On May 31, the Department of Defense announced $300 million worth of additional military aid to Ukraine. In this latest package are four kinds of anti-air missiles—meaning missiles meant to shoot down threats in the air—including the AIM-7 air-to-air missile.

The Air Intercept Missile-7 (AIM-7) Sparrow is a guided missile with its origins in the 1940s. It saw its first deployment in 1958, though the missiles of that era are a far cry from the weapons deployed today. The modern version, AIM-7M, substantially improved from early days, has been in service since 1982. It’s used by the US, NATO allies like Italy, Spain, Canada, and others, as well as countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

The AIM-7 is carried by aircraft to destroy other aircraft. In the May 31 package authorized for Ukraine, it is joined by three ground-based anti-air systems. These include Patriot missiles, which can target planes or cruise missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which are human portable and especially useful against low-flying targets like attack helicopters or strafing jets, and Avenger air defense systems. The Avenger mounts multiple Stinger launchers on a turret on the back of a HMMWV (better known as a Humvee) vehicle, and pairs those weapons with a heavy .50 caliber machine gun. This gives it range and flexibility against both aircraft in Stinger range, as well as a cheaper weapon that can hit other flying enemies, like small drones.

“Russia has continued to wage a brutal, completely unprovoked war against Ukraine, launching yet more airstrikes and bombarding Ukrainian cities across the country,” said National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby during a briefing at the White House. The release from the Pentagon paired that statement with the note that Russia recently launched 17 separate air assaults against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in May.

“One of Ukraine’s most urgent requirements is ground-based air defense,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in the same briefing. “And this contact group will continue driving hard to help Ukraine defend the skies. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its sordid bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. And the Kremlin’s cruelty only underscores Ukraine’s need for a stronger, layered ground-based air defense architecture.”    

The three ground-based air defenses make sense in light of this specific call. The AIM-7, which fits into an overall approach of arming Ukraine against Russian aircraft, requires aircraft to launch it. This May, several months after Ukrainian’s president Zelensky asked for artillery, tanks, planes, and Patriot missiles, the Biden administration joined other nations in agreeing to provide F-16 fighter-bombers to the country. These single-engine fighters, used widely across the world, are more than capable of carrying AIM-7 missiles, and while the US models may feature more advanced weapons, the AIM-7 is able to get the job done.

While the exterior form of the Sparrow has remained largely the same for its decades of service, how the missile finds and tracks targets has changed massively over the years. The first Sparrow missiles “used a beam-riding guidance system, in which an aircraft’s fire-control radar would lock on to a target and the missile would fly along the radar beam,” wrote Norman Friedman, in a history of the weapon. That fixed-beam path meant pilots had to keep their plane and radar directed in the same path as when they fired the weapon. It was a plausible use case for jets against propeller-powered bombers, but locking a pilot into a fixed route against a maneuvering plane like an enemy jet would render the missile easily beatable.

In April 1959, Popular Science boasted of an early improvement to the Sparrow III, noting the supersonic guided missiles “packs 50 percent more wallop than its predecessor.” Sparrow IIIs saw action in Vietnam, but the missiles were designed as a way for fighter pilots to shoot down bombers beyond visual line of sight. Over the skies of Vietnam, instead, pilots encountered fast flying and turning fighters.  

The AIM-7M version in use today uses better radar and maneuvering, allowing it to track targets more closely and without requiring the firing jet to maintain a lock on the target. It’s a weapon that had success when used by US pilots in 1990’s Persian Gulf War, and one that would likely prove straightforward to use by Ukraine, once the weapon is attached to planes that can launch it.

This latest military aid is the 39th transfer of such equipment to the country, dating back to August 2021, when Ukraine’s war was limited to reclaiming the Donbas. That was before Russia’s full invasion in February 2022 transformed the ongoing war into an existential threat to Ukraine.

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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Early in the morning of May 3, local Moscow time, a pair of explosions occurred above the Kremlin. Videos of the incident appeared to show two small drones detonating—ultramodern tech lit up against the venerable citadel. The incident was exclusively the domain of Russian social media for half a day, before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it a failed assassination attempt.

What actually happened in the night sky above the Russian capital? It is a task being pieced together in public and in secret. Open-source analysts, examining the information available in the public, have constructed a picture of the event and video release, forming a good starting point.

Writing at Radio Liberty, a US-government-funded Russian-language outlet, reporters Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov point out that a video showing smoke above the Kremlin was published around 3:30 am local time on a Moscow Telegram channel. Twelve hours later, Putin released a statement on the attack, and then, write Dobrynin and Krutov, “several other videos of the night attack appeared, according to which Radio Liberty established that two drones actually exploded in the area of ​​​​the dome of the Senate Palace with an interval of about 16 minutes, arriving from opposite directions. The first caused a small fire on the roof of the building, the second exploded in the air.”

That the drones exploded outside a symbolic target, without reaching a practical one, could be by design, or it could owe to the nature of Kremlin air defense, which may have shot the drones down at the last moment before they became more threatening. 

Other investigations into the origin, nature, and means of the drone incident are likely being carried out behind the closed doors and covert channels of intelligence services. Without being privy to those conversations, and aware that information released by governments is only a selective portion of what is collected, it’s possible to instead answer a different set of questions: could drones do this? And why would someone use a drone for an attack like this?

To answer both, it is important to understand gimmick drones.

What’s a gimmick drone?

Drones, especially the models able to carry a small payload and fly long enough to travel a practical distance, can be useful tools for a variety of real functions. Those can include real-estate photography, crop surveying, creating videos, and even carrying small explosives in war. But drones can also carry less-useful payloads, and be used as a way to advertise something other than the drone itself, like coffee delivery, beer vending, or returning shirts from a dry cleaner. For a certain part of the 2010s, attaching a product to a drone video was a good way to get the media to write about it. 

What stands out about gimmick drones is not that they were doing something only a drone could do, but instead that the people behind the stunt were using a drone as a publicity technique for something else. In 2018, a commercial drone was allegedly used in an assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in which drones flew at Maduro and then exploded in the sky, away from people and without reports of injury. 

As I noted at the time about gimmick drones, “In every case, the drone is the entry point to a sales pitch about something else, a prelude to an ad for sunblock or holiday specials at a casual restaurant. The drone was always part of the theater, a robotic pitchman, an unmanned MC. What mattered was the spectacle, the hook, to get people to listen to whatever was said afterwards.”

Drones are a hard weapon to use for precision assassination. Compared to firearms, poisoning, explosives in cars or buildings, or a host of other attacks, drones represent a clumsy and difficult method. Wind can blow the drones off course, they can be intercepted before they get close, and the flight time of a commercial drone laden with explosives is in minutes, not hours.

What a drone can do, though, is explode in a high-profile manner.

Why fly explosive-laden drones at the  Kremlin?

Without knowing the exact type of drone or the motives of the drone operator (or operators), it is hard to say exactly why one was flown at and blown up above one of Russia’s most iconic edifices of state power. Russia’s government initially blamed Ukraine, before moving on to attribute the attack to the United States. The United States denied involvement in the attack, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said to take any Russian claims with “a very large shaker of salt.”

Asked about the news, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the country fights Russia on its own territory, not through direct attacks on Putin or Moscow. The war has seen successful attacks on Putin-aligned figures and war proponents in Russia, as well as the family of Putin allies, though attribution for these attacks remains at least somewhat contested, with the United States attributing at least one of them to Ukrainian efforts.

Some war commentators in the US have floated the possibility that the attack was staged by Russia against Russia, as a way to rally support for the government’s invasion. However, that would demonstrate that Russian air defenses and security services are inept enough to miss two explosive-laden drones flying over the capital and would be an unusual way to argue that the country is powerful and strong. 

Ultimately, the drone attackers may have not conducted this operation to achieve any direct kill or material victory, but as a proof of concept, showing that such attacks are possible. It would also show that claims of inviolability of Russian airspace are, at least for small enough flying machines and covert enough operatives, a myth. 

In that sense, the May 3 drone incident has a lot in common with the May 1987 flight of Mathias Rust, an amateur pilot in Germany who safely flew a private plane into Moscow and landed it in Red Square, right near the Kremlin. Rust’s flight ended without bloodshed or explosions, and took place in a peacetime environment, but it demonstrated the hollowness of the fortress state whose skies he flew through.

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Last week, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) introduced the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act alongside Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) and numerous other bipartisan co-sponsors. The bill’s objective is as straightforward as its name: ensuring AI will never have a final say in American nuclear strategy.

“While we all try to grapple with the pace at which AI is accelerating, the future of AI and its role in society remains unclear. It is our job as Members of Congress to have responsible foresight when it comes to protecting future generations from potentially devastating consequences,” Rep. Lieu said in the bill’s announcement, adding, “AI can never be a substitute for human judgment when it comes to launching nuclear weapons.”

He’s not the only one to think so—a 2021 Human Rights Watch report co-authored by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic stated that “[r]obots lack the compassion, empathy, mercy, and judgment necessary to treat humans humanely, and they cannot understand the inherent worth of human life.”

[Related: This AI-powered brain scanner can paraphrase your thoughts.]

If passed, the bill would legally codify existing Department of Defense procedures found in its  2022 Nuclear Posture Review, which states that “in all cases, the United States will maintain a human ‘in the loop’ for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment.’’ Additionally, the DOD said that no federal funds could be used to launch nukes by an automated system without “meaningful human control,” according to the bill’s announcement.

The proposed legislation comes at a time when the power of generative AI, including chatbots like ChatGPT, is increasingly part of the public discourse. But the surreal spectrum between “amusing chatbot responses” and “potential existential threats to humanity” is not lost on Lieu. He certainly never thought part of his civic responsibilities would include crafting legislation to stave off a Skynet scenario, he tells PopSci.

As a self-described “recovering computer science major,” Lieu says he is amazed by what AI programs can now accomplish. “Voice recognition is pretty amazing now. Facial recognition is pretty amazing now, although it is more inaccurate for people with darker skin,” he says, referring to long-documented patterns of algorithmic bias. 

The past year’s release of generative AI programs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, however, is when Lieu began to see the potential for harm.

[Related: ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google to talk openly about the dangers of the rapidly emerging tech.]

“It’s creating information and predicting scenarios,” he says of the available tech. “That leads to different concerns, including my view that AI, no matter how smart it gets, should never have operative control of nuclear weapons.”

Lieu believes it’s vital to begin discussing AI regulations to curtail three major consequences: Firs, the proliferation of misinformation and other content “harmful to society.” Second is reining in AI that, while not existentially threatening for humanity, “can still just straight-up kill you.” He references San Francisco’s November 2022 multi-vehicle crash that injured multiple people and was allegedly caused by a Tesla engaged in its controversial Autopilot self-driving mode.

“When your cellphone malfunctions, it isn’t going at 50 miles-per-hour,” he says.

Finally, there is the “AI that can destroy the world, literally,” says Lieu. And this is where he believes the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act can help, at least in some capacity. Essentially, if the bill becomes law, AI systems could still provide analysis and strategic suggestions regarding nuclear events, but ultimate say-so will rest firmly within human hands.

[Related: A brief but terrifying history of tactical nuclear weapons.]

Going forward, Lieu says there needs to be a larger regulatory approach to handling AI issues due to the fact Congress “doesn’t have the bandwidth or capacity to regulate AI in every single application.” He’s open to a set of AI risk standards agreed upon by federal agencies, or potentially a separate agency dedicated to generative and future advanced AI. On Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled plans to offer $140 million in funding to new research centers aimed at monitoring and regulating AI development.

When asked if he fears society faces a new “AI arms race,” Lieu concedes it is “certainly a possibility,” but points to the existence of current nuclear treaties. “Yes, there is a nuclear weapons arms race, but it’s not [currently] an all-out arms race. And so it’s possible to not have an all-out AI arms race,” says Lieu.

“Countries are looking at this, and hopefully they will get together to say, ‘Here are just some things we are not going to let AI do.’”

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On April 4, Australia’s Department of Defence announced the award of $12.9 million to defense giant QinetiQ for a laser weapon. The move followed years of work and interest by Australia’s government in developing lasers for the battlefields of tomorrow. What is most ambitious about the Australian research into laser weapons is not the modest funding to QinetiQ, but a powerful goal set by the Department of Defence in 2020: Australia wants a laser weapon powerful enough to stop a tank.

Laser weapons, more broadly referred to as directed energy, are a science fiction concept with a profoundly mundane reality. Instead of the flashy beams or targeted phasers of Star Wars or Star Trek, lasers work most similarly to a magnifying lens held to fry a dry leaf, concentrating photons into an invisible beam that destroys with heat and time. Unlike the child’s tool for starting fires, modern directed energy weapons derive their power from electricity, either generated on site or stored in batteries. 

Most of the work of laser weapons, in development and testing, has so far focused on relatively small and fragile targets, like drones, missiles, or mortar rounds. Lasers are energy intensive. When PopSci had a chance to try using a 10-kilowatt laser against commercial drones, it still took seconds to destroy each target, a process aided by all the sensors and accouterments of a targeting pod. Because lasers are concentrated heat energy over time, cameras to track targets, and gimbals to hold and stabilize the beam against the target, all ensure that as much of the beam as possible stays focused. Once part of a drone was burned through, the whole system would crash to the ground, gravity completing the task.

Tanks, by design and definition, are the opposite of lightly armored and fragile flying machines. That makes Australia’s plan to destroy tanks by laser all the more daring.

Tanks for the idea

In the summer of 2020, Australia’s Department of Defence released a strategy called the 2020 Force Structure Plan. This document, like similar versions in other militaries, offers a holistic vision of what kinds of conflicts the country is prepared to fight in the future. Because the strategy is also focused on procurement, it offers useful insight into the weapons and vehicles the military will want to buy to meet those challenges.

