EMP Missile Is No Longer Science-Fiction

[The Lugz]

I have to admit...this is actually pretty fucking scary.

not really, couple kilowatt radio rx could be completely stopped by a Faraday cage around the walls, and or some metal casings around the pc's

if you're personally concerned go and grab some lead based paint and coat your house in it
then lay steel or copper mesh under your wallpaper and ground it to your house grounding point guarantee that will block 90% of all incoming radio energy and stop you getting a signal with your phone
the price of paranoia is high i suppose

if i were some terrorist organisation, i'd be buying lots of car batteries and ripping the lead plates out of my old ones and bolting them to pc cases, sam sites, whatever
lead roof cladding and bismuth ( magnetic, resonance damping material )
mixed together is probably the best defense for buildings
both are easy to get if you look in the right places

ridiculously easy to block, it's a non-issue for any serious organisation
what it will do however is make all airplane designs prior to this point totally obsolete and or require upgrades if it could kill a fighter jet cpu even for a couple seconds it falls out of the sky which is useful, you could deploy it from a fighter drone to make it reuseable but still not world changing as the British fleet has boats that will do the same thing with standard boring old missiles

 

[Petromir]

So it took out the camera recording it too eh? How exactly did we just watch video of the computers going black then? Also why did the one on the bottom right come back on for a second?

A few options, lead shielding is probably involved, the camera may well have been film using a film stock not sensitive to the EMPs wavelength rather than an easy to burn out digital camera.

With resources you can do a lot to make a device EMP resistant especially if you know what's coming at you. You tend not to end up with a particularly mobile but its possible, simple devices tend to be easier. The more complex or delicate the electronics involved the bulkier the protection has to be.

Anyway a film camera with a shielded motor and analogue control for said motor seems the logical choice here.

There are clearly cameras available designed to do this in the US military from the nuclear test days, unless they scrapped them all and their plans.

 

[alandavidson]

All in all, though, this is cool. Should've been kept a secret, though, until its first use. Surprise is a powerful weapon, too.

What??? Actually keep military secrets and be able to deploy new weapons with plausible deniability? This is 'Merica, if we don't flash our shit to the world every five seconds, they might forget we have it!

Captcha: Toodle-Oo

Have you been drinking again, Captcha?

 

[sunsethorizons]

Woah woah woah. I may be over-reacting here but: how strong are these "high power microwaves"? Because if this is an EMP weapon that also makes a human look like a chicago town pizza (or some other, less exagerrated health risk) then we can't exactly refer to it as non-lethal, can we?

Well the thing is that what we think of as "microwaves" like the kind that can boil water and kill us from the inside is actually ONE very specific frequency of microwave radiation that has certain properties that excite water molecules. Microwave radiation itself is actually a huge range of electromagnetic radiation, and most of is passes right through us (and is passing right through you right now) without doing any damage whatsoever. So yeah. We're probably safe. Unless we suddenly start growing a third arm. Which could happen. I guess.

 

[theultimateend]

Question is, are Faraday cages going to become the next hot item in near-future warfare?

All in all, though, this is cool. Should've been kept a secret, though, until its first use. Surprise is a powerful weapon, too.

My exact thoughts, I feel like this would be easy to protect against. Frankly I kinda wish my house already was enclosed in a faraday cage (build it into the walls lilke a boss). Just imagine a solar flare wipes out all the electronics in your neighborhood, sure you can't turn shit on because power is gone but at least once it IS fixed you are in like flint.

 

[Teddy Roosevelt]

Hate to burst the bubble but the Taliban don't use electronics (outside of cars, and if you took out a few blocks worth of cars in the Middle East I imagine you'd get a lot of pissed off people who just had their lives ruined for lack of transportation), nor do other countries really use drones at all, but hey YOU HAVE AN EMP YOU CAN TOTALLY THREATEN PEOPLE WITH!

Actually, Russia and China both have technology for unmanned aircraft. They are not as widely used because they have not been as developed in those countries as in the US. On top of that, Iran has old drones from the Chinese and Russians, as well as a handful of their own.

