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Technology

EMP Artillery Shells 202

Posted by michael from the bomb-them-into-the-abacus-age dept.
smartfart writes "Military.com has this story about artillery shells "that can put out such a powerful burst of radio-frequency energy it will destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems for miles around without killing anyone."" Some (not all) modern military equipment is designed to withstand large EMP pulses, so I'm not sure how effective this would be against most armies. But it would sure do a number against civilian computer networks.
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EMP Artillery Shells More

EMP Artillery Shells

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  • Sorry, acronym came out before I could stop it. That means High Explosive Dual Purpose for those unfamiliar with the term. HEDP is designed to be effective against both soft (leg infantry) and hard (mech infantry, armor) targets. It also does a pretty good job of fscking up anything else in the target area like civilians or non-military property...


    --

  • uh oh (Score:1)

    by tred ( 29362 )
    this worries me
  • I'll have to ask around at work about it. If I had a decent EMP source, I have a whole cardboard box full of pacemakers on my bench at work that I could experiment with. The easy test is to see if they can do telemetry after being exposed to the pulse. Then again, maybe they would just POR (Power On Reset) and continue to function.
  • Actually the fallback in florida is to have them accosted by Boise and several billion chad counters.
  • interesting point, but somehow i think that the police wouldnt use emp weapons untill they have ones useful against small, isolated targets. scary, none the less...

  • Cybercrime must be crushed! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "In the light this recent information, it is clear that to prevent threats to our national security the availability of aluminum foil and car batteries must be restricted."

    --Janet "crush the cybercrime" Reno

  • The local police already have this capability, as part of their frightening arms build-up of the 1990s. Certain large cities (L.A., etc.) have a low-power EMP weapon which is on what amounts to a very fast electric radio-controlled car. The theory is that, during a car chase, the RC car is run up under the criminal's engine bay and the EMP weapon is fired, disabling the ignition system. I don't know if this has ever actually been used.

    So, if you are a criminal, get a low-rider with mechanical distributor ignition :)

  • This thing can only have a total energy equivalent of something in the range 100Kg - 1000Kg of some military explosive since it's deliverable by some kind of aircraft/rocket and unless I misread the article is non-nuclear. I guess it must work by collapsing a wire/tube in a magnetic field or possibly by accelerating a jet of metal into/through such a field. Even assuming 100% conversion it would seem given the inverse square law that with such a limited energy input it can't really do a lot of damage. The nuclear emp weapons would have much larger inputs (by factors of 10k-1M) and would likely be more effective.
  • During the gulf war the press brought thier off the shelf fax machines.
    they didn't last long in the desert.
    the military grade fax machines our troops were using had no problems
    people made a big deal cuz the military spent thousands of dollars on the mil spec
    fax machines that didn't have half the features the off the shelf models

  • Re:More useful than you'd think. (Score:4)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @07:29AM (#538420) Journal
    Here are some random reactions to the above.

    One thing to consider is that the EMP is a pulse. a huge ragged electromagnetic square wave.

    The thing about a pulse is that it is has edges. Imagine, a normal ambient low voltage condition suddenly is whacked to tens or hundreds of thousands of volts induced by the pulse, in a time period measuring nanoseconds. And then it gets whacked in the other direction since this is a wave and it goes back and forth.

    Smaller electronics are using smaller wires, and are using smaller voltages. this makes them more vulnerable.

    Voltage is induced by magnetism is a single wire. Although voltages induced by differances in different parts of the system are fun as well.

    People also do not realise that electronic logic now is often edge based. in other words, the ones and zeros are not determined by reaching and settling at 0 volts and 5 volts (or 2.3 or 2.4 volts, etc) but by detecting the edge of the shift from zero to max and vice versa. this has the advantadge of being faster because you do no have to wait for things to stabilize as much.

    This is much more vulnerable to noise. Even without any damaging voltage levels, a nice heavy edge (such as found in an EMP)can act as a reset command, or lock the system up.

    I imagine that high frequency systems are going to have a problem, even if the voltage does not actually fry the system.

    I imagine that older technology, like non-digital cars, would have a problem with this. Tube based technology, relay logic, etc. tends to be more robust, but this is not proof against the effects described above.

  • I recommend you actually try to erase a hard drive (or even a VCR tape) with a magnetic coil.

    You need a Major magnetic field to do an effective job. The off-the-shelf Bulk Tape Erasers have to be buzzed right up against a VCR tape for quite a while for the tape to actually be wiped clean.

    A concealed coil in the doorway likely wouldn't have any affect, particularly with a hard drive in a somewhat magnetically shielded case, and being carried through the doorway for just a moment.
  • Thanks wljones, for the tech-y interruption to all this witty reparté. In the Matrix(movie), the defense againt the EMP was to turn off all power. Besides it being a MOVIE, why would that not be a realistic defense in the real world? Also, *shades of "Dark Angel"* - sometimes fact is dwarfed by fiction.
  • You're encouraged, at your soonest convenience, to head on into the crack district of your nearest major city.