The tank-killing laser comes in the section on Land Combat Support. “A future program to develop a directed energy weapon system able to be integrated onto [Australian Defence Forces] protected and armoured vehicles, and capable of defeating armoured vehicles up to and including main battle tanks. The eventual deployment of directed energy weapons may also improve land force resilience by reducing the force’s dependence on ammunition stocks and supply lines,” reads the strategy.

The latter part of the statement is a fairly universal claim across energy weapons development. While laser weapons are power-intensive, they do not need individual missiles, bullets, or shells, the same as what a chemical explosive or kinetic weapon might. Using stored and generated energy, instead of specifically manufactured ammunition pieces, could enable long-term operation on even field-renewable sources, if available. This could also get the shot per weapon use down below the cost of a bullet, though it will take many shots for that to equal the whole cost of developing a laser system.

But getting a laser to punch through the armor of a tank is a distinct and challenging task. A drone susceptible to melting by laser might have a plastic casing a couple millimeters thick. Tank armor, even for older versions of modern tanks, can be at least 600 mm thick steel or composite, and is often thicker. This armor can be enhanced by a range of add-ons, including reactive plating that detonates outward in response to impact by explosive projectiles.

Defeating tank armor with lasers means finding a way to not just hold a beam of light against the tank, but to ensure that the beam is powerful and long-lasting enough to get the job done. 

“One problem faced by laser weapons is the huge amount of power required to destroy useful targets such as missiles. To destroy something of this size requires lasers with hundreds of kilowatts or even megawatts of power. And these devices are only around 20% efficient, so we would require five times as much power to run the device itself,” wrote Sean O’Byrne, an engineering professor at UNSW Canberra and UNSW Sydney, in a piece explaining the promise and peril of anti-tank lasers.

O’Byrne continued: “We are well into megawatt territory here — that’s the kind of power consumed by a small town. For this reason, even portable directed energy devices are very large. (It’s only recently that the US has been able to make a relatively small 50kW laser compact enough to fit on an armoured vehicle, although devices operating at powers up to 300kW have been developed.)”

April’s announcement of a modest sum to develop a domestic laser weapon capability in Australia is a starting point for eventually getting to the scale of lasers powerful enough to melt tanks. Should the feat be accomplished, Australia will find itself with an energy-hunger tool, but one that can defeat hostile armor for as long as it is charged to do so.

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Reports from the Centers for Disease Control show gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. In 2021, a separate study indicated over a third of its surveyed adolescents alleged being able to access a loaded household firearm in less than five minutes. When locked in a secure vault or cabinet, nearly one-in-four claimed they could access the stored gun within the same amount of time. In an effort to tackle this problem, a 26-year-old MIT dropout backed by billionaire Peter Thiel is now offering a biometrics-based solution. But experts question the solution’s efficacy, citing previous data on gun safety and usage.

Last Thursday, Kai Kloepfer, founder and CEO of Biofire, announced the Smart Gun, a 9mm pistol that only fires after recognizing an authorized user’s fingerprints and facial scans. Using “state-of-the-art” onboard software, Kloepfer claims their Smart Gun is the first “fire-by-wire” weapon, meaning that it relies on electronic signals to operate, rather than traditional firearms’ trigger mechanisms. Kloepfer claimed the product only takes “a millisecond” to unlock and said the gun otherwise operates and feels like a standard pistol, in a profile by Bloomberg. He hopes the Smart Gun could potentially save “tens of thousands of lives.”

In a statement provided to PopSci, Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer stated, “Firearm-related causes now take the lives of more American children than any other cause, and the problem is getting worse.” Kloepfer argued that accidents, suicides, homicides, and mass shootings among children reduced when gun owners have “faster, better tools that prevent the unwanted use of their firearms,” and claims the Smart Gun is “now the most secure option at a time when more solutions are urgently needed.”

[Related: A new kind of Kevlar aims to stop bullets with less material.]

Biometric scanning devices have extensive, documented histories of accuracy and privacy issues, particularly concerning racial bias and safety. Biofire claims that, to maintain the device’s security, the weapon relies upon a solid state, encrypted electronic fire control technology utilized by modern fighter jets and missile systems. Any biometric data stays solely on the firearm itself, the company says, which does not feature onboard Bluetooth, WiFi, or GPS capabilities. A portable, touchscreen-enabled Smart Dock also supplies an interface for the weapon’s owner to add or remove up to five users. The announcement declares the Smart Gun is “impossible to modify” or convert into a conventional handgun. The Smart Gun’s biometric capabilities are powered by a lithium-ion battery that purportedly lasts several months on a single charge, and “can fire continuously for several hours.” 

According to Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health in Violence Prevention and a Distinguished Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Biofire may have developed an advancement in gun safety, but Webster considers Biofire’s longterm impact on “firearm injury, violence, and suicide” to be “a very open ended question.”

[Related: Two alcohol recovery apps shared user data without their consent.]

“I’d be very cautious about [any] estimated deaths and injuries advertised by the technology,” Webster wrote to PopSci in an email. While Biofire boasts its safety capabilities, “Many of these estimates are based on an unrealistic assumption that these personalized or ‘smart guns’ would magically replace all existing guns that lack the technology… We have more guns than people in the US and I doubt that everyone will rush to melt down their guns and replace them with Biofire guns.”

Webster is also unsure who would purchase the Biofire Smart Gun. Citing a 2016 survey he co-conducted and published in 2019, Webster says there appears to be “noteworthy skepticism” among gun owners at the prospect of “personalized” or smart guns. “While we did not describe the exact technology that Biofire is using… interest or demand for personalized guns was greatest among gun owners who already stored their guns safely and were more safety-minded,” he explains.

[Related: Tesla employees allegedly viewed and joked about drivers’ car camera footage.]

For Webster, the main question boils down to how a Biofire Smart Gun will affect people’s exposure to firearms within various types of risk. Although he concedes the technology could hypothetically reduce the amount of underage and unauthorized use of improperly stored weapons, there’s no way to know how many new guns might enter people’s lives with the release of the Smart Gun. “How many people [would] bring [Smart Guns] into their homes because the guns are viewed as safe who otherwise wouldn’t?” he asks. Webster also worries Biofire’s new product arguably won’t deal with the statistically biggest problem within gun ownership.

While some self-inflicted harm could be reduced by biometric locks, the vast majority of firearm suicides occur via the gun’s original owner—according to Pew Research Center, approximately 54-percent (24,292) of all gun deaths in 2020 resulted from self-inflicted wounds. Additionally, guns within a home roughly doubles the risk for domestic homicides, nearly all of which are committed by the guns’ owners.

“Biofire is strongly committed to expanding access to safe and informed gun ownership and emphasizes the importance of education and training to every current and future gun owner,” the company stated in its official announcement. The company plans to begin shipping their Smart Gun in early 2024 at a starting price of $1,499, “in adherence with all applicable state and local regulations.”

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Earlier this month, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed off a new tool for fighting against drones. With an enclosed cabin on top of a four-wheel ATV frame, the system mounts a high-energy laser in the back, alongside the power needed to make it work. It is part of the growing arsenal of counter-drone weapons, and one that fits into the expanded role and arsenal of Japan’s modern military.

The laser and ATV combination was on display at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) Japan conference, which ran from March 15 through 17 outside Tokyo. The exhibition is a place for various arms makers from around the world to gather and showcase their wares to interested collaborators or governments. This year’s conference, the second Japan-hosted iteration, had 66 countries and 178 companies represented.

The system, while funded by Kawasaki, was made at the request of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA), a rough analog of DARPA that looks to integrate new tech into Japan’s self-defense forces. On display, the laser system included a tracker, a high-energy laser, a gimbal to balance and hold the laser’s focus, and a 2 kilowatt power source. It has a range of just 100 meters or 328 feet for destroying drones, though it can track targets at up to 300 meters, or 984 feet. It was mounted on a Mule Pro-FX, a three-seat all terrain vehicle that retails for $15,000.

“The system tracks targets with an infrared camera, and laser beams cause instantaneous damage to UAVs and mortar shells. ATLA and Kawasaki have been testing it for this purpose, plus they are researching whether it can also intercept missiles,” reports Shephard Media.

A 2019 document from the Ministry of Defense outlined Japan’s vision for how to use new technology to improve its defense forces. Lasers, or directed energy weapons, are mentioned as a tool to intercept incoming missiles through precise targeting. These weapons are seen as part of a comprehensive suite of tools that utilize the electro-magnetic spectrum, a category that includes sensors for watching enemy signals, as well as jammers and high-powered microwaves that can interfere with or harm enemy electronics.

“High-power directed energy weapons must be realized from the standpoint of low reaction time countermeasures for accelerated aircraft and missiles as well as low cost countermeasures for miniature unmanned aircraft, mortar shells, and other large-scale, low cost threats,” reads a 2020 strategy document from ATLA. This document explicitly argues for the damage and destruction by high-powered lasers as their most salient points. Against missiles, uncrewed ships, and drones, especially smaller cheaper drones, lasers can be an invaluable asset.

What sets Kawasaki’s displayed laser vehicle apart from others is the power level. At just 2 kilowatts, the vehicle is attempting to fry drones with an amount of power roughly comparable to what it takes to run a dishwasher. Raytheon’s counter-drone laser, which Popular Science got to fire first-hand in October 2022, fires a 10 kilowatt beam. Other laser weapons, designed to quickly burn through incoming artillery rounds or missiles, can use power in the tens or even low hundreds of kilowatts.

Drones, especially the commercial kind that have become an essential part of how armies in Ukraine fight, are small, weak targets. A laser does not necessarily need a ton of power if it is going to burn through the more vulnerable parts of a quadcopter. Tracking tools, which let lasers stay focused on a target, can let a lower-powered laser burn through plastic and metal in the same time as a more powerful but less locked-on laser might.

While the laser at DSEI was displayed on the back of an ATV, it could be mounted on other vehicles, a situation where its power requirements could be an added bonus. As a tool for hunting down drones, limited range and power hinder function, but as a defensive system mounted on vehicles that might come under attack by drone, a smaller laser that sips power could be enough to disable a drone. Drones can be deadly threats on their own by dropping bombs, but they are also used as spotters for other weapons, like artillery. If the spotter is incapacitated and the convoy moves on, artillery are left to fire at where they think the vehicles are, rather than where they know their targets to be. 

“Japan will also reinforce the capability to respond to small UAVs with weapons including directed-energy weapons,” reads a defense strategy published December 2022. “By approximately ten years from now, Japan will reinforce its integrated air and missile defense capabilities by further introducing research on capability to respond to hypersonic weapons in the gliding phase and interception by non-kinetic means to deal with assets such as small UAVs.”

Lasers like this are the start of an effective counter-drone strategy, one explicitly framed as a beginning approach while developing more and different powerful systems. These could include high-powered lasers and high-powered microwaves. As the threat from small drones has expanded, so too are the tools explored by countries to stop all manner of aerial threat, including small drones.

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ON THE COLORADO PLAINS just below the Rocky Mountains, near the quaint town of Berthoud, lies the headquarters of a space company called Ursa Major. There, just about an hour’s drive north of Denver, the company regularly test-fires rocket engines straight out the back of an onsite bunker. 

These engines, which are mostly 3D printed, aren’t just for launching satellites into space: They’re also of interest to the US military for propelling hypersonic vehicles. And their dual-use nature is a modern manifestation of the two faces that rocket technology has always had, which is that it is simultaneously useful for defensive and offensive purposes, and for cosmic exploration.

With this technology in hand, the company hopes to get both civilian and military projects off the ground.

3… 2…1… liftoff

Joe Laurienti, who founded Ursa Major in 2015, grew up not too far from Berthoud. His father worked for Ball Aerospace—the cosmic arm of the company that makes a whole lot of aluminum cans, and the former owner of Ursa Major’s current 90-acre site. “He was always working on satellites,” says Laurienti. But when Laurienti went to see one of his father’s payloads launch, he thought, “The thing my dad worked on is really important. It’s on top of this rocket. But the fire coming out the bottom is way more exciting.”

Laurienti has been chasing that fire ever since, his life consumed by propulsion: the technology that makes rockets go up fast enough to counteract gravity and reach orbit. As an adult, he joined SpaceX’s propulsion team, then slipped over to Blue Origin—hitting two of the trifecta of space-launch companies owned by famous billionaires. (The third is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.)

Soon, Laurienti saw others in the industry trying to start commercial rocket companies. He, perhaps biased, didn’t think that was a good idea: The heavy hitters that were founded first would obviously win, and the others would just be also-rans.

Nevertheless, he thought he had a startup to contribute to the mix: one that wouldn’t make entire rockets but just engines, to sell to rocket companies—much like General Electric makes engines that propel aircraft from Boeing or Airbus. “I spent my career on the engines, and that was always kind of a pain point” for the industry, says Laurienti.

Rocket engines, of course, are pretty important for heaving the space-bound vehicle upward. “A little over 50 percent of launch failures in the last 10 years are propulsion-related,” explains Bill Murray, Ursa’s vice president of engineering, who’s known Laurienti since they were both undergrads at the University of Southern California. You can take that to mean that half the complexity of a rocket exists inside the engines. Take that out of some rocket maker’s equation for them? Their job theoretically gets a lot easier.

“That’s the next wave of aerospace,” thought Laurienti. “It’s specialization.” 

With that idea, he sold his SpaceX stock in preparation for his new venture. “Instead of buying a house and starting a family, I bought a 3D printer, started the company, and made my mom cry,” he says.

3D printing engines—and entire rockets

The 3D printer was key to Laurienti’s vision. Today, 80 percent of a given Ursa engine is 3D printed with a metal alloy—and printed as a unit, rather than as separate spat-out elements welded together later. Most space companies use additive manufacturing (another way to refer to 3D printing) to some degree, but in general, they aren’t 3D printing the majority of their hardware. And they also aren’t, in general, designing their space toys to take advantage of 3D printing’s special traits, like making a complicated piece of hardware as one single part rather than hundreds.

