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By Alan Philps in Jerusalem
April 16 2002
Daily Telegraph, London
The Israeli Army is broadcasting ear-splitting screeches and wails at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, traditional site of Jesus' birth, to force out 200 Palestinians besieged there.
Troops brought in a crane to hoist loudspeakers over the ancient basilica, one of the holiest shrines in Christendom, as part of what one person inside called "psycho terror". One of the noises sounds like a car alarm.
Camped outside the church, the army estimates there are about 50 wanted Palestinian militants inside, with clergy and civilians.
The Israeli Government offered a deal on Sunday under which the wanted men would be given a choice between permanent exile and trial before a military court. "If they leave, it's for good but, if they stay, then they will have to stand trial in Israel," said a spokesman for the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. The offer was put by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, during talks on Sunday.
Palestinian negotiators immediately rejected it, saying the men would not accept exile, and if they were to be judged it should be before a Palestinian court. But they would accept any deal that Mr Arafat approved.
In an appeal on Friday the trapped Palestinians called for United Nations intervention to save them from "a slow death".
They have been deprived of food for almost two weeks, and the army has shot at Palestinian youths lobbing bags of bread into the compound.
"We are hearing loud whistles and screeches in the daytime and now at night," said the Governor of Bethlehem, Mahmoud Madani, who is inside the church. "They want to destroy our morale, but the only solution is a negotiated settlement."
The church has responded to the caterwauling by ringing its bells.
In a major blow to the Palestinian resistance, Israel last night arrested Marwan Barghouthi, a leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction in the West Bank and regarded by Israel as the top militant in the area, Israeli security sources said.
Barghouthi, sought by Israel since it launched a West Bank offensive on March 29, was arrested in the city of Ramallah, the sources said
14:47 09 May 02
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992254
Bugs that eat roads and buildings. Biocatalysts that break down fuel and plastics. Devices that stealthily corrode aluminium and other metals. These are just a few of the non-lethal weapons that the US has tried to develop, or is trying to develop.
But quite how close such weapons are to reality we may never know. The US National Academy of Sciences is refusing to release dozens of reports proposing or describing their development, even though the documents are supposed to be public records.
The academy is justifying its unprecedented reticence by citing security concerns after 11 September. But campaigners think the real reason is that the research violates both US law and international treaties on chemical and biological weapons.
The documents in question were collected in 2001 by a panel of academic and industry scientists set up by the NAS to evaluate recent non-lethal weapons research for the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program. The US took an increased interest in non-lethals after its disastrous peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1993, when rioting civilians killed American soldiers.
The panel, whose report is due out later in 2002, collected 147 reports and proposals from researchers, many of them funded by the JNLWP. One group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, for example, proposes using intense electromagnetic fields to produce effects "ranging from the disruption of short-term memory to total loss of control of voluntary bodily functions". Others propose directed energy weapons.
Off the record
In March, as is usual with non-classified studies by the NAS, they were deposited with the academy's Public Access Records Office, and their titles were released (see table). "These documents are supposed to be public," says Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a group campaigning against biological weapons. When he asked the records office to see 77 of the documents, it agreed to hand them over.
"But two days later the NAS pulled the documents," says Hammond. "Kevin Hale, the NAS security officer, told me it was because someone had expressed concern." Who did so is not clear. The pressure for the clampdown does not appear to have come from the JNLWP itself, because last week it sent Hammond eight documents he had requested, including three on the NAS list.
New Scientist could not get hold of Hale. "We are still formulating our response to the Sunshine people," is all an assistant would say. But the few reports that Hammond did obtain make interesting reading.
In 2000, New Scientist revealed that senior officials in the JNLWP want to rewrite the chemical and biological weapons treaties to give themselves more freedom to develop non-lethal weapons. The reports make it clear that research that violates the treaties has been under way since the 1990s.
Eating tarmac
One 1998 funding application from the Office of Naval Research proposes creating genetically engineered microorganisms that would corrode roads and runways, and produce "targeted deterioration of metal parts, coatings and lubricants of weapons, vehicles and support equipment, as well as fuels".
The plan was to isolate genes for enzymes that attack materials such as Kevlar, asphalt, cement, paints or lubricants, and put them into microbes that churn them out in large quantities. The bugs were to be engineered to self-destruct after wreaking havoc.
It is not clear how many of these ideas have actually been realised. But the group has already patented a microorganism that would decompose polyurethane, "a common component of paint for ships and aircraft", including stealth anti-radar coatings.