In addition, most of NATO has access to drone technology, Israel has been using drones for at least short range recon since the 1980's, and Iraq had some unmanned drones during the invasion in the Second Gulf War, though they were not combat aircraft and were instead old drones used as training targets for pilots, and decoys to get US and other coalition aircraft to open fire and reveal themselves for Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries or the odd fighter pilot.

Most importantly, though, why focus on drones? Radios have been in military use since World War One. No one is going to deny that radio communications make or break combat engagements. EMP can be used to knock out communications and command-and-control centers, making the concept useful in a conventional war.

Oh, what? There will never be another conventional war? Will we never fight China? I suppose people were also correct around the turn of last century when the popular supposition was that the major powers of Europe were so economically and politically intertwined that a hot war was impossible.

Make no mistake, new conventional weapons are always useful.

 

[Teddy Roosevelt]

Technically, development of non-nuclear EMP munitions has been going on for a long time. This technology is still most certainly not ready to be fielded, despite ongoing research by both the United States and Russia.

Aside form that, I hardly see that this would actually be super cost-effective. If the EMP warhead uses high explosives to generate a shockwave (high-explosive propelled flux compression generator), or any other non-nuclear method, then the blast radius of the pulse will probably be less than superb. At that point, would it not just be easier to use a proper explosive warhead to destroy anything in the kill zone?

Perhaps, if the goal of the mission is to destroy anything in the kill zone. But that's exactly the point of this EMP missile, it's to knock out electronics WITHOUT causing collateral damage. If they ever needed to knock out the communications of an enemy within a densely-populated area, you can't just go and bomb everything.

After posting that, I did have that very thought. For the purposes of capturing equipment, one might want to use EMP. However, couldn't you also capture tanks knocked out by things other than EMP? Either that or take abandoned tanks or other such equipment.

Aside from the fact that main battle tanks, and many other armored fighting vehicles, are protected against radiation so EMP shouldn't be that effective, you need to think about cost effectiveness. Would EMP not be redundant in most applications? An EMP warhead is certainly not cheap, so it should be best justified by a role that can't be played by other weapons.

 

[SextusMaximus]

"Today we turned science fiction into science fact," Coleman continued.

For a moment there I thought they had made Gary Coleman their official PR speaker, hitting two birds with one stone and declaring their EMP can not only destroy electrics but also reanimate the dead.
Zombie Coleman away!

WAIT GARY COLEMAN IS DEAD?

 

[ChaplainOrion]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c5tG3fC2XSU
(I don't know how to have the video show up here)
Apparently Iran and Venezuela already have EMPs. My god what will we do.

-_-

 

[Strazdas]

Question is, are Faraday cages going to become the next hot item in near-future warfare?

All in all, though, this is cool. Should've been kept a secret, though, until its first use. Surprise is a powerful weapon, too.

would they work against a EMP bomb though. disturbance - sure. but a blast of such strengt may fry faraday cage.


Also, this was possible long time ago. we had EMP bomb for a while now. its just that only now they put it on a missile. its like saying we had atom bombs but till we put it on ICBMs atomic missiles werent possible.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

Wait, EMPs were science fiction? I had just accepted them as real after awhile. I just figured they were expensive and that we didn't really have a use for them yet.

 

[DTWolfwood]

So it took out the camera recording it too eh? How exactly did we just watch video of the computers going black then? Also why did the one on the bottom right come back on for a second?

A few options, lead shielding is probably involved, the camera may well have been film using a film stock not sensitive to the EMPs wavelength rather than an easy to burn out digital camera.

With resources you can do a lot to make a device EMP resistant especially if you know what's coming at you. You tend not to end up with a particularly mobile but its possible, simple devices tend to be easier. The more complex or delicate the electronics involved the bulkier the protection has to be.

Anyway a film camera with a shielded motor and analogue control for said motor seems the logical choice here.

There are clearly cameras available designed to do this in the US military from the nuclear test days, unless they scrapped them all and their plans.

Statement made does not collaborate with the footage shown. That's pretty damning when you are trying to state a fact.

