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E-Bomb Frequently Asked Questions

For the EE Community

by
Dr Carlo Kopp, Associate Fellow AIAA, Senior Member IEEE, PEng
© 2012 Carlo Kopp

Electromagnetic bomb mockup located on a Los Angeles high rise rooftop helicopter pad, prior to the NCIS LA
Episode 3.11 “Higher Power” shoot in October, 2011 (Courtesy of Shane Brennan Productions).

What are the most common questions asked about electromagnetic weapons?

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Why do they work? The “information age” has seen the pervasive use of digital hardware,
mostly based on silicon monolithic technology, across the complete infrastructure of
developed nations, whether in handheld devices, domestic or office equipment,
transportation, production, health, or education. Expose any monolithic semiconductor
device to voltages, whether transient or radiofrequency, in excess of the specification limits
of several Volts, and bad things usually happen. Dielectric insulators break down or leak, and
reverse biased junctions suffer avalanche breakdowns. With a mains or battery power supply
attached to the device, often very little energy is actually needed to initiate a catastrophic
electrical failure - the power supply is what actually delivers the killing blow. Imagine that the
electromagnetic weapon is like a device putting a crack into a dike, and the power supply is
like the body of water which causes the actual damage.

What kinds of electromagnetic weapons exist? Put simply, a great many. A trivial
taxonomy divides such weapons by steady state or transient effect, the former being beam
weapons and the latter being one-shot E-bombs, and then by spectral coverage, whether
wideband or narrowband, and low or high frequency, and emitted power. A wideband low
frequency low power one shot weapon might be a submunition for a cluster bomb using a
rare earth magnet with a high explosive jacket, while a wideband high frequency high power
repetively pulsed weapon might be a Marx bank driven Landecker Ring mounted in the focal
area of a parabolic dish antenna. The term “E-bomb”, which I coined in 1996, has been used
to describe high altitude nuclear Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) bombs, as well as much
smaller non-nuclear devices based on Flux Compression Generators, the latter producing
direct low frequency wideband effects, or used as a one-shot pulsed power supply for High
Power Microwave (HPM) tube such as a Virtual Cathode Oscillator (Vircator).

What is a Flux Compression Generator? Invented by the late Max Fowler at Los Alamos
National Laboratories during the 1940s, the FCG is an explosively driven electromagnetic
amplifier. Primed with an initial electrical starting current, a high velocity explosive is used to
mechanically compress the magnetic field, which in turn transfers energy from the explosive
into the magnetic field. While the FCG disintegrates during operation, in operation it
produces an enormously powerful pulse of electrical current. Cascading two or three FCGs
can yield hundredfold amplication of the initial pulse, which is usually produced by a high
voltage capacitive device called a Marx Bank. The biggest FCGs have produced peak
power outputs of many GigaWatts.

Why use a Vircator? Microwave devices like the Vircator allow the power produced by the
FCG to be quite precisely focussed against a target area up to hundreds of metres or more
away from the FCG, which left to itself, produces most damage only within tens of metres.
The antenna attached to the Vircator is not unlike the reflector in a torch or car headlight.
Ordinary inverse square law physics then apply, with field strength diminishing with distance.
Choose the right E-bomb power, antenna gain, and distance, and you can achieve a
reasonably precise peak electrical field strength over an intended target area.

How does the microwave power couple into targets? Place a digital device into a
microwave oven, turn on the oven, and then see if the device still works. Likely it won't.
Microwave radiation will have penetrated into the device through cracks, crevices, cooling
grills and exposed wiring. Much the same happens with a microwave E-bomb. Mains power
wiring and copper network cabling will behave like an antenna, and while the E-bomb is
radiating, electrical standing waves will appear on the cables, producing large voltages at
the ends of the cables, where devices are attached. Gaps, loose panels, cooling grilles and
other openings, as well as antennas, may also allow the radiation into the equipment.
Electrically lethal field strengths for consumer equipment vary between 10 kiloVolts/metre up
to 30 kiloVolts/metre.

What is a cascade failure? In a large interconnected system, like a power grid or computer
network, a cascade failure arises when the failure of one device triggers an overload and
failure in another, and the damage effects then propagate bringing down much, most or all of
the network. E-bombs have the potential to produce massive cascade failures in a pervasive
digital insfrastructure, as they can cause simultaneous massed failures in a large percentage
of electronic equipment, if not all electronic equipment, within the lethal footprint of the
weapon. Switchmode power supplies blowing out can produce electrical spikes in a power
grid, and having hundreds or thousands fail simultaneously across several square miles of
grid can produce damage effects in areas peripheral to the lethal footprint itself.

How easy are E-bombs to build? Any nation with the technology to design and build a
nuclear bomb will be capable of designing a non-nuclear E-bomb, and mass producing it.
The main challenge for entrants into this game is having a sufficient pool of competent

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physicists to design devices like FCGs and Vircators. The technology to construct all of the
components in such a bomb would be available in a 1950s university physics lab. With an
accurate set of drawings, an FCG could be constructed in a suburban garage for several
hundred dollars of cost in uncontrolled materials, other than the requirement for several
kilograms of C4, Semtex or other high velocity castable explosive.

How likely is a terrorist E-bomb attack? How likely is a tsunami, volcanic eruption, big
solar flare or meteor impact? Given the pervasive use of highly interconnected digital
infrastructure in developed nations and its resulting vulnerability to such attack, and the
relative simplicity of such weapons technology, the use of such weapons is ultimately,
inevitable. Determining how soon such weapons will be deployed by terrorists is a trickier
proposition, since they tend to operate in secrecy. Once we see E-bombs deployed by
military forces as standard tactical or strategic weapons, which will happen through this
decade, the odds of a terrorist organisation acquiring them with or without the consent of the
deploying nation go up enormously. With proven and robust weapon designs in circulation,
terrorists then have the option of reverse engineering them or using them directly.

