February 17, 2003
Guardian Unlimited: U.S. Will Test "Death Ray" on Iraq

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | John Sutherland explains why the US wants to attack Iraq

John Sutherland

Monday February 17, 2003

"I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle" says Shakespeare's soldier, the night before Agincourt. The "cause", the old sweats agree, is the only thing that can justify the next day's carnage. And here we are again, on the eve of battle. What then is the cause that has taken 46,000 British troops to the Gulf? Oil? Payback for the failed hit on dad? Homeland defence?

Add weapons-testing to the causa belli. Samurai knights, one is told, were permitted to try the cutting edge of their sword on the neck of any luckless (and soon headless) passing peasant.

The battlefield will be the testing ground for the US samurai. No more rhesus monkeys or pigs but real, live Iraqis.

In Afghanistan, the big new toy was the thermobaric bomb - the 15,000lb Daisycutter. It ploughed underground to release a "tsunami of air pressure". Your lungs were suddenly where your nose used to be. The bomb had been used twice in Gulf war one without success. Bunkers were obstinately unbusted. In 2001 it was profusely dropped on the Tora Bora cave complex. But, as Osama's recent bulletin told us, his warriors simply dug little holes elsewhere and escaped, their daisies uncut.

The newer, smarter weapon to be battlefield-tested in Gulf war two will be that fantasy of every sci-fi writer, a death-ray. The HPM (high-power microwave) bomb is the first viable product from America's top-secret Dew (directed energy weapon) programme. It is described as 100 lightning bolts, focused into a single pulse of radiation equivalent to two billion watts. Wow! The HPM bomb fries any electronic equipment within its impact area: computers, motors, radar. It all conks out, leaving the enemy defenceless.

The bomb is mechanically simple, robust, compact and - most important of all - ready to lock and load. "Vircator" (sounds Latin, but it is just short for Virtual Cathode Oscillator) has been fitted to small AGM-86 cruise missiles, carried by the cluster on B52s.

Currently, Vircator's destructive radius is a puny 300ft (they are working on that). But, if aimed precisely, it can penetrate underground without needing to blast its way into Saddam's bunkers. Well-earthed wire mesh built into the concrete fabric affords protection - but cunning radiation will eel its way through ventilation shafts, cracks, wires, radio antennae. You can burrow, but you can't hide.

The HPM arsenal has had highest priority in the run up to the war. It is, as the Pentagon coyly puts it, "the top item in our boutique of capabilities". And, in the past few weeks, it has been sold to the American public as a weapon of mass non-destruction - the Mother Teresa of bombs. "What's good about it," the Pentagon says, "is that it doesn't harm people." Regurgitating PR releases, the American press has hailed HPM as a humane "wonder weapon".

The only danger, apparently, is to those with pacemakers or on life-support systems. Since Saddam buries his nastiest labs under hospitals, that thesis may well be tested - having a pacemaker explode in your chest just might be classified as "harm".

Although not primarily an anti-personnel device, those who have been exposed to HPM report that its effect is agonising. The radiation penetrates below the skin, boiling nerve cells. It can blind. It induces uncontrollable panic (early research into HPM was as a crowd control agent).

Will the HPM bomb be employed as a "precision" weapon? Or as part of the declared "shock and awe" strategy to terrify the general population? Will it be used to destroy what infrastructure the last war left working? Will Iraqi civilians serve as guinea pigs? No one knows what the long-term effect of microwave exposure is. And, frankly, no one this side of the Tigris and Euphrates gives a damn. Peasant, bare your neck!

Posted by Brian Stefans at February 17, 2003 06:58 PM
Comments

It is unfortunate that the United States appears to be testing semi nuclear devices on the designated enemy with dirty munitions. When ammunition is encased with depleted uranium, it is volatile enough to penetrate tank armor, cave walls, and dependent upon the structure of the encasement, as in the case with tank killer shells, penetrate the armor and meld the soldier contained therein to the interior of the tank, or retain its integrity until it reaches its test site, such as the confines of a CIA constructed mountain shelter, not unlike Tora Bora. The trace of these weapons is plutonium, which is found everywhere our armed forces have made their mark since Operation Desert Storm. One need not be a Madame Curie to understand why those exposed to the relatively new weapons to be wielded in Operation Enduring Freedom may get a hint and then a debilitating cancer so we may penetrate further and more precisely in our inseminations. As for the HMP, it is a clean offshoot of an EMP, the electromagnetic pulse radiated from the fusion or fission of radioactive material. Though Many Japanese civilians outside the radius of the blast and subsequent fallout of fat man and little boy didn't suffer physically, immediately, geneticists have detected a rapid mutation of the human genome composing those, and their lineage, exposed to the magnetic pulse, a percussive wave generated with such intensity it disturbed the nuclear/atomic fabric of our being. I mention this as a non-scientist and a Republican. One must know one's enemy to befriend him.

Posted by: Thomas Mediodia on February 18, 2003 02:42 AM

Hello Folks,nice site youre running!

Posted by: Preteen on October 12, 2003 12:54 PM

nice site, you know

Posted by: Lolita! on October 14, 2003 05:16 PM

Nice site you have!

Posted by: lolita on November 4, 2003 03:36 AM

http://www.buergerwelle.de/d/doc/gesund/munzert-directed-energy-weapons.htm

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/kopp/apjemp.html

http://anyboard.net/gov/gatorscage/posts/780.html


http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/164/documentid/1748/history/3,656,164,1748


http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/834929.htm


http://liun.hektik.org/hightech/herf/ISTAS.htm


http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/hv/marx.htm


http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/nis/groups/nis10/index.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0302-01.htm

Take your television apart.
Take your microwave apart.
Leave all the electronics in tact.
Build a metal box.
Put it around the thing that makes the microwaves. Note from John: this is called the "magnetron". It may look

something like this:
Attach the box to a natural ground.
Put a 1 foot length of PVC pipe extending from the "nozzle" of the magnetron.
Point it at something useless and preferably made of metal and plastic.
Get away.
Hide behind metal.
Turn it on.
Fear what you have created.

Glubco takes no responsibility for people doing stupid things with appliances.
Glubco - Deny Everything Copyright 1997.

Posted by: Morons on December 2, 2003 05:59 AM

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

Posted by: Joan on January 18, 2004 06:36 PM

Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.

Posted by: Lionel on January 18, 2004 06:37 PM

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

Posted by: Ralph on January 18, 2004 06:37 PM

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

Posted by: Henry on January 18, 2004 06:38 PM

For this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.

Posted by: Gregory on January 18, 2004 06:38 PM
-->