If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Options
America to use WMD on Iraq
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Coming Soon to Baghdad – The Preview of the E-Bomb
newsmax ^ | 2/17/03
It will begin with a sharp crack, like the sound of a bolt of lightning hitting its target. In an instant, Baghdad and its environs will go dark. Even though turned off, fluorescent lights and television sets will glow and the smell of ozone mixed with the odor of smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Palm Pilots will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Computers, and every bit of data on them, will be history.
Suddenly there will be a deadly quiet as internal-combustion engines shut down never to be restarted. No Iraqis will suffer any harm – they will simply be thrust back in time to an era where electricity and the electronics it made possible were non-existent.
Saddam Hussein will sit in his silent darkened bunker – suddenly stifling as all air intake systems shut down. With communication with his armed forces arrayed around the capital city no longer operating, he and his top generals will be rendered as mute as the troops in the field themselves. Only by carrier pigeon could be hope to contact his forces.
His missiles inoperative, his tanks without engines, his jet fighters downed, his radar installations useless, Saddam no longer has the instruments of modern warfare at his beck and call. He has been e-bombed back to the stone ages.
That’s the scenario for the opening of the invasion of Iraq if intelligence reports are correct. The age of the e-bomb has arrived and modern warfare will never be the same.
Early Beginnings
It all began in 1925 with the atomic research of physicist Arthur H. Compton who demonstrated that firing a stream of highly energetic photons into atoms that have a low atomic number causes them to eject a stream of electrons. Physics students know this phenomenon as the Compton Effect. It became a key tool in unlocking the secrets of the atom, to the development of the e-bomb.
Leap forward to the high altitude detonation of a hydrogen bomb over Siberia by the Soviets back in the 1960s which had an unexpected effect. It knocked out communications systems for hundreds of miles below the blast.
While testing hydrogen bombs in outer space, hundreds of miles above the planet, American scientists also discovered that each atomic blast created a pulse of electromagnetic energy similar to conventional radio-made microwaves, but with energy so great that they erased magnetic memories and melted the microscopic junctions in transistors on the Earth below. These were veritable tidal waves of energy, sufficient to cripple sensitive microelectronics but too weak to be seen, heard, or felt by human beings.
During one U.S. test, in July 1962, a hydrogen bomb was detonated approximately 650 miles in space, roughly where today's space shuttles orbit. Simultaneously, an incredible 2100 miles to the northeast, street lights went dark and burglar alarms began ringing on the Hawaiian islands. The reason was an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) produced by the blast.
According to a report by intelligence expert Major Scott W. Merkle, then a student assigned to the Air Command and General Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, a declassified U.S. military report showed that the explosion of a bomb about one megaton in size (the exact size remains classified) eight hundred miles over Omaha, Nebraska, would shower the continental United States, southern Canada, and northern Mexico with an EMP capable of disabling virtually every computerized circuit in its potential damaging consequences of such an EMP attack in 1982, when he wrote in an obscure engineering journal
Dependence on Computers
“Today there is almost universal dependence on electronic computers. They are used by first-graders as well as research engineers. Industry, communications, financial records, are all at stake here. In the event of heavy EMP radiation, I suspect it would be easier to enumerate the apparatus that would continue to function than the apparatus that would stop.”
“Due to this reaction, in 1963 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty to counter the considerable threat posed by EMPs,” wrote Major Merkle. “Since then, that threat has grown at a fantastic rate, fueled by the rapid progress made in compacting ever more EMP-sensitive transistors onto the computer chips upon which modern electronics rely. ”
Testifying before the House Committee on National Security, Military Research and Development Subcommittee, on July 16th, 1997 Dr Lowell Wood of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory described the effects of EMP.
“Electromagnetic pulses, EMP, generated by high-altitude nuclear explosions have riveted the attention of the military nuclear tactical community for three-and-a-half decades since the first comparatively modest one very unexpectedly turned off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific. This EMP also shut down radio stations, turned off cars, burned out telephone systems, and wreaked other mischief throughout the Hawaiian Islands nearly 1,000 miles distant from ground zero.
“The potential for even a single high-altitude explosion of a more deliberate character to impose continental-scale devastation of much of the equipment of modern civilization and of modern warfare soon became clear. EMP became a technological substrate for the black humor: Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.
