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August 19, 2006
N. Korea Planning Nuclear Test
Q. Could NK rig up a electromagnetic pulse (aka EMP) bomb in conjunction with normal explosives to mimick the EMPs coming from a nuclear blast?
A. In late September 2001, Popular Mechanics published an article outlining the possibility of construcing an e-bomb. The article focused on flux compression generator bombs (FCGs), which date back to the 1950s. This sort of e-bomb has a fairly simple, potentially inexpensive design, illustrated below. It is simple enough that North Korea could probably pull it off.
This conceptual bomb design comes from this report written by Carlo Kopp, a defense analyst. The design concept has been widely available to the public for some time. NOTE: Nobody would be able to construct a functioning e-bomb from this description alone.
The bomb consists of a metal cylinder (called the armature), which is surrounded by a coil of wire (the stator winding). The armature cylinder is filled with high explosive, and a sturdy jacket surrounds the entire device. The stator winding and the armature cylinder are separated by empty space. The bomb also has a power source, such as a bank of high density capacitors, which can be connected to the stator. Lately, hi-density capacitors on the order of an entire Farad or more have become widely available to the public from those skull crushing stereo systems used in hip-hop cars for Richter-Scale bass note reproduction...they could be used for a device like this.
It's basically just a high explosives driven electrical generator.
Here's the sequence of events when the bomb goes off:
A switch connects the capacitors to the stator, sending a huge instantaneous electrical current through the wires. This generates an intense magnetic field. A fuze mechanism ignites the explosive material. The explosion travels as a wave through the middle of the armature cylinder. As the explosion makes its way through the cylinder, the cylinder comes in contact with the stator winding. This creates a short circuit, cutting the stator off from its power supply. The moving short circuit compresses the magnetic field, generating an intense electromagnetic burst which travels down the length of the barrel. This device can actually be aimed.
This type of weapon would affect a relatively small area -- nothing on the order of a nuclear attack -- but it could do some serious damage and mimic an EMP pulse from a traditional fission bomb. But then there's the release of all sorts of hi-energy particles that would be missing, so its still possible that our satellites would not verify a successful fission device test.
Our thanks to Mr. Anthony Watts for submitting this information.
Posted by Post Scripts at August 19, 2006 10:19 AM
Comments
Ok, add to this a large quantity of yellow cake Uranium,(Iraq has hundreds of tons of it, why shouldn't North Korea?) wouldn't that make a pretty good radiological device? Maybe something good enough to look like a nuke blast that went wrong but makes us think they are closer to a functioning device than they actually are.
Posted by: Toby Stahler at August 20, 2006 03:52 AM