IFrom UASR-L: A New Scientist article. Please note report that
electromagnetic bomb [eBombs] were used to knock out radar (and electrical)
facilities during the Yugoslave war. You cannot shut this thread down as long
as there is evidence.
Alfred Webre
=====
Source: New Scientist
July 1, 2000.
Just a normal town...
... but out of nowhere a wave of chaos was to wash over that world. In
a millisecond it was gone. There were no phones, no computers, no
power, nothing. Yet nobody had died, no buildings razed to the ground.
And then the blind panic set in. What's going on, asks Ian Sample
IT SOUNDS like the perfect weapon. Without fracturing a single brick
or spilling a drop of blood, it could bring a city to its knees. The
few scientists who are prepared to talk about it speak of a sea change
in how wars will be fought. Even in peacetime, the same technology
could bring mayhem to our daily lives. This weapon is so simple to
make, scientists say, it wouldn't take a criminal genius to put one
together and wreak havoc. Some believe attacks have started already,
but because the weapon leaves no trace it's a suspicion that's hard to
prove. The irony is that it's our love of technology itself that makes
us so vulnerable.
This perfect weapon is the electromagnetic bomb, or e-bomb. The idea
behind it is simple. Produce a high-power flash of radio waves or
microwaves and it will fry any circuitry it hits. At lower powers, the
effects are more subtle: it can throw electronic systems into chaos,
often making them crash. In an age when electronics finds its way into
just about everything bar food and bicycles, it is a sure way to cause
mass disruption. Panic the financial markets and you could make a
killing as billions are wiped off share values. You could freeze
transport systems, bring down communications, destroy computer
networks. It's swift, discreet and effective.
Right now, talk of the threat of these weapons is low-key, and many
want it to stay that way. But in some circles, concern is mounting.
Last month, James O'Bryon, the deputy director of Live Fire Test &
Evaluation at the US Department of Defense flew to a conference in
Scotland to address the issue. "What we're trying to do is look at
what people might use if they wanted to do something damaging," he
says. With good reason, this is about as much as O'Bryon is happy to
divulge.
E-bombs may already be part of the military arsenal. According to
some, these weapons were used during NATO's campaign against Serbia
last year to knock out radar systems. So do they really exist? "Lots
of people are doing lots of work to protect against this type of
thing," says Daniel Nitsch of the German Army Scientific Institute for
Protection Technology in Muster, Lower Saxony. "You can make your own
guess."
Interest in electromagnetic weapons was triggered half a century ago,
when the military were testing something a lot less subtle. "If you
let a nuclear weapon off, you get a huge electromagnetic pulse," says
Alan Phelps of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. If this pulse
hits electronic equipment, it can induce currents in the circuitry
strong enough to frazzle the electronics. "It can destroy all
computers and communications for miles," says Phelps.
But the military ran into problems when it came to finding out more
about the effects of these pulses. How could they create this kind of
powerful pulse without letting off nuclear bombs? Researchers
everywhere took up the challenge.
The scientists knew that the key was to produce intense but
short-lived pulses of electric current. Feeding these pulses into an
antenna pumps out powerful electromagnetic waves with a broad range of
frequencies. The broader the range, the higher the chance that
something electrical will absorb them and burn out.
Researchers quickly realised the most damaging pulses are those that
contain high frequencies. Microwaves in the gigahertz range can sneak
into boxes of electronics through the slightest gap: vent holes,
mounting slots or cracks in the metal casing. Once inside, they can do
their worst by inducing currents in any components they hit. Lower
radio frequencies, right down to a few megahertz, can be picked up by
power leads or connectors. These act as antennas, sending signals
straight to the heart of any electronic equipment they are connected
to. If a computer cable picks up a powerful electromagnetic pulse, the
resulting power surge may fry the computer chips.
To cook up high-frequency microwaves, scientists need electrical
pulses that come and go in a flash--around 100 picoseconds, or one
ten-billionth of a second. One way of doing this is to use a set-up
called a Marx generator. This is essentially a bank of big capacitors
that can be charged up together, then discharged one after the other
to create a tidal wave of current. Channelling the current through a
series of super-fast switches trims it down to a pulse of around 300
picoseconds. Pass this pulse into an antenna and it releases a blast
of electromagnetic energy. Marx generators tend to be heavy, but they
can be triggered repeatedly to fire a series of powerful pulses in
quick succession.
Deadly burst
Marx generators are at the heart of an experimental weapons system
being built for the US Air Force by Applied Physical Sciences, an
electronics company in Whitewater, Kansas. "We're trying to put them
on either unmanned aerial vehicles or just shells or missiles in an
effort to make an electromagnetic minefield," says Jon Mayes of APS.