    Bring along a grocery bag full of dollar bills. Have fun reasoning with the teenage vandals about how they should share the dollar bills amongst themselves. Maybe you can play a game of chess with some of them at the coffee house.
  • Actually, military stuff is very vulnerable to EMP--much more than it commonly supposed. The Russians made an attempt at preparing for EMP attacks, but didn't get very far. China doesn't really need to (you'd be surprised how many tube manufactuers the Chinese army keeps in business--or, since this is China, runs). The US, OTOH, uses very vulnerable electronics, and hasn't done much about it. The US used to run wargames of Word War 3, and they always started by the Red team detonating an EMP over the US, and then everyone would go get some coffee while the umpires removed half the US's forces. :-)

    The reason is obvious enough--people glibly assume that there's some way to shield electronics from Bad Things(tm) like EMP blasts, particle beams, X-ray lasers, and so forth. In reality (and I'm not an electrician, so this is only roughly accurate) you can either completly isolate it from EVERYTHING (effectivly impossible), or enclose it in active shielding, like an electrified cage (sometimes called a Faraday shield, IIRC). Neither is perfect, and neither works well for systems in planes, missiles, or handheld devices, many of which are, from an EMP point of view, just like your Palm, except MUCH MORE VALUABLE.

    In any case, vulnerable is relative. Your Palm has tiny wires, so it's difficult for any major potential difference to be set up. What's vulnerable is big long wires. Power lines, telephone cables, networks, and anything connected to them, including telephone exchanges and sub-stations. The old sub-orbital EMP burst is crippling because it turns all of your power liness into antennas--thereby frying everthing connected to them. In theory, an EMP burst might cause a poorly run/designed nuclear power plant to go boom--not by messing with the electronics in the control room, but by inducting big currents in the outgoing power lines. These EMP shells work on a different scale, but the principle is similar.

    The short of it is, magnetic memory is probably going to be toast, and anything connected to power lines without a surge protector is toast. Anything connected to a copper network is also likely toast. But solid state electronics are (mostly) only as vulnerable as the power supply (that is, they can be toasted by stuff that is vulnerable to EMP, but are not themselves directly vulnerable), unless the flux levels reach a level so high that metal starts melting, in which case your probably going to be more concerned about your fillings, not your computer.

    Or to be blunt: Of course the military is vulnerable. No, there's nothing anyone can do. But no, these shells aren't really that useful, since the area of effect will be so much smaller.
  • Hi!

    Here [spyking.com] is an interesting link about "HERF and other Radio Weapons".

    Some of the links are dead, but those who are not give a really interesting read, about things like:

    • Destructive Energy Devices
    • Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) & TEMPEST Protection for Facilities
    • Hardening your Computing Assets against HERF
    • How to build a HERF Gun
    ... and much more!

    have fun!
    cheers
    mike
  • I'm pretty sure that most pacemakers are highly insulated and shielded against radio, electrical, and magnetic interference.

    Ever see those signs that say MICROWAVE OVEN IN USE?

    Ever wonder why such warnings are posted?
  • Actually, I wasn't referring to the lifts/elevators dropping down the shaft when an EMP fries their electronics, but to the possibility of entombment of people riding in them at the time.

    Beyond that, there are probably thousands of other ways in which people would die as a result of such a blast, from failed traffic lights on busy roads and control signals on trains, to machinery or even weapons going haywire. The really nasty deaths would follow later on though if the blast is not just a local one, as society's threads start to unravel after the failing of the primary services which these days are entirely dependent on electronics.
  • Some (not all) modern military equipment is designed to withstand large EMP pulses...

    Electromagnetic pulse pulses? Are they like PIN numbers?

  • Comrades,

    I don't really have the inclination to do the proper back-of-the-envelope, but consider the amount of electromagnetic energy contained in a half-sphere several miles in diameter; and consider the amount of energy in an artillery shell. There's simply not enough energy available for the effects claimed.

    In addition, I remind everyone that military equipment undergoes rigorous testing for EMP. At one point in time the world's largest wooden structure was a ramp used by the US military to elevate airplanes during EMP testing. And the size of the generators needed to generate a sufficiently large EMP burst is nothing to sneeze at.

    I have seen demonstrations of very small-scale EMP burst devices that could generate sufficient power to disable a single vehicle -- if the device is adjacent to the vehicle. A stand-off device requires a van full of equipement. Again, nothing that would fit into an artillery shell.

  • I'm somewhat sceptical about this. How are they going to store enough power in the 155 shell for it to be able to generate such a powerful burst?
  • from the article:
    The company's work on the system won the scientists a gold award for innovation from the BAe Systems chairman.

    games like redalert/total a have had this idea for along time, and i would suspect that it has been in science fiction literature for much longer. i wouldnt call this an innovation by the scientists.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that

  • Principles Behind EMP Bursts (Score:3)

    by DaneelGiskard ( 222145 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @04:35AM (#538432) Homepage
    Got this from here [spyking.com]. It's interesting to read if you know the basics.

    The general idea is to set up an L-R-C circuit and destabilize it. For example, we know the change in emf (E) is related to the ke quantities (L = indcutance, R = resistance, C = capacitance) by:

    L (d^2 I(t) / dt^2) + R (dI(t) / dt) + I(t)/ C = dE(t)/ dt

    where I(t), and E(t) are time-variable

    Under suitable conditions (cf. Spicer, 'Solar Physics', v53, p. 305, 1977) it is possible to induce a voltage 'spike' which is the equivalent of a HERF burst. In his Fig. 4, Spicer shows a profile of such a burst, generated using an ST-tokamak.

    Of course, ST-tokamaks are not needed to accomplish this. It is fairly well known that *all* electrical circuits containing an inductance (L) are intrinsically explosive (cf. Alfven, 'Cosmic Plasma', p. 34, Dordrecht-Reidel, 1981).

    Thus, if such a circuit is somehow disrupted, there is an explosive release of magnetic energy, of order:

    W = 0.5 LI^2

    Where L is the inductance (say of the inducting coil in the circuit) and I is the current. Say, for example, that L = 10 H (10 Henries) and I = 20A, then:

    W = 0.5 (10H) (20A)^2 = 2000 J (Joules)

    This is a fair amount of energy.