EMP Wreckage
“It was EMP-imposed wreckage, at least as much as that due to blast, fire, and fallout, which sobered detail studies of the post-nuclear-attack recovery process. When essentially nothing electrical or electronic could be relied upon to work, even in rural areas far from the blast, it appeared surpassingly difficult to bootstrap American national recovery, and post-attack America in these studies remained stuck in the very early 20th century until electrical equipment and electronic components begin to trickle into a Jeffersonian America from abroad.”
EMP he said, “can induce large voltages and currents in power lines, communication cables, radio towers, and other long conductors serving a facility. Some other notable collectors of EMP include railroad tracks, large antennas, pipes, cables, wires in buildings, and metal fencing. Although materials underground are partially shielded by the ground, they are still collectors, and these collectors deliver the EMP energy to some larger facility. This produces surges that can destroy the connected device, such as, power generators or long distance telephone systems. An EMP could destroy many services needed to survive a war.
“Many systems needed are controlled by a semiconductor in some way. Failure of semi-conductive chips could destroy industrial processes, railway networks, power and phone systems, and access to water supplies. Semiconductor devices fail when they encounter an EMP because of the local heating that occurs.
When a semi-conductive device absorbs the EMP energy, it displaces the resulting heat that is produced relatively slowly when compared to the time scale of the EMP. Because the heat is not dissipated quickly, the semiconductor can quickly heat up to temperatures near the melting point of the material. Soon the device will short and fail. This type of failure is call thermal second-breakdown failure.(16)
Vulnerability
“It is also important to realize how vulnerable the military is to EMP. "Military systems often use the most sophisticated and therefore most vulnerable, electronics available, and many of the systems that must operate during a nuclear war cannot tolerate the temporary disturbances that EMP may induce."(17) Furthermore, many military duties require information to be communicated over long distances. This type of communication requires external antennas, which are extremely vulnerable to EMP.”
Dr. Wood was dealing with a so-called HEMP (High Altitude EMP) activated by a hydrogen bomb which was by then outlawed and considered unthinkable.
But even then the cat was out of the bag and the race began to develop a non-nuclear method weapon capable of delivering an EMP punch. If current reports are accurate the U.S. now has such a weapon – the so-called e-bomb, and is getting ready to demonstrate its power to Saddam Hussein.
According to Associated Press Technology writer Jim Krane, the U.S. may fire a cruise missile tipped with a high-powered electromagnetic-pulse emitter - a so-called e-bomb - "which fries the electronics without killing the people," said Andrew Koch of Jane's Information Group.
Wrote Krane, “The weapon's massive power surge is supposed to travel through antennas or power cords to wreck any unshielded electronic appliance - civilian or military - within a few hundred yards, according to studies cited by GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization.
Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Epstein quoted Roger McCarthy, chairman of Exponent Failure Analysis Associates in Menlo Park, a firm deeply involved in developing futuristic weaponry for the Pentagon as declaring: "Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along, and sends out a few thousand volts. Wham! Your cell phone or your computer dies,"
Invisible Wallop
Epstein explains that the weapons “pack an incredible, invisible wallop, hundreds of times the electrical current in a lightning bolt. That ‘directed energy,’ in principle not unlike the power used more benignly in laser pointers or supermarket scanners, opens a whole new area of warfare, one that for now gives the United States a leg up on potential opponents.
newsmax ^ | 2/17/03
It will begin with a sharp crack, like the sound of a bolt of lightning hitting its target. In an instant, Baghdad and its environs will go dark. Even though turned off, fluorescent lights and television sets will glow and the smell of ozone mixed with the odor of smoldering plastic will seep from outlet covers as electric wires arc and telephone lines melt. Palm Pilots will feel warm to the touch, their batteries overloaded. Computers, and every bit of data on them, will be history.
Suddenly there will be a deadly quiet as internal-combustion engines shut down never to be restarted. No Iraqis will suffer any harm – they will simply be thrust back in time to an era where electricity and the electronics it made possible were non-existent.
Saddam Hussein will sit in his silent darkened bunker – suddenly stifling as all air intake systems shut down. With communication with his armed forces arrayed around the capital city no longer operating, he and his top generals will be rendered as mute as the troops in the field themselves. Only by carrier pigeon could be hope to contact his forces.
His missiles inoperative, his tanks without engines, his jet fighters downed, his radar installations useless, Saddam no longer has the instruments of modern warfare at his beck and call. He has been e-bombed back to the stone ages.
That’s the scenario for the opening of the invasion of Iraq if intelligence reports are correct. The age of the e-bomb has arrived and modern warfare will never be the same.
