PHOTO: CHIP SIMONS

Microwave weapons researcher Edl Schamiloglu sits in front of the Pulserad-110A accelerator, which his lab at the University of New Mexico uses to produce single 100-nanosecond pulses of electron beams, each pulse emitting hundreds of megawatts of power.

In these media-fueled times, when war is a television spectacle and wiping out large numbers of civilians is generally frowned upon, the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks, yet harm neither hide nor hair. Such a weapon might shut down telecommunications networks, disrupt power supplies, and fry an adversary's countless computers and electronic gadgets, yet still leave buildings, bridges, and highways intact. It would strike with precision, in an instant, and leave behind no trace of where it came from.

In fact, it almost certainly is already here, in the form of high-power microwave (HPM) weapons. As their name suggests, HPMs generate an intense "blast" of electromagnetic waves in the microwave frequency band (hundreds of megahertz to tens of gigahertz) that is strong enough to overload electrical circuitry. Most types of matter are transparent to microwaves, but metallic conductors, like those found in metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS), metal-semiconductor, and bipolar devices, strongly absorb them, which in turn heats the material.

An HPM weapon can induce currents large enough to melt circuitry. But even less intense bursts can temporarily disrupt electrical equipment or permanently damage ICs, causing them to fail minutes, days, or even weeks later. People caught in the burst of a microwave weapon would, by contrast, be untouched and might not even know they'd been hit. (There is, however, an effort to build a microwave weapon for controlling crowds; a person subjected to it definitely feels pain and is forced to retreat.)

"HPM sources are maturing, and one day, in the very near future, they will help revolutionize how U.S. soldiers fight wars," says Edl Schamiloglu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and one of the leading researchers in this burgeoning field.

The fact that we seldom hear about HPM weapons only adds to their exoticism. Last spring, stories leaked to the press suggested that the Pentagon, after decades of research, had finally deployed such a device in Iraq. And when news footage showed a U.S. bomb destroying an Iraqi TV station, many informed onlookers suspected it was an electromagnetic "e-bomb."

"I saw the detonation, and then I saw the burst—which wasn't much. If they took the station out with that blast, I strongly suspect that we used Iraq as a proving ground" for HPMs, says Howard Seguine, an expert on emerging weapons technology with Decisive Analytics Corp., in Arlington, Va.

But while the U.S. military proudly paraded assorted new war-making technology during its conquest of Iraq, from unmanned combat aerial vehicles to a new satellite-based tracking network, it remained tight-lipped about this "mother of all weapons." Asked at a 5 March news briefing to confirm the rumor, General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. forces during the war, would only say, "I can't talk to you about that because I don't know anything about it."

Military secrecy is nothing new, of course. What is known about microwave weapons is that the U.S. military has actively pursued them since the 1940s, when scientists first observed the powerful electromagnetic shock wave that accompanied atmospheric nuclear detonations, suggesting a new class of destructiveness. While much of the work on HPMs remains classified, the Pentagon has also recently sponsored a number of U.S. university laboratories to work out the basic principles of microwave weapons, including reliable and compact nonnuclear ways of generating microwave pulses.

Many of those results are being published in the open literature. In fact, all you need is a reasonable grasp of physics and electrical engineering to appreciate the ingeniousness of microwave weapons. Anyone with a technical bent could probably also build a crude e-bomb in their garage, a thought that security-minded folks find rather troubling.