    In practical HERF circuits one would incorporate a 'double layer' say by using a capacitor across which some maximum value of voltage V(D) might be applied. As the current is made to exceed a threshold value I(D), a voltage drop V(D) occurs across the capacitor up to the current I(ex) when it explodes and disrupts the current (cf. Alfven, ibid.).

    When switched on, the current increases at rate:

    dI/dt = (V(b) - R I/ L)

    (V(b) is intrinsic emf of circuit)

    Without the 'double layer' (capacitor) it reaches saturation at:

    I(s) = V(b)/ R

    If I(D) I(D) is given by:

    dI/dt = [V(b) - V(D) - RI]/ L

    The current will tend towards a saturation value:

    I(s)' = [V(b) - V(D)]/ R

    If I(ex)
    The explosion will generate a high energy radio frequency pulse.

    This pulse, if proximate enough to an electronic device (i.e. computer) will render it inoperable

  • And perhaps you should tell the next police officer that pulls you over and tries to search your car without a search warrant that he can't because it's a violation of your rights under the fourth amendment. You'll quickly find yourself severely beat up or dead.
  • All your older earth movers, trucks, trains, and buses using old fashioned diesel should still work fine.
  • The only possiblity (very remote IMHO) is to load a metal matrix with deuterium atoms using electrochemical loading, then to imploded said matrix using a compressive exposion. This (with the appropriate other triggers) could then cause a large number of the deuterium ions to overcome the columb (sp?) barrier, and to fuse... thus creating heat, and a large flux of neutrons. An asymmetric shield around the device could then create an asymmetric source of ionizing radiation, which gives you the proper field strengths required to do this right.

    The only problem is that cold fusion doesn't work. (or does it??)

    --Mike--

  • Remember, the attack must be in close proximity to work. EMP and light behave the same. Double the distance and the force drops by a square root. This is why the average lightning storm doesn't take out the whole country. I can't see anything as small as a suitcase producing a pulse any stronger than a lightning bolt at the same distance. Too much power on the antenna of the device would make a glowing plasma ball that would absorb much of the pulse power and turn it to heat. Air breaks down at high voltage. Anyone who has built a TESLA COIL knows this. It uses pulses of power great enough to arc over the antenna (coil), but it rarely does damage more than a house away. Most banks and data centers would need the device to discharge within a few hundred feet to do anything more than cause an equipment lockup or reboot. More stuff is going into racks, which provide excelent EMP shielding and fiber optics are immune to EMP. If the stuff is built with filtered power leads to the cabinet and only fiber in and out of the cablnet, it would be very tempest proof. I wouldn't think one of these would shut down all the cars is a city, at least not any more than an electrical storm in the city.
  • RF also follows the inverse square law. Just guessing, would not all non-coherent radiation?

    Magnetic force is not important in itself unless it's so strong that it moves things. It's what is induced that is important. CMOS chips are not so bad - they have really short internal leads, so you need only concern yourself with what comes in on a wire. CMOS chips generally include diodes to power and ground at every I/O pin.

    I've seen HIPOT testing with a spark gun. It crashed the workstation being tested, but did not damage it. We could probably have gotten rid of the crash, too. Nice big 1N4007 diodes to the power supply rails at all of the I/O pins might have done it.

    It's pretty easy to suppress phone line EMI. Chokes, MOVs, gas tubes, all help. Good ones are too expensive for consumer equipment, but most modems I buy have two chokes, a few MOVs, and a gas tube that looks like a neon lamp.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • You have the diesel generator to run your CPU down there in the cellar, too, right? No long wires running out to the generator in the garage that powers it all?
  • I think that the most vulnerable part of systems are those things connected to phone lines. Many newer phones probably could not handle a bad surge on the line. I seem to see a fair number of 'used' computer modems around that mysteriously don't work - but were in fact probably damaged by lightning. I saw a VCR that was killed by lightning - the part that was damaged though was the cold cathode display in front, but not the power supply! My guess is that the HV transformer for the display picked up the EMP, but the power supply being able to handle larger currents internally was spared.

    Also, since these pulses work by induction (as other posts mentioned) you would have to be close by the source for it to be damaging, Wouldn't this have to do with the magnetic component of the wave? - i.e. intensity of wave is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the source, whereas RF strenght is just inversely proportional to the distance? (I'm too lazy to look up the details.

    I think that EMP is as much of a psychological weapon as it is a physical one, and largely overplayed - even for a nuclear one. After all, people are going to be (or should be!) more worried about their relationship to ground zero than if there radio is going to survive.

    That being said, hams like you and myself come from a different day. Our equipment was mostly transitorized using discreet components - a lot more sturdier than the low voltage CMOS that everything is using nowadays. It is hard for us to imagine how stuff can die being close to what is nothing more than a glorifed lightning strike. As chip densities increase, that insulating layer for the CMOS Fet junctions grows thinner and thinner, and easier to puncture...

  • EMP works by coupling a momentary AC electromagnetic signal to conductors that work as an antenna and deliver a high voltage to equipment. Most military aircraft are not vulnerable. I happen to have some military-surplus EMP suppressors on hand, and use them for lightning protection on my ham station. These are bulkhead-mounting devices that take the antenna cable from inside the metal aircraft body (think Faraday cage) to outside where the antenna is. They use a gas tube (which becomes conductive when a high voltage is imposed across it and shorts it out) an air gap (similar to the gas tube but a second line of defense) and a choke coil. For fixed-frequency radios, you can also use a 1/4 wave stub which appears as an open at the desired frequency and a short at many other frequencies (but is not as effective for lightning protection as people think because its impedance is too high).

