gambit
PROFESSIONAL
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2009
- Messages
- 28,569
- Reaction score
- 148
- Country
- Location
A nuclear EMP (NEMP) weapon has political baggage. No one is going to see a high altitude nuclear detonation as an EMP attack, even though the dominant effect will be EMP. The reasoning here is that EMP is a byproduct of a nuclear detonation, of which the main product of such is the physical destruction of people and objects. So if the enemy is using a byproduct today, who is going to guarantee that he will not use the main product tomorrow?Tactical EMP isn't exactly easy to develop,however the US is working on tactical EMP so are other nations.
Here is a model of Tomahawk cruise missile with an non nuclear EMP warhead.
"BGM-109 "TOMAHAWK" equipped with EMG warheads would be aimed at enemy electronics
In military form, the EMG is a conventional warhead that produces a magnetic pulsed field equal to a small nuclear bomb. EMGs can knock out computers, radios, radars and fry a wide variety of electronic devices.
The U.S. version, an EMG warhead equipped Tomahawk cruise missile, was considered by the Clinton administration for "non-lethal" strikes against Serbian radar and command posts. Russian versions vary but two have been openly developed for Speznatz (special forces) operations, a backpack EMG and a grenade sized EMG."
Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://www.mobilemag.com/2012/10/25/video-boeing-champ-missle-drone-acts-as-flying-emp-weapon/
A non-nuclear EMP (NNEMP) weapon is much more palatable politically and militarily. Remember, the goal of any war is still territorial acquisition and control, or far less preferable -- denial of the same to the enemy. A nuclear detonation has another unfortunate byproduct -- radiation -- which would be denial of territory to all sides.
EMP is essentially electromagnetic jamming on steroids and then squared, to put it simply. The difference between EM jamming and an EMP assault is that in EM jamming, it is about the disruption of transmissions from sources other than one's own and using just enough power for that purpose. An EMP assault is about generating so much EM energy that this transmission will be able to overcome not just EM barriers but physical ones as well. Those physical barriers are things like capacitor housing, conductor traces on circuit boards, etc.
The turbine engine in a cruise missile already has enough POTENTIAL surplus power waiting to be exploited to become an NNEMP weapon. That was the goal of CHAMP. The range will be far less than from an NEMP weapon, of course, but given the fact that the EMP generator is in an air vehicle capable of loitering, duration will be far longer and the EMP assault will be more precise. So it is not that difficult to imagine a concentration of enemy hardware being under EMP assault by several NNEMP cruise missiles and probably under minutes instead of a microsecond from an NEMP detonation.
A CHAMP-like weapon will be more difficult to develop because instead of using a byproduct of a nuclear detonation, we are trying to isolate that byproduct and make it the main product of a new weapon, instead of an existing one -- a nuclear warhead.