Another 1998 proposal, from a biotech lab at Brooks Air Force Base near San Antonio in Texas, was to refine "anti-material biocatalysts" already under development. One of these involved a bacterial derivative that breaks down organic molecules such as fuels and plastic.
Stink bombs
The proposal claims that such substances are exempt from biological warfare restrictions. But that is not true, argues Mark Wheelis of University of California, Davis.
The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972 prohibits the "development, production, stockpiling or acquisition of biological agents or toxins" other than for peaceful purposes. What is more, last year the US itself introduced a law banning the possession of bioweapons, including microbes designed to attack materials.
The withheld documents also include proposals to use stink bombs, sedatives and opium derivatives as weapons, which Wheelis thinks would contravene the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992. This prohibits "any chemical which ... can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm".
Debora MacKenzie
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992254
http://www.newscientist.com/nl/0701/end.html
... but out of nowhere a wave of chaos was to wash over that world. In a millisecond it was gone. There were no phones, no computers, no power, nothing. Yet nobody had died, no buildings razed to the ground. And then the blind panic set in. What's going on, asks Ian Sample
It sounds like the perfect weapon. Without fracturing a single brick or spilling a drop of blood, it could bring a city to its knees. The few scientists who are prepared to talk about it speak of a sea change in how wars will be fought. Even in peacetime, the same technology could bring mayhem to our daily lives. This weapon is so simple to make, scientists say, it wouldn't take a criminal genius to put one together and wreak havoc. Some believe attacks have started already, but because the weapon leaves no trace it's a suspicion that's hard to prove. The irony is that it's our love of technology itself that makes us so vulnerable.
This perfect weapon is the electromagnetic bomb, or e-bomb. The idea behind it is simple. Produce a high-power flash of radio waves or microwaves and it will fry any circuitry it hits. At lower powers, the effects are more subtle: it can throw electronic systems into chaos, often making them crash. In an age when electronics finds its way into just about everything bar food and bicycles, it is a sure way to cause mass disruption. Panic the financial markets and you could make a killing as billions are wiped off share values. You could freeze transport systems, bring down communications, destroy computer networks. It's swift, discreet and effective.
Right now, talk of the threat of these weapons is low-key, and many want it to stay that way. But in some circles, concern is mounting. Last month, James O'Bryon, the deputy director of Live Fire Test & Evaluation at the US Department of Defense flew to a conference in Scotland to address the issue. "What we're trying to do is look at what people might use if they wanted to do something damaging," he says. With good reason, this is about as much as O'Bryon is happy to divulge.
E-bombs may already be part of the military arsenal. According to some, these weapons were used during NATO's campaign against Serbia last year to knock out radar systems. So do they really exist? "Lots of people are doing lots of work to protect against this type of thing," says Daniel Nitsch of the German Army Scientific Institute for Protection Technology in Muster, Lower Saxony. "You can make your own guess."
Interest in electromagnetic weapons was triggered half a century ago, when the military were testing something a lot less subtle. "If you let a nuclear weapon off, you get a huge electromagnetic pulse," says Alan Phelps of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. If this pulse hits electronic equipment, it can induce currents in the circuitry strong enough to frazzle the electronics. "It can destroy all computers and communications for miles," says Phelps.
But the military ran into problems when it came to finding out more about
the effects of these pulses. How could they create this kind of powerful
pulse without letting off nuclear bombs? Researchers everywhere took up the
challenge.
The scientists knew that the key was to produce intense but short-lived pulses of electric current. Feeding these pulses into an antenna pumps out powerful electromagnetic waves with a broad range of frequencies. The broader the range, the higher the chance that something electrical will absorb them and burn out.
Researchers quickly realised the most damaging pulses are those that contain high frequencies. Microwaves in the gigahertz range can sneak into boxes of electronics through the slightest gap: vent holes, mounting slots or cracks in the metal casing. Once inside, they can do their worst by inducing currents in any components they hit. Lower radio frequencies, right down to a few megahertz, can be picked up by power leads or connectors. These act as antennas, sending signals straight to the heart of any electronic equipment they are connected to. If a computer cable picks up a powerful electromagnetic pulse, the resulting power surge may fry the computer chips.
To cook up high-frequency microwaves, scientists need electrical pulses that come and go in a flash--around 100 picoseconds, or one ten-billionth of a second. One way of doing this is to use a set-up called a Marx generator. This is essentially a bank of big capacitors that can be charged up together, then discharged one after the other to create a tidal wave of current. Channelling the current through a series of super-fast switches trims it down to a pulse of around 300 picoseconds. Pass this pulse into an antenna and it releases a blast of electromagnetic energy. Marx generators tend to be heavy, but they can be triggered repeatedly to fire a series of powerful pulses in quick succession.
