I have visited labs in Russia since 1991 and labs in China since 2006, and the investment being made by China dwarfs activity in the U.S. Today, research in high-power microwaves continues in the U.S. Credit: Edl Schamiloglu, University of New Mexico, CC BY-ND This high-power microwave generator built in the Soviet Union continues to operate in Edl Schamiloglu’s lab at the University of New Mexico. I had a fruitful decade of collaboration with my Russian colleagues, which swiftly ended following Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, I and other American scientists gained access to Russian pulsed power accelerators, like the SINUS-6 that is still working in my lab. The development of this technology led to a subset of the U.S.-Soviet arms race – a microwave power derby. For comparison, the output power of today’s typical microwave ovens is around a thousand watts – a million times smaller. Converting 10% of that beam power into microwaves using standard microwave tube technology that dates back to the 1940s generates 1 gigawatt of microwaves. Plasma physicists at the time realized that if you could generate, for example, a 1-megavolt electron beam with 10-kiloamp current, the result would be a beam power of 10 billion watts, or gigawatts. ![]() That’s more voltage than the highest-voltage long-distance power transmission lines, and about the amount of current in a lightning bolt. Pulsed power generates short electrical pulses that have very high electrical power, meaning both high voltage – up to a few megavolts – and large electrical currents – tens of kiloamps. They were enabled by the development of pulsed power in the 1960s. These types of directed energy microwave devices came on the scene in the late 1960s in the U.S. Air Force’s high-power microwave anti-drone weapon THOR. Two good examples are Boeing’s Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), which is a high-power microwave source mounted in a missile, and Tactical High-power Operational Responder (THOR), which was recently developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory to knock out swarms of drones.Ī news report about the U.S. The directed high-power microwaves damage equipment, particularly electronics, without killing nearby people. ![]() Directed energy microwave weapons convert energy from a power source – a wall plug in a lab or the engine on a military vehicle – into radiated electromagnetic energy and focus it on a target. But as the Havana syndrome reports show, these pulses of energy can harm people, as well.Īs an electrical and computer engineer who designs and builds sources of high-power microwaves, I have spent decades studying the physics of these sources, including work with the U.S. High-power microwave weapons are generally designed to disable electronic equipment. But the technology behind the suspected weapons is well understood and dates back to the Cold War arms race between the U.S. The report doesn’t clear up who targeted the embassies or why they were targeted. A committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields concluded that directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy is the “most plausible mechanism” to explain the illness, dubbed Havana syndrome. embassy staff and CIA officers off and on over the last four years in Cuba, China, Russia and other countries appears to have been caused by high-power microwaves, according to a report released by the National Academies. The mystery ailment that has afflicted U.S. ![]() Air Force microwave weapon is designed to knock down drones by frying their electronics.
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