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What Next?
By Jim "Twitch" Tittle

Article Type: Real Military
Article Date: Novemeber 16, 2001


There is a distant sound of thunder and suddenly all the lights go out. The CRT display of your computer along with the light bulbs have a weird radiance but not a glow. You smell ozone like the time your AAA batteries leaked when you recharged them. Flashlights don’t even work. The phone is dead. After a while your boss tells you to go home, as there must have been a power station overload somewhere. But your and your co-workers’ cars will not start or even turn over. There is an uncanny silence outside. There are no traffic sounds. People from nearby buildings have emerged to the streets to mill around and contemplate what happened. What did happen?

Did you hear that? Why did all the lights go out?

Elecro What?

Like many of you I watched the Fox Channel’s television show Dark Angel and pondered the show's background lead-in that the U.S. society in 2019 is economically disadvantaged due the fact that “terrorists set off an electro-magnetic pulse bomb that fried all the computers.” I’ve searched out some interesting information about the real-world technology behind the screenwriters’ storyline.

First we all need to realize that the modern Western world is computerized to a far greater extent than just PCs and mainframes in businesses. Smart chips are mini computers that may perform just one function in a small appliance or electrical device or several in slightly more complex ones. Pretty much everything has a printed circuit board with transistors and/or diodes where vacuum tubes once performed.

So while your programmable toaster and coffee maker have simple brains other devices grow in complexity with circuitry to do more complicated things. For example, cash registers have several boards that make all the calculations of monetary transactions with some even reporting to a mainframe that this or that tangible good has been reduced from inventory. Electronic terminals debit or charge your account. Remember, except for the cash you have on you, all your assets are electronically stored. They’re not even on paper any more.

All vehicles have electrical systems with most now depending on a computer to monitor and regulate all of those systems. If you think you old 1963 Chevy is immune think again. Its 12-volt wet cell battery and direct current electrical system is vulnerable too. Vulnerable to what?


Electrons! Electrons! Everywhere Electrons!

A physicist in the mid-1920s was studying atoms and experimented with firing energetic photons into atoms with low atomic numbers and found that it causes the atoms to emit a stream of electrons. Now if you’ll recall the movie Broken Arrow that fantasized about the rogue air force pilot that crashes a B-2 after ejecting the nuclear payload and the subsequent detonation of one of them placed deep in a mine, you will remember the effect it had on vehicular electrical systems as the airborne helicopter in the vicinity immediately crashed.

The effect is due to gamma rays that pulse outward like ripples from a pebble dropped in a pond. This was realistically demonstrated in the late 1950s when a hydrogen warhead was air-detonated in the Pacific. It caused the overload of electric lights in Hawaii and disrupted radio navigation for eighteen hours as far away as Australia. The gamma rays ride that outbound wave and strike the oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, which releases electrons for hundreds of miles.

Since that test, it has been paramount for military planners to develop shielding of sensitive electronic systems. If these systems weren't protected, a preemptive nuclear strike against us could knock out our own missile's electronics and there would be no shooting back. Certainly classified work has been done on the reverse effect where powerful electro-magnetic pulses could be generated using super conductors for offensive uses creating intense magnetic fields. An alternative that was considered and rejected was the relatively simple Flux Compression Generator.


All Fluxed Up

The Flux Compression Generator has conventional explosives inside of a copper coil. An instant before the detonation the coil is energized by capacitors creating a magnetic field. The explosives are set up to detonate forward. As the housing tube bursts outward it touches the edge of the coil creating a moving short circuit. This short compresses the magnetic field at the same time reducing the inductance of the coil.

A peaking current pulse effect is produced that breaks before the final collapse of the apparatus multiplied by several ten hundreds of a microsecond peaking currents of tens of millions of amps. The electromagnetic energy generated is compared to a photoflash versus an A-bomb.

Can vital electrical systems be shielded? Experts say yes. But it is a dubious claim. Even so, your local power generating plant is not protected like military and government facilities. So once again you’re on your own. And studies have shown that high-frequency microwave pulses can go around shields like Germans around the Maginot Line.

But how does this effect John Q. Public? Even if military facilities are immune little else is. As we’ve unfortunately seen terrorists did not attack NORAD or hard military targets. They hit vulnerable civilian ones, the Pentagon being a minor exception. These would be the projected future efforts by follow up extremists. The Western world’s military can’t protect all the people all the time. To the terrorist it’s like driving on the interstate at midnight—wide open.