That kind of mindset is also important at another company, Relativity Space, which has 3D printed basically an entire rocket—including the engines. Its Terran 1 rocket is the largest 3D printed object on Earth. The team attempted to launch the rocket on March 8 and 11, but it ultimately scrubbed the shots both times due to issues with ground equipment, fuel pressure, and automation systems.

Like Laurienti, Relativity founder Tim Ellis noticed a reluctance to fully embrace 3D printing tech at traditional space companies. At Blue Origin, his former employer, Ellis was the first person to do metal 3D printing; he was an intern desperate to finish creating a turbo pump assembly before his apprenticeship was over. Later, as a full employee, Ellis would go on to start and lead a metal 3D printing division at the company. 

But the way traditional space companies like Blue Origin usually do 3D printing didn’t work for him, because he felt that it didn’t always include designing parts to take advantage of additive manufacturing’s unique capabilities. “Every 3D printed part that Relativity has made would not be possible to build with traditional manufacturing,” says Ellis. The result of that approach has been “structures that ended up looking highly integrated, [because] so many parts of our rocket engine, for example, are built in single pieces.” Those one-part pieces would, in traditional manufacturing, have been made of up to thousands of individual pieces.

He thought more people would have come over to this side by now. “It’s been a lot slower than I’ve expected, honestly, to adopt 3D printing,” he says. “And I think it’s because it’s been slower for people to realize this is not just a manufacturing technology. It’s a new way to develop products.”

Five times the speed of sound

Initially, Ursa Major’s business model focused on space launch: getting things to orbit, a process powered by the company’s first engine, called Hadley. The design, currently still in production, slurps liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,000 pounds of thrust. That’s about the same as the engines on Rocket Lab’s small Electron vehicle, or VirginOrbit’s LauncherOne spaceplane. 

But then an early customer—whose name Laurienti did not share—approached the company about a different application: hypersonics. These vehicles are designed to fly within Earth’s atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound. Usually, when people discuss hypersonics, they’re talking about fast-moving, maneuverable weapons. 

“Hey, we were buying rocket engines from someone else, but they’re not really tailored for hypersonics,” Laurienti recalls this customer saying. “You’re [in] early development. Can you make some changes?” 

They could, although it wouldn’t be as easy as flipping a switch. Hypersonic vehicles often launch from the air—from the bottom of planes—whereas rockets typically shoot from the ground on their way to space. Hypersonics also remain within the atmosphere. That latter part is surprisingly hard, in the context of high speeds.  

Just like rubbing your hand on fabric warms both up, rubbing a hypersonic vehicle against the air raises the temperature of both. “The atmosphere around you is glowing red, trying to eat your vehicle,” says Laurienti. That heat, which creates a plasma around the craft, also makes it hard to send communications signals through. Sustaining high speeds and a working machine in that harsh environment remains a challenge.

But the company seems to have figured out how to make Hadley, which is now in its fourth iteration, work in the contexts of both launching a rocket to space and propelling a hypersonic vehicle that stays within Earth’s atmosphere. As part of one of Ursa Major’s contracts, the military wanted the engine to power an aircraft called the X-60A, a program run by the Air Force Research Lab. The X-60A was built as a system on which hypersonic technologies could fly, to test their mettle and give engineers a way to clock the weapons’ behavior.

Hypersonic weapons—fast, earthbound missiles—aren’t actually faster than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which carry nuclear warheads and arc up into space and then back down to their targets. But they’re of interest and concern to military types because they don’t have to follow trajectories as predictable as ICBMs do, meaning they’re harder to track and shoot down. Russia, China, India, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, both Koreas, and Iran all have hypersonic weapon research programs.

To intercept these fast-moving weapons, a country might need its own hypersonics, so there’s a defensive element and an offensive one. That’s partly why the Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in hypersonics research, in addition to its desire to keep up with other countries’ technological abilities. That, of course, often makes other countries want to keep pace or get ahead, which can lead to everyone investing more money in the research.

A long-standing duality

Rocket technology, often touted as a way for humans to explore and dream grandly, has always had a military connection—not implicitly, but in a burning-bright obvious way. “[Nazi Germany’s] V-2 rocket was the progenitor to the intercontinental ballistic missiles,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, an assistant professor of history at Caltech, who focuses on space technologies and their afterlives.

Space-destined rockets were, at least at first, basically ballistic missiles. After all, a powerful stick of fire is a powerful stick of fire, no matter where it is intended to go. And that was true from the Space Age’s very beginning. “The R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik was one of the first operational ICBMs,” says Rand. The first American astronauts, she continues, shot to space on the tip of a modified Redstone ballistic missile. Then came Atlas rockets and Titan rockets, which even share the same names as the US missiles that were souped up to make them.

Rockets and flying weapons also share a kind of philosophical lineage, in terms of the subconscious meaning they impart on those who experience their fire. “They really shrunk the world, in a lot of ways, in time and space,” says Rand. “Accessing another part of the world, whether you were launching a weapon or a satellite, really made the world smaller.”

Today, in general, the development of missile technology has been decoupled from space-launch technology, as the rockets intended for orbit have been built specifically for that purpose. But it’s important not to forget where they came from. “They still all descend from the V-2 and from these military rockets,” says Rand. “And also most of them still launch DOD payloads.”

In a lot of ways, a 3D printed rocket engine that can both power a hypersonic vehicle and launch a satellite into orbit is the 21st-century manifestation of the duality that’s been there from the beginning. “Maybe it’s just saying the quiet part out loud,” says Rand. “What’s happening here—that was always kind of the case. But now we’re just making it very clear that, ‘Yeah, this has got to be used for both. We are building a company and this is our market and, yes, rockets are used for two main things: satellites and launching weapons.’”

‘A shock hitting your chest’ 

It’s no surprise that hypersonic capabilities have gotten their share of American hype—not all of it totally deserved. As defense researchers pointed out in Scientific American recently, the US has for decades put ballistic missiles on steerable maneuvering reentry vehicles, or MaRVs. Although they can only shift around toward the end of their flight, they can nonetheless change their path. Similarly, the scientists continued, while a lower-flying hypersonic might evade radar until it approaches, the US doesn’t totally rely on radar for missile defense: It also has infrared-seeking satellites that could expose a burning rocket engine like Hadley.

Still, the Air Force has been interested in what Ursa Major might be able to contribute to its hypersonic research, having funded seven programs with the company, according to the website USA Spending, which tracks federal contracts and awards. In fact, the Air Force is Ursa’s only listed government customer, having invested a few million in both the hypersonic and space-launch sides of the business. It’s also responsible for two of four of Relativity’s federal awards. 

Also of national security interest, of late, is decreasing the country’s reliance on Russian rocket engines for space launch. To that end, Ursa Major has a new engine, called Arroway, in development, which boasts 200,000 pounds of thrust. “Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to US launch companies,” the company said last June. It is also developing a third, in-between engine called Ripley, a scaled-up version of Hadley. 

Today, Ursa Major tests their 3D printed engines up to three times daily. On any given day, visitors in Berthoud might unknowingly be near six or nine high-powered experiments. When the static rocket engine begins its test, huge vapor clouds from the cryogenics can envelop an engineer. 

“When it lights, it’s just a shock hitting your chest,” says Laurienti. A cone of flames shoots from the back of the engine, toward a pile of sand in the field behind the bunker. Onlookers face the fire head-on, their backs to the mountains and their eyes on the prize.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Just a year after the United States reopened its embassy in Havana, Cuba, in 2015, some diplomats began experiencing a painful ringing in their ears. This “Havana syndrome” was first reported at that embassy in 2016, and included symptoms like dizziness and headaches, incapacitating diplomats and the spies who worked alongside them. It was reported across several embassies over multiple years.

One immediate hypothesis was that the symptoms were the result of a deliberate attack by another nation against the diplomats and spies of the United States. Today, that theory is as close to being fully dismissed as it has ever been. On March 1, the Washington Post reported that five US intelligence agencies determined that Havana syndrome was very unlikely to be the result of action by a foreign adversary. With the new reporting, while the actual origins of all injuries attributed to it cannot be pinned down, it is safe to say the majority of the intelligence community does not see the symptoms as resulting from malicious action by a hostile nation.

The intelligence community, as the collection of spy and surveillance agencies are known, includes better known agencies like the CIA, NSA, and the FBI, as well as long-running but lower-profile organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Seven of these agencies (the Post’s reporting does not specify which ones) conducted a review of around 1,000 cases broadly identified under the Havana syndrome banner.

The Post, citing two intelligence officials who remained anonymous, summarized the findings this way: “Five of those agencies determined it was ‘very unlikely’ that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick,” wrote Shane Harris and John Hudson. 

Of the remaining two agencies on the review, one determined that it was merely “unlikely,” not “very unlikely” that a foreign government was responsible, while that last agency did not offer a conclusion either way. Still, none of the agencies in the review offered a dissenting view from the conclusion. 

Congress has already mandated payments for those injured by the syndrome, which the Biden administration last summer said it would honor, even as no clear cause of the symptoms could be found. 

The previous leading explanation was an as-yet undiscovered advanced directed energy weapon.

How would such a weapon work?

Directed energy weapons have moved from the realm of science fiction to reality. These include, most commonly, high-powered lasers and microwaves, which operate in different ways. Laser weapons need a clear line of sight, and cause harm by heating up the surface of the drone or other object they are in contact with, until that object burns or breaks. Popular Science even had the chance to try one.

Because Havana syndrome sufferers lacked visible marks, it is easy to rule out a laser as the origin. Other directed energy weapons, like high-power microwaves, or sound beyond what humans can consciously perceive, have also been considered and then dismissed as possible causes. 

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

“The officials said that as analysts examined clusters of reported cases, including at U.S. embassies, they found no pattern or common set of conditions that could link individual cases. They also found no evidence, including forensic information or geolocation data, that would suggest an adversary had used a form of directed energy such as radio waves or ultrasonic beams,” the Post reports. “In some cases, there was no ‘direct line of sight’ to affected personnel working at U.S. facilities, further casting doubt on the possibility that a hypothetical energy weapon could have been the culprit, one of the officials said.”

The Post’s reporting of this conclusion contradicts an earlier independent study of possible causes. A 2020 study by a committee from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations reported by [Department of State] employees are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy.”

This is the kind of energy used in less-lethal millimeter-wave weapons like the Active Denial System employed by the US military. This weapon takes a massive amount of power to operate, and it can cause second degree burns on people in the beam’s path if it is held for long enough. The weapon is used to disperse crowds, making the pain felt immediately and in a way that dissipates as people leave the area of the beam. For people who do stay in the beam’s path, spots can become visible on their skin.

[Related: The US military’s heat weapon is real and painful. Here’s what it does.]

The people suffering Havana syndrome symptoms lacked injuries that would match how a microwave weapon works.

“There’s a persistent myth that microwaves heat things from the inside out. Anyone who has heated a frozen dinner knows that this is not true. The outer part of the frozen food thaws first, because it absorbs the microwaves before they can reach the inner part,” wrote Cheryl Rofer, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist, in response to the NAS study. She added: “if a directed microwave beam hit people’s brains, we would expect to see visible effects on the skin and flesh. None of that has accompanied Havana syndrome.”

The new report suggests that, while there may be no single explanation for the symptoms, there are likely other, identifiable causes. One possibility, instead of a weapon causing the harm, was simply the conditions of people in an embassy breathing air passing through clogged ducts, reports the Post. 

Embassy work can be difficult and stressful, to say nothing of the decades when US embassies were regularly violently targeted by insurgencies and terror groups. This includes the US Embassy in South Vietnam in 1965 by the Viet Cong, the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy by Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, and attacks on the US Embassy in Afghanistan in 2011, 2012, and 2019, among others. In light of that history, it can be easy to understand how worsening health might feel like symptoms of an invisible siege. While the report likely rules out known weapons and deliberate attack, it doesn’t negate the fact that people can experience harmful symptoms from sources other than weapons.

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Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the country would suspend participation in New START, the last standing major arms control treaty between the country and the United States. Putin clarified that the suspension was not a withdrawal—but the suspension itself represents a clear deterioration of trust and nuclear stability between the countries with the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. 

Putin’s remarks precede by a few days the anniversary of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, an entirely chosen war that has seen some concrete Russian gains, while many of Russia’s biggest advances have been repulsed and overtaken. At present, much of the fighting is in the form of grinding, static warfare along trenches and defended positions in Ukraine’s east. It is a kind of warfare akin to the bloody fronts of World War I, though the presence of drones and long-range precision artillery lend it an undeniably modern character.

Those modern weapons, and the coming influx of heavy tanks from the United States and other countries to Ukraine, put Putin’s remarks in some more immediate context. While New START is specifically an agreement between the United States and Russia over nuclear arsenals, the decision to suspend participation comes against the backdrop of the entirely conventional war being fought by Russia against Ukraine, with US weapons bolstering the Ukrainian war effort.

A follow-up statement from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the country would still notify the United States about any launches of Intercontinental or Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs), and would expect the same in reverse, in accordance with a 1988 agreement between the US and the USSR. That suggests there is at least some ongoing effort to not turn a suspension of enforcement into an immediate crisis.

To understand why the suspension matters, and what future there is for arms control, it helps to understand the agreement as it stands.

What is New START?

New START is an agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, which carries a clunky formal name: The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The short-form name, which is not really a true acronym, is instead a reference to START 1, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was in effect from 1991 to 2009, and which New START replaced in 2011. New START is set to expire in 2026, unless it is renewed by both countries.