Marx generators are at the heart of an experimental weapons system being built for the US Air Force by Applied Physical Sciences, an electronics company in Whitewater, Kansas. "We're trying to put them on either unmanned aerial vehicles or just shells or missiles in an effort to make an electromagnetic minefield," says Jon Mayes of APS. "If something flies through it, it'll knock it out." It could also be used on a plane to burn out the controls of incoming missiles, says Mayes. Put it on the back of a military jet and if a missile locks onto the plane, the generator can release a pulse that scrambles the missile's electronics.
Marx generators have the advantage of being able to operate repeatedly. But to generate a seriously powerful, one-off pulse, you can't beat the oomph of old-fashioned explosives. The energy stored in a kilo or two of TNT can be turned into a huge pulse of microwaves using a device called a flux compressor. This uses the energy of an explosion to cram a current and its magnetic field into an ever-smaller volume. Sending this pulse into an antenna creates a deadly burst of radiowaves and microwaves.
Simplicity is one of the flux compressor's big attractions. Just take a metal tube, pack it with explosives, and stick a detonator in one end. Then fix the tube inside a cylinder of coiled wire, which has a wire antenna attached at the far end. Finally, pass a current through the coil to set up a magnetic field between the metal tube and the coil, and you're ready to go (Click on thumbnail graphic for diagram.).
Setting off the detonator triggers the charge, sending an explosion racing
along the tube at almost 6000 metres per second. If you could slow this down,
you'd see that in the instant before the explosive pressure wave begins to
shatter the device, the blast flares out the inner metal tube. The distorted
metal makes contact with the coil, causing a short circuit that diverts the
current--and the magnetic field it generates--into the undisturbed coil ahead
of it. As the explosive front advances, the magnetic field is squeezed into
a smaller and smaller volume. Compressing the field this way creates a huge
rise in current in the coil ahead of the explosion, building a mega-amp pulse
just 500 picoseconds wide. Finally, just before the whole weapon is destroyed
in the blast, the current pulse flows into an antenna, which radiates its
electromagnetic energy outwards. The whole process is over in less than a
tenth of a millisecond, but for an instant it can spray out a terawatt of
power.
Tom Schilling of TPL, an electronics company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is working along similar lines with the microwave weapons he's developing for the US Air Force. "We're using explosive flux generators to generate the power, then sending that straight into an antenna," he says. "One of the systems we're looking at is a guided bomb that can be dropped off a plane. Targets would be things like command and control centres--we should be able to shut those down with little or no collateral damage." Schilling's company is also looking at putting flux compressors into air-to-air missiles. It's an appealing idea, as even a near miss could bring down a plane.
It certainly ought to be practical. As long ago as the late 1960s, scientists sent a pair of flux compressors into the upper atmosphere aboard a small rocket to generate power for an experiment to study the ionosphere. "You can build flux compressors smaller than a briefcase," says Ivor Smith, an electrical engineer at Loughborough University who has worked on these devices for years.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of these weapons is that they carry the tag "non-lethal". You could take out a city's communications systems without killing anyone or destroying any buildings. In addition to the obvious benefits for the inhabitants, this also avoids the sort of bad press back home that can fuel opposition to a war. But that doesn't make these weapons totally safe, especially if they're being used to mess up the electronics of aircraft. "If you're in an aeroplane that loses its ability to fly, it's going to be bad for you," points out James Benford of Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California.
Another big plus for people thinking of using these weapons is that microwaves pass easily through the atmosphere. This means that you can set off your weapon and inflict damage without having to get close to your target. "People think in terms of a kilometre away," says Benford. According to some estimates, a flux compressor detonated at an altitude of few hundred metres could wipe out electronics over a 500-metre radius.
Electromagnetic weapons can be sneaky, too. You don't have to fry everything in sight. Instead you can hit just hard enough to make electronics crash--they call it a "soft kill" in the business--and then quietly do what you came to do without the enemy ever knowing you've even been there. "That could be useful in military applications when you just want to make [the opposition] lose his electronic memory for long enough to do your mission," Benford says. "You can deny you ever did anything," he adds. "There's no shrapnel, no burning wreckage, no smoking gun."
The downside is that it can sometimes be hard to tell when an electromagnetic weapon has done its job. This is compounded by the fact that unless you know exactly what kind of electronics you are attacking, and how well protected they are, it's hard to know how much damage a weapon will do. This unpredictability has been a major problem for the military as it tries to develop these weapons. "Military systems have to go through an enormous amount of development," says Benford. "The key thing is that it has to have a clearly demonstrated and robust effect."
