There is not any proven tech that can take down an icbm reliably.
This is reassuring
propaganda plain and simple.
If the US and allies could take down a rocket they'd shoot down every NK test missle just to make a point.
Absolutely delusional saying this system can take down consumer drones and then extrapolate that out to a missle that is travelling at speeds measured in machs.
Even with drones I don't see how this is more effective than radio signal and gps hijacking which can control a malicious drone rather than destroy it in place. Various companies already do this incredibly well, shoutout to D13.
Certainly there are fair reasons for hiding capabilities, and they seem quite adept at determining what is going into the sea or not, but in a war of words environment if it was a certainty as THAAD propenents seem to claim a single shootdown would be a huge PR blow for nk.
It's just not reliable enough to risk and as such is still a last resort measure.
Defending against a nuclear ICBM is not possible to do reliably. It's a sad reality.
As long as they don't rely on foreign supply for their missiles[1], they can manufacture them forever without having to pay anything to anybody.
[1]: it may sound like a bold hypothesis, but I doubt anyone would ship missile materials to North Korea. China could, of course, but that would be a bit risky diplomatically.
The place is an autocracy. The only way they will run out, is if nobody, and i mean absolutely nobody, wants to trade with them, officially or under the table.
And with NK slaves showing up in Polish shipyards, that is highly unlikely.
why would they need money? Why would they need to trade with anyone? It is not like North Korea is infinitely small and the earth infinitely big. The earth is a small globe, and NK is a region of that globe, one which almost certainly can be an autarky.
This isn't about shooting down a rocket. This is about disrupting the launch complex. It's about sending enough energy into a complex that computers, the ones in the offices, stop working reliably enough to launch. It is possible, but imho would require a dish far to large to fit on an aircraft. So I agree that it doesn't exist, that this is propaganda.
EM interference is why launch complexes use fiber. You don't want a lighting strike near a 2km cable to cause a squib to fire somewhere. Lighting protections also protect against EM attack.
I expect it must be put in something that can bring it close to its target to be effective. O(n²) power drop off for electromagnetic radiation is tough to beat at a distance of kilometers.
You can get a way smaller constant, but the area of a cone still drops off as O(n²) with distance. You would need collimination to beat that, and even then, there’s atmospheric dispersion.
"If the US and allies could take down a rocket they'd shoot down every NK test missle just to make a point."
I'm not sure that news is true, shooting down a missile with something that doesn't fly and is not a laser would require an immense power, but anyway, using it on test missiles would be a really bad move: if you have a countermeasure you never use it until when it's really necessary (war) both to keep the surprise element and to give minimum information to the enemy about what you can or -even more important- cannot do.
This story is meant to make the American public more willing to support an attack on NK. Americans are generally happy to support strikes that we view as high tech and not targeting/harming civilians directly.
But in reality any strikes with RF weapons will be accompanied by significant conventional strikes.
I think there is still zero chance that there will be any sort of war between the US and NK. NK holds all the cards and has played them quite effectively. The only question is how much longer our president will continue to bluster embarrassingly before he realizes his actual strategic reality.
One other possibility is that the US would be willing to undertake a strike on NK even if there was a decent chance of NK launching a successful attack on Seoul. In that scenario, the goal of the PR is to help Americans feel that every "high tech" thing possible was done to stop NK and that the casualties were sad but ultimately worthwhile.
US bluster over NK reveals both the failure of power projection toward China and China's full knowledge that the US has more to lose from failed negotiations than China does. China will let this play out slowly and let our leaders act foolish as long as they wish.
It's funny how even in spite of the widespread mockery of our president, there is much less mockery of the foolishness underlying US "tough talk" aimed at NK. I think we believe that the tough talk is aimed at NK and not at the American people.
This story has been all over the news in the last 24 hours, but it's sending my bogometer well into the yellow because Faraday cages are a simple and effective defense against any electromagnetic interference. (That's why you can safely peer into your microwave oven while it's pouting 1500 watts into your leftover lasagna.) So this feels like a Saddam-has-WMDs-style disinformation campaign to me. It also has a whiff of desperation to it since we really so seem to be pretty helpless to stop NK from developing the ability to deliver nukes to the continental U.S. without more collateral damage to Seoul than the American public is likely willing to accept (to say nothing of the residents of Seoul!)
I fear that the ethos of tell-a-lie-often-enought-and-it-becomes-the-truth has permeated very deeply into the U.S. government. That approach often works in politics. In physics, not so much.
I love the explanation I got from my high school physics teacher for why microwaves aren't dangerous to be near; anyone comment on whether it's actually accurate? Or whether I may be misremembering it?
'You can look into the microwave safely because the holes in the grate are smaller than the amplitude and thicker than the frequency of the microwave.'
That can't be right because the amplitude of EM waves has nothing to do with spatial displacements (unlike guitar strings). The way it works is that every point in space has an E (electric) and B (magnetic) field vector which can oscillate around a 3D space. The vectors point towards other places in space, but their meaning is a field strength and direction at a single point. So this diagram[1] is actually describing the EM fields along a single line, not in the volume of space that the (purely illustrative) arrows are drawn in.
The correct understanding of Faraday cages is that their holes must be small relative to the wavelength: this is easy to remember because on a very large wavelength scale you would expect the tiny holes to not be very noticeable, and on a very short wavelength scale you're essentially talking about the light that you can see your food with.
