E-bombs: the looming threat from doomsday terror weapons of the 21st century
http://indrus.in/blogs/2013/04/26/e-bomb_the_real_doomsday_weapon_24213.html
People are more vulnerable today because virtually everything now runs on microchips, which are a million times more vulnerable to a power surge than the thermonic valves used in electronics in 1962. Today most people around the world are unable to function normally without access to mobile phones and computers.It’s like a powerful lightning bolt that surges into your house. The strength of the pulse – 30,000 to 50,000 volts per meter – is more than enough to burn your circuits and make your television set explode. Just like in the movies. Such damage cannot be repaired – everything would need to be replaced. But wait, even that won’t be easy. According to one study, if the United States lost its large transformers, 40 per cent of the country’s population would be without electrical power for as long as four to 10 years. That isn’t farfetched as it sounds. Several countries, including the United States, no longer manufacture large power transformers. They are all sourced from abroad. At a US Senate hearing on March 8, 2005, Dr Lowell Wood, astrophysicist and Commissioner of the EMP Commission, declared: ‘‘And when you want a new one, you order it and it is delivered – it is, first of all, manufactured…. Typical sort of delays from the time you order until the time you have a transformer in service are one to two years, and that is with everything working great. ‘‘If the United States was already out of power and it suddenly needed a few hundred new transformers because of burnout, you could understand why we found not that it would take a year or two to recover, it might take decades, because you burn down the national plant, you have no way of fixing it and really no way of reconstituting it other than waiting for slow-moving foreign manufacturers to very slowly reconstitute an entire continent’s worth of burned down power plants.’’ According to a report prepared for the United States Congress, Russia and China are now capable of launching a crippling high EMP strike against the United States with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, and other nations, such as North Korea, could possibly have the capability by 2015. Other nations that could possibly develop a similar capability over the next few years include France, Israel, India, the UK and Pakistan. China could either blanket the area over Taiwan to paralyze the country or above a US Navy aircraft carrier to cripple carrier groups. Israel can dispatch Iran or any Middle Eastern challenger to the Stone Age. And what North Korea can do is anybody’s guess. EMP can be produced on a smaller, non-nuclear scale using a device with batteries or chemical explosives. A group of Russian scientists from Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow have developed a series of unique compact generators capable of producing high-energy pulses of hundreds and even thousands of megawatts, Yuri Zaitsev, an adviser at Russia’s Academy of Engineering Sciences, wrote in a 2007 article. The United States has also ramped up its research on non-nuclear EMP weapons. In October 2012, Boeing tested a missile system that does not use any explosives, thereby limiting damage to its intended goal of directing microwave energy that can cause instant blackouts. Aimed at taking out Iran’s nuclear plants, it is codenamed CHAMP – Counter-Electronics High Power Advanced Missile Project. However, there’s one bomb that could be the ultimate doomsday weapon – an ordinary nuclear warhead packed with common cobalt. The bomb transforms the cobalt into highly radioactive cobalt-60, which has a half-life of over five years. You can run but you can’t hide from such a weapon because unlike the radioactivity of Hiroshima type bombs that remains local, the radioactivity of cobalt-60 would spread around the world and slowly kill all life. The average supermarket stocks food for two days, and regional food warehouses may have a few weeks supply. What are you going to do for the next five years? Compared with the madness that modern maniacs can unleash, the horrors of WWII and 9/11 are but mere sideshows. –Russia India Report