Source: http://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~valeri/EMP.html
Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons
1 September 2002. Updated 25 February 2003.
April 19, 2004: At the end of file: AIR STRATEGY, Use of a "clean" weapon of mass destruction
Not much information about weapons comes from Nordic sources. Anders Kallenaas from FOA (Swedish National Defence Research Institute) has written: "Russia is the most equipped country in the world for designing and manufacturing electromagnetic weapons." To complement this, the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (March 1, 1998), citing an AFP news report, wrote that high-power electromagnetic bombs ("beer cans" — so named because they fit in a briefcase) could be marketed by the Russians for $150,000, and that Australians had already purchased such devices. These weapons, delivering impulses with an instantaneous power of ten gigawatts (ten thousand megawatts!!), could destroy complex electrical and electronic installations (as well as any nuclear facility, any flying or rolling machine, any power plant, or even a simple telephone exchange). A reader's comment: with such a "can," one could trigger an explosion similar to the one that destroyed the AZF facility. Furthermore, it appears that investigative elements have been deliberately concealed from the public. A long article was published (&&& I'll find the reference) showing that the explosion had been preceded by an extremely clear and impressive failure of an EDF transformer. This initial phenomenon is what caused the explosion (recordings showed two explosions, not just one). The article went unnoticed because it was presented in an unfortunately too technical form, lacking sufficient synthesis. Generally speaking, it would be a serious mistake to assume terrorists are fools. The attack on the Twin Towers, which obviously has nothing to do with this dossier, was a masterpiece in this regard. It is known that Ben Laden's family has created many architectural projects (including major developments at the site of Mecca). The attack was planned by the best specialists in modern buildings. The collapse of the towers by "implosion" had been foreseen.
Let me make a brief digression here, since I've already discussed this in another file (but as my website is starting to resemble the Samaritaine, I'm having trouble finding my way around).
If I find the passage, I'll replace this paragraph with a link.
In short, the Twin Towers were built around a central core to which the floor slabs were attached. The "core" was actually a set of vertical steel beams enclosed within a prism-shaped cage made of concrete panels. When the planes struck the towers, their kinetic energy was sufficient to penetrate the thin concrete shielding (no one had considered such an event during the design phase. The concrete panels were neither load-bearing nor reinforced. They were not designed as armor protecting the central structural elements). The jet fuel from the planes then poured into these cages, the shafts containing the structural elements. Everything turned into a furnace. When the temperature reached sufficient levels—starting from the top of the towers—the structural elements ceased to function. The tower then collapsed like a house of cards. Each floor, as it fell, struck the floor immediately below, triggering its collapse in turn. As an attack, this is brilliant—not only for the number of casualties, the "financial impact," the extremely small number of suicide bombers, but also for the technical knowledge of the building.
I believe this phenomenon had previously been evaluated through computer simulation, not by the pilots of the planes, of course.
But let's return to the EMP dossier:
The originality of electromagnetic weapons lies in the fact that, once they reach a conductive component of an electrical system, their effect can propagate over distance through the conductors to which it is connected. If one attempts to disable an electrical installation using conventional bombs, destruction is limited to the immediate vicinity of the impact point. With EMP weapons, the situation becomes entirely different. It all began with the pioneering work of Andrei Sakharov and his colleagues Altshuler, Voitenko, and Bichenkov, forty years earlier. The concept of EMP effects emerged as soon as high-altitude nuclear explosions were conducted and it was realized that such explosions could destroy electrical and electronic installations on the ground. Subsequently, military installations were "hardened" by shielding them in Faraday cage-like enclosures. All control and guidance systems for sensitive installations and objects—such as missiles—were equipped with fiber-optic-based electronics, immune to such effects. However, all civilian installations, which remain outside these new technologies, remain vulnerable.
Two types of non-nuclear EMP systems have been developed. The first uses conventional explosives to generate the effect; the second uses a microwave generator delivering a single pulse. The potential of these EMP weapons was discussed by Carlo Kopp (Carlo Koop: "The electromagnetic bomb: a weapon of electronic mass destruction" at http://www.hut.fi/~zam/ew/mirror/apjemp.html) in a paper published by the RAAF Air Power Studies Center in 1996. The author concluded that deployment of such weapons should be considered for the coming decade, emphasizing the subsequent reduction of "collateral damage." These weapons thus fall into the category of "non-lethal weapons."
Such devices can be fitted to bombs, but they can also be deployed by ground teams carrying out a new kind of sabotage. This leads to what is now commonly called "E-bombs," which the Americans are considering using to disable Saddam Hussein's underground military installations. Indeed, while it is very difficult to reach installations housed in bunkers using conventional bombs (a simple bend in a tunnel is enough to neutralize a shockwave), the vulnerability of these buried installations becomes completely different when exposed to an electromagnetic pulse. For an installation to be fully protected, it would need to be entirely isolated from the outside world, sealed within its own Faraday cage. Any point of entry for electrical power or external communication is also a potential access point for the destructive electromagnetic pulse. The likely targets for these E-bombs are:
- Telecommunication systems
- National power grid
- Financial management systems