02.15.10

The Future That’s Been Coming for 15 Years — But Never Quite Arriving

Posted in Crazy Weapons at 2:47 pm by George Smith

Aviation Week and David Fulghum have been pushing electromagnetic pulse bombs or EMP rays for … it seems like always.

As long as DD has been on-line and paying attention, EMP bombs and rays have been the transformative miracle weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving. And that seems to have been since at least the early Nineties.

Today, Aviation Week writes:

Electronic and computer attack—the futuristic segment of the Pentagon’s arsenal—will benefit from the proposed 2011 military spending plan, but identifying all the key pieces is difficult without close scrutiny.

Electronic attack (EA) includes invading networks and releasing beams of energy against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). These blasts of energy are sometimes generated by U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowlers and Air Force EC-130 Compass Call aircraft to prematurely detonate or disable bombs. In addition, an EA-6B Prowler—and its EA-18G Growler successor— can drop a “cone of ­silence??? on emitters within a given tactical area to prevent enemy communications.

“Other weapons — including a new line of bombs being developed at the Eglin AFB Armaments Center — will generate an electromagnetic pulse that damages electronics,” it says.

As it has at least once a year for the last fifteen or so.

Now the magical electromagnetic pulse ray, or pulse bomb, will be used to miraculously solve the problem of improvised roadside munitions and mines.

So that’s why the Marines are using all those big mine-clearing tanks in the Afghanistan push! Because all the electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays still aren’t quite here yet. Just wait. We’ll show them with American technical no how know-how. Rays and cones of silence! They’ll just give right up at the power and supremacy!

From a 2009 post right here:

[Obsession, delusion and military applications welfare projects] die hard and a recent article from the journal IEEE Spectrum is a showcase for scientists trying to keep their electromagnetic pulse bomb projects alive for the Dept. of Defense.

A week or two ago DD revisited the phenomenon of US electromagnetic pulse crazies in two posts. The second of the two — here — dealt with the social crowd plagued with an Ahab-like obsession for deployable electromagnetic pulse bombs (not dependent on a multi-megaton fusion blast) and hand-held ray guns.

They regularly pop up in news announcing fantastic weapons are about to arrive, or have arrived and been secretly used, or are about to be tested. This has been a regular occurrence, if not obvious to everyone, since around 1994 when the EMP lobby boffins began giving it
the hard sell.

Readers will note the top listing from the Google link is a reprint of a cover story published in Popular Mechanics in 2001, an article predicting electromagnetic pulse bombs were about to show, possibly capable of throwing civilization back hundreds of years. If they found their way into terrorist hands. One also notes the piece is accompanied with a harsh critique from various punters.

“Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts,??? read a very recent piece of EMP crazy emission at the New Scientist a couple weeks ago.

“Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along and sends out a few thousand volts! [Like] like man-made lightning bolts!??? read a couple newspaper articles just before the second war with Iraq.

In every such article, a blizzard of jargon and promises.

“Hey wz up listen im just 12 but im realy interested in tech stuff and science so im a nerd,” writes one commenter from that original post on DD blog. “im not too smat just about enough to understand most of this. what i want to ask u is can you help me make a mini empg because i realy want to try one out. im just realy curious on the matter. so yeah thats it. oh yeah can you also send me some more info on the matter.”

Done.

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