, when aircraft dropped special carbon fibers over a radio broadcast station, effectively shutting it down. That operation generated national and international criticism because it attacked a civilian target.

Moore said there should be no problem with developing and using such weapons, depending on how they are used. There is no international prohibition on developing HPM weapons, just as there is no international ban on producing nuclear weapons, he said.

“The only question with respect to any weapons system, whether it’s a rock, a knife, or a standard carbine, [is] how it’s used, so it would depend specifically on how it’s used and whether it’s used in a way that generates collateral damage that is excessive in relation to the military effectiveness of the weapon,” he said.

That question is usually addressed through extensive testing. For example, a different sort of electromagnetic weapon unveiled by the Marines last year for use in controlling crowds without killing them was tested extensively on goats and people to measure its safety.

When used briefly, the weapon causes a burning sensation on the skin but no long-term damage, a Marine official told the Marine Corps Times last year. Prolonged use could cause permanent damage or death, the Times suggested, reporting that the period of time defining prolonged use is classified.

Accelerated Deployment

Rumsfeld said high power microwave technologies are in very early stages of development, but he suggested officials might field them nevertheless.

“The unmanned aerial vehicles that were used in Afghanistan, were not, had not reached their full development. They had not been authorized for use. They were still in a development stage and experimental, and yet you use them,” he said.

Pentagon spokesman Marine Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said Rumsfeld was probably referring to the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, which is still under development but has seen action in Afghanistan. The United States also used a fighter jet reconnaissance pod still under development during the conflict over Kosovo, Lapan said.

Legal reviews to make sure weapons conform to U.S. and international law might be hastened in situations where they are pulled out of development and put into the field, Lapan said.

“There would still be that process, [but] now it might be speeded up. And ultimately, if the secretary felt this was something the commander needed, he’s got to weigh all of the risks and benefits. The general counsel’s inputs are just that — inputs,” Lapan said.

Weapons Possibly Ready

Like the Russian, Chinese and other militaries, the U.S. military has been pursuing HPM weapons technologies for decades, analysts have said.

HPM weapons could be deployed in variety of ways, including by unmanned aerial vehicle, land vehicle, bomb or missile, according to military experts. The Pentagon has been working on a loading a system on an unmanned aerial vehicle that could remain airborne for extended periods and stealthily focus the energy on numerous targets.

Another concept that developers have explored is deploying an HPM weapon on a cruise missile. Defense Systems Daily reported in June 1999 that Los Alamos National Laboratory had developed an HPM weapon that could be deployed by laser-guided bomb or cruise missile.

GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike, who has extensively catalogued U.S. and foreign weapons capabilities, said the United States has had at least since the early 1980s a “highly classified” cruise missile-launched electromagnetic pulse weapon — which would cause an effect similar to an HPM but would not focus the energy in one specific direction.

Energy from HPM weapons can be directed at a particular area, but technical challenges remain on projecting high power levels over longer distances to a target, according to experts.

“Increasing the power levels, while simultaneously reducing the size of these microwave systems, will be extremely challenging and technically difficult,” Walling wrote in 2000.

Analysts also have noted difficulties in modulating power levels over distances so that a person close and in front of an HPM emission might suffer strong effects while a person moderately far away would be unfazed.

Walling concluded, however, that “several high-power microwave technologies have matured to the point where they are now ready for the transition from engineering and manufacturing development to deployment as operational weapons.”

The technology “is ready for the transition to active weapons in the U.S. military,” she wrote.

 

[Lost Cause]

Military benefits to civilian....

I wonder if there is a new source of electricity in the works?

Read this line from the article again, "HPMs can unleash in a flash as much electrical power—2 billion watts or more—as the Hoover Dam generates in 24 hours."

Think electrical vehicles/rains/commuter tubes.

 

[Lost Cause]

Article Date:Sunday, January 19, 2003; 10:31 a.m. EST

It could be an assemby of different articles, I just never heard on how far they've come since I was around that stuff..Thanx.