Tests like this are close to the heart of Nigel Carter, who assesses aircraft for their sensitivity to microwaves at Britain's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in Farnborough, Hampshire. Microwaves can easily leak between panels on the fuselage, he says. "You've also got an undercarriage with hatches that open, there's leakage through the cockpit, leakage through any doors."
To find out how bad that leakage is, Carter could simply put the plane in a field and fire away at it with microwaves. But he has to be careful. "If we go blatting away at a very high level at hundreds of frequencies, people in the nearest town get a bit upset because they can't watch TV any more," says Carter. "It's very unpopular."
To avoid annoying the neighbours, Carter beams very low-power microwaves at the plane. Sensors on board--linked by fibre optics to data recorders so they are immune to the microwaves--record the currents induced in the plane's electronics.
Knowing what currents are produced by weak microwaves, Carter calculates what kinds of currents are likely to be produced if the plane is hit by a more powerful pulse of microwaves. "You can then inject those currents directly into the electronics," he says. The results can be dramatic. "The sort of effects you might expect to get if it's not protected are instrumentation displaying wrong readings, displays blanking out and you could, in the worst case, get interference with your flight controls," he says.
The idea of weapons like these being used in warfare is disturbing enough, but what if criminals get their hands on them? According to Bill Radasky, an expert in electromagnetic interference with Metatech in Goleta, California, they may have already done so. A basic microwave weapon, he says, can be cobbled together with bits from an electrical store for just a few hundred dollars. Such a system would be small enough to fit in the back of a car and could crash a computer from 100 metres away.
Other systems are even easier to acquire. Some mail-order electronics outlets sell compact microwave sources that are designed to test the vulnerability of electronics. But they could just as easily be used in anger. "We've done experiments that show it's very easy to do," says Radasky. "We've damaged a lot of equipment with those little boxes." If some reports are to be believed, they're not the only ones.
Criminals may have already used microwave weapons, according to Bob Gardner who chairs the Electromagnetic Noise and Interference Commission of the International Union of Radio Science in Ghent, Belgium. Reports from Russia suggest that these devices have been used to disable bank security systems and to disrupt police communications. Another report suggests a London bank may also have been attacked. While these incidents are hard to prove, they're perfectly plausible. "If you're asking whether it's technologically reasonable that someone could do something like this," says Gardner, "then the answer is yes."
Gardner's claims are backed by Nitsch. He is investigating how vulnerable computers and networks are to powerful bursts of microwaves. Surprisingly, he has found that today's machines are far easier to crash than older models. He says computer manufacturers used to be more worried about electromagnetic interference, so they often put blocks of material inside to absorb stray signals, and ran strips of copper around the joins in the casing to keep microwaves out.
That modern computers have less protection is bad enough. But they are also more susceptible because they are more powerful. To push signals around faster, you must reduce the voltage to ensure that the extra current doesn't make the processor chips overheat. In the 1980s, most computers operated at 5 volts. Today's machines operate at nearer 2 volts, says Nitsch, making their signals easier to disrupt. Networks are particularly susceptible, he adds, because the hundreds of metres of cabling connecting their workstations can act as an efficient radiowave receiving antenna.
So are businesses taking the threat seriously? Radasky knows of only one European company that has protected its control centre against microwave weapons. Gardner believes it will take a high-profile attack to raise awareness of the issue. But combine the lack of evidence left by microwaves with companies' reluctance to admit their systems have been breached and you'd expect attacks to go unreported.
The good news is that protection isn't too difficult if it's done at the design stage, says Carter. The first thing to do is make sure you've got well-constructed circuits. This means using strong signals that can easily be distinguished from the fuzz of noise generated by microwaves. "You also want to make sure your circuitry only responds at the frequency it's supposed to," he says. So if your computer is intended to respond to signals coming in at 500 megahertz, you want to make sure it won't also respond to signals at twice that frequency--the kind that could be induced by microwaves. Another step is to wire in filters that absorb large surges of current--much like those used to protect against glitches in the mains power supply following lightning strikes.
Regardless of whether these weapons have been used yet, they highlight the way our dependence on electronics could become our Achilles' heel. The next time your computer crashes, don't automatically blame Bill Gates. Just wander over to the window and look out for that unmarked van that sometimes parks across the street. Could there be someone inside sending a blast of microwaves your way?
07May00 - New Scientist Electromagnetic Weapon Article
http://www.newscientist.com/nl/0701/end.html