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What are the most common questions
asked about electromagnetic weapons?
Why do they work? The “information age” has
seen the pervasive
use of digital hardware, mostly based on silicon monolithic technology,
across the complete infrastructure of developed nations, whether in
handheld devices, domestic or office equipment, transportation,
production, health, or education. Expose any monolithic semiconductor
device to
voltages, whether transient or radiofrequency, in excess of the
specification limits of several Volts, and bad things usually happen.
Dielectric insulators break down or leak, and reverse biased junctions
suffer avalanche breakdowns. With a mains or battery power supply
attached to the device, often very little energy is actually needed to
initiate a catastrophic electrical failure - the power supply is what
actually delivers the killing blow. Imagine that the electromagnetic
weapon is like a device putting a crack into a dike, and the power
supply is like the body of water which causes the actual damage.
What kinds of electromagnetic weapons exist? Put simply, a
great
many. A trivial taxonomy divides such weapons by steady state or
transient effect, the former being beam weapons and the latter being
one-shot E-bombs, and then by spectral coverage, whether wideband or
narrowband, and low or high frequency, and emitted power. A wideband
low frequency low power one shot weapon might be a submunition for a
cluster bomb using a rare earth magnet with a high explosive jacket,
while a wideband high frequency high power repetively pulsed weapon
might be a Marx bank driven Landecker Ring mounted in the
focal area of
a parabolic dish antenna. The term “E-bomb”, which I coined in 1996,
has
been used to describe high altitude nuclear Electro Magnetic Pulse
(EMP) bombs, as well as much smaller non-nuclear devices based on Flux
Compression Generators, the latter producing direct low frequency
wideband effects, or used as a one-shot pulsed power supply for High
Power Microwave (HPM) tube such as a Virtual Cathode Oscillator
(Vircator).
What is a Flux Compression Generator? Invented
by the late Max
Fowler at Los Alamos National Laboratories during the 1940s, the FCG is
an explosively driven
electromagnetic amplifier. Primed with an initial electrical starting current,
a high velocity explosive is used to mechanically compress the magnetic
field, which in turn transfers energy from the explosive into the
magnetic field. While the FCG disintegrates during operation, in
operation it produces an enormously powerful pulse of electrical
current. Cascading two or three FCGs can yield hundredfold amplication
of the initial pulse, which is usually produced by a high voltage
capacitive device
called a Marx Bank. The biggest FCGs have produced peak power
outputs
of many GigaWatts.
Why use a Vircator?
Microwave devices like the Vircator
allow
the power produced by the FCG to be quite precisely focussed against a
target area up to hundreds of metres or more away from the FCG, which
left to itself, produces most damage only within tens of
metres. The antenna attached to the Vircator is not unlike the
reflector in a torch or car headlight. Ordinary inverse square law
physics then apply, with field strength diminishing with distance.
Choose the right E-bomb power, antenna gain, and distance, and you can
achieve a reasonably precise peak electrical field strength over an
intended target area.
How does the microwave power couple into targets?
Place a
digital device into a microwave oven, turn on the oven, and then see if
the device still works. Likely
it won't. Microwave radiation will have penetrated into the device
through cracks, crevices, cooling grills and exposed wiring. Much the
same happens with a microwave E-bomb. Mains power wiring and copper
network cabling will behave like an antenna, and while the E-bomb is
radiating, electrical standing waves will appear on the cables,
producing large voltages at the ends of the cables, where devices are
attached. Gaps, loose panels, cooling grilles and other openings, as
well as antennas, may
also allow the radiation into the equipment. Electrically lethal field
strengths for consumer equipment vary between 10 kiloVolts/metre up to
30 kiloVolts/metre.
What is a cascade failure?
In a large interconnected
system,
like a power grid or computer network, a cascade failure arises when
the failure of one device triggers an overload and failure in another,
and the damage effects then propagate bringing down much, most or all
of the network. E-bombs have the potential to produce massive cascade
failures in a pervasive digital insfrastructure, as they can cause
simultaneous massed failures in a large percentage of electronic
equipment, if not
all electronic equipment, within the lethal
footprint of the weapon. Switchmode
power supplies blowing out can produce electrical spikes in a power
grid, and having hundreds or thousands fail simultaneously across
several square miles of grid can produce damage effects in areas
peripheral to the lethal footprint itself.
How easy are E-bombs to build? Any nation with the technology
to
design and build a nuclear bomb will be capable of designing a
non-nuclear E-bomb, and mass producing it. The main challenge for
entrants into this game is having a sufficient pool of competent
physicists to design devices like FCGs and Vircators. The technology to
construct all of the components in such a bomb would be available in a
1950s university physics lab. With an accurate set of drawings, an FCG
could be constructed in a suburban garage for several hundred dollars
of cost in uncontrolled materials, other than the requirement for
several kilograms of C4, Semtex or other high velocity castable
explosive.
How likely is a terrorist E-bomb attack? How likely is a
tsunami,
volcanic eruption, big solar flare or meteor impact? Given the
pervasive use of highly interconnected digital infrastructure in
developed nations and its resulting vulnerability to such attack, and
the relative simplicity of such weapons technology, the use of such
weapons is ultimately, inevitable. Determining how soon such
weapons will be deployed by terrorists is a trickier proposition, since
they tend to operate in secrecy. Once we see E-bombs deployed by
military forces as standard tactical or strategic weapons, which will
happen through this decade, the odds of a terrorist organisation
acquiring them with or without the consent of the deploying nation go
up enormously. With proven and robust weapon designs in circulation,
terrorists then have the option of reverse engineering them or using
them directly.