 

[The Heretic]

The problem with any EMP or similar weapons is that electronics can be shielded and the "lightning bolts" grounded. We have a lot of experience in doing this; most of our telecom systems are already shielded and grounded.

I don't know if HPMs can overwhelm that protection, but think of it this way - a lot of our systems have already been hit by lightning bolts (the good old fashioned kind that Mother Nature zaps us with) and survived.

 

[busybody..]

Bradley writes to point me to an article describing one of the wizard weapons we may unleash in this war. The report is, typically, mangled and demonstrates that the reporter who wrote it was probably a liberal arts major, but it's possible to see through the reporter's confusion to the underlying weapon's characteristics.

They're referred to as HPM, or High Power Microwave, and they generate a very brief but massively powerful burst of microwaves.

HPMs can unleash in a flash as much electrical power—2 billion watts or more—as the Hoover Dam generates in 24 hours. Capacitors aboard the missile discharge an energy pulse—moving at the speed of light and impervious to bad weather—in front of the missile as it nears its target. That pulse can destroy any electronics within 1,000 ft. of the flash by short-circuiting internal electrical connections, thereby wrecking memory chips, ruining computer motherboards and generally screwing up electronic components not built to withstand such powerful surges. It's similar to what can happen to your computer or TV when lightning strikes nearby and a tidal wave of electricity rides in through the wiring.

The first sentence in this paragraph is nonsense. Power, measured in watts, is an instantaneous measurement of energy release. 1 gigawatt released for one microsecond is exactly the same as 1 gigawatt released for 24 hours. However, 1 gigawatt released for one microsecond is only 1 kilojoule, whereas 1 gigawatt released for 24 hours is 86.4 terajoules. But they're both a gigawatt, at least for a moment.

What the reporter got told was that the power level of the pulse was about the same as the power output of Hoover Dam (which depends on the flow of the Colorado but actually limits out at about 1.5 gigawatts).

Most of the rest of this is mangled, too. The zorch this releases may well be stronger in some directions than in others, but something like this is basically going to go in all directions and not just to the front.

It will indeed zorch semiconductors, and in a way similar to one of the effects of a lightning strike, but not the one this describes. When lightning strikes and hits part of the power grid, such as a telephone pole with a transformer on it, then some of the electricity from the strike will ride in onto the power lines. Even if it doesn't hit a power pole, it will temporarily change the electrical potential of the "ground" near where it hits, and since the electrical system is grounded everywhere, that also will generate a temporary blip since that can travel faster through power lines than it can through the ground itself, to even out the differential. That's the effect we defend against with surge protectors.

That's not what an HPM would do. Lightning has a different effect as well; it generates a huge burst of radio waves, photons at a wide variety of frequencies. That's why it is bright, and that's why you can pick it up with an AM radio. (If you're in a lightning storm some time, turn on your AM radio and tune to between stations; you can hear the lightning very clearly, including the majority which are up in the clouds and never come near the ground. FM isn't the same, and you won't hear anything with FM.)

The generic term for this is EMI; electromagnetic interference. Given that all wires are antennas, a sufficiently powerful burst of EMI can generate local electrical current flow of a sufficient magnitude to toast inadequately-shielded semiconductors, especially MOSFETs (which are extremely susceptible to overvoltages even at tiny current levels). Since MOSFETs are the foundation of most modern semiconductor designs, and with the increasing reliance on semiconductors in modern weaponry, the potential for this as a weapon in war is clear.

HPMs are man-made lightning bolts crammed into cruise missiles. They could be key weapons for targeting Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. HPMs fry the sophisticated computers and electronic gear necessary to produce, protect, store and deliver such agents. The powerful electromagnetic pulses can travel into deeply buried bunkers through ventilation shafts, plumbing and antennas. But unlike conventional explosives, they won't spew deadly agents into the air, where they could poison Iraqi civilians or advancing U.S. troops.

