IEEE Spectrum Online November 01, 2003
The Dawn of the E-Bomb
For the wired world, the allure and the danger of high-power microwave weapons are both very real
By Michael Abrams
The full text of this article is available at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/nov03/1103ebom.html
In these media-fueled times, when war is a television spectacle and wiping out large numbers of civilians is generally frowned upon, the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks, yet harm neither hide nor hair. Such a weapon might shut down telecommunications networks, disrupt power supplies, and fry an adversary's countless computers and electronic gadgets, yet still leave buildings, bridges, and highways intact. It would strike with precision, in an instant, and leave behind no trace of where it came from.
In fact, it almost certainly is already here, in the form of high-power microwave (HPM) weapons.
(...)
The wide disparity in opinions and the uncertainty about microwave weapons, from Loren Thompson on one end to Arthur Varanelli on the other, are all part of what makes them so powerful, says military analyst John Pike, who is director of GlobalSecurity.org (Alexandria, Va.). "It all depends on the complex interactions between the weapon and the target," he notes. "I can set up a strap-down chicken test that makes [an HPM weapon] look pretty good. But as soon as I start getting into real-world targets, maybe it doesn't work so well."
"Part of the story is we don't know what the story is," Pike says. "These are weapons that by their nature seek the shadows. And unlike cluster bombs or atomic bombs, they aren't going to leave behind unambiguous evidence of their use."
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To Probe Further
For a detailed technical discussion of high-power microwaves, see High-Power Microwave Sources and Technologies, edited by IEEE Fellows Robert J. Barker and Edl Schamiloglu (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2001). Schamiloglu is also coauthor, with James Benford and John Swegle, of the forthcoming High-Power Microwaves, 2nd edition (Institute of Physics, 2004).
The truly prepared, or merely paranoid, will want to consult Carlo Kopp's "Hardening Your Computing Assets" at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1997/harden.pdf.
© Copyright 2003, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