New START is the latest of a series of agreements limiting the overall size of the US and Russian (first Soviet) nuclear arsenals, which at one point each measured in the tens of thousands of warheads. Today, thanks largely to mutual disarmament agreements and the limits outlined by New START, the US and Russia have arsenals of roughly 5,400 and 6,000 warheads, respectively. Of those, the US is estimated to have 1,644 deployed strategic weapons, a term that means nuclear warheads on ICBMs or at heavy bomber bases, presumably ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Russia is estimated to have around 1,588 deployed strategic weapons.

As the Start Department outlines, the treaty limits both countries to 700 total deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Bombers are counted under the treaty in the same way as a missile with one warhead, though nuclear-capable bombers like the B-52, B-2, and soon to be B-21 can carry multiple warheads.) In addition, the treaty sets a limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, as well as 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments

In its follow-up statement to the suspension of New START, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified it would stick to the overall cap on warheads and launch systems as outlined in the treaty.

What will change is the end of inspections, which have been central to the “trust but verify” structure of arms control agreements between the US and Russia for decades. The terms of New START allow both countries to inspect deployed and non-deployed strategic systems (like missiles or bombers) up to 10 times a year, as well as non-deployed systems up to eight times a year. These on-site inspections were halted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their resumption is the most likely act threatened by this change in posture.

It is unclear, yet, if this suspension means the end of the treaty forever, though Putin taking such a step certainly doesn’t bode well for its continued viability. Should New START formally end, some analysts fear it may usher in a new era of nuclear weapons production, and a rapid expansion of nuclear arsenals.

While that remains a possibility, the hard limits of nuclear production, as well as decades of faded production expertise in both Russia and the United States, mean such a restart may be more intensive, in time and resources, than immediately feared. Both nations have spent the last 30 years working on production of conventional forces. Ending an arms control treaty over nuclear weapons would be a gamble, suggesting nuclear weapons are the only tool that can provide security where conventional arms have failed. 

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YOU COULD PLAY Elden Ring, or maybe you’d rather try out God of War Ragnarok. Perhaps you’re more of a Candy Crush connoisseur. But if you want researchers to gather data on your gaming strategy, and what that might mean for real-world nuclear war, you might instead check out SIGNAL, courtesy of the Project on Nuclear Gaming (PoNG). The academic group behind the game wanted to show that video games could be used to gather large-scale data on human behavior and military strategy. Perhaps, they speculate, this digital tool could even hang on the belt along with traditional military research and formal war games.

In a pilot analysis, whose results were published a few months ago in the Journal of Peace Research, scholars analyzed more than 400 SIGNAL matches to see how the existence of tailored nuclear weapons—more on what those are in a moment—affected the likelihood that some world leader (or, in this case, a player pretending to be a world leader) might start an atomic war. 

For the uninitiated, tailored is a term that in this context refers to nuclear bombs that don’t just detonate with many megatons of energy. Tailored nuclear weapons may include boosted electromagnetic pulses—the grid-killing bursts of radiation that blast out right after explosions. They may be neutron bombs, which produce more radiation compared to their blast than other weapons. Or they may be bombs that are smaller and less destructive than their traditional counterparts, a category commonly called tactical nuclear weapons. 

For a while, such tactical weapons were a key part of the US arsenal: nuclear torpedoes, nuclear artillery shells, nuclear land mines. “Name a conventional weapons system today, and there used to be a nuclear weapon to fit that role,” says Geoff Wilson, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight.

In the early 1990s, the US largely phased these weapons out, although it currently has a couple hundred on hand. Russia has a couple thousand. Recently, and not unrelatedly, they’ve reentered American military discourse too. In 2018, the Nuclear Posture Review made way for a new low-yield weapon called the W76-2; the Biden administration’s 2022 review kept it on the table. 

Although the precise characteristics that make a nuclear weapon tactical, aka nonstrategic, are debatable, University of Southern California international relations professor Nina Rathbun recently wrote that “tactical nuclear weapons vary in yields from fractions of 1 kiloton to about 50 kilotons, compared with strategic nuclear weapons, which have yields that range from about 100 kilotons to over a megaton, though much more powerful warheads were developed during the Cold War.” A kiloton is the amount of energy that 1,000 tons of dynamite would release. For the record, both bombs that the US dropped on Japan during World War II would now be considered tactical. Estimates hold that those bombings killed anywhere between 110,000 and 210,000 people.

There are many issues related to the existence of tactical nuclear weapons, and here’s one of the biggest: Experts don’t agree on whether they make the world more stable or less stable, or whether they make nuclear war more or less likely. Maybe these bombs provide an eye-for-an-eye deterrent against other countries’ similarly sized weapons, meaning everyone is threatened away from launching any. But maybe these weapons make countries more willing to launch—and thus to break what Brown University’s Nina Tannenwald calls the “nuclear taboo”—because the consequences on the ground are less apocalyptic than what comes with the use of traditional, more powerful nuclear weapons. Wilson, of the Project on Government Oversight, falls into the latter camp.

Most troublingly, though, no one knows if a “limited” nuclear war, fought with comparatively small nuclear weapons, would actually stay limited and little. “Once you decide to let one of these things off the chain somewhere, the threat of using more of them increases,” says Wilson. 

Can data from a game be helpful?

There isn’t actually ground-truth data to support theories on how any kind of tailored nuclear weapon affects the course of war, because only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war, and it did so back when no other nation had any. The physical data set has a sample size of one. “We certainly don’t want to have any kind of [real world] experimental data around the nuclear use,” says Bethany Goldblum, a co-author on the recent SIGNAL results paper who currently holds positions at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. 

In the absence of such evidence, Goldblum and collaborators hoped that an online war game might provide significant fictional data—enough that it could be analyzed statistically. With a sample size of more than 400 games, they succeeded at that part.

War games in general are a longstanding means used by defense wonks and military leaders to figure out what other humans, beyond their borders, might do, and what they themselves might do in response or preemptively. “People role-playing together in a room is a type of war game that is often referred to as a tabletop exercise,” says Goldblum. It’s a common practice in think tanks and in government. “There are also war games in the form of strategic board games,” she continues. Some studies are surveys, which aren’t quite games but which present people with various written scenarios, to which people respond with what they would do. Usually, participants in these kinds of efforts are experts or practitioners in the relevant field. Digital simulations also exist to explore decision-making in different scenarios.

PoNG scientists, though, wanted their offering to be a little different: to live inside computers, be larger-scale, involve a wider and larger swath of people, immerse players in an environment where they have to live with their choices, and allow for iteration and experimentation. (PoNG comes from the University of California, Berkeley; the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium; and Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, and the analysis in the Journal of Peace Research came from two of its members.)

So they came up with the “Strategic Interaction Game between Nuclear Armed Lands,” or SIGNAL, which was designed to investigate what Andrew Reddie, a cybersecurity professor at Berkeley and co-author on the results paper, calls their “toy problem”: Does adding tailored weapons to the arsenal increase the likelihood of nuclear use?

To test it out, the project team gathered players through social media, mailing lists, meetups, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and campus events, and also through the chance interest of internet passersby. 

Shall we play a game?

SIGNAL went live in May 2019, and it’s still up today. You can play if you convince two friends to log in at the same time as you, learn the somewhat complicated rules, and then stick it out till you nuke each other or don’t. Players are welcomed to a digital board filled with hexagonal tiles arranged in the shapes of three (fictional) countries, each of which is delineated by the color of its tiles: purple, green, or orange. The research team chose the unrecognizable national borders and non-triggering colors (no red, for instance) to decrease people’s tendency to read real-world situations into this fictional universe. “Minor states” are neutral in gray and can become allies.

A swelling soundtrack accompanies the game’s loading. Before you can make any moves, you first have to signal that you are about to do something by putting a generic marker on a hex, thus telling everyone that you might act on that piece of territory. If it’s a hex that belongs to another playing country, the two of you can negotiate in the chat box. Then, you can act—or not—on that tile: conventionally striking it with infantry or a missile, cyber attacking it, or navally attacking it. You may defend your own territory, build cities or military bases, or, of course, go nuclear. 

In SIGNAL, the scientists created a setup where two players were nuclear-armed countries and one was conventionally armed. But that setup had two different varieties: In one, which accounted for 209 of the matches in their analyzed dataset, the nuclear-armed countries had only traditional nuclear weapons. In the other, which represented 216 games, the nuclear nations had both traditional and tailored nuclear weapons. It is, the authors boasted, “the largest wargaming dataset collected to date,” at least “to the best of [their] knowledge.”

Players win by increasing their infrastructure and resources and defending their territory—pretty standard for strategy games like Civilization. The question the researchers had in mind related to who uses nuclear firepower to help them with those objectives.

It sounds robust, but there are some problems with SIGNAL. “Our game is hard to orient to,” admits Goldblum. “It’s a complex environment, by design, because you have to add enough complexity in order for it to be realistic.” And the graphics are… not stunning. They resemble, admits Reddie, a year-2000 version of Civilization. 

In addition, players can’t just log on and jump in: They have to have three people handy, or the game will just wait for others to join. 

In fact, reasonable skepticism about SIGNAL’s utility and biases, standard for a group of scientists, led the team to also create a survey-based war game, mimicking situations found in the video game, so they could compare people’s behavior in the two.

The results? The presence of tailored nuclear weapons does indeed seem to increase the likelihood that a player will take the conflict radioactive. The results also indicated that if tactical weapons are available, people are more likely to use them than the more destructive traditional ones.

The aftermath 

Those seem like neat conclusions, but that’s not the whole story: Despite the large amount of data gathered from the SIGNAL video game, the results from looking at the game-level trends weren’t actually statistically significant. They just trended toward supporting the survey’s findings—those listed above. Considering the game alone, though, the presence of tailored weapons only increased the likelihood of nuclear conflict by 2 percent with a margin of error of “plus or minus 20 percent, so we really can’t say much and need more data to reduce this error bar,” notes Goldblum. The effect was more pronounced, though still not with statistical significance, when the analysis removed the final round of play, in which players may have thrown their weapons “without fear of reciprocal action,” according to the paper. 

Demographic findings—about female players, college graduates, people over 29, people with national-security expertise or jobs—also didn’t rise to the level of statistical significance in a game-level analysis, though the potential trends warrant further study, in Goldblum’s view. 

That’s kind of disappointing for a game meant, in part, to get a big sample number. But the specific results of this game set’s conditions weren’t the point, says Reddie: PoNG’s creators wanted to prove that experimental war-gaming could be a thing, and he hopes to make that thing simpler for future researchers. “My primary interest is supporting the creation of a sandbox toolkit to actually make it easier to deploy this stuff in the absence of a million dollars of funding,” says Reddie. 

Goldblum sees it in a similar way. “The biggest takeaway is that experimental war-gaming offers this new tool for study,” she says. And, she adds, the fact that the results from the two different methods didn’t match up precisely provides a note of caution for other researchers: The tool you’re using likely has its own biases that influence players’ behavior.

Some tend to see this particular new tool as useful. Others, like a set of scholars from the RAND Corporation who wrote a letter to Science after the magazine published a 2018 piece about PoNG’s plans, definitely do not agree. The RAND team argued in part that data sets gathered from the public weren’t useful: To understand behavior in international conflict, you need players who are experts in geopolitics. “I’m not necessarily sure that’s wrong, right?” says Reddie. “But it’s a testable theory. They don’t have any data to suggest that they’re right.” 

They could gather some, though, if they compared such experts’ SIGNAL gameplay to that of a group of non-experts. In a lot of ways, though, all those human unpredictabilities—the possible dependence on experience, individual difference, inability to get behaviors to cohere or coalesce, strategy alterations based on whether an interaction is occurring on-screen or with a sheet of paper—are also part of the point. “Nuclear decisions would likely be made and influenced by fallible individuals acting under a tremendous amount of stress and time pressure,” says Wilson. In fact, he thinks war games are mostly useful for the pesky personhood that plagues them all. 

“The value of war games is, I think,” says Wilson, “that they show how unpredictable and often wrong our assumptions about humans are.”

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On February 3, Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder confirmed that the United States was sending a type of munition called Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs to Ukraine, among other equipment and weapons. The bombs will expand what Ukraine can do with existing weapons, and will fit into an overall buildup of armaments that should allow Ukraine to more effectively pursue its war to repel the Russian invasion, which began in February of last year.

“This gives them a longer-range capability,” said Ryder, who added that the weapons will help Ukraine “conduct operations in defense of their country and to take back their sovereign territory in Russian-occupied areas.”

The GLSDB, developed by American defense giant Boeing and Swedish defense manufacturer Saab, is a combination of a bomb with wings and a rocket engine. The rocket engines are the same as those used for boosters in an artillery rocket called the M26 Multiple Launch Rocket System. What the GLSDB adds on top of that rocket booster is a 250-pound bomb with a winged guidance system. Those wings fold out in flight, taking the weapon from a diameter of 9.5 inches to a flying bomb with a wingspan over 5 feet. 

In other words, this bomb launches from a tube like a rocket, flies like a little plane, and then explodes like a bomb. That sets it apart from other bombs, which are dropped out of planes, or other artillery rounds, which arc back to the ground after launch. 

The bomb features inertial guidance, which can plot the bomb’s path based on distance and direction traveled since launch, as well as GPS guidance. To protect against electronic interference, the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs include features to block jamming, and to block spoofing, or the injection of false coordinates into its navigation. Against sophisticated Russian electronic warfare tools, ensuring that bombs travel the paths intended is important.

But what really sets the GLSDB apart from other artillery rounds is the range: 93 miles, or 150 kilometers. Firing guided rockets, HIMARS have a range of 43 miles. The GLSDB more than doubles that range. Artillery can be useful for winning fights on static fronts, as it punishes hostile advances and can counter enemy artillery. Longer range artillery also lets Ukrainian forces attack positions further away from the front lines, especially supply depots and ammunition stockpiles. When Ukraine launched its counter-offensives in fall 2022, the increased range of HIMARs made it hard for Russian defenders to hold territory, and also denied supplies to other reinforcing Russian units. 