Like ripples in a pool, the electromagnetic pulse would spread out

The real damage would not be localized either. Like time delay bombs, after the initial air detonation of a Flux Compression Generator device, further damage occurs. The electromagnetic pulses that surged through every electrical system in immediate range created localized magnetic fields. When fields collapse electric surges travel through the power and telecommunication infrastructure. Terrorists would not have to drop their bomb directly on the targets they want to destroy. Even heavily guarded military sites, telephone switching centers and electronic banking, could be attacked through their electric and telecommunication connections. The stock exchange could be put out of action in an instant.

A total electronic overload would fry every electronic device. If you ever tinkered with an electronic device or fiddled with your car you may have seen a tiny example of this in that too much AC or DC voltage surged to an unprotected circuit and fried it. Even devices not connected to the power grid would be destroyed, of course. Every battery powered device you own would overload and burn out including laptops, cell phones and Gameboys. Everything running on AC or DC current overloads.

Telephone lines and AC electrical lines would melt. All vehicles and stationary engines would die. A few diesels might re-start given new batteries. Sure the engines themselves would be mechanically sound but they would not restart without a complete rewiring and replacement of all electrical components. Think how much work it would be to rewire a modern automobile. The area would not include the entirety of a country but it would extend far from the epicenter since the effect travels through any hard wire in the area affected outwards. Several devices used over the cities of a compact European country could inflict a medieval atmosphere quickly. The U.S., Canada or like-sized, vast geographical countries would be harder to do.


It’s 1800 Again

But just one prominent city anywhere on Earth would suffer dramatically. Tokyo, Hong Kong, London or Paris suddenly thrust backward in time to 1800 would have catastrophic effects. Refrigerated foodstuffs would be soon rot. You couldn’t travel except by bicycle and communication would be non-existent. Your light and heat would be once again be candles and fire. It would take decades to rewire the affected area if it could ever be accomplished. Certainly this scenario is more to the liking of the extremists who wish Western civilization would just go away. Destruction of a few edifices is temporary by comparison.

Of course the military strategists are involved in this technology for “good.” Using electro-magnetic pulses directed at specific targets in a narrow band could bring down any enemy’s inbound missile.

Manned and unmanned aircraft along with satellites are being studied as platforms for this type of weapon. Bombers, fighters, cruise missiles and air vehicles like the unmanned Predator are being considered for this future capability now.

The use of such technology by “friendlies” is intriguing. A belligerent entity could be specifically targeted; be it cities in a country or an obscure military outpost. Any thing or place with any electronic capability could be neutralized without the widespread loss of life. Even field radios in a combat zone have circuitry and batteries!

We’ve all wondered if more technology in military applications is the answer. Surely all country’s military are vulnerable to electro-magnetic pulse invasion, not just the U.S. Non-military aircraft could deliver the device. Any force dedicated to private pilot training and light plane purchase or rental could do the deed. The technology is not all that technical and anyone with 1950s electro-mechanical skill could create this weapon in the crude but effective form outlined above. The cost is very low as well and the perpetrators don’t even have to commit suicide. Whether the delivery aircraft is affected is uncertain, but even so it would be possible to exit the aircraft with parachutes or dead stick in to land.

This threat would be a bad reason to ground all private aviation. And there is no way to scrutinize every aircraft before it flies so let’s not think up more governmental agencies to regulate things.

The explosives are placed inside a copper tube with the stator coil around it surrounded by a dielectric jacket. The detonator would be altitude activated like atomic weapons with easily obtainable parts. Behind would be the battery-powered capacitor bank. A GPS guidance system could be used though it would not be critical in this area weapon. While I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics it wouldn’t take too much smarts I deduce. It doesn’t even have to be streamlined like a free falling “factory made” bomb does to do the job, just roughly cylindrical.

Beyond the terrorists we know about there exist a hardcore faction of anti-civilization activists. They are the ones on TV lamenting Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of North America and how things would have been better if he hadn’t as if no one in the rising renaissance Europe ever would have. If he hadn’t some one else would have.

Like the terror groups who want Western civilization to go away they peer back through history in a perverted hindsight warped by today’s perspective attempting to apply modern values on history’s timeline. It is a bankrupt philosophy.

But could the opening 2001 scenario, like the famous 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast by Orson Wells, happen?

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