13:41 29.09.2017(updated 17:37 29.09.2017)
Russia is developing radio-electronic weapons, which use a powerful UHF impulse capable of destroying all electronic equipment miles away and even changing the course of a war.
Alexander Khrolenko (RIA Novosti) – The Listva, a remotely operated mine clearance vehicle capable of detecting and blowing up mines up to 100 meters away, is one such weapon.
An armored vehicle equipped with a UHF emitter moves in front of a mobile missile system. It detects radio-controlled landmines planted along and away from the road using ground-penetrating radar and then uses ultra-high-frequency rays to neutralize them.
This is a novel technique, which had never been used before.
During a drill on Wednesday, some 20 real cellphone-controlled explosive devices were planted along the route of a column of Yars mobile ballistic missile systems. A single Listva vehicle spotted all of them and blew them up long before the missiles reached the area.
In the next two years Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces will receive over 150 Listva robotic mine clearing vehicles.
Future Weapons
The unique radio-electronic weapons based on new physical principles, which were successfully tested in Russia last fall use mobile electromagnetic emitters to disable missile warheads and onboard aircraft electronics many miles away.
The electromagnetic bombs developed by Russia can be more effective than nuclear weapons because they are able to neutralize entire armies with just one short electromagnetic impulse.
Moreover, unlike already exiting electronic jammers, they can completely take out or seriously damage even off-line weapons like tanks, grounded planes and missiles in silos.
Earlier, media reports said that Russia’s defense industry had come up with the Alabuga, a new electro-magnetic missile, which uses a powerful UHF emitter to disable all enemy electronics within a radius of 3.5 kilometers (2.3 miles), turning it into “a heap of scrap metal.”
A directed beam of waves of a particular frequency has a sledgehammer effect on electronic equipment knocking out computers and navigation systems by physically destroying their motherboards.
Russia plans to install such weapons on its sixth-generation fighter drones because powerful UHF radiation can kill pilots.
Radio-electronic weapons are able to jam a tank’s loading mechanism, blow up artillery shells inside a turret and destroy enemy soldiers hiding inside a bunker or taking cover up to 100 meters underground.
Foreign Designs
The US, Israel and China are equally busy developing their own types of electromagnetic weapons. During Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991, the Americans used a relatively primitive electronic bomb by fitting the warheads of their Tomahawk cruise missiles with carbon fiber.
As a result, the missiles short-circuited the electrical lines of Iraqi power stations and power lines severely degrading the country’s vital infrastructure and air defenses.
The Pentagon used more advanced electromagnetic weapons during NATO’s 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia. In the first two week alone, the US Air Force dropped over 400 super-heavy JDAM gliding bombs packed with graphite and metallic fibers and particles knocking out the country’s entire air defense control system.
Since electromagnetic weapons are capable of pushing a nation back centuries, countries are now developing ever ever-new means of defending themselves again these fearsome weapons.
Source:
https://sputniknews.com/russia/201709291057806285-russia-electromagnetic-weapons/
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CONVENTIONAL ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE WARHEADS
ABSTRACT
The efficient attack against modern industrial opponent will require the use of electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of disrupting electronic monitoring, communications, control and information systems in limited area, leaving other structured intact and without radioactive contamination.
The Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) effect was first observed in 1962 when a 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon was detonated in Test Shot Starfish. The Starfish shot was conducted 400 kilometers high above the mid-Pacific and the electromagnetic pulse from it destroyed satellite equipment and blocked high frequency radio communications across the Pacific for 30 minutes.
The effect itself is characterized by the production of a very short and intense shock wave, producing a powerful electromagnetic field whose intensity rapidly decreases with the distance from the pulse source. This field can be made sufficiently strong to produce short-lived transient voltages of thousands of Volts in exposed electrical wires, or conductive tracks on printed circuit boards, therefore causing irreversible damage to a wide range of electrical and electronic devices, particularly telecommunications equipment, computers, radio and/ or radar receivers.
As modern military platforms are dependent on densely packed electronic equipment, an EMP device can render them unusable in an instant. Shielding of their electronics gives limited results in that any cables running out of the equipment behave like antennae, guiding the high voltage transients into the equipment.
EMP warhead technology and production cost levels are low, making them ideal choice for many national armies. There are indications that, for some time, this weapons are in operative use.
TECHNOLOGY
1. The operation principle behind one of most advanced versions of EMP devices is that which uses chemical explosion to rapidly compress magnetic field, which was initially produced by a start current, transferring much of energy from the explosion into the magnetic field. At this stage its peak power reaches order of tens of TW, equaling that of ten to a thousand typical lightings.
Typical representative of this kind of devices is called explosively pumped Coaxial Flux Compression Generator (FCG), consisting of cylindrical copper tube filled with a fast high energy explosive, surrounded by a helical coil of heavy wire, typically copper, and structural jacket of a non-magnetic material. Start current can be sourced from platform, condenser or FCG cascade, where a small FCG is used to prime a larger one.
Weapons built this way produce most of the power in the frequency band below 1 MHz, making target focusing difficult.
2. The Vircator is high power microwave source (HPM) whose output power may be tightly focused and it has a much better ability to couple energy into many target types.
It is mechanically simple, small and robust device, capable of producing a very powerful single pulse of radiation, which is, at the moment, ranging from 170 kW to 40 GW, over frequencies spanning the decimetric and centimetric bands.
Main difference between the FCG and HPM weapons is that latter, owing to its frequency range, has ability to directly couple into equipment through ventilation holes, gaps between panels and poorly shielded interfaces, forming a spatial standing wave patterns within the equipment exposing it to potentially high electromagnetic fields.
KNOWN US DEPLOYMENTS
1. In 1993. it was reported that an electromagnetic warhead, presumably of Vircator type, was fitted to the USAF AGM-86 Air Launched Cruise Missile airframe.
More:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070110212856/http://www.deepspace4.com:80/pages/main/pagemain.htm
IZAKOVIC