Also faraday cage around a GoPro is the solution, tho judging from the resolution probably a handheld camcorder from the 90s. lol

 

[Zortack]

Now all we need is a weapon that makes guns useless.

I'll be in the back making a mace and polishing my armour.

 

[likalaruku]

& I'll be awaiting the inevitable slew of exploitation horror movies on how this can be negative exploited.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

...Lovely. Hopefully the government has plans just in case of an attack... otherwise, I'm moving to Australia.

 

[Therumancer]

Let me be honest for those who mentioned other countries like Iran and Venezuala having this, their claims are to be taken with a grain of salt. Second and third world countries love boasting about things they don't actually have, North Korea's claims that it has missles capable of hitting the mainland US is about as plausible as Venezualan EMP. The big thing to consider if 90% of these guys have what they say, they would have already used it on their neighbors if nothing else.

Big countries like China, The UK, USA, etc... have difficulty keeping this kind of stuff under wraps because of the way the media works. If anyone developed this we'd have already known about it. Then again I kind of assumed EMP bombs and missles had already been outed.

My big issue here is that Obama is a frakking idiot though, even if he's referred to as "The Commander In Chief". To be honest now that this is out there everyone is going to have it before too long. If we were "late to the party" and the last ones to get it that's even worse, but the same basic story. Relying on unmanned drones and such and keeping humans off the battlefield is a great liberal position, but when your working with EMP that is just going to get increasingly powerful, this means such toys are going to be knocked offline. This means one should be increasingly manning the battlefield, not the opposite.

I ran accross something on TV talking about how our drones had unsecured feeds and Iraqi militants were found tapping into their video using over the counter software, and watching US transmissions and such. We wouldn't be able to encrypt/secure the entire fleet against the current stuff until like 2015 at the best. If we can't even make the video secure, I have little faith in being able to constantly update the EMP shielding if we want to use these as our primary weapon of war, assuming we could even shield them against something like this to begin with.

As I've said before, the primary weapon of war might be artillery and airstrikes, whether it's delivered by drones or not is irrelevent, that's how you do your damage, BUT you haven't actually accomplished anthing until a pair of boots goes in ther to verify it, and inevitably call in more precise strikes (forward observer) and/or directly mop up anything that is inevitably left.

I'm not blaming Obama for the transition to Drones since that goes beyond any one president, and they are a good tool, but if he said anything like that article implies in relation to EMP, the guy is a mental furball. "Durrr, EMP weapons, obviously we need more drones and un-manned military devices".

 

[DanDeFool]

now all the US has to do is create an imaginary money making machine...


...oh wait...

Well the world can help us out by removing our IMF status that would stop that printing press overnight and our government would be bankrupt.

Maybe we can get back to a currency actually based on something real like the gold standard or platinum.

I fail to see how that's any different. Even if your paper money can be exchanged for precious metals, as long as you have moneylending and credit you'll still have all the same problems you have now.

Maybe you can enlighten me, but I don't see how bad fiscal policy can be fixed just by associating your currency with shiny rocks, no matter how valuable they are.

OP: I'm not too worried. Those missiles probably cost at last $0.5 M a shot. I doubt anyone it's going to spend that much just to disable my laptop.

Besides, now that such a weapon exists, the military will have an incentive to look for better ways to make EMP hardened electronics, which may eventually make their way into vital infrastructure.

Now, if you want something to worry about, consider that a solar flare could EMP an entire continent if it were directed towards earth.

 

[Orc]

Let me be honest for those who mentioned other countries like Iran and Venezuala having this, their claims are to be taken with a grain of salt. Second and third world countries love boasting about things they don't actually have, North Korea's claims that it has missles capable of hitting the mainland US is about as plausible as Venezualan EMP. The big thing to consider if 90% of these guys have what they say, they would have already used it on their neighbors if nothing else.

Conventional EMP generators are rather simple devices and are easily within the grasp of any nation-state willing to bother making one. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator

Note that military hardware is usually well shielded from EM interference. This weapon, much like the graphite bombs, is likely meant to be used against industrial facilities and civilian infrastructure.