You've got it backwards: the holes are smaller than the wavelength of the microwaves, and the material is thick enough that the eddy currents induced by the microwaves don't generate enough heat to melt the grating.
A satellite dish is actually a mirror telescope for microwaves, with its receiving antenna located at the real image of the distant satellite. But unlike the smooth, shiny mirror of a light telescope, a typical satellite dish is made of dull metallic mesh. Microwaves reflect almost perfectly from this mesh because
Answer: (A) its holes are much smaller than the wavelength of the microwaves.
Not sure what "thicker than the frequency" means, but it's because they're much smaller than the wavelength, which is a few inches, as you can demonstrate with some marshmallows. (Google "measure speed of light with microwave oven".)
Maybe the world should support any country with nuclear weapons in their efforts to build domestic ICBMs. If a nuclear power attacks a country, having it arrive on the tip of an ICBM leaves no doubt where it came from and who is responsible. Using a submarine, shielded shipping container, 4x4 across the Mexican border, etc. to plant and explode a nuclear weapon in the USA or other country would cause much greater long term harm to global political and social systems.
On the other hand, one does not want North Korea armed with hundreds of atomic weapons and the ability to end civilization single-handedly. How about this as an opening offer to North Korea? We will accept you with 10 warheads and end the embargo. You allow full inspections of any location at any time, so the number of warheads can be verified. Seems like new approaches to the North Korea problem are needed as they now have detonated a ~100kT device.
Your response to NK is IMHO exactly what NK wants. They think that having nuclear weapons will get them a seat at the table. Which table I'm not sure. What they want from that point I suspect is more than just elimination of sanctions.
Would it be so terrible to end sactions against North Korea? Trade should rise the middle class North Koreans up, and the last thing a wealthy middle class wants is war. A well fed and housed middle class seems the best insurance against war possible.
This N. Korea standoff is a tough situation. I cannot help but wonder if satellite weaponry exists that the U.S. could use to laser beam their dear leader? [Edited for clarity]
A bit like the UK plan to assassinate Hitler in 1944 which was cancelled as "he was by then considered to be such a poor strategist that it was believed whoever replaced him would probably do a better job of fighting the Allies"
> Thornley also argued that Germany was almost defeated and, if Hitler were assassinated, he would become a martyr to some Germans, and possibly give rise to a myth that Germany might have won if Hitler had survived. Since the idea was not only to defeat Germany but to destroy Nazism in general, that would have been a highly undesirable development.
Hitler was an eloquent and persuasive person who effectively represented/exploited Nazi philosophy. There were certainly (secret) critics of his policies and goals, but he was not some kind of sorcerer with a spell over the German population as if, on his assassination, the Axis powers would shake their heads and blink their eyes and say "wait a minute, are we the baddies?"
The same applies even more to modern politics because modern states are not as totalitarian in their removal of critics - they must therefore have stronger supporters. You cannot blame only Donald Trump or Theresa May or Xi Jinping or Angela Merkel or whoever your opponents figurehead may be; they have huge political parties behind them and are backed by huge numbers of constituents who identify with their message. There are surely strong effects from having these leadership positions, but you also need to reach their base with your message.
From what I know by 1944 pretty much everybody around Hitler knew that their cause was lost. I doubt anybody else would have had the power to continue. And yes, he had a spell over the people around him when you read biographies.
Obviously we will never know but I think at the present taking out Kim Jong Un should be worth consideration.
By that point the Allies (actually originally just Roosevelt, with the others following along) had insisted on unconditional surrender:
"those Germans — and particularly those German generals — who might have been ready to throw Hitler over, and were able to do so, were discouraged from making the attempt by their inability to extract from the Allies any sort of assurance that such action would improve the treatment meted out to their country."
Seoul is near the DMZ, probably closer than San Jose and San Francisco. One would have to take out their entire chain of command to prevent a retaliatory conventional artillery strike on the US bases near the DMZ and Seoul.
That's possible. Based on all the border incidents since the end of the Korean War though it looks like the North Korea side is on a hair trigger to respond.
I was supposing a hypothetical laser attack because it wouldn't be detected like a missile strike would. Therefore, the political need to respond immediately with all out war would be lessened, and maybe take less precedence than the power struggle.
If satellites were not (for good reason!) extremely conservative, I can see a way to turn spy satellite into a deniable blinding weapon for about $10 of parts.
I suspect that North Koreans have heard of Faraday cage and shielding. The missile has no need to communicate with the outside world, it can use astro and inertial navigation systems.
Is this true? Everything I've read says they use mobile launchers (that they bought from China on the basis they had been de-militarized and converted for "logging").
Wow, so the weapon fries Nork electronics and only Nork electronics? Weaponry from other nations as well as domestic electronics and infrastructure are completely unaffected?
I don't seem to be able to edit this comment anymore, but since it's being downvoted so much, perhaps I need to clarify the tone:
Isn't it interesting that this article is written to imply the microwave weapons will specifically target Nork military hardware when it could be used upon other "enemies" and civilian populations too?
This is reassuring propaganda plain and simple.
If the US and allies could take down a rocket they'd shoot down every NK test missle just to make a point.
Absolutely delusional saying this system can take down consumer drones and then extrapolate that out to a missle that is travelling at speeds measured in machs.
Even with drones I don't see how this is more effective than radio signal and gps hijacking which can control a malicious drone rather than destroy it in place. Various companies already do this incredibly well, shoutout to D13.