Early Beginnings
It all began in 1925 with the atomic research of physicist Arthur H. Compton who demonstrated that firing a stream of highly energetic photons into atoms that have a low atomic number causes them to eject a stream of electrons. Physics students know this phenomenon as the Compton Effect. It became a key tool in unlocking the secrets of the atom, to the development of the e-bomb.
Leap forward to the high altitude detonation of a hydrogen bomb over Siberia by the Soviets back in the 1960s which had an unexpected effect. It knocked out communications systems for hundreds of miles below the blast.
While testing hydrogen bombs in outer space, hundreds of miles above the planet, American scientists also discovered that each atomic blast created a pulse of electromagnetic energy similar to conventional radio-made microwaves, but with energy so great that they erased magnetic memories and melted the microscopic junctions in transistors on the Earth below. These were veritable tidal waves of energy, sufficient to cripple sensitive microelectronics but too weak to be seen, heard, or felt by human beings.
During one U.S. test, in July 1962, a hydrogen bomb was detonated approximately 650 miles in space, roughly where today's space shuttles orbit. Simultaneously, an incredible 2100 miles to the northeast, street lights went dark and burglar alarms began ringing on the Hawaiian islands. The reason was an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) produced by the blast.
According to a report by intelligence expert Major Scott W. Merkle, then a student assigned to the Air Command and General Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, a declassified U.S. military report showed that the explosion of a bomb about one megaton in size (the exact size remains classified) eight hundred miles over Omaha, Nebraska, would shower the continental United States, southern Canada, and northern Mexico with an EMP capable of disabling virtually every computerized circuit in its potential damaging consequences of such an EMP attack in 1982, when he wrote in an obscure engineering journal
Dependence on Computers
“Today there is almost universal dependence on electronic computers. They are used by first-graders as well as research engineers. Industry, communications, financial records, are all at stake here. In the event of heavy EMP radiation, I suspect it would be easier to enumerate the apparatus that would continue to function than the apparatus that would stop.”
“Due to this reaction, in 1963 the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty to counter the considerable threat posed by EMPs,” wrote Major Merkle. “Since then, that threat has grown at a fantastic rate, fueled by the rapid progress made in compacting ever more EMP-sensitive transistors onto the computer chips upon which modern electronics rely. ”
Testifying before the House Committee on National Security, Military Research and Development Subcommittee, on July 16th, 1997 Dr Lowell Wood of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory described the effects of EMP.
“Electromagnetic pulses, EMP, generated by high-altitude nuclear explosions have riveted the attention of the military nuclear tactical community for three-and-a-half decades since the first comparatively modest one very unexpectedly turned off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific. This EMP also shut down radio stations, turned off cars, burned out telephone systems, and wreaked other mischief throughout the Hawaiian Islands nearly 1,000 miles distant from ground zero.
“The potential for even a single high-altitude explosion of a more deliberate character to impose continental-scale devastation of much of the equipment of modern civilization and of modern warfare soon became clear. EMP became a technological substrate for the black humor: Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.
EMP Wreckage
“It was EMP-imposed wreckage, at least as much as that due to blast, fire, and fallout, which sobered detail studies of the post-nuclear-attack recovery process. When essentially nothing electrical or electronic could be relied upon to work, even in rural areas far from the blast, it appeared surpassingly difficult to bootstrap American national recovery, and post-attack America in these studies remained stuck in the very early 20th century until electrical equipment and electronic components begin to trickle into a Jeffersonian America from abroad.”
EMP he said, “can induce large voltages and currents in power lines, communication cables, radio towers, and other long conductors serving a facility. Some other notable collectors of EMP include railroad tracks, large antennas, pipes, cables, wires in buildings, and metal fencing. Although materials underground are partially shielded by the ground, they are still collectors, and these collectors deliver the EMP energy to some larger facility. This produces surges that can destroy the connected device, such as, power generators or long distance telephone systems. An EMP could destroy many services needed to survive a war.
“Many systems needed are controlled by a semiconductor in some way. Failure of semi-conductive chips could destroy industrial processes, railway networks, power and phone systems, and access to water supplies. Semiconductor devices fail when they encounter an EMP because of the local heating that occurs.
When a semi-conductive device absorbs the EMP energy, it displaces the resulting heat that is produced relatively slowly when compared to the time scale of the EMP. Because the heat is not dissipated quickly, the semiconductor can quickly heat up to temperatures near the melting point of the material. Soon the device will short and fail. This type of failure is call thermal second-breakdown failure.(16)
Vulnerability
“It is also important to realize how vulnerable the military is to EMP. "Military systems often use the most sophisticated and therefore most vulnerable, electronics available, and many of the systems that must operate during a nuclear war cannot tolerate the temporary disturbances that EMP may induce."(17) Furthermore, many military duties require information to be communicated over long distances. This type of communication requires external antennas, which are extremely vulnerable to EMP.”