"If something flies through it, it'll knock it out." It could also be
used on a plane to burn out the controls of incoming missiles, says
Mayes. Put it on the back of a military jet and if a missile locks
onto the plane, the generator can release a pulse that scrambles the
missile's electronics.
Marx generators have the advantage of being able to operate
repeatedly. But to generate a seriously powerful, one-off pulse, you
can't beat the oomph of old-fashioned explosives. The energy stored in
a kilo or two of TNT can be turned into a huge pulse of microwaves
using a device called a flux compressor. This uses the energy of an
explosion to cram a current and its magnetic field into an
ever-smaller volume. Sending this pulse into an antenna creates a
deadly burst of radiowaves and microwaves.
Simplicity is one of the flux compressor's big attractions. Just take
a metal tube, pack it with explosives, and stick a detonator in one
end. Then fix the tube inside a cylinder of coiled wire, which has a
wire antenna attached at the far end. Finally, pass a current through
the coil to set up a magnetic field between the metal tube and the
coil, and you're ready to go (Click on thumbnail graphic for
diagram.).
Setting off the detonator triggers the charge, sending an explosion
racing along the tube at almost 6000 metres per second. If you could
slow this down, you'd see that in the instant before the explosive
pressure wave begins to shatter the device, the blast flares out the
inner metal tube. The distorted metal makes contact with the coil,
causing a short circuit that diverts the current--and the magnetic
field it generates--into the undisturbed coil ahead of it. As the
explosive front advances, the magnetic field is squeezed into a
smaller and smaller volume. Compressing the field this way creates a
huge rise in current in the coil ahead of the explosion, building a
mega-amp pulse just 500 picoseconds wide. Finally, just before the
whole weapon is destroyed in the blast, the current pulse flows into
an antenna, which radiates its electromagnetic energy outwards. The
whole process is over in less than a tenth of a millisecond, but for
an instant it can spray out a terawatt of power.
Tom Schilling of TPL, an electronics company in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, is working along similar lines with the microwave weapons he's
developing for the US Air Force. "We're using explosive flux
generators to generate the power, then sending that straight into an
antenna," he says. "One of the systems we're looking at is a guided
bomb that can be dropped off a plane. Targets would be things like
command and control centres--we should be able to shut those down with
little or no collateral damage." Schilling's company is also looking
at putting flux compressors into air-to-air missiles. It's an
appealing idea, as even a near miss could bring down a plane.
It certainly ought to be practical. As long ago as the late 1960s,
scientists sent a pair of flux compressors into the upper atmosphere
aboard a small rocket to generate power for an experiment to study the
ionosphere. "You can build flux compressors smaller than a briefcase,"
says Ivor Smith, an electrical engineer at Loughborough University who
has worked on these devices for years.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of these weapons is that they carry the
tag "non-lethal". You could take out a city's communications systems
without killing anyone or destroying any buildings. In addition to the
obvious benefits for the inhabitants, this also avoids the sort of bad
press back home that can fuel opposition to a war. But that doesn't
make these weapons totally safe, especially if they're being used to
mess up the electronics of aircraft. "If you're in an aeroplane that
loses its ability to fly, it's going to be bad for you," points out
James Benford of Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California.
Another big plus for people thinking of using these weapons is that
microwaves pass easily through the atmosphere. This means that you can
set off your weapon and inflict damage without having to get close to
your target. "People think in terms of a kilometre away," says
Benford. According to some estimates, a flux compressor detonated at
an altitude of few hundred metres could wipe out electronics over a
500-metre radius.
Electromagnetic weapons can be sneaky, too. You don't have to fry
everything in sight. Instead you can hit just hard enough to make
electronics crash--they call it a "soft kill" in the business--and
then quietly do what you came to do without the enemy ever knowing
you've even been there. "That could be useful in military applications
when you just want to make [the opposition] lose his electronic memory
for long enough to do your mission," Benford says. "You can deny you
ever did anything," he adds. "There's no shrapnel, no burning
wreckage, no smoking gun."
Did it work?
The downside is that it can sometimes be hard to tell when an
electromagnetic weapon has done its job. This is compounded by the
fact that unless you know exactly what kind of electronics you are
attacking, and how well protected they are, it's hard to know how much
damage a weapon will do. This unpredictability has been a major
problem for the military as it tries to develop these weapons.
"Military systems have to go through an enormous amount of
development," says Benford. "The key thing is that it has to have a
clearly demonstrated and robust effect."
Tests like this are close to the heart of Nigel Carter, who assesses
aircraft for their sensitivity to microwaves at Britain's Defence
Evaluation and Research Agency in Farnborough, Hampshire. Microwaves
can easily leak between panels on the fuselage, he says. "You've also
got an undercarriage with hatches that open, there's leakage through
the cockpit, leakage through any doors."