“We’ve been focused on several key areas in the last few months to support Ukraine, specifically air defense capabilities, armor capabilities, long-range fires capabilities, and then combined with training in order to enable them to have the ability to conduct combined arms operations,” said Ryder.

The announcement of the GLSDB, described plainly as “precision-guided rockets,” came with a longer list of further material aid to the war from the United States. This includes ammunition for HIMARS, for other artillery, and for mortars, a small, soldier-portable weapon that can hurl bombs over obstacles and into trenches. The notice included anti-personnel weapons like Claymores, a close cousin of land mines, and heavy machine guns. Apart from the rockets, these weapons would all be familiar in form, generally speaking, to soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I. (Rocket artillery dates to World War II.) Given the static fronts and held trenches in the Donbas, and especially around the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, it is a familiar style of warfare.

What is newer are tools like thermal imagery sights paired to machine guns, which give users a powerful edge in night battles. Then there are MRAPs, or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, which were heavily used by the United States to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan from roadside bombs; those are being sent to Ukraine where they can serve as useful transports especially in areas that might have landmines or unexploded bombs.

Counter-drone tools and ammunition, designed to spot the small flying scouts from observing soldiers in the field, are a modern reality paired with an older style of warfare. These, alongside anti-tank missiles and anti-air weapons, fit into the broader combined arms package prepared by the US and other countries for Ukraine. Following on the heels of January’s big push to commit heavy armored tanks to Ukraine, the nation should be in a better position to launch counter-offensives and drive back the invading forces.

Weapons like the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb, which extend the range of how and where Ukraine can strike, should give its military added depth and punch as it chooses battles in the coming months.

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On February 4, a pilot in an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet scored the plane’s first air-to-air kill, firing a missile at the Chinese surveillance balloon drifting off the coast of South Carolina. The shot, an AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from 58,000 feet above the ground, hit the balloon at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, and ended a week-long incident in which the military, the public, and Congress all followed the course of the balloon with great interest.

“The balloon, which was being used by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above US territorial waters,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement. 

The balloon entered the sky above Montana on February 1, where it caused a halt to flights in and out of Billings International Airport. For four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, the balloon followed the wind across the US, until ultimately meeting its missile-induced end over the ocean. 

At a press conference February 2, a senior defense official noted that the US had tracked the balloon and “had custody” of it ever since it entered the country’s airspace. This includes previous fly-bys of the balloon with F-22s over Montana, although the decision was made not shoot it down then out of a concern for risk to those below.

The defense official repeatedly identified the balloon as created and operated by China, acknowledging when a reporter highlighted that Montana houses siloed nuclear ICBMs. The location of the silos is by design not secret—part of Cold War nuclear strategy that dictated the placement of the silos set them far away from dense urban centers, in part to ensure some incoming nuclear missiles would aim for the silos instead of cities. The day-to-day operation of missile silos can still contain some fresh information, so it is possible that is what was targeted by the balloon’s sensors.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

“Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the [People’s Republic of China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low-Earth orbit,” said the official. “But out of an abundance of caution, we have taken additional mitigation steps.  I’m not going to go into what those are.  But we know exactly where this balloon is, exactly what it is passing over. And we are taking steps to be extra vigilant so that we can mitigate any foreign intelligence risk.”

At the same briefing, the official noted that this was not the first time “that you had a balloon of this nature cross over the continental United States.  It has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration.”

While this event garnered widespread national fascination—it was even fodder for a skit on Saturday Night Live—the use of balloons for gathering intelligence dates back centuries. Here’s what to know about their history. 

Trial balloons

Balloons have been used in military surveillance since 1794, when revolutionary France employed them to watch movements of people and cannons from above. In the US Civil War, the Union and Confederate forces used balloons, flying as high as 1,000 feet, to document activity below. Communication with balloons then was tricky, with balloonists using either signal flags or telegraph wires to report what they observed. These balloons were tethered, allowing crews on the ground to draw the balloons back into place. In this sense, the balloons were more like deployable observation towers, rather than true scouting vehicles.

Later, World War I saw balloons used to photograph battlefields below. While film took time to develop, the long static fronts of the Great War ensured that such information was useful, or at least useful if the balloonists collecting it were not shot down by early fighter planes. In World War One, Frank Luke Jr was a US Army pilot who earned the nickname “Arizona Balloon Buster” for shooting down 18 German observation balloons. 

World War I also saw the use of dirigibles, or rigid airships, which flew as bombers as well as spotters. Airships could move under their own power and without tethers, allowing them deadly access to the skies above enemy lines. 

In World War II, Japan built high-altitude balloons that were lofted into the newly discovered jet stream, and then carried by the high-altitude wind across the pacific. More than 9,000 FuGo balloons were launched into the jet stream, complete with incendiary bombs designed to burn down cities and forests. The FuGo attacks were limited in effectiveness because they relied on winds that were strongest in November through March, when the Pacific Northwest was wet and cold, limiting the ability of fires to spread. Indeed, apart from fires, the only deaths directly attributed to FuGo attacks were that of a picnicking family, investigating a mysterious device.

Eyes floating in the sky

Long-range balloon surveillance is limited by how the balloon can be directed and what information it can communicate. Weather balloons, launched hourly, record atmospheric conditions. The famous 1947 balloon crash at Roswell, New Mexico, was of an instrument carrying acoustic sensors, designed to listen for the sounds of Soviet nuclear detonations.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

One reason to use balloons is that they can carry large payloads, as a lighter-than-air body of sufficient size floats in the sky, instead of needing to generate lift. The US general responsible for North America described the balloon as “up to 200 feet tall, with a payload the size of a jetliner.”

As for what the balloon was actually recording, that remains to be seen. It is possible that its high-altitude flight allowed for greater surveillance of radio and other wireless transmissions than can a satellite, though that is more speculative than proven.

Recovery of the downed balloon, and especially its sensor package, could prove revelatory, though it should be assumed that any sensitive information and technology taken into military possession will be classified, only parts of which may be selectively released. Given the widespread interest of other militaries in developing surveillance balloons, as well as the revelation that these overflights have happened before, it is likely that the modern balloon race is only just beginning. 

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On January 26, Russian politician Dmitry Rogozin claimed in an interview that the country’s robotic Marker Uncrewed Ground Vehicles will be deployed in Ukraine as a tool to counter tanks. The Marker is a long-in-development and high-tech concept, designed to explore how robots could work together with humans on the battlefield. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and as Ukraine prepares to receive armored vehicles, including tanks, from other countries, Marker appears to have been moved from conceptual promise to being touted as a wonder weapon. 

The Marker UGV dates back to at least 2019, when it was promoted as a symbol of the modern technological prowess of the Russian military. While Russia had already developed armed drones, ground robots typically took the form of mine clearing machines like the Uran-6. With treads and with a turret, the Marker featured in glossy produced videos with a rock beat and a machine gun swivel that seemed to follow the commands of a remote human spotter.

Marker was developed by Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation, which is a rough analog to DARPA in the US. Early work on Marker made it a tool for exploring concepts in robots, remote control, and autonomy, with the assumption that later, other companies would develop new tools and weapons based on the research done with Marker.

As recently as January 2022, Russian state-owned media described Marker as being used to patrol a spaceport and work alongside quadcopter drones. Marker was one of several robots promoted as major technological advances, all against the backdrop of Russia mobilizing tanks and soldiers for the invasion of Ukraine that came February 24. In the eleven months since the invasion, Russia’s major advances have been halted, and on multiple fronts turned back. Now, with news that Ukraine stands ready to receive armored transports and tanks, Marker is back to being a darling of Russian media.

Meeting its Marker  

On January 15, Rogozin claimed to news service TASS that Marker robots would be tested in Ukraine soon. While Rogozin has no official capacity in the Russian government, he has held multiple high-level positions within the Russian government. In July 2022, he was dismissed as the head of Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, and has since rebranded himself as a leader of a volunteer group called the “Tsar’s Wolves” whose aim is improving the technology of Russian forces. Testing Marker in Ukraine would mark a debut for the device, and a task it was never quite designed for.

“This would be a first combat deployment for the Marker UGV, and yes, it wasn’t really tested in combat conditions before,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “It was tested in a rather controlled environment, even when it had to navigate autonomously through a forested environment in late 2021. There is of course a possibility of a classified series of tests that could have taken place, but as far as all info about this UGV, there was no real combat stress test.”

Deploying an untested robot into combat, should it happen, reads as more of a stunt than battle-changing tool. In earlier tests and demonstrations, what set Marker apart was its ability to carry machine guns and anti-tank weapons, then use them at the discretion of protected or hidden soldiers. Powerful cameras and sensors could make it a useful spotter and shooter, though the role necessarily entails exposing the robot to return fire, risking the integrity of the machine. At a production level, that is a loss that a military can absorb. But with just a handful of test platforms, it is a big gamble for a flashy demonstration.

“Marker has limited autonomy capability for movement and target selection, although testing that in a complex battlefield space is probably different than trying to recreate such a test in pre-2022 trials. This is the crux of the problem in using such UGVs – real combat presents many unpredictable situations that cannot be all tested out beforehand, so it’s also likely that Markers will be remote-controlled to avoid losses,” says Bendett. “And there is also a significant PR element here.”

The possible fronts where Marker could be deployed in Ukraine are many, from old trenches in the Donbas region that Russia has contested since 2014, to fierce fighting around the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in the east, or even along Russian-held front lines northeast of Crimea. Regardless of where it is deployed, it is unlikely to be effective against heavy armor.

Rogozin highlighted that Marker exists in two forms. The sensor-and-drone equipped scout is designed as a useful spotter. Rogozin pitched the armed version, complete with anti-tank missiles, as an answer to Abrams and Leopard tanks. Says Bendett: “The recon version seems more plausible [for use] than a straight up contest against two of the most powerful tanks in the world.”

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On January 19, the Department of Defense announced that it would send 90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) with 20 mine rollers to Ukraine, as part of a broader $2.5 billion package of aid. The Strykers will join Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and a host of other equipment that will increase Ukraine’s ability to move with armor. 

Adding to the Strykers, Bradleys, and other equipment is now the distinct possibility that the US could send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, as both CNN and The Wall Street Journal are reporting. The US “could make an announcement as soon as this week” about those tanks, according to CNN. Meanwhile, Germany is reportedly preparing to announce the delivery of Leopard 2 tanks as well.

All this mobile armor—Strykers, Bradleys, tanks, and more—serve different roles on a battlefield. To understand this hodgepodge better, it is easiest to look at each component part.

What to know about Strykers, or armor for moving

The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored transport, designed to fit in between the Army’s light vehicles (like Humvees) and heavier transports (like Bradleys). It is operated by a crew of two, with room for a nine-person squad of infantry to ride in the back. The basic model of a Stryker is lightly armed, with just a machine gun for shooting and smoke grenades to conceal the vehicle’s movement. There are eight Stryker variants, including ones armed with everything from anti-tank missiles to extra sensors or even a mortar artillery piece, fired through the flipped-open roof hatches.

The mine rollers mentioned in the release allow a Stryker to detonate explosives, like anti-tank landmines, that are triggered by the weight of heavy vehicles. These rollers, which can be mounted on the front of the vehicle, set the mines off before they are underneath the Stryker. Strykers, as wheeled vehicles, are especially dependent on roads, which are easy to cover with mines. Using a Stryker to clear mines lets the road become an open path not just for the Strykers, but for the whole armored column behind them.

[Related: The Army’s new light tank can venture where its beefier cousins can’t]

At a press conference on January 20, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the US’s objective “is to provide the capability that Ukraine needs to be successful in the near term. And so you’ve heard us talk about two battalions of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles — very capable platform, [as well as] three battalions, or a brigade’s-worth of Strykers. So you add that up, that’s two brigades of combat power that the U.S. is providing, along with enablers and other things.”

In the US, a Brigade Combat Team is a formation of about 5,000 soldiers and about 300 vehicles, usually some mix of transports and tanks, or vehicles with heavy weapons. So far, the United States has promised Ukraine 109 Bradleys and 90 Strykers, which is two-thirds of the way to an armor brigade combat team, without the tanks. The US has also provided other vehicles, like 300 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, an even more lightly armed and protected battlefield taxi than the Stryker. 

What to know about tanks, or armor for fighting

In order for an army to take advantage of armored transports, it needs to break through a defended line. That is the role tanks were built for, as heavy armor designed for fighting.

Tanks are in concept and execution over a century old. The first tanks were built to break the stalemate along Europe’s Western Front in World War I, where trenches, machine guns, explosives, and artillery made any assault horrific and bloody. Tanks, as literal moving armor, protected soldiers advancing behind them; with cannons and machine guns, tanks could devastate defenders. While tanks debuted in World War I, their use in World War II would shift the course of warfare. German tank doctrine, developed during the interwar era, prized armored formations that could punch through enemy lines, leaving defenses useless and routed around.

Today, tanks remain a vital part of the military effort, as both Ukraine and Russia employ their Soviet-inherited tanks against one another. Tanks remain vulnerable to dedicated anti-tank weapons, like Javelin missiles, as well as to attack from the air, like by planes or helicopters. And tanks are also vulnerable to other tanks. In other words, stopping a tank assault requires dedicated anti-tank weapons, which could include other tanks. Meanwhile, weapons that are useful at stopping other armored vehicles, like rocket-propelled grenades useful against Bradleys and Strykers, are more abundant, but will struggle against heavy armor.

The heavy and powerful M1 Abrams is optimized to run on jet fuel, which American logistics can regularly supply, but could be trickier for a military without as robust a resupply system as the United States. Meanwhile, the Leopard 2, made by and exported from Germany, is a diesel-powered tank used by the militaries of many NATO countries. Should Ukraine receive the tanks, they will enable the Ukrainian military to launch combined arms assault, with the mobility of tanks and armored transports shifting the battle. 

