Boeing Has Perfected A Missile That Wipes Out Electronics And Leaves Everything Else Intact

[MacGyver]

Yay! EMP party at Mikes.

Hold on, let me check..yep calendar is free the rest of the day. Shoot...an EMP clears up my whole week.

[mikegideon]

Hold on, let me check..yep calendar is free the rest of the day. Shoot...an EMP clears up my whole week.

It would be just the opposite for me. I would be a busy boy

[MacGyver]

It would be just the opposite for me. I would be a busy boy

Meh...chances are it'll still be there waiting when you get there

[mikegideon]

Meh...chances are it'll still be there waiting when you get there

I'm pretty sure you two couldn't smoke all those stogies if I was gone for a week or two.

[MacGyver]

I'm pretty sure you two couldn't smoke all those stogies if I was gone for a week or two.

Oh, I was talking about all your equipment that's going to be down.

I'm waiting until the apocalypse to take up smoking anyway...too many other expensive vices...so you're probably right about the stogies.

[Dolomite_supafly]

I know where a target rich environment exists that this new technology can be field tested.

Definitely not Afghanistan. Other than cell phones and AK's 95% of the country are living like they did 500 years ago.

Hell, the biggest advance they have made in the last millennia has be to not crap in their own wells.

Dolomite

[mikegideon]

Oh, I was talking about all your equipment that's going to be down.

I'm waiting until the apocalypse to take up smoking anyway...too many other expensive vices...so you're probably right about the stogies.

I'm not near as skeered of EMP as most folks. Since I have towers hooked to all of my facilities, we get pulsed by Zeus on a regular basis. Lots of heavy grounding and shielding. Let the grid fail if it wants to. I can live without it until I run out of fuel.

[TMF]

Definitely not Afghanistan. Other than cell phones and AK's 95% of the country are living like they did 500 years ago.

Hell, the biggest advance they have made in the last millennia has be to not crap in their own wells.

Dolomite

Nope, I was thinking something a little over to the left of it.

[Jonnin]

I am not sure this is all that new. Actually, pretty sure it is not: by default, when a "new" weapon is talked about openly, its no longer "new".

[Caster]

I am not sure this is all that new. Actually, pretty sure it is not: by default, when a "new" weapon is talked about openly, its no longer "new".

Right. If they're willing to divulge on this one, what do they have that they are NOT willing to talk about?

[TMF]

Right. If they're willing to divulge on this one, what do they have that they are NOT willing to talk about?

This is all assuming we are still able to keep secrets.

[Caster]

This is all assuming we are still able to keep secrets.

Politicians never.

But, in my deluded world of tin foilery I firmly believe that top brass put away things much the same as we stock ammo and no perishable foods. WTSHTF we all know our own military will not be turned against us on a grand scale because no self respecting troop will follow that order. BUT, some guy with a pound of brass on his shoulder decides to say to his men, let's go over here, set up and be safe by working together, who's with me? He will have lots of followers. Kings to him if he has the rod of iron with which to rule.

Money gets lost by the dump truck load on government projects. No telling what pet projects get funded that no one knows about.

[mcurrier]

Money gets lost by the dump truck load on government projects. No telling what pet projects get funded that no one knows about.

Yup.

[TGO David]

My Toyota, iTunes and TGO will be the only thing I miss.

I reckon I could get along without 'em.

TGO will be circulated via carrier pigeon after The Collapse.

[RED333]

TGO will be circulated via carrier pigeon after The Collapse.

I will take it, bit slow, but I will take.

[runco]

Why not divuldge? Think of the resources required to R&D and protect against this weapon. Rather for them to spend resources defending, than spending resources to offend! Let China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc. know about this, heck parade the darn thing in Time Square.

BTW this probably has 12th power energy.

[Seabeejason]

They should sail one of these right over Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. That'd be a good way to get the party started

[tnhawk]

....One thing's for sure... you won't find anybody in the loop that will talk about it.

If obama knew anything about it, everyone would.

[TMF]

Money gets lost by the dump truck load on government projects. No telling what pet projects get funded that no one knows about.

Hookers and blow, mostly.

[TMF]

If obama knew anything about it, everyone would.

Good thing he doesn't read those pesky intel reports, huh?

[mikegideon]

If obama knew anything about it, everyone would.