How can we protect ourselves from E-bombs? The simple answer is electro-magnetic
hardening of the infrastructure, which involves making digital equipment and power supplies
"hardened" to resist high electrical fields, using optical fibres rather than metallic cables for
network connections, and putting protection devices into antenna feeds and mains power
interfaces. There is little point in this being done by individual home users since having a
working computer without a working network or power grid is not very helpful. Hardening
requires legislation to make it mandatory for all critical national infrastructure, spanning both
government services and commercial service providers, across all industry sectors. Is this
achievable? As the Y2K experience over a decade ago shows, the answer is yes. Will it be
expensive? That depends on how the problem is tackled. If equipment is built hardened from
the outset, the cost penalty may be as little as 10-20% of the build cost. Replacing copper
networks with fibre will be costly, but it is also an impending necessity to get genuinely high
data rates across national network infrastructures, and reduce urban/suburban background
noise levels.

If nobody uses an E-bomb against us, is hardening a waste of time and money? This
is the perennial question arising with all military technologies. If you do not deploy it, an
enemy will, and will then use it to an advantage. If you do deploy protective measures, the
enemy may be discouraged or deterred. In the case of electromagnetic hardening, there are
other good reasons for putting it in. Annually insurance companies pay out considerable
funds to compensate subscribers for electrical damage produced by lightning strikes and
main power grid transient spikes. More importantly, we have observed in recent years
several incidents in which solar weather variations produced significant mains grid outages
over large areas, often with considerable electrical collateral damage. An unusually powerful
event of this kind hitting the CONUS or EU could produce a major mess, on the scale of a
nuclear EMP attack. Well designed hardening would thus not only protect against hostile
governments, state sponsored terrorists, and free-lance terrorists, it would also protect
against naturally arising electrical damage effects.

What can I do about overcoming this risk? The simple answer is to write to your local
legislator, and do your best to educate them to the very real risks which unhardened
infrastructure presents in an genuinely electromagnetically hostile environment. The
electromagnetic weapons community has done this over and over again for nearly two
decades, but has frequently not been listened to. Only the United States has draft legislation,
yet to become law, dealing with aspects of this matter. Until the legislatures across
developed nations understand this is a real risk, and not science fiction, the necessary
legislation will not be produced, and if produced, will not become law. For better or worse,
legislators in democracies react primarily to the weight of numbers. Small numbers of
researchers with PhDs will mostly be seen as less important than large numbers of
concerned citizens, especially if the subject matter is esoteric and difficult to understand.

Further Reading:

Kopp, Carlo, The E-Bomb Threat and WMD Terrorism, Interview with Dr. Karen Carth for
ISRIA, International Security Research & Intelligence Agency, 28th June, 2006.

Kopp, Carlo, A Doctrine for the Use of ElectroMagnetic Pulse Bombs, Air Power Studies
Centre Paper No.15, Royal Australian Air Force, July 1993. (PDF 61691 bytes)

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Kopp, Carlo, The E-Bomb - A Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction, InfoWarCon 5
Conference Paper, Proceedings of InfoWarCon 5, NCSA, September 1996 (PPT).

Kopp, Carlo, The Electromagnetic Bomb - A Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction, Air
Chronicles Paper, USAF CADRE Air Chronicles, October 1996, Paper (HTML); Russian
Translation Part 1, Part 2; Mirror@GlobalSecurity.org; Mirror@APA

Kopp, Carlo, An Introduction to the Technical and Operational Aspects of the

Electromagnetic Bomb, Air Power Studies Centre Paper No.50, Royal Australian Air
Force, November 1996. (PDF 394009 bytes)

Ertekin, Necati, E-Bomb: The Key Element of the Contemporary Military-Technical

Revolution, MEng Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, September, 2008
(PDF).

Prischepenko, Alexander B., Video (Russian language): Electromagnetic Weapons:

Myths and Reality, Popular Mechanics Seminar, November, 2010.

Kopp, Carlo, Hardening Your Computing Assets, Technical Report, posted on

infowar.com, March 1997 [previously published in Open Systems Review, February,
1997]. (HTML)

Kopp, Carlo and Pose, Ronald, Electromagnetic Considerations for Computer System
Design, Computer Architecture '97 Selected Papers of the 2nd Australasian Conference,
Springer-Verlag Singapore Pte Ltd, Singapore, 269-287, 19pp.

Kopp, Carlo, Considerations on the Use of Airborne X-band Radar as a Microwave

Directed-Energy Weapon, Journal of Battlefield Technology, vol 10, issue 3, Argos Press
Pty Ltd, Australia, pp. 19-25.

Neuber, Andreas, Explosively driven pulsed power: helical magnetic flux compression
generators, Google eBook, Springer Science & Business, 15/09/2005 - Science - 280
pages.

Benford, James, Swegle, John Allan, Schamiloglu, Edl, High power microwaves, CRC
Press, 05/02/2007 - Technology & Engineering - 531 pages.

Landecker, K.; Skattebol, L.V.; Gowdie, D.R.R., Single-spark ring transmitter,

Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume: 59 Issue: 7, July, 1971, pp 1082 - 1090.

Kopp, Carlo, E-Bomb Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Technical Note, posted on
GlobalSecurity.org, 2003.

Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse
(EMP) Attack / Rep. Roscoe Bartlett on Electro Magnetic Pulse

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