In brief, the Stryker is a transport that can protect passengers from machine gun fire. The Bradley is heavier armored transport with some weapons useful against other vehicles, and a tank like the M1 Abrams is built to destroy other heavy vehicles, while being protected from the same.

The stakes: Armored columns pick their battlefields

Ever since Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the United States and other countries have increased aid to that invaded country. This aid built in some cases on programs already in place, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, along with Russian occupation of the Donbas from 2014 to the present. But while the Donbas war was long-fought, it was geographically contained, over a fraction of the country, and involving somewhat static defensive lines for both sides. The present war was launched with a three-pronged invasion of Ukraine, with Russia at one point threatening Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv, the eastern metropolis of Kharkiv, and occupying the city of Kherson, at the mouth of the Dnipro river.

Today, much of Russia’s effort is aimed at capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas. The nature of the war is such that the two sides can lock into grinding, gruesome fights over static positions, and then shift dramatically based on a collapse elsewhere in a front line. When Ukraine launched a counter-offensive in fall 2022, its armed forces did so with new weapons like US-supplied HIMARs rocket artillery, which destroyed Russian supplies at a great distance.

With an army in armored transports, like those provided by the US, Ukraine would be in a position to take advantage of any new gap in Russian defenses, moving behind established defenses and possibly causing a major shift in the war, like what happened in the fall of 2022. 

Update on Feb. 13, 2022. This story has been updated to clarify that M1 Abrams tanks are optimized to run on jet fuel. They don’t necessarily run on that fuel exclusively.

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In the nightmare scenario of a nuclear bomb blast, you might picture a catastrophic fireball, a mushroom cloud rising into an alien sky overhead, and a pestilent rain of toxic fallout in the days to come. All of these are real, and all of them can kill.

But just as real, and every bit as deadly, is the air blast that comes just instants after. When a nuke goes off, it usually creates a shockwave. That front tears through the air at supersonic speed, shattering windows, demolishing buildings, and causing untold damage to human bodies—even miles from the point of impact.

[Related: How to protect yourself from nuclear radiation]

So, you’ve just seen the nuclear flash, and know that an air blast is soon to follow. You’ve only got seconds to hide. Where do you go?

To help you find the safest spot in your home, two engineers from Cyprus simulated which spaces made winds from a shockwave move more violently—and which spaces slowed them down. Their results were published on January 17 in the journal Physics of Fluids.

During the feverish nuclear paranoia of the Cold War, plenty of scientists studied what nuclear war would do to a city or the world. But most of their research focused on factors like the fireball or the radiation or simulating a nuclear winter, rather than an individual air blast. Moreover, 20th-century experts lacked the sophisticated computational capabilities that their modern counterparts can use. 

“Very little is known about what is happening when you are inside a concrete building that has not collapsed,” says Dimitris Drikakis, an engineer at the University of Nicosia and co-author of the new paper. 

[Related: A brief but terrifying history of nuclear weapons]

The advice that he and his colleague Ioannis W. Kokkinakis came up with doesn’t apply to the immediate vicinity of a nuclear blast. If you’re within a shout of ground zero, there’s no avoiding it—you’re dead. Even some distance away, the nuke will bombard you with a bright flash of thermal radiation: a torrent of light, infrared, and ultraviolet that could blind you or cause second- or third-degree burns.

But as you move farther away from ground zero, far enough that the thermal radiation might leave you with minor injuries at most, the airburst will leave most structures standing. The winds will only be equivalent to a very strong hurricane. That’s still deadly, but with preparation, you might just make it.

Drikakis and Kokkinakis constructed a one-story virtual house and simulated striking winds from two different shockwave scenarios—one well above standard air pressure, and one even stronger. Based on their simulations, here are the best—and worst—places to go during a nuclear war.

Worst: by a window

If you catch a glimpse of a nuclear flash, your first instinct might be to run to the nearest window to see what’s just happened. That would be a mistake, as you’d be in the prime place to be hit by the ensuing air blast.

If you stand right in a window facing the blast, the authors found, you might face winds over 300 miles per hour—enough to pick the average human off the ground. Depending on the exact strength of the nuke, you might then strike the wall with enough force to kill you.

Surprisingly, there are more dangerous places in the house when it comes to top wind speed (more on that later). But what really helps make a window deadly is the glass. As it shatters, you’ll be sprayed in the face by high-velocity shards.

Bad: a hallway

You might imagine that you can escape the airblast by retreating deeper into your building. But that’s not necessarily true. A window can act as a funnel for rushing air, turning a long hallway into something like a wind tunnel. Doors can do the same. 

The authors found that winds would throw an average-sized human standing in the corridor nearly as far as it would throw an average-sized human standing by the front window. Intense winds can also pick up glass shards and loose objects from the floor or furniture and send them hurtling as fast as a shot from a musket, the simulations showed.

Better: a corner

Not everywhere in the house is equally deadly. The authors found that, as the nuclear shockwave passed through a room, the highest winds tended to miss the room’s edges and corners. 

Therefore, even if you’re in an otherwise dangerous room, you can protect yourself from the worst of the impact by finding a corner and bracing yourself in. The key, again, is to avoid doors and windows.

“Wherever there are no openings, you have better chances to survive,” says Drikakis. “Essentially, run away from the openings.”

Best: a corner of an interior room

The best place to hide out is in the corner of a small room as far inside the building as possible.  For example, a closet that lacks any openings is ideal.

The “good” news is that the peak of the blast lasts just a moment. The most furious winds will pass in less than a second. If you can survive that, you’ll probably stay alive—as long as you’re not in the path of the radioactive fallout.

These tips for sheltering can be useful in high-wind disasters across the board. (The US Centers for Disease Control currently advises those who cannot evacuate before a hurricane to avoid windows and find a closet.) But the authors stress that the risk of nuclear war, while low, has certainly not disappeared. “I think we have to raise awareness to the international community … to understand that this is not just a joke,” says Drikakis. “It’s not a Hollywood movie.”

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On January 6, the Department of Defense announced it was going to send 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine. The long-awaited move comes amidst a flurry of announcements from NATO nations about sending armored vehicles to Ukraine, as the country’s fight against the Russian invasion lurches inevitably towards its second year. 

The Bradley is an armored transport, with tracks and a small turret. It is tank-like in appearance, though the Bradley’s gun is much smaller than what’s mounted on a main battle tank like the M1 Abrams fielded by the US military. Its inclusion in the aid package comes after public calls from Ukraine’s President Zelensky for countries to send them high-end military equipment, including tanks.

“It’s not a tank, but it’s a tank killer,” Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon Press Secretary, said at a press conference on January 5. “A Bradley is an armored vehicle that has a firepower capability that can deliver troops into combat.  So, again, it will provide a significant boost to Ukraine’s already impressive armor capabilities.  And we’re confident that it will aid them on the battlefield.”

[Related: Ukraine is getting upgraded Soviet T-72B tanks]

In the January 6 announcement of US aid to Ukraine, the 50 Bradley vehicles share a line with 500 TOW anti-tank missiles, as well as 250,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition. The TOW, an acronym that originally stood for “Tube Launched, Optically Tracked, Wire-Guided” and now stands for the “Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wireless-guided” missile, is a kind of anti-tank missile that often is mounted on the side of Bradley turrets. This is the primary weapon to be used against tanks, and has been for decades. 

The 25mm ammunition, fired by the Bradley’s 25mm Bushmaster cannon, means that a Bradley can destroy targets like light vehicles, walls, and even helicopters. The weapon can fire armor-piercing ammunition, giving it some ability to fight with the gun against heavier armor, though that is at best a secondary use. Bradleys can sometimes fire ammunition using depleted uranium penetrators, which can punch through armor and also carry long-term environmental and health risk to civilians who might encounter them after the battle, especially if the rounds have not been properly disposed of.

Beyonds its weaponry, the Bradley can carry six or seven passengers inside. Dismounted, those soldiers can fight in support of the vehicle, before loading up and driving away as needed.

War of maneuver

One way to understand the Bradley is not in relation to tanks, which outclass it in firepower, but compared to the vehicle it was designed to replace. The M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, first introduced in 1960, were designed as a “battle taxi,” or a way to get soldiers where they needed to be to fight. The M113s were initially outfitted with machine guns, but unlike the sturdy cannon and missiles of a Bradley, the M113 was not designed to fight on its own in battle. Instead, the role of the M113 was to carry troops quickly to where they needed to disembark and fight.

The M113 is still in service today, and the Pentagon announced the aid to Ukraine would include 100 M113 APCs, alongside the 50 Bradleys provided. The M113 needs a crew of two to operate, and can carry 11 soldiers and their gear in addition to that. While a modest difference from the Bradley’s passenger capacity, it can add up: The 50 M113s can carry 550 soldiers, while 50 Bradleys can at best transport 350 troops.

[Related: What the future holds for the Army’s venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle]

In addition to the Bradleys and the M113s, the same aid package includes 55 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs. These machines, used heavily by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, are big troop transports with V-shaped hulls, capable of deflecting the explosive blast from roadside bombs into injuries instead of immediate deaths. Landmines, common across the war, have been exacerbated by the risk of unexploded weapons fired across the battlefield. MRAPS provide a way for Ukraine to more safely move forces across those hazards.

Rounding out the mobility aid portion of the package, the Department of Defense aims to provide 138 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs), popularly known as Humvees. These are light transports, which move soldiers quickly and can cross terrain, like marshes or rocky fields, that may trap heavier vehicles.

[Related: The Army’s new light tank can venture where its beefier cousins can’t]

Tanks are a threat in combat in part because they require specialized equipment, like massive cannons or anti-tank missiles to destroy. But one major way to limit the impact of heavy armor is to launch fast offensives where the tanks aren’t, and then make sure anti-tank weapons are in place before a counter-offensive. Bradleys, with TOW missiles, offer added punch. The combined fleet of MRAPs, M113s, and Humvees supporting the Bradleys ensures that Ukrainian forces will have greater freedom of movement. 

While the United States is not at this moment providing Ukraine with heavy armor to fight heavy armor, it is preparing the aforementioned slew of vehicles that let Ukraine pick when and where to fight battles. 

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To better defend Taiwan in the face of a potential invasion, the United States is selling it Volcanos. More precisely, the United States is selling Taiwan the Volcano Mine Dispenser, a system that can rapidly hurl anti-tank landmines, creating a dangerous and impassable area for heavy armor. The Volcano is an older system, but its use in Taiwan would be brand-new, indicating the kinds of strategies that Taiwan and the United States are considering when it comes to how to defend the island nation in the future.

Land mines are a defensive weapon, though one that can certainly be used aggressively. Putting a landmine in place imperils all who would pass through the area, forcing attackers to face immediate danger or slow down their advances as they reroute around the hazard. What the Volcano does, specifically, is allow for the defenders to create a minefield rapidly. 

“Using a ground vehicle, a 1,000-meter minefield can be laid in 4 to 12 minutes based on terrain and vehicle speed,” reads an Army description. The Volcano system’s mines can also be deployed by helicopter, and it can deploy anti-personnel mines, but the announcement from the State Department specifically mentions trucks for carrying and mounting the Volcano systems it is selling Taiwan, and mentions anti-tank mines. 

Enemy mine

Every landmine is an explosive designed to detonate in the future. Anti-personnel landmines, as the name suggests, are used to kill people, and are prohibited by international treaties in part because of the threat they pose to civilians during and after war. (The United States is only party to some of the treaties regarding land mines.)

Anti-tank landmines have detonation thresholds that are harder to accidentally set off with anything except a vehicle, and are targeted squarely at the largest and deadliest vehicles on a battlefield. In addition, to ensure that the anti-tank mines are used for battlefield purposes, rather than permanently delineating a fixed border, their detonation fuses can be programmed to not work after a set amount of time. 

“A Soldier-selectable, self-destruct mechanism destroys the mine at the end of its active lifecycle – 4 hours to 15 days – depending on the time selected,” declares the Army.

This fits into the larger role of mines as tools to change how battles are fought, rather than create static fronts. In the announcement authorizing the sale, the mines are referred to not as mines but as “munitions,” the broader category of all explosives fired by weapons. With the ability to cover an area, and then have that area be littered in active explosives for over two weeks, one way to think of the Volcano is as artillery designed to send explosives forward in both space and time. 

Island time

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrated, landmines can have a major impact on how and where armies fight. Ukraine borders Russia by land, and even before the February 2022 invasion, the country had leftover explosives littering the landscape, posing a threat to life and limb. After the invasion, both sides used explosive barriers to limit how and where their foes could safely move. Placing landmines can be quick, while clearing landmines without loss of life or equipment usually needs specialized tools and time.

Taiwan’s unique position as an island nation gives it a meaningful physical barrier to hostile takeover. Unlike Russia into Ukraine, China cannot simply roll tanks over the border. An invasion of Taiwan, should the government of mainland China decide to undertake it, would have to be an amphibious affair, landing soldiers and vehicles by ship as well as attacking from the sea and sky. 

“I think we’ve been very clear in the United States over multiple administrations, that Taiwan needs to put its self-defense front and center. We think the Chinese put a premium on speed,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kath Hicks at a security forum in December.

“And the best speed bump or deterrent to that is really the Taiwan people being able to demonstrate that they can slow that down, let alone to defend against it,” Hicks continued. “And that’s where the Ukraine example, I think, really can give the Chinese pause to see the will of a people combined with capability to stall or even stop a campaign of aggression.”

The Volcano is not the flashiest of tools for stopping an invasion by sea, but it does give Taiwan’s military options for how to stop invading forces once they have landed. By being able to place deadly, explosive barriers to movement where they’re needed, for likely as long as they’re needed, the Volcano can halt and restrict advances. It makes the assault into a mess of impassable terrain, blunting attacks with an eruption of explosive power.

