EMP Guns Still More Mythical Than a Unicorn

Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus has a unicorn. Its a goat with an implanted single horn, and it trots around the three ring circus to the delight of children and parents alike. So a unicorn at least exists. Electro-Magnetic-Pulse weapons that are supposed to shut down electronics? That’s still mythical. Geeks Are Sexy posted the following video:

The video is for Popular Science’s TV show on the Science Channel. Can this giant hunk of steel cylinders and copper tubing really zap a SUV and cause it to turn off? The answer is NO. Notice that when the weapon is fired you don’t see the ignition keys? Just the dash lights? Yeah, the same thing will happen if you turn off the keys.

Also notice that the camera used to film the vehicle failure didn’t even flutter? Those cameras have many more sensitive electronics than a sturdy SUV, I guarantee it. Had they really wanted to prove to the world that this device exists, they could have used scientific instruments to record and show the output.

For years, the military, the government and others have worried about the existence of an electro-magnetic weapon. Supposedly if one were fired at a computer network, it could render the CPU’s and disk arrays inert and could cause massive economic devastation in the hands of a terrorist or hacker crew. George Smith of the Crypt Newsletter has been writing for over ten years about how the EMP weapons just don’t exist. Here’s one such example:

EMP Gun: The Chupacabras of Infowar by George Smith — July 22, 1997

International terrorists are downloading plans for a superweapon from the Internet! Russian gangsters and hackers are responsible! Banks in England and Russia have been destroyed by it! The Irish Republican Army is going to use it next! Look out, here comes the chupacabras of cyberspace, always dreaded but never seen: the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) gun.

Said to be capable of corrupting computer circuitry on corporate networks with ionizing radiation, microwaves or radio waves, the EMP gun strikes from afar even as secretaries labor at their desks.

The only sticking point is that no one has actually produced one for public examination.

Neal Singer of Sandia National Laboratory called it an interesting urban legend. Sandia is one of the national laboratories responsible for weaponization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The lab has also done extensive research into generating — and shielding against — electromagnetic pulse effects.

The technical point that hangs the claims, according to Sandia’s Singer and others interviewed, is the generation of “militarily interesting” — a euphemism for destructive — amounts of electromagnetic pulse. To guarantee the effects attributed to the weapon requires the release of sufficient power, be it in the form of gamma rays or microwaves, that anyone triggering the weapon and everyone in the vicinity of the target would be killed or seriously injured. The science doesn’t jibe with the EMP gun’s definition as a homebrewed, surreptitious, nonlethal terrorist weapon.

So why go through the effort to produce a faked video of a technology that doesn’t exist? The answer is that the company that makes the mythical weapon, Eureka Aerospace, is a tiny defense contracting agency that is desperately seeking federal funding. And they’ve been telling the world that this prototype has existed for over 6 years! You’d think that the LA Police, who were quoted in their first press release and again 6 years later in this video, would get tired of waiting for Eureka to cough up a working version. Hell, if the technology really existed, the guys from Junk Yard Wars would have produced one in an 8 hour period!

The R&D lab’s CEO, James Tatoian, is a major democratic donor too. One of his recipients of campaign money was sheriff for LA County, which may explain why one of his employees so happily went on camera for the news to promote this fictitious weapon system. Of course, democrats always promote things that just don’t work, like universal health care and wealth redistribution, so it makes sense that he is promoting a fictional technology. And even with Obama in the White House, the DoD still isn’t buying his EMP gun.

You want to know who really believes that the government controls electromagnetic waves? Check out this guy, who claims he’s had to move his family twice to get away from the CIA brain-wave guns, but they keep finding him. He has taken to the streets with a dash-mounted video camera to film all of his neighbors- 95 films in all- who are apparently “gang stalkers” who make his life miserable. If he only knew this technology just doesn’t exist.