I'm thinking a coherent discussion about underlying technologies is way over his head.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I'm thinking a coherent discussion about underlying technologies is way over his head.

Mebbe my perspective is warped, but the heavy-duty dsp fields might nowadays attract some of the smartest nerds on the planet. Of which I know about the same as a sunday football fan knows about football, but still... The radar, satellite comm, and image processing guys in particular. And then there are the guys who design microprocessors. In the past that level of talent would have been designing spacecraft and nukular weapons.

But the gee-whiz weapons are directed by lawyers, investment speculators and real estate shysters. Oppenheimer and Fermi design fat man and little boy, and then Harry S. Truman gets to decide whether to set it off. Farmer, soldier, clerk and machine politician. OTOH though not formally edumacated, harry probably had more real-world experience than most current politicians.

An emp cruise missile may very well be coil-and-capacitor hell but tis surprising they can stuff enough of em to do the trick, into a flying machine? Unless they have nifty new secret squirrel double-naught-spy capacitor technology? Maybe spun off from previous weapon-laser and rail-gun work? Just sayin, amateur nerds have made some smallish experimental emp and rail-gun gadgets using rather expensive banks of off-the-shelf high end capacitors, which turn out low-powered, bulky and temperamental.

The explanation on McGyver's DarkGovernment.com link appears to describe a hot short-duration electron beam (pulsed electron accelerator) which causes stimulated emission of microwaves when the electron beam hits atmosphere. Which is "in the ballpark" of a pulsed maser maybe. Except using characteristics of the atmosphere as the stimulation-emission media?

Which is similar to one published explanation of space-nuke emp's-- Nanoseconds-brief gamma ray burst makes it down to a certain density level of the atmosphere, where the gamma rays induce a stimulation-emission cascade in that density layer of the atmosphere, generating the emf pulse. The "masing" being a brief energy "ringing" within a certain layer of atmosphere.

Wonder if a chemical maser could be made? AFAIK the strongest experimental weapons lasers were chemical fueled rather than electrical. The most ambitious weapons lasers I'd heard about were proposed orbital x-ray lasers for Reagan's star wars missile defense, however. A small nuke with a core bundle of tungsten wires. The nuke pumps the shaft of tungsten to deliver a heck of an x-ray pulse as it is being vaporized.

Our neuronal system is based on electrochemical pulses. The semipermeable nerve membrane gets pumped up with an excess of sodium ions on one side, and when the gates open for the sodium at one locality of the membrane, it generates a weak electrical pulse which causes the membrane to "open up" farther on down the line, so the electrochemical pulse moves from one end of the nerve to the other. Kinda a chemical triggered release electrical pulse. Not drastically different in principle than discharging a pumped capacitor. Maybe such a thing could be "scaled up".

Anyway, hope they never use an emp missile on us. Modern-day store clerks can't sell anything when the cash registers are down, no longer are capable of adding a string of numbers, much less figure out how much change to hand out if the cash register isn't there to tell them how much to hand back. We would all starve because of the population's woeful ignorance of basic arithmetic! Brought on by the evil corrupting influence of calculator abuse in elementary school math classes?

Edited October 25, 2012 by Lester Weevils

[mikegideon]

In this case, Lester, they said in the article that it was high power microwaves. That's a lot of information. We know how microwaves behave, know all the various antenna designs, and can speculate on how much power will need to be in the bain beam of the antenna. We also know the main goal in a system like that. It has to deliver a big enough EM field to induce destructive voltages in the target equipment.

Like all things like this, the devil is gonna be in the details. I'm just thinking the bulk of the design has nothing to do with a ton of new technology. I'm sure it took a lot of engineering time to make it work. I'm just speculating that the payload section is gonna be real close to a RADAR transmitter on steroids. In my day, they smacked a magnetron with a bigass pulse, and called it a day.

[MacGyver]

This thread got me to thinking about this picture that has recently been colorized. It's from the 1927 Solvay Conference, and has 29 of the brightest minds of the time Over half of them would go on to win Nobel Prizes, Marie Curie twice.

This particular conference focused on the newly formulated quantum theory. Einstein made his famous quote regarding Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that, "God does not play dice", to which Neils Bohr replied, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!"

You can look at this list and every single one made a lasting contribution to science. Heck, a lot of them had an impact on this Boeing mystery missle.