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On December 12, Australia announced the name of its latest robotic submarine: the Ghost Shark. This vessel, which is being developed by both Anduril and Australia’s Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group, is designed as a large, underwater, autonomous machine, guided by artificial intelligence. The Ghost Shark will be a stealth robot, built for future wars at sea.

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent.

“Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle. It also keeps that linkage to the Ghost Bat, the MQ-28 program for the Air Force, which is also another quite stealthy autonomous system,” said Commodore Darron Kavanagh of the Royal Australian Navy. (Ghost sharks, the animals, are often consumed as part of fish and chips.)

The Ghost Bat drone fighter, or MQ-28 he referenced, is another recent initiative by Australia to augment crewed forces with robotic allies. While a jet is bound by the finite number of hours it can stay airborne, a robotic submarine, freed of crew, can endure under the sea for a long time.

“They have the capacity to remain at sea undetected for very long periods, carry various military payloads and cover very long distances,” Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said in a release. “The vessels will provide militaries with a persistent option for the delivery of underwater effects in high-risk environments, complementing our existing crewed ships and submarines, as well as other future uncrewed surface vessels.”

Pause for effect

“Effects” is a broad term that refers to all the ways a vehicle, tool, or weapon can make battle easier for one side and harder for its enemies. “Kinetic effects,” for example, are the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets that immediately come to mind when people think of war. But effects can include other tools, like electromagnetic jamming, or a smoke grenade detonating and creating a dense cloud to hide the movement of soldiers.

Underwater, those effects could be direct attack, like with torpedoes, or it could be sending misleading sonar signals, fooling enemy ships and submarines to target a robot instead of a more powerful crewed vessel.

In May, Anduril announced it was working on Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs) for the Royal Australian Navy, which is what is now known as Ghost Shark.

“It is modular, customizable and can be optimized with a variety of payloads for a wide range of military and non-military missions such as advanced intelligence, infrastructure inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting,” read the announcement.

In this instance, its job could include seeing enemy vessels and movements, as well as identifying targets for weapons fired from other vehicles. One of the most consistent promises from autonomous systems is that, by using sensors and fast onboard processing, these machines will be able to discover, discern, and track enemies faster than human operators of the sensor systems. If the role of the Ghost Shark is limited, at least initially, to targeting and not firing, it lets the robot submarines bypass the difficult questions and implications of a machine making a lethal decision on its own.

At the press conference this month, Quinn told the press that adversaries will have to assume that a Ghost Shark is not only watching their movements, but “is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” reports Breaking Defense. If the Ghost Shark is to be an armed robot, it will raise difficult questions about human control of lethal autonomous machines, especially given the added difficulty of real-time communication under water.

Uncrewed underwater

The Ghost Shark is just one of a growing array of large underwater drones in development by a host of nations. In the chart below, the XL-AUV references the original name for the Ghost Shark.

Before the Ghost Shark can reach the extra-large size it’s intended to have, Anduril is developing the concept on an existing robot submarine it already makes, the smaller Dive-LD. At the naming announcement, a Dive-LD with “Ghost Shark” on the side was on display, highlighting how the program will flow from one into the other.

The Dive-LD is smaller than the XL-AUV (or Ghost Shark) will be, with its 5.8 meter length between 4 and 24 meters shorter than the final design. It still is a useful starting point for developing software, techniques, and testing payloads, all with the intent of scaling the robot up to the size needed for long lasting and deep operations.

The company boasts that these submarines can operate for up to 10 days, with room to expand that endurance, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters below the surface. 

Watch a video about the Ghost Shark, from the Australian Department of Defence, below:

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On December 21, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke before the United States Congress, on his first trip out of his country since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Speaking against tyranny and drawing a direct analogy to American successes in the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Saratoga and World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, Zelensky promised to see Ukraine through to victory. He also asked for weapons. He asked for artillery, tanks, and planes, and he asked for one weapon specifically by name: Patriot missiles.

“If your Patriots stop the Russian terror against our cities, it will let Ukrainian patriots work to the full to defend our freedom,” said Zelensky. “When Russia cannot reach our cities by its artillery, it tries to destroy them with missile attacks.”

On the same day, the Department of Defense announced it was sending Ukraine its first Patriot air defense battery, along with missiles for it. 

Missile defense

There are, broadly, two ways that militaries can use long-range explosives in war. The first is specific attacks, trying to find military bases or ammunition depots, fixed targets with clear impact on the ability to fight a war. Another is to use bombardment as a weapon of punishment, to inflict pain generally on a population, hoping that the destruction and demoralization hastens victory. Cruise missiles, which can be quite precise weapons, can serve the latter function when fired in barrages at targets far away.

Stopping cruise missiles is hard, in part because of their long range and ability to change direction in flight. Missile defense, which are systems that pair sensors like radar with interceptors like missiles, is one way to stop some of the attacks. Missile defense is a hard problem, even when only talking about missiles with conventional (non-nuclear) warheads, but it’s also a technology that has been developed for decades.

In November, the Department of Defense announced it was joining Spain in supplying Ukraine with HAWK missile interceptors. These weapons were first developed in the 1950s, deployed in the 1960, and upgraded versions still in use by many nations today. HAWKs are useful against aircraft, and they destroyed planes and helicopters when fired by Kuwaiti forces against Iraq in 1990. 

Patriot missiles 

While the United States retained HAWKs in its inventory and other nations deployed them, Patriot missiles have been the standard of interception for a long time. A Patriot missile battery consists of launchers, missiles, a command room to control firing, and a radar to identify and track targets. Once a target, like a plane or a missile, is detected for intercept, the operators fire in response, and then the Patriot missile flies to intercept, its own sensors guiding it along the course. Early Patriot missiles would intercept targets by exploding near them. Modern Patriot missiles destroy their targets in a physical collision.

Patriot missiles also had a major debut in the 1991 Gulf War against Scuds, a ballistic missile fired by Iraq, though that debut should come with caveats.

“During the 1991 Gulf War, the public was led to believe the [sic] that the Patriot had near-perfect performance, intercepting 45 of 47 Scud missiles,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis of Middlebury Institute of International Studies in 2019. “The U.S. Army later revised that estimate down to about 50 percent — and even then, it expressed ‘higher’ confidence in only about one-quarter of the cases. A pesky Congressional Research Service employee noted that if the Army had correctly applied its own assessment methodology consistently, the number would be far lower. (Reportedly that number was one — as in one lousy Scud missile downed.)”

Patriot missiles have improved considerably since then. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Patriot missiles were much more effective at intercepting ballistic missiles than they were in 1991, though there were still limits to their performance. The missiles have seen extensive use by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, intercepting missiles, rockets, and drones fired into the countries by forces in Yemen as part of that ongoing war. Israel has also used Patriot missiles to shoot down a Syrian fighter-bomber.

Part of the challenge of using Patriot missiles is that they are made to destroy big threats, like bombers and ballistic missiles, while also being used to destroy smaller targets, like drones. In his speech before Congress, Zelensky said “Iranian deadly drones sent to Russia in hundreds — in hundreds became a threat to our critical infrastructure.”

These drones, most especially the self-detonating Shahed-136s, are used like cruise missiles to barrage a target from afar, but built from much cheaper parts.

“The high cost per missile and the relatively small number of missiles in a battery means that Patriot operators cannot shoot at every target,” wrote Mark Cancian and Tom Karako of CSIS, a think tank, earlier this month. “High-value Russian aircraft and ballistic missiles would be appropriate targets. Shooting $4 million missiles at $250,000 Russian cruise missiles might be justified if those missiles would hit sensitive targets. Shooting a $4 million missile at a $50,000 Iranian Shahed-136 drone would probably not.”

So long as Russia launches or threatens to launch cruise missiles into Ukraine, Patriot missiles can have a role in stopping the severity of the attack. To comprehensively deal with threats to the country, Ukraine can incorporate the Patriots into a holistic and layered defense, with everything from retaliatory rocket strikes to “threat emitters” that confuse sensors.

When it comes to stopping attacks, Ukraine may need not to use just Patriots, but Vampires—which are truck-mounted drone interceptors—too.

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To fire artillery faster, the US Army is turning to robotic arms. On December 1, Army Futures Command awarded a $1 million contract to Sarcos Technology and Robotics Corporation to test a robot system that can handle and move artillery rounds. 

Every artillery piece is, in essence, a tube that combines the artillery shell with an explosive propellant, hurling a projectile and pain far away to someone else. The rate of artillery fire is determined by how quickly the crew can aim, load, and reload the gun. For artillery on the ground, that’s a matter of drill and skill, training the humans to lift and load, and clear and seal guns as fast as possible without dropping an artillery round that can weigh over 90 pounds. 

As such, the Army hopes that robotics can help with this process. “The Sarcos robotic ammunition handling solution leverages a dexterous robotic arm that was designed to be integrated into the U.S. Army’s fleet of Self-Propelled Howitzer Systems,” the company said in a release.

A self-propelled artillery system is a long-range gun mounted on a vehicle, usually a tracked and to some extent an armored one, that looks at a distance like a tank with a very large gun. The Army’s self-propelled howitzer is the venerable M109 Paladin, whose earliest models entered service in 1963. The Paladin has been upgraded at least 15 times in its long service, with new production models adapting to better technology and changing needs in combat.

Operating a Paladin at present takes a crew of six. The driver directs the vehicle, the gunner aims the weapon, three ammunition handlers load and ready the weapon, and a commander oversees the whole operation. Fitting three people in the back of the Paladin to lift and load ammunition means specifically finding recruits who can fit within the vehicle’s confines. Those people must also endure the stress of repeatedly lifting and loading rounds at the pace of battle.

[Related: The US’s latest assist to Ukraine: Rocket launchers with a 43-mile range]

For the Extended Range Cannon Artillery, the Army’s latest iteration of the Paladin-derived design, the Army is hoping to double the range of its artillery, while keeping pace with the complex tasks of firing and calibrating shots. Depending on ammunition, a Paladin today can hit targets at a range of 11 to 15 miles away. The Extended Range version, which has been thoroughly redesigned since the 1963 models, will have a range of 40 miles. 

“The Extended Range Cannon Artillery system is used extensively in the U.S. Army for long range precision firing, but the downside to this system is the weight of the ammunition needing to be hand-loaded by Soldiers in the field,” Reeg Allen, vice president of business development, Sarcos, said in a release.

An automated system, using robot arms to fetch and ready artillery rounds, would function somewhat like a killer version of a vending machine arm. The human gunner could select the type of ammunition from internal stores, and then the robotic loader finds it, grabs it, and places it on a lift. 

If it sounds futuristic, a system like this is actually already in use. This is how the automated loader of the Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled howitzer works. That gun is in service with several nations, including Germany and Ukraine. The use of the automated system requires one fewer human artillery crew member in the vehicle. The PzH 2000 also has an automated loader for outside the vehicle, allowing soldiers to carry ammunition from trucks or nearby storage and restock the vehicle in the field, without having to crawl into the confined space of the artillery crew compartment.

[Related: What to know about the Caesars, the gigantic truck-mounted artillery units France sent Ukraine]

Testing the new automated system means ensuring not just that it can lift and load artillery, but that it can also handle the rigors of war. Any useful hardware must be able to absorb the shock and vibration of driving, as well as handling the environmental factors in which it operates, from intense heat to sharp cold, as well as erosion from sand, dust, and humidity.

Should the robot arm perform as expected in testing, it will eliminate a job that is all repetitive strain. The robot, lifting and loading ammunition, is now an autonomous machine, automating the dull and menial task of reading rounds to fire.

Improved speed and reduced crewing of artillery are always broadly good objectives, and the ongoing war in Ukraine has emphasized the continuing role of artillery on modern battlefields. Self-propelled artillery offers a way for armies to shoot and scoot, unleashing salvos and then relocating before retaliation. Unlike high-end rock and missile systems like the HIMARs, self-propelled artillery can deliver that barrage using much lower cost artillery shells.

Watch an automated loader for a PzH 2000 in action below: 

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To confuse Russian aircraft, Ukraine reportedly has access to a training tool from the United States. Known as “Threat Emitters,” they are a way for pilots to learn the signatures of hostile aircraft and missiles, allowing them to safely practice identifying and reacting to combat situations in training. In simulated scenarios, pilots learn how their sensors would perceive real threats, and can safely plan and adapt to the various anti-aircraft weapons they might encounter. The net effect is that pilots learn to fight against a phantom representation of air defenses, in preparation for the real thing.

But when brought to actual war, the emitters in turn are a way to make an enemy’s sensors less reliable, confounding adversarial pilots about what is real and what is merely an electromagnetic mirage.

These “low-cost emitters were built for ranges inside the U.S. but now are in the hands of Ukrainians,” reported Aviation Week, citing Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr. “The emitters can replicate surface-to-air missiles and aircraft, and are a cheap, innovative way to further complicate the air picture for Russia.”

One such system is the Joint Threat Emitter. There are two major components to the system: a command unit that lets soldiers operate it, and trailer-mounted radar threat emitters. A command unit can control up to 12 different threat emitters, and each emitter can simulate up to six threats at once. 

These emitters help pilots train on their sensors, practicing for war when far from conflict. In 2013, the Air Force and Navy set up Joint Threat Emitters at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both the Navy and Air Force operate from the island, and as the American territory closest to North Korea and China, Guam is prominently featured in war plans around either country. 

“When [pilots] go to a real-world situation, they won’t see anything that we haven’t thrown at them before,” Staff Sgt. Rick Woltkamp, a ground radar systems craftsman with the Idaho Air National Guard, said in 2013. “We simulate a ground attack, and the pilot will react and respond accordingly to the simulation.”

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

Development and use of the tech goes back two decades. In 2002, the Air Force selected Northrop Grumman to develop the Joint Threat Emitter over the next 10 years as a “high-fidelity, full-power threat simulator that is capable of generating radar signals associated with threat systems” that will “better enable aircrews to train in modern war environments.”