How can we protect ourselves from E-bombs? The
simple answer is electro-magnetic
hardening of the infrastructure,
which involves making digital equipment and power supplies "hardened"
to resist high electrical fields, using optical fibres rather than
metallic cables for network connections, and putting protection devices
into antenna feeds and mains power interfaces. There is little point in
this being done by individual home users since having a working
computer without a working network or power grid is not very helpful.
Hardening requires legislation to make it mandatory for all critical
national infrastructure, spanning both government services and
commercial service providers, across all industry sectors. Is this
achievable? As the Y2K experience over a decade ago shows, the answer
is yes. Will it be expensive? That depends on how the problem is
tackled. If equipment is built hardened from the outset, the cost
penalty may be as little as 10-20% of the build cost. Replacing copper
networks with fibre will be costly, but it is also an impending
necessity to get genuinely high data rates across national network
infrastructures, and reduce urban/suburban background noise levels.
If nobody uses an E-bomb against us, is hardening a
waste of time and
money?
This is the perennial question arising with all military technologies.
If you do not deploy it, an enemy will, and will then use it to an
advantage. If you do deploy protective measures, the enemy may be
discouraged or deterred. In the case of electromagnetic hardening,
there are other good reasons for putting it in. Annually insurance
companies pay out considerable funds to compensate subscribers for
electrical damage produced by lightning strikes and main power grid
transient spikes. More importantly, we have observed in recent years
several incidents in which solar weather variations produced
significant mains grid outages over large areas, often with
considerable electrical collateral damage. An unusually powerful event
of this kind hitting the CONUS or EU could produce a major mess, on the
scale of a nuclear EMP attack. Well designed hardening would thus not
only protect against hostile governments, state sponsored terrorists,
and free-lance terrorists, it would also protect against naturally
arising electrical damage effects.
What can I do about overcoming this risk? The
simple
answer is
to write to your local legislator, and do your best to educate them to
the very real risks which unhardened infrastructure presents in an
genuinely electromagnetically hostile environment. The electromagnetic
weapons community has done this over and over again for nearly two
decades, but has frequently not been listened to. Only the United
States has draft legislation, yet to become law, dealing with aspects
of this matter. Until the legislatures across
developed nations understand this is a real risk, and not science
fiction, the necessary legislation will not be produced, and if
produced, will not become law. For better or worse, legislators
in
democracies react primarily to the weight of numbers. Small numbers of
researchers with PhDs will mostly be seen as less important than large
numbers of concerned citizens, especially if the subject matter is
esoteric and difficult to understand.
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Further
Reading: |
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Kopp,
Carlo, The
E-Bomb Threat and WMD Terrorism, Interview with Dr. Karen Carth
for ISRIA, International Security Research & Intelligence Agency,
28th June, 2006.
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Kopp,
Carlo, A Doctrine for the Use of
ElectroMagnetic Pulse Bombs, Air
Power Studies Centre Paper No.15,
Royal Australian Air Force, July 1993. (PDF 61691 bytes)
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Kopp, Carlo,
The E-Bomb - A
Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction, InfoWarCon 5 Conference Paper, Proceedings of InfoWarCon 5, NCSA,
September 1996 (PPT).
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Kopp,
Carlo, An Introduction to the
Technical and Operational Aspects of the Electromagnetic Bomb, Air Power Studies Centre Paper No.50,
Royal Australian Air Force, November 1996. (PDF 394009 bytes)
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Ertekin,
Necati, E-Bomb:
The Key Element of the Contemporary Military-Technical Revolution,
MEng Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, September, 2008 (PDF).
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Prischepenko,
Alexander B., Video
(Russian language): Electromagnetic Weapons: Myths and Reality,
Popular Mechanics Seminar, November, 2010.
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Kopp,
Carlo, Hardening Your Computing
Assets, Technical Report, posted on infowar.com, March 1997
[previously published in Open Systems Review, February, 1997]. (HTML)
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Kopp, Carlo,
Considerations
on the Use of
Airborne X-band Radar as a Microwave Directed-Energy Weapon,
Journal of
Battlefield Technology, vol 10, issue 3, Argos Press Pty Ltd,
Australia, pp. 19-25.
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Neuber,
Andreas, Explosively
driven pulsed power: helical magnetic flux compression generators,
Google eBook, Springer Science & Business, 15/09/2005 - Science -
280 pages.
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Benford,
James,
Swegle, John Allan, Schamiloglu, Edl, High
power microwaves, CRC Press, 05/02/2007 - Technology &
Engineering - 531 pages.
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Landecker,
K.; Skattebol, L.V.; Gowdie, D.R.R., Single-spark
ring transmitter, Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume: 59
Issue: 7, July, 1971, pp 1082 - 1090.
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Kopp,
Carlo, E-Bomb Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ), Technical Note, posted on GlobalSecurity.org,
2003.
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Commission to Assess
the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack
/ Rep.
Roscoe Bartlett on Electro Magnetic Pulse
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