Superweapons

You can never have enough doomsday devices.


Megavolt!
As in, the Darkwing Duck villain, you pagans.

Anyway, the Pentagon is putting out a relatively small contract to research EMP weapons. They want to be able to zap everything electronic in a wide swath with relatively little damage to the human population. Or just, you know, to knock out all the electronic defenses, tanks, planes, phones and such before they torch the place the old fashioned way.

Either or.

The HERA notice says the Air Force would like zappers delivering peak power in the multi-gigawatt range, or even more.

"Research and experiments will be conducted with the goal of... increasing power (trillion watt range)... mating advanced weapons concept devices to HPM generators..."

Millimetre-wave pulses in the lotsa-gigawatt intensity range - let alone terawatt - can run up against "air breakdown limits" where the very air itself starts to glow with the energy being beamed through it. While no doubt very cool in appearance, from the war boffins' point of view this is a problem as they want the power to get into the enemy's circuitry rather than waste itself in flashy pyrotechnics. They'd like candidates for the $75m to have "innovative methods to overcome air breakdown limits" up their sleeve.

Among other things, the lucky organisation will also need plenty of staff suitable for a "CRITICAL NUCLEAR WEAPON DESIGN INFORMATION" security clearance. This is probably to do with the fact that most of the decent HPM pulses produced so far have been side effects of atomic bomb explosions.

All this is pretty tasty stuff: but it isn't a death ray, or anyway isn't meant to be. The idea is to mount strikes against "targets set such as... facilities with electronic systems" or "centers of gravity". The electropulse blast would knock out communications, data, and/or power grid networks, by overloading their circuits with fatal RF-induced spikes.

ZERT!

Source: The Register

If the Scarecrow Worked For the Government
The Pentagon, it seems, is interested in developing what they colorfully call 'contagious fear'. Less dramatically, they want to see if humans have the same sort of alarm pheromones that make other animals panic and flee, and if so, can they be, you know, sprayed on people we don't like.

merican military researchers are working to uncover and harness the most terrifying chemical imaginable: that most primal odor, the scent of fear.

Pheromones are chemicals released by animals as signals to their own kind: for sex, for territorial marking, and more. They're often detected in the olfactory membranes. But there's more to pheromones than attraction. Many animals have an alarm pheromone which is used to signal danger; aphids, for example, use it to cause their fellow lice to flee.

Now, the US Army is trying to track down and harness people's smell of fear. The military has backed a study on the "Identification and Isolation of Human Alarm Pheromones," which "focused on the Preliminary Identification of Steroids of Interest in Human Fear Sweat."

The contagious aspect, btw, comes from the idea that, once a person is zapped with the fear pheromone, they'll start cranking out their own into the local environment, replenishing the supply and becoming a carrier.

The fact that humans respond weakly to pheromones, if at all, could put a damper on this whole thing though.

Source: Wired