Dr. Wood was dealing with a so-called HEMP (High Altitude EMP) activated by a hydrogen bomb which was by then outlawed and considered unthinkable.
But even then the cat was out of the bag and the race began to develop a non-nuclear method weapon capable of delivering an EMP punch. If current reports are accurate the U.S. now has such a weapon – the so-called e-bomb, and is getting ready to demonstrate its power to Saddam Hussein.
According to Associated Press Technology writer Jim Krane, the U.S. may fire a cruise missile tipped with a high-powered electromagnetic-pulse emitter - a so-called e-bomb - "which fries the electronics without killing the people," said Andrew Koch of Jane's Information Group.
Wrote Krane, “The weapon's massive power surge is supposed to travel through antennas or power cords to wreck any unshielded electronic appliance - civilian or military - within a few hundred yards, according to studies cited by GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization.
Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Epstein quoted Roger McCarthy, chairman of Exponent Failure Analysis Associates in Menlo Park, a firm deeply involved in developing futuristic weaponry for the Pentagon as declaring: "Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along, and sends out a few thousand volts. Wham! Your cell phone or your computer dies,"
Invisible Wallop
Epstein explains that the weapons “pack an incredible, invisible wallop, hundreds of times the electrical current in a lightning bolt. That ‘directed energy,’ in principle not unlike the power used more benignly in laser pointers or supermarket scanners, opens a whole new area of warfare, one that for now gives the United States a leg up on potential opponents.
0
Comments
Contribute to arguments from *you* not x, y or z newspaper, and you'll be welcomed.
Scary!:eek:
And if Saddam gets stuck in his bunker and suffocates...then isn't that the main aim accomplished?
Yes, this is also coming from the same people who said the depleted uranium in their ammunition did not cause thousands of birth defects and the same people who prattled on for years about the non-existence of Gulf War Syndrome as thousands of its own soldiers died.
Well I suppose that is the case. Seeing how America and Great Britain have a sovereign right to interfere in the affairs of any nation on Earth they may choose at any given time for any given reason it is not all that suprising assassinating the leader of a foreign state would be taken so cavalierly. Of course these are te two nations who wrote the book on Imperialism in the first place, one of my favourite episodes being the time Great Britain forced the lethal narcotic heroin on the Chinese to profit or the Indian wars in the United States.
ROFL hardly no destruction at all.
"According to a report by intelligence expert Major Scott W. Merkle, then a student assigned to the Air Command and General Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, a declassified U.S. military report showed that the explosion of a bomb about one megaton in size (the exact size remains classified) eight hundred miles over Omaha, Nebraska, would shower the continental United States, southern Canada, and northern Mexico with an EMP capable of disabling virtually every computerized circuit in its potential damaging consequences of such an EMP attack in 1982, when he wrote in an obscure engineering journal."
Why not? After all America tested out Atomic bombs on Japan just like it injected blacks with syphliss in the Tuskegee Experiments.
Perhaps I cannot read, but how does that describe a WMD?
No deaths...
Unless you don't understand that the defining part of a WMD is that it would cause large scale death either at the moment it detonates or soon afterwards...
You obliterate transportation in Iraq at the same time you bomb the living hell out of that country. That will cause massive deaths. Do you have something against hospitals?
Well I've tried to find an effective definition for you, but it's not easy. The UN 1948 declaration only really covered "radiological" weapons, but this has appreantly been extended over the years to include biological and chemical weapons.
The best (short!) definition I found was this:
A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is generally taken to be a type of weapon which is designed to kill large numbers of people, usually civilians but also potentially military personnel
Hmm, no mention of property there. Perhaps because there is a recognition that lives matter, buildings (and transport) doesn't.
@ Heydrich, perhaps you can now explain your accusation.
Me thinks you take the definition a little too far.
And funnily enough, you don't actually need a whole raft of PCs to keep someone alive.
On your definition Mok, does a tactical nuke used on an army base not necessarily count as WMD then, that doesn't seem right.......
The definition relates to what the weapon is "designed" to do, and I believe it covers low yield nukes... so I would have thought that it would.
If we were just talking about the damage and deaths caused then we could now designate Aircraft as WMD. But we don't and that's because its not what they are designed to achieve...