    My local area net uses shielded cables with only one end grounded (to avoid ground loops). This is to keep interference out of the radios, but protects the net from outside RF as well.

    I have put choke coils (a toroid with a few turns of AC wire around it) in a lot of the electrical outlet boxes (again for interference reduction). But I could do a lot more work on that.

  • Nope.

    Innovation involves, at a minimum, an actual working bench-top prototype.

    I think the word you wanted to use was 'inspiration.' And thoughts are really cheap compared to prototype materials.
  • Why won't an EMP this powerfull effect humans? Aren't our nervous systems susceptible to this? What kind of physiological effects would an EMP like this have on a person?
  • Faraday cages work on the basis that a charge only has meaning OUTSIDE of objects. You can't meaningfully talk of an electrical charge inside a charged sphere, for example. It's essentially constant and therefore zero.

    The main reason faraday cages are useless for this kind of situation is because you're not dealing with unearthed objects in isolation. As soon as you have conduction, you are no longer talking of static point charges.

  • Another sign that the end is near!
  • So to democratise thi we need a Kalishnikov to engineer a low tech way to make this High tech weapon?
  • Wasn't this exactly the plot device behind the Bond movie "Goldeneye"? Now we know where the USA's top military minds get their ideas from!
  • OK, so... this is a very cool, but I see little real utility as a military weapon. Remember that artillery is a tactical weapon--that is, it influences the battlefield directly.

    EMP weapons make excellent strategic or even operational weapons, as they can do serious damage to non-tactical military power (i.e., by screwing up the support units' ability to support the troops in the field).

    But as for supporting the tactical battle, which is fought by infantry, armored fighting vehicles and tube/rocket artillery, I just don't see it being of much use. I'd much rather have HE blast/fragmentation rounds coming down on the bad guys. Hell, even smoke so I can close with the enemy and kill him with personal weapons.

    It's a cool toy, but still pretty much just a toy. EMP isn't a tactical weapon of too much use.

    Being lit off in the middle of downtown Chicago from the back of a Ryder truck, however, it would be much more effective. Definately a terrorist weapon.
  • The RIAA... could wipe all our HDs clean of mp3s. This is one silver bullet I never wanna see near my puter. Time to back up everything to optical again...
  • Currents induced in the brain by strong magnetic fields can indeed cause physiological and psychological effects. I have a friend working here [boojum.hut.fi] studing the effects of magnetic fields on human brain. By collimating the field at different parts of brain they can induce different feelings (euphoria, despair, ...) as well as physiological effects such as involuntary muscle contraction.

    The fields, however, are orders of magnitude larger and much more coherrent than those found in an EMP pulse.

  • No problem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Note that while the power is "billions of watts" the duration of the pulse is only few nanoseconds (1x10^-9 s). Since energy equals power times duration, you can see that if "billion" in this context means 1x10^9 W the energy in the pulse is only a couple of Joules.
  • I did some more research into this and discovered something. It is not the US government that has designed and built these things. RIAA and MPAA got together to find a way to enforce thier copyrights. So if you don't submit to thier wishes on not using napster or similiar programs, they will launch one of these in your general vicinity.

    :)
  • I can see it now instead of putting "hello" or "merry christmas hitler" on bombs like they did in WWII they'll write "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!", "ph34r my Sk1llz" and " 1337 liek jeffk!!!111!!!"
  • One of these days, when a car alarm goes off for absolutely no reason, I'd love to be able to retaliate.... *evil grin*
  • We used to laugh at the Soviet equitpment for still usinbg tubes.

    Tube baed equiptment is 100% immune to EMP, so maybe they were right after all :)
  • Rad hard is a term used by NASA and the military that refers to equipment that can survive the ravages of space, unprotected by our atmosphere. ICs in particular, with their tiny circuit traces, can be blown to smithereens by an errant sub-atomic particle travelling at the speed of light. It is quite conceivable that a wealthy military like, say, ours could create a weapon to serve this purpose. Thus the crude electromagnetic weapon discussed here is only the beginning...
  • With a name like "Coward" what makes you think you were even included in the human race?
  • It's flamebait, but hey:

    (all Scottish, too)...

    • John Logie Baird - inventor of TV;
    • Alexander Graham Bell - inventor of the telephone;
    • John Macadam - tarmac/asphalt;
    • Alexander Fleming - penicillin;
    • John Paul Jones - US Navy (had to throw this one in);
    • James Young Simpson - chloroform;
    • James Watt - steam engine/condensor;
    • and many more.
  • Hahaha.... that reminds of when Windows 2000s starts up it says. "Built on NT Technology" Well... NT means New Technology so if you break down the acronymns built on "New Technology Technology" kinda humorous.
  • In fact, they're meaningless right now, even without thinking about the plight of people with pacemakers: one of those pulses would probably kill many people simply because they happen to be in planes or lifts/elevators at the time.

    On the other hand, if something bad was going down, maybe hidden safe away in the corner of an elevator isn't such a bad thing.

    I believe, for elevators to be allowed past inspection, they must have a mechanically operated brake shoes that activates if the elevator passes a certan speed(or meets some other mechanically determined criteria). The EMP probablly wouldn't affect those, you'd freak out, and see your life flash before your eyes, then you'd be stopped halfway up the shaft.