Some of the signals it can generate mimic surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, both of which threaten planes but require different countermeasures. One example of a non-missile air defense system is the ZSU-23, built by the Soviet Union. The ZSU is an armored vehicle with anti-aircraft guns pointed on a turret that uses a radar dish to guide its targeting. As a Soviet-made system, ZSU-23 systems were handed down to successor states, and are reportedly in operation by both the militaries of Ukraine and Russia.

When used for training purposes, the Joint Threat Emitters let pilots perceive and adapt to the presence of enemies, beyond visual line of sight. At these distances, pilots rely largely on sensor readings to see and anticipate the danger they are flying into. One way for them to adapt might be to pick a new route, further from the anti-air radars. Another would be to divert the attack to knock out anti-air systems first.

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

In Ukraine, the likely use case for these emitters is to augment the country’s existing air defenses. Using the emitters to project air-defense signals across the battlefield—signals identical to known and real Ukrainian air defenses—could mask where the actual defenses are. Real defenses lurking in a sea of mirage defenses, simulated but not backed up by the actual weapons, is a vexing proposition for an attacker. Discovering what is real means probing the defenses with scouts (or hoping that satellite imagery provides a timely update). But because the emitters, like the weapons they emulate, can be driven around, even a view from space cannot accurately pin down a fixed location for long.

Russia’s air force has struggled to achieve air superiority over Ukraine since it invaded in February 2022. Existing air defenses, from vintage human-portable missiles to newer arrivals, put planes and helicopters at real risk for attack. Videos of Russian helicopters lobbing rockets, increasing range while greatly reducing accuracy, suggest that even in the war’s earliest months Russian pilots were afraid of existing Ukrainian anti-air defenses. 

While the threat emitters alone do not offer any direct way to shoot down aircraft, having them in place makes Russia’s work of attacking from the sky that much harder. Even if a threat emitter is found and destroyed, it likely means that Russia spent ammunition hitting a decoy target, while missing a real and tangible threat.

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On November 29, the Department of Defense released its annual report on the military power of China. The document offers a public-facing look at how the military of the United States assesses the only country it truly considers to be a potential rival. Most strikingly, the report suggests that not only is China expanding its nuclear arsenal, but it is potentially on track to field 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035.

Nuclear warheads are hardly the only measure of a nation’s destructive power, but they’re easily the most eye-catching. China already has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, behind Russia and the United States. 

In the report, the Pentagon estimates China’s arsenal to currently be over 400 warheads. The Federation of American Scientists, which produces an independent assessment of nuclear forces, estimated China’s arsenal at over 350 warheads as of early 2022. Getting to 1,500 warheads by 2035 would require China to produce 85 warheads a year, every year, until then.

Nuclear numbers

China’s arsenal, while large and growing, is relatively in keeping with the arsenals of India, Pakistan, the UK, and France. More specifically, India is estimated by the Federation to have 160 warheads while France has 290. (North Korea and Israel, with 20 and 90, respectively, have the fewest.) 

These arsenals are all an order of magnitude or two smaller than the 5,428 for the United States, and 5,977 for Russia. That’s a huge change in scale, with the world’s largest arsenal roughly 300 times as big as the world’s smallest. It’s also a divide largely determined by history. The United States and the Soviet Union, from which Russia inherited its nuclear arsenals, were the first two countries to develop and test atomic weapons, and they did so in the context of the Cold War, after the United States used two atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Importantly, the arsenals of the United States and Russia remain bound by arms control treaties, most crucially the New START treaty. While the US and Russia both maintain thousands of warheads in stockpiles or reserves, they both actively deploy roughly 1,600 warheads each. That’s comparable to the total the Pentagon estimates China to be working towards.

Throughout the Cold War, arsenal increases were driven by advances in technology and changes in strategy. More warheads in more missiles, including missiles that could carry and launch multiple warheads at once, developed as an approach to guaranteeing destruction in the face of developments around sophisticated defenses, like missile interceptors or silos hardened against nuclear attack. New technologies, like the continued development by Russia, China, and the United States of hypersonic weapons, could similarly bend arsenal design to more warheads, ensuring that the missiles launched in an attack can cause sufficient harm upon arrival. 

Launching points

Warheads are the smallest unit of a nuclear arsenal. They are, after all, the part that creates the explosions. But a nuclear warhead on its own is just a threat waiting to be sent somewhere far away. What really determines the effectiveness of warheads is the means available to launch them.

In the United States, there exists what’s known as the nuclear triad: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) launched from silos, submarine-launched missiles, and weapons delivered by planes. But even that seemingly simple triad fails to capture the complexity of launch. The United States can fire Air Launched Cruise Missiles with nuclear warheads from bombers, a weapon that travels at a different trajectory than gravity bombs or ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon report outlines China’s platforms across air, sea, and land. Air is covered by China’s existing H-6N bomber class. At sea, China has six operational nuclear-armed submarines, with development expected on a next-generation nuclear-armed submarine this decade. On land, China has both road-mobile missile launcher-erector trucks, which can relocate and launch long-range missiles across the country, and growing silo fields, capable of housing ICBMs underground.

The distribution of warheads across submarines, planes, road-mobile missiles, and silos matters, because it can suggest what kind of nuclear war a country anticipates or wants to deter. Silos are especially notable because they are designed to launch in retaliation to a first strike, like submarines, but unlike submarine-launched missiles, silos are specifically placed to attract incoming attack, diverting enemy firepower away from civilians or military command as a missile sink.

Road-mobile missiles, instead, are vulnerable when found, but can be relocated to avoid strikes like submarines and bombers, only with the added feature that they are visible from space. The act of signaling—when one nation uses the position and readiness of nuclear weapons to communicate with other nations indirectly—is tricky, but one of the signs countries look for is obvious mobilization seen from satellite photography. 

Ultimately, the increase in warhead numbers suggests a growing arsenal, though it is hard to know what the end state of that arsenal will be. Producing nuclear weapons is hard, dangerous work. Wielding them, even as a deterrent, is risky as well. 

What is certain, at least, is that the days of talking about Russia and the United States as the world’s predominant nuclear powers may be trending towards an end. Cold War arms control and limitation treaties, which halted and then meaningfully reduced arsenal sizes, were done in the context of two countries agreeing together. Reducing arsenals in the 21st century will likely be a multi-party effort. 

The post A snapshot of the world’s nuclear weapons—and how the numbers are changing appeared first on Popular Science.

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The past year has been marked by serious challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency, a subsequent increase in extreme forest fire frequency, and the devastating war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. But we’ve also seen true innovation in the field of crisis response. More exact location systems will help emergency services find people in trouble quicker. Better respirator technology is rolling out, designed to help wildland firefighters breathe a little easier. And fire trucks are finally starting to go electric. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations offer paths out of tight spots, aiming to create a safer future—or at least a better way to handle its myriad disasters.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner 

Wildland Firefighter Respirator by TDA Research: A lightweight, field-rechargeable respirator for forest firefighters

TDA

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Forest fire fighters need a lightweight wearable respirator to protect them from inhaling smoke. The Wildland Firefighter Respirator, by TDA Research, uses a hip-mounted pump to pull air through a HEPA filter, channeling it to a secure but loose-fitting half-mask (a helpful feature for people who haven’t had the chance to shave while in the field). A sensor in the system detects air flow direction, letting the pump only blow at full strength when the user inhales. Importantly, the device weighs just 2.3 pounds, which is only about 10 percent the weight of a typical urban firefighting Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. About the size of a 1-liter water bottle, the respirator is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. To recharge in the field or away from a generator, that pack can also draw power from 6 AA batteries. Bonus: Even though it was designed for safety professionals, the device could also become civilian protective gear in fire season.

Connect AED by Avive: Connecting defibrillators to those in need, faster

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Avive’s Connect AED (Automated External Defibrillator) is designed to be a life-saving device that’s also smart. The devices can automatically do daily maintenance checks to ensure they can perform as needed, thanks to WiFi, cellular, bluetooth, and GPS. Plus, with that connectivity, 911 operators could alert nearby Connect AED holders to respond to a called-in cardiac arrest, saving time and possibly someone’s life. Once a person has been defibrillated, Connect’s connectivity also lets emergency room doctors see data the device collected, such as the patient’s heart rhythm, as well as the device’s shock history, complete with timestamps. The Connect AED also has a backpack-like form factor and touch screen for intuitive use.

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations by Ames Research Center: Letting drone pilots clear skies for aerial emergency vehicles 

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The sky above a forest fire can be a dangerous, crowded place, and that was before forest fire fighters added drones joined the mix. Developed by NASA, the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project (STEReO) is developing tools for managing the complicated airspace above an emergency. In the spring of 2022, a NASA team field-tested a STEReO’s suitcase-sized prototype device, called the UASP-Kit, to monitor drones safely in the open airspace around prescribed burns. By tracking transponders on crewed aircraft, the UASP-Kit can play a sound through tablet speakers, alerting drone operators when helicopters and planes fly close to where they are operating. That hopefully lets drone pilots get their equipment to safety without risking aerial collision.

Locate Before Route by AT&T: Pinpointing the emergency 

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When a person in an emergency calls 911 for help, that call is routed, based on its location, to the closest 911 operator. For cell phones, that meant matching the call to the nearest tower and hoping it sent the call to dispatch in the right county. But in May 2022, AT&T announced the nationwide rollout of a better system. Leaning on the improved location services on iOS and Android phones, AT&T’s Locate Before Route feature can pinpoint the location of the emergency call within 50 meters, sometimes even as precisely as 15 meters. This better location information should allow the call to be routed to the best dispatch center, ideally helping responders arrive faster. That data can only be used for 911 purposes, and helps first responders get where they’re needed quickly, nationwide.

GridStar Flow by Lockheed Martin: Helping to power defense with renewable energy

Lockheed Martin

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The US military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, but if it wants to use more renewable energy, it needs a way to store that electricity to power vital functions. GridStar Flow, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Army, is a massive battery complex that takes advantage of the space of Colorado’s Fort Carson to go big. It will store up to 10 megawatt-hours of juice, thanks to tanks of charged electrolytes and other equipment. Construction at Fort Carson broke ground on November 3, but the company has already tested out a smaller flow battery in Andover, Massachusetts. Using electrolytes that can be derived from commodity chemicals, GridStar Flow offers a power storage and release system that can help smooth the energy flow from renewable sources.

Volterra Electric Firetruck by Pierce: A more sustainable, quieter fire truck

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Fire trucks are big, powerful vehicles, but they run on diesel, a polluting fossil fuel. The Pierce Volterra truck can deliver all that power on an electric charge, and it can also run on diesel fuel if need be. Already in use with the Madison, Wisconsin fire department, but with contracts to expand to Portland, Oregon and Gilbert, Arizona underway this year, the Volterra has enough battery power for a full day as an electric vehicle. The electric power helps complement a transition to renewable energy, but it also comes with immediate benefit to the firefighters: the vehicle doesn’t spew exhaust into the station. The quiet of the electric engine also lets firefighters coordinate better on the drive, and can help cries for help be heard when the responders arrive on site.

Vampire Drone by L3Harris: Taking down drones from kilometers away

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Drones are increasingly a part of modern battles, seen in wars across the globe but especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both countries using a range of uncrewed aircraft to scout and fight. In August 2022, the Department of Defense announced it would send a new tool to aid Ukrainian forces as a way to counter Russian drones. Made by L3Harris, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system is a rocket launcher and sensor kit that can be mounted to a range of vehicles, providing a means to damage and destroy drones at a range of at least three miles. The laser-guided rockets, directed by a human operator, explode with a proximity fuse, making near misses into effective takedowns. 

Emergency SOS via satellite by Apple: Locating lost hikers with satellites

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For hikers lost in remote parts of the United States and Canada, calling for help means hoping for cell phone coverage, or waiting for a serendipitous rescue. But Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite, announced September 2022, will let people with an iPhone 14 transmit emergency messages via satellite, provided they can’t first establish a cellular connection. Texters will have a tap-through menu to create an information-dense but data-light report, and provided trees or mountains don’t block the signal, they can transmit crucial information, like what kind of injuries someone has sustained. With a clear view of the sky and fifteen seconds, a cry for help can reach space and then, even better, rescuers on Earth.

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Stopping a missile is a complicated operation that takes a team of machines. The Army, charged with protecting soldiers in the field from enemy attacks, is testing a system that can coordinate sensors and interceptors to better accomplish this task. On November 17, the Army successfully used this new system to shoot down a cruise-missile stand-in at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

To do this, soldiers from the Army’s 43rd Air Defense Artillery Regiment used two Patriot and Sentinel radars, Patriot missile launchers, and Patriot interceptors, all coordinated through a new command system. This connective tissue between sensors and interceptors is the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS. It’s a way for the Army to coordinate radars and missile interceptors across a broad area, comprehensively detecting incoming threats and then making sure those missiles are stopped, without overcommitting interceptors and depleting vital stockpiles.

This endeavor “had a test objective of demonstrating Army Integrated Air & Missile Defense capability to execute [a] kill chain against a ground launched cruise missile surrogate,” the Army said in a release.

In other words, the soldiers used the sensors and interceptors to track and destroy a target drone that was imitating a cruise missile in flight. While the test specifically used Patriot and Sentinel radars, and Patriot interceptors, the premise is that the IBCS can incorporate a host of useful existing and future sensors, as well as any kinds of interceptors the Army might field.

“Preliminary indications are that the planned flight test objectives against the cruise missile threat were achieved, and the target was successfully intercepted,” said the release.

Cruise missiles are a durable threat on modern battlefields, in part because their low trajectory and high degree of maneuverability mean they can be hard to detect at a distance. Patriot missiles, which are deployed in batteries with fire command stations and radars to track targets, have been used to defend against cruise missiles for decades, though the missiles drastically underperformed at intercepting targets during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