Again, what comes through here is distorted. An HPM isn't a lightning bolt (though they may be generating their flux with a big brief arc), but some of its effects would be similar. But if a weapon like this had sufficient area effect (the article says 1000 foot radius, which is not inconceivable) then it could deactivate the guidance electronics on missiles and the targeting computers on artillery, which would turn them into inanimate junk, and also deactivate a lot of other kinds of essential electronics. Any installation using electronic locks on its doors is obviously vulnerable.

It can't be guaranteed that this would not lead to a release of chemical agents, but it is certainly much less likely to do so than any kind of attack with explosives. And if there are indeed installations thought to be holding these kinds of weapons, and if we do have some sort of HPM system, I think they'd be near the top of the list of places to use them (right behind Saddam's bunker).

I'm sure that these are designed to be delivered by cruise missiles, but I doubt that's the only way they could be used. I can see how you might not want to drop one of these from a manned aircraft, though if it were dropped from 20,000 feet or higher it seems as if the risk would be minimal to the plane. (It better be; our planes aren't supposed to be vulnerable to low levels of EMI, and the flux decreases as the square of the distance, plus there's time for the jet to leave the area between drop and detonation. It's hard to see how this could be any more hazardous to the plane than dropping a small nuke, and they're designed to survive that.)

I'm not really at all surprised to learn that they've been working on this concept. It's a non-trivial problem but also an obvious approach to high-tech weaponry, and if it turns out that we really do have this kind of capability, a hell of a lot of governments around the world are going to get even more nervous about our military power than they already are.

By the way, this kind of warhead would be extremely useful on an ABM system.

Update: I might mention that I think that the statement that this involves discharge of capacitors is extremely unlikely, and I suspect it may be disinformation. It's obvious that the trick here is figuring out how to generate that kind of current at those levels, even for a brief interval. I'd be more inclined to suspect that there's something like silver batteries involved, because they have the ability to generate truly mammoth amounts of current for brief intervals, far beyond that of any other kind of battery.

But what I really suspect is that they've figured out how to build something which can, for a very brief interval, use the energy release from an explosive to generate electricity. Of course, it would then be destroyed, but it doesn't have to work for very long. A few microseconds would be more than enough, and having it be destroyed afterwards is actually an advantage since it could not then be analyzed by the enemy to figure out how it worked. Could we be seeing some sort of high tech equivalent of "running a flashlight bulb off the heat of a candle flame", sort of a thermocouple on steroids?

 

[busybody..]

In response to the previous article about development of High Power Microwave weapons to attack enemy semiconductors, James writes:

Wouldn't it be kind of stupid for our military to develop HPM weapons? If other nations acquired the tech required to construct them, which they probably would eventually, our armed forces would be at a distinct disadvantage?

Development of military technology is the Red Queen's Race.

Alice looked round her in great surprise. `Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

`Of course it is,' said the Queen, `what would you have it?'

`Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

There's no advantage as fleeting as a technological one, and you can't stop the march of progress. If you want to maintain superiority, you have to keep moving. No one else is going to stop just because you did. American wizard weapons of 2003 will be commonplace in 2023 and obsolete junk in 2043. Whether we develop HPM or not, others are going to. But we have a good chance of developing them first, and taking advantage of them first. Refusing to work on them does nothing to decrease our vulnerability; it just throws away our chance of gaining an advantage from them.

HPM is not a doomsday weapon; it can be defended against. It's not that it instantly and automatically destroys all semiconductors within a given area. What it destroys is semiconductors which are in equipment which wasn't designed to survive such an insult, and a lot of what our enemies have isn't. (And essentially all civilian electronics isn't, and won't ever be.)