    Who knows, maybe they've moved these emergency systems to rely on electronics now... in which case, nice knowing you.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • EMP effects (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    During the early-to-mid eighties, I worked on one of a number of projects at Bell Labs that looked at hardening the phone network agaist threats like EMP. I did not have a security clearance so I never got to see things like the FEMA maps that indicate where they expected bombs to fall in a real attack, but the difference between classified and public data was largely irrelevant. Induced voltages in long-haul phone and electrical transmission lines from EMP was by far the most pernicious effect that they had to guard against. The ffects would be felt far beyond the curtain of EMP. Central offices have long looked like giant faraday cages for other reasons, but that also helps guard them against EMP. For a while it looked like fiber optics lines would avoid the problems with copper wires, until someone found that gamma rays would affect fiber optic lines, sometimes even when they are buried.

    The lesson was the in a real nuclear exchange with a sophisticated enemy, there are many nuclear effects short of direct blast damage that are completly debilitating. Our government and the soviets have taken such effects very seriously for many decades. (As I recall, Sandia labs has had a big EMP simulator in the field since the sixties.)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • [Moderation : -5 Flamebait]

    "
    You see... WE are really the mature nation in the world. It is you, who have yet to find a system that works. European nations don't want to give up their gang turf and are drunk on their own penny-ante power trips. Look at the debacle over the FAILING Euro to see the all the squabbling chiefs in action. Waaaa! We're not giving up our money! That's why you're still a pile of tiny separatate nations and monarchies. And you're telling us to grow up and mature? Sire? Lord? Or whatever the hell title separates the l33t from the squalor.
    "

    Obviously the Euros should take lessons from the longer established Yanks.

    Lesson 1 :
    Great ways to decide on your next president.
  • This will be a real problem for the US the next time we get into a shooting war against an opponent that isn't a total incompetent. Any competent military opponent capable of inserting a few small teams into the US can use this technology.

    When the US was bombing Bhagdad, Iraq might have retaliated by using EMP attacks against a few key targets, like the major stock exchange data centers and their backup sites, the VISA/MasterCard switching centers (there are only two for VISA in the US), and two or three of the major power grid control centers. This is a good strategy for a beleagured third-world country; it's not too expensive, it won't kill enough people to invite massive retaliation, but it will make it clear to the US population that the enemy can hit back. Merely demonstrating such a capability with a single incident would likely generate substantial opposition to U.S. military adventures.

    So we have to prepare for this, and Slashdot readers involved with critical infrastructure should be thinking hard about this. Protection is quite feasible, but has to be designed in when a building goes up and the equipment goes in. For example, reinforced concrete has rebar and metal mesh inside, but it's not customary to weld them together for electrical continuity. If they are welded, you get the big parts of a Faraday cage for quite low cost. Military sites have used this technique.

    Cables going in and out need to go through what a telco calls a "central office grade protector", the gas-tube device mentioned previously. Power isolation is also needed, and there are standard devices for that. It's cheap if you design it in; EMP won't go through a transformer, so if you integrate the data center's main transformers into the EMP system, it just costs you some shielding. And fibre optics are immune to EMP.

    With a little prodding, the Bush administration might provide some financial incentives for EMP protection. The Heiritage Foundation has a report on EMP threats [heritage.org], although they're still thinking it takes an ICBM and a nuclear weapon.

  • Guess we'll have to transition to either optical or fluidics for our computation systems :)
  • What would be even MORE fun would be to have one in MY car - mounted to fire out the rear of my car. No more worrying about speeding tickets! :)
  • At least you have the choice of what you wish to speak. To each their own. It will be a sad day when the American, or English, or German, or French, or... system is totally dominant in the world A competition of systems (from the latin cum petito - to try together) yeilds the best possible result. And yes, I distrust the government of any country, America or otherwise. It is not paranoia, it is experience and a study of history. Too often the government has been hijacked by special interests (from the whites in the American south anti-bellum to Germany in the 30s) for me to be anything but suspicious of a strong government. Anyway, have a good new year (and/or millenium) mon ami.
  • and perhaps you would like to play them using a CD drive that doesn't work anymore because the firmware has been wiped. Nah.
  • Hey,

    I'm pretty sure that most pacemakers are highly insulated and shielded against radio, electrical, and magnetic interference. Although I just looked around and it said a high level of EMP could disable a pacemaker ( Radio-Frequency Radiation ) I don't know how high of a level the EMP would have to be.

    Well, in most hospitals they ask you to deactivate your cell phone because the location-tracking signal could interfere with equiptment. I would expect a powerful EMP field to produce several times as much magnetic radiation as my mobile telephone.

    Pacemakers may well be shielded, but I sure-as-hell wouldn't like to be on life support in hospital when an EMP-based weapon is used.

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • What? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You are right about the EMP being a big pulse at the generator, but you got a couple of things wrong. First, it is not an electromagnetic square wave, it is transmitted as a large amount of frequencies that make up the square wave (remember Fourier?). Second it is the high frequency components of this square wave that cause all the trouble. At high enough frequencies traces on a board can become very good antennas, thus there is interferrence. Add to this the fact that shielding at high frequencies is very very difficult and costly. I've seen a project that involved only a couple of gigahertz (easily achievable through EMP) and the shielding involved was a solid hunk of aluminum surrounding the entire system. It still had leakage. In the real world it is difficult to shield against EMP's of significant power.

  • Some factoids about EMP weapons (Score:3)

    by wa1hco ( 37574 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @08:46AM (#538491)
    Studying this stuff was my job for a few months...
    Three concepts for EMP shells:
    1) launch a blast of microwaves toward the target just before impact. Advantages: uW can be directed forward, can penetrate small openings in the target
    2) generate high freq RF just before impact. Advantages: can couple into wires and cables such as between radar dish and control van. Disadvantage: requires deploying long antenna wires.
    3) directly connect to building and pulse it with MegaVolt DC or AC. Advantages: effecient connection, lots of power.