To find out how bad that leakage is, Carter could simply put the plane
in a field and fire away at it with microwaves. But he has to be
careful. "If we go blatting away at a very high level at hundreds of
frequencies, people in the nearest town get a bit upset because they
can't watch TV any more," says Carter. "It's very unpopular."
To avoid annoying the neighbours, Carter beams very low-power
microwaves at the plane. Sensors on board--linked by fibre optics to
data recorders so they are immune to the microwaves--record the
currents induced in the plane's electronics.
Knowing what currents are produced by weak microwaves, Carter
calculates what kinds of currents are likely to be produced if the
plane is hit by a more powerful pulse of microwaves. "You can then
inject those currents directly into the electronics," he says. The
results can be dramatic. "The sort of effects you might expect to get
if it's not protected are instrumentation displaying wrong readings,
displays blanking out and you could, in the worst case, get
interference with your flight controls," he says.
The idea of weapons like these being used in warfare is disturbing
enough, but what if criminals get their hands on them? According to
Bill Radasky, an expert in electromagnetic interference with Metatech
in Goleta, California, they may have already done so. A basic
microwave weapon, he says, can be cobbled together with bits from an
electrical store for just a few hundred dollars. Such a system would
be small enough to fit in the back of a car and could crash a computer
from 100 metres away.
Other systems are even easier to acquire. Some mail-order electronics
outlets sell compact microwave sources that are designed to test the
vulnerability of electronics. But they could just as easily be used in
anger. "We've done experiments that show it's very easy to do," says
Radasky. "We've damaged a lot of equipment with those little boxes."
If some reports are to be believed, they're not the only ones.
Criminals may have already used microwave weapons, according to Bob
Gardner who chairs the Electromagnetic Noise and Interference
Commission of the International Union of Radio Science in Ghent,
Belgium. Reports from Russia suggest that these devices have been used
to disable bank security systems and to disrupt police communications.
Another report suggests a London bank may also have been attacked.
While these incidents are hard to prove, they're perfectly plausible.
"If you're asking whether it's technologically reasonable that someone
could do something like this," says Gardner, "then the answer is yes."
Gardner's claims are backed by Nitsch. He is investigating how
vulnerable computers and networks are to powerful bursts of
microwaves. Surprisingly, he has found that today's machines are far
easier to crash than older models. He says computer manufacturers used
to be more worried about electromagnetic interference, so they often
put blocks of material inside to absorb stray signals, and ran strips
of copper around the joins in the casing to keep microwaves out.
That modern computers have less protection is bad enough. But they are
also more susceptible because they are more powerful. To push signals
around faster, you must reduce the voltage to ensure that the extra
current doesn't make the processor chips overheat. In the 1980s, most
computers operated at 5 volts. Today's machines operate at nearer 2
volts, says Nitsch, making their signals easier to disrupt. Networks
are particularly susceptible, he adds, because the hundreds of metres
of cabling connecting their workstations can act as an efficient
radiowave receiving antenna.
Secret attacks
So are businesses taking the threat seriously? Radasky knows of only
one European company that has protected its control centre against
microwave weapons. Gardner believes it will take a high-profile attack
to raise awareness of the issue. But combine the lack of evidence left
by microwaves with companies' reluctance to admit their systems have
been breached and you'd expect attacks to go unreported.
The good news is that protection isn't too difficult if it's done at
the design stage, says Carter. The first thing to do is make sure
you've got well-constructed circuits. This means using strong signals
that can easily be distinguished from the fuzz of noise generated by
microwaves. "You also want to make sure your circuitry only responds
at the frequency it's supposed to," he says. So if your computer is
intended to respond to signals coming in at 500 megahertz, you want to
make sure it won't also respond to signals at twice that
frequency--the kind that could be induced by microwaves. Another step
is to wire in filters that absorb large surges of current--much like
those used to protect against glitches in the mains power supply
following lightning strikes.
Regardless of whether these weapons have been used yet, they highlight
the way our dependence on electronics could become our Achilles' heel.
The next time your computer crashes, don't automatically blame Bill
Gates. Just wander over to the window and look out for that unmarked
van that sometimes parks across the street. Could there be someone
inside sending a blast of microwaves your way?
Further reading:
www.infowar.com/mil_c4i/mil_c4i8.html-ssi
www.dallas.net/~pevler/jec.htm
www.nawcwpns.navy.mil/~pacrange/ news/RFWeap.htm
Mark
Alien Astronomer - "Exploring Our Universe"
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583
Astronomy - Hi-Tech/Secret Projects - Secret Societies - Ufology
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
>>
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