You can design electronics to be impervious to truly mammoth levels of EMI, but it radically changes the design problem and you have to keep it in mind at all times. For instance, if you're designing an aircraft and need to run signals around, you have to use fiberoptic instead of wires. All wires are antennas, and the longer a wire is, the more efficient it will be at picking up EMI and pushing a big spike at you. Fiberoptic won't do that.

You have to put all your electronics inside of metal boxes (which amount to local Faraday cages), and make sure that openings in the boxes are as small as possible. You use optoisolators heavily. You need to make sure that whatever power source is used doesn't make you vulnerable. And ultimately you'll need to test the stuff against massive EMI bursts just to make sure you didn't overlook anything. All of this makes the process vastly more complicated and expensive, and most of the military electronics out there hasn't been developed under such a protocol, or only partially.

But it's not clear that we would be at a disadvantage in this, partly because we've always been willing to spend a lot more on our equipment than anyone else, and this is one of the reasons why. This danger is not a new one. The threat was originally thought to be from EMP, electromagnetic pulse, which is something that is associated with battlefield use of nuclear weapons, and for a long time now they've been designing our military systems to survive that. What non-nuclear HPM technology would do is to move that threat from the theoretical to the practical. And it's also noteworthy that a lot of what would truly be attacked using HPM would be non-military electronics. It's going to make life interesting in your weapons bunker if all the card-key readers are instantly toasted on all the locked doors, wouldn't you say? And will your trucks run if the electronic ignition got smoked?

What common use of HPM will do is to make all weapons which rely on electronics much more expensive if they're not to be highly vulnerable, which favors the country with the biggest wallet and the greatest willingness to spend money. Guess who that is?

The reason this is cool is that it instantly and substantially reduces the effectiveness of a force, while increasing confusion and fear, without actually killing very many people. (People in moving vehicles at the time of the burst are still at risk, of course.) But this isn't a super-weapon against which there's no defense. It's another step in the process of development, just like the JDAM.

Update: Matt writes to send a link to this interesting article. Among many interesting things in it is the fact that an HPM weapon will work against enemy electronics even if they are not running. As an example of this, it would be a superb weapon to use against enemy air defenses. If an enemy radar unit isn't designed with isolation relays to physically disconnect the dish from the electronics, then a weapon like this detonated within range, even if not in the focus of the dish, would generate a spike back into the electronics that could fry the radar completely. So you could blind an entire section of an enemy's air defense with this kind of weapon, even if you had no idea where the radars were actually located. There's also this quote:

The technological community has also made great strides in developing new and innovative ways to reduce the size, weight and volume of microwave sources and antennae, while simultaneously increasing power levels. For example, one microwave source radiates one gigawatt of power in a few nanoseconds (10-9) and weights less than 45 pounds. Another example is a microwave source that radiates 20 gigawatts of power in a few nanoseconds and weights 400 pounds. To comprehend these power levels, the total daily power generated by Hoover Dam is 2 gigawatts.

I believe that Matt has located the source of this news report...

I'm a bit surprised that Colonel Walling would make the mistake of saying "in a few nanoseconds" instead of "for a few nanoseconds", and talking about "daily power". Given that she has a Masters degree in Physics, she should know better.

I'd love to know what physical approach they're using to create that kind of flux, but I don't expect I'll find out soon.

Update: Paul (the evil genius) writes the following:

High current is put into several coils of wire, which are compressed by a shaped-explosive detonation, then James Clerk Maxwell prevails.

That makes perfect sense. The coil would physically resist compression because of its field, and the force of the explosion would overcome that, and as a result it would induce a huge back-current out of the coil. Shortly thereafter the entire system is vaporized, but the current could flow to some sort of generation system far faster than the expanding concussion and produce the EMI burst before it all vanished due to the explosive. That sounds completely plausible, and it can be scaled up nicely. You could energize the coil with something like silver batteries which can produce huge current for a short time.

 

[Harry_Rabbit]

Has Busybody ever had an original thought in his life, or does he just plagiarize everything?