    The microwave shell used an explosive to crush a magnetic field and shoot it past a coil that generated KiloVolts and 100's of KiloAmps, then a transformer stepped it up to MegaVolts and fed a klystron-like device. I saw the model for 155mm shell and nothing looked like a circuit...just some very simple shapes in metal, plastic and explosive...beautiful engineering!

    The HF shell shoots wires out from the nose to form an antenna and uses the Megavolts to generate and impulse around 30 MHz

    The direct connect shell shoots wire our towards the target and puts the MV directly on the wires. The Volts jumps the air gaps and penetrates to the internal wiring of the building and fries everything inside.

    The article missed one of the most important threats...EMP rent-a-trucks. Load a set of large HF emp generators in the back of semi-trailer and drive it into a high density business area. The energy couples into the power and network wiring and fries all the computers.

    On the subject of susceptability for HERF...The published literature varies widely. Some tests claim that 100's of Watts per square cm will create damage but others say it requires 10KW/cm2. The equipment design literature tends to assmue the threat can generate huge power. On the other hand, it's not possible to generate that much power over a wide area. The question becomes...if you need to get a 100 lb shell within 10 feet of the target...isn't it better just use high explosives?

    Bottom line...these weapons will damage civilian infrastructure (business, not the phone company) but probably have little military use except to slow the adoption of high technology by increasing the number of special requirements for military systems (just what the old Soviets would want)
  • There's a story about it here [zdnet.com].

    It was also previously mentioned on slashdot here [slashdot.org]

    It's different from an EMP pulse in that it doesn't actually fry the electronics, it just disrupts them. So it'll stop a car's engine, but you'll be able to start it up again...tho that's not much of a comfort if you're on the highway when it hits you.

  • That's twice in 24 hours...
    EMP = ElectroMagnetic Pulse
    EMP Pulse = ElectroMagnetic Pulse Pulse

    This has been an English lesson.
  • Yeah, the world would really be much better off if America had never developed the ability to make war so well.

    For instance, all the trains would run on time, and there'd be no anti-Semitism to worry about any more.

    -
  • Actually, Russian, not British. If you read the article, the West is playing catch up to the Russians in this area who have had such shells for at least two years. The scary part is that the Russians are dying off and desperate for money. The IRA (according to the article) is interested in a suitcase version of this and I would guess that the Russians would sell it when they develop it.

    Imagine this in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or any other high value electronics concentration. For network administrators it means that they have to military harden their networks *right now* and hope that they keep ahead of the kooks.

    Vain hope.

    DB
  • Hi again ;-)

    Here [eskimo.com] is an article about a guy who build such a weapon, mostly out of commercially available tools.

    *pretends that he is not into these things* ;-)

    cheers
    mike
  • COTS stands for commercial off the shelf in military jargon. The trend across most military forces including the U.S. is to save money by buying commercial equipment and installing it directly in military vehicles, particularly for computers and radios.

    Go into most military communications vans and what you see is Cisco routers just like you have back at the office.

    This saves money but makes the equipment vulnerable to exactly the threat described, EMP. The military no longer "drives the train" on technology and they recognize it. It remains to be seen whether or not this becomes false economy. Sure the router works great in an air conditioned building but put it in a tent in Kuwait at 120F in a sandstorm for a few days and see how it holds up ;-)
  • And when it isn't peacetime (according to which authority) who rings the bell?
  • Dude, you forgot three of the greatest British Scientists...

    Sir Isaac Newton - the laws of physics

    James Clerk Maxwell - the laws of electrodynamics

    Stephen Hawking

  • No, the hospital ban on cell phones is to keep people from coming into hospitals with cell phones and acting more important than the doctors.
  • First, without a chinese BM capable of penetrating US airspace (yet), there'd be a problem with step 1. Next, it would be a rash assumption to simply remove half the forces.

    Yes, there would be serious crippling of communications, and high-tech reliant weapons, systems, early warning, perhaps air defenses. But that by no means eliminates any forces. A grunt with an M16 is still a grunt with an M16. Most grunts don't even carry a radio. GPS, sure, but communication at the platoon level would still go on as normal.

    I'm guessing stage 2 of this war would be something like, the US responds with a massive wave of high-altitude bombers, nuclear and non. Stage 3, Oog, the former communist uses flint and stone to start a fire in his cave to cook the wild deer he just killed with a flint spear. . .
  • The spark gap transmitter is a holdover from the last century, and does not represent the latest in EMP creation. Use something like this, and all you will do is bring the wrath of the broadcasting community down upon your head, along with attendant Federeal Communications Commissions lawyers, etc.

    Plus, you don't get enough range to sneeze at.

    If you want to do it correctly, look up magnet pulse creation by explosive realignment. Anybody with half a smidgeon of physics should be able to convert this into a reasonable EMP device. Obtaining the materials to build one, however, is left as an exercise for the reader. Good luck and when they come knocking on your door, I don't know you...

  • All the vintage aircooled VWs would still be running just fine too. Some of the hopped-up ones would eat the TR-6 for breakfast.
  • I assume a scottsman invented the inflatable sheep too?

    (sorry, it had to be said).
  • yes, but think of all the money the defense contractors will make in the meantime - and the economic boom that will ensue!
    (well, that, and cheap oil that George W.'s buddies will get to drill out of the prisine Alaskan wilderness).
  • So you really could make the blame thrower like in Mystery Men?
  • That sounds like the device used in Runaway.

    So all those restored low-riders and such wouldn't be effected, yet souped-up Hondas would? Hmmmm.
  • Has to do with direction of explosion force, heat and duration of explosion. I'm not an expert, by any means, but if you think about it, anti-tank artillery or ammunition are basically small explosive packages that burn with very high intensity heat (several thousand degrees) to literally penetrate through armor and then ignite/blow up whatever's inside.
    Those same rounds would be fairly ineffective against personnel (oh, they'd kill people obviously, just not as many as you could otherwise). What you want with squishy targets is an explosion that maximizes concussive force and shrapnel distribution over a larger area. You just want to get in the right general area and take out everything adjacent. Napalm, cluster bombs - things like this can kill large number of infantry, but your average tank just wouldn't notice them at all.

  • Electromagnetic Bombs (Score:3)

    by DaneelGiskard ( 222145 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @05:50AM (#538534) Homepage
    Here [abovetopsecret.com] is a very interesting article on

    ELECTROMAGNETIC BOMB - A WEAPON OF ELECTRONIC MASS DESTRUCTION [abovetopsecret.com]

    It's a very interesting read. Explains everything, with many pictures (;-))

    cheers
    mike
  • My vacuum tube equipment kept working just fine! Core memory too, is unaffected by EMPs and radiation.

    So is my 58 Chevy pickup immune to the EMP. It's got this wierd carbeurrated engine and mechanical points system.

    IMO, transistors and silicon chips were GIVEN to us by an Evil Alien Race. You see, they wanted to conquer Earth. And while possessing superrior space travel ability, they possessed inferrior weapons.

    Our ferrite bead core memories and grid-plate electron vacuum tube technology and mechanical points/carbeurrated car engine designs were totally impervious to their EMP discharge device and all our warplanes and defense systems were based on this robust technology (Planes that dropped atomic bombs were unaffected by the EMP from its detonation and kept on flying).

    So the Evil Aliens deliberately crashed a "UFO" loaded with technology int New Mexico in 1947, hoping that we would capitalize on it and grow massively dependent on the technology within and abandon all of our old indigenous Earth technology. Once we were totally relying on transistors and silicon, like we are now, the Evil Aliens could EMP the entire planet from orbit, and then easily move in and conquer a chaotic and decimated society.

    Well, I'm on to you Kotos!

  • . . . unless you're in a Keanu Reeves movie
  • Perhaps Sony would like to get ahold of this technology?

  • Pacemakers? (Score:4)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @03:14AM (#538545)
    ... "that can put out such a powerful burst of radio-frequency energy it will destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems for miles around without killing anyone."

    As mankind becomes more and more dependent on electronics and begins to integrate with it, statements like the above will become ever more meaningless. In fact, they're meaningless right now, even without thinking about the plight of people with pacemakers: one of those pulses would probably kill many people simply because they happen to be in planes or lifts/elevators at the time.

    Sigh. But then, I guess loss of life isn't a severe worry to weapons manufacturers.
  • Reminds me of "Atomic Train". A nuke goes off, and Rob Lowe is stuck driving a Triumph TR-6 around since all the other cars were dead in the water. Ironic how a car with Lucas electrics survied an EMP.
  • ... "that can put out such a powerful burst of radio-frequency energy it will destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems for miles around without killing anyone."

    As mankind becomes more and more dependent on electronics and begins to integrate with it, statements like the above will become ever more meaningless. In fact, they're meaningless right now, even without thinking about the plight of people with pacemakers: one of those pulses would probably kill many people simply because they happen to be in planes or lifts/elevators at the time.

    Sigh. But then, I guess loss of life isn't a severe worry to weapons manufacturers.

  • Unless it drops right on top of you, most EMP effect is going to be strictly transitory. There is a great deal of difference between EMP power that can destroy circuitry and that which interrupts its proper workings. The first requires power densities on the order of tens of thousands of watts per meter cubed (sorry, don't know the industry sanctioned term). This is going to required massive power input to cover a decent sized area. Can you say nuke?

    On the other hand, interruption takes far less power, and can be useful to deny the enemy immediate use of comms and fire control. It is not going to take out hardened facilities, however.

    EMP hardening of equipment is not nearly as difficult as it might seem, especially if you don't have other engineering constraints to worry about (portability, weight, time to field repair, etc.) Just remember that electrical ground is king, mu metal foil is your friend, and fiber optic links are the preferred way of getting in and out of the cage. Testing is, of course, the difficult part 8)

    And all you folks out there who are burying lead-foil-wrapped PC parts in the woods, stop it. If there is enough radiation or EMP around to make an integrated circuit stop working, then you had better start worrying about the operator as well.

  • Remember ?
    They happened to imagine such devices in the Matrix.
    Anyway I am not sure this would be that painless as electromagnetism as generated by a cellular phone is supposed to be harmful so, why wouldn't these weapons harm people too ?
    Who says the truth here : the ones who say cellular phones are harmless or the ones who claim it is dangerous ?
    PS: Happy New Year, pals !
    --
  • While the average computer is not hardened against EMP, the average car ir tv isn't either. With the advent of fuel injection on everything, the average car/truck/etc. is totally dependent on a transistor computer module of some sort. An EMP would take those out, rendering transportation available only through vintage aspirated means. Basically, every veicle made since the 1980s would be more or less dead in the water. In addition practically all civilion communications (radio, television, telephone, etc.) would be dead too. Quite an effective means of disabling the populice in an area. They can't move and the can't talk.
  • Well, the effect supposedly caused is cancer. However, to cause cancer you've gotta disrupt the DNA of some cells (as best we know), and that requires a radiation of the type called ionizing. That basically means that a single photon has enough energy to strip electrons off of stuff. And the bare minimum needed to disrupt human cells is ultraviolet, or possibly a lot of visible light.

    Cell phone radiation is down in the 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz range... far below the many many terahertz of even visible light. So, each photon coming out of your cell phone just doesn't have enough energy to strip electrons off of your molucules. About the only thing it might do is resonate some of your water molecules, heating them up exactly like a microwave oven, except that the power is on the order of 0.1 Watts, so you don't even feel it.

    So there can't really hurt you, to the best of our (current) knowledge :-)
    -----

  • U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Paper! (Score:3)

    by DaneelGiskard ( 222145 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @06:07AM (#538572) Homepage
    Got a paper by the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers".
    It's 467 pages long and talks about electromagnetic impulses and how you can shield your facilities.

    Get it here [army.mil] (pdf, directly from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Homepage [army.mil]) or here [jya.com] (text format).

    cheers
    mike
  • Gee, now just need a laser turret and I'm ready for my next budget meeting ;)

    --
    Remove the rocks to send email

  • Re:What a load of bull! Y2K all over again? (Score:3)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @03:35AM (#538587)
    > Yes, people can create huge electro-magnetic pulses which will do a good job of annhiliating the watch you are wearing, likely your TV as well.

    Knocking out the enemy's televisions would probably make their society more productive, and cost you the war in the long run.

    --
  • ... "that can put out such a powerful burst of radio-frequency energy it will destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems for miles around without killing anyone."

    I hope no one thinks I'm crazy for saying this, but if electrical and electronic systems are disabled for miles around, who are they to say that it won't kill anyone? People use machines frequently every day, and some are big, fast, or some other adjective that could potentially compromise the health of anyone nearby in case of a sudden disabling. Perhaps, then, they only meant to say that they *can* do it without killing anyone. This doesn't mean that the positions the people are in when they activate the charge won't compromise themselves. I guess they didn't care to include that detail.

  • Naturally the effects on the target will vary depending on the overall technical level of the army (e.g. a T-55 probably has less onboard electronics than an M1A1). Still, even relatively low-tech armies will more than likely depend on radios for C-cubed-I (command, control, coordination, and intelligence), at the platoon level and above, and you can bet said second and third world (mostly the latter) armies are using radios old enough and/or cheap enough that EMP sheilding isn't in them. On an operational level this yields them just as inactive with functioning unit-level equipment as a more modern grouping with nonfunctioning unit-level equipment.

    Collateral damage from the device could be extreme (Manhattan) to practically non-existent (rural Africa). Of course, if you wear in-the-ear hearing aids like I do, it might not be fun to be around in any locale... ;-) (*bzzt* ow ow ow ow...)


    --

  • The army isn't the one we should worry about... (Score:4)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Monday January 01, 2001 @07:08AM (#538598)
    Anyone with a knowledge of electricity can build an EMP gun. I remember a website on the internet showing how one was built out of a telsa coil with an aluminum foil reflector, powered by a 12 volt car battery and (IIRC) a coil. A google search can't find it, so I'm relying on memory, but the entire thing could be built with off the shelf parts, or even salvaged junk. In a test, it crashed a computer at 200 yards (computer rebooted without a problem). Now imagine a slightly more powerful version of this gun, still built with off-the-shelf components. Then stick it in a van, aim it out a tinted window (else the van's body will contain the pulse) and drive past a few government buildings, corperate offices, and banks. Its a wonderful terrorist/militia-freaks weapon, or a nice "prank" by a bunch of stupid kids. Its not far-fetched to think of an organized, coordinated attack on a country that has lots of electronics and has a sizeable terrorist element (Israel is probably at a big risk here).

    Anyways, whenever I hear about EMP weapons, I always think of the terrorist aspects of them.

    Just my $.02

    P.S.: A properly directed EMP gun can also stop annoying bragging about uptimes and stability. :) Just kidding!
  • it would bitchslap saddam's playstation supercomputer.
    ______

  • If you do a little searching with Google and friends, you'll see that US fighter aircraft (and their components) are designed -- and tested -- to withstand significant amounts of EMP radiation. EMP is a well-known problem, and the engineers have been designing-in solutions for it for decades. Over a decade ago, in fact, I worked for a defense contractor on fighter aircraft, and EMP was one of the standard things upon which the aircraft were tested.

    Basically, an aircraft near an EMP acts like an antenna, building up a voltage of about 8V/ft of aircraft size. There are fairly standard ways to design around this kind of build up. It might seem like a nasty problem after the fact, but if you know about it when engineering aircraft (and other military hardware), it's not the uncrackable nut it's made out to be.

    See, for example, this [navy.mil] reference that Google turned up. This is textbook stuff now.

  • There'd be no anti-semitism?

    I always thought "Geeks" were very right-wing in most aspects of life but this confirms my thoughts that you are all just a bunch of lefty trendy PC dogooders.

    No, dumbass, it was sarcasm; if America wasn't good at making war, there'd be no anti-Semitism because the Nazis would have slaughtered all the Jews.

    -

  • Not likely. Now if the weapon was deployed to supress a target group in or near a city it may be a different story. But then again, considering that really the only way to make a large EMP previous to this was a nuclear package, which would you prefer going off in your backyard?

    WRT weapons manufacturers and caring about loss of life: of course not. It wouldn't make business sense (many are working on non-or-low-lethality systems but this is only to satisfy demands by governments that wish to appear enlightened to their governed; I can guarantee you that the same company that would market this would just as cheerfully market HEDP to people like the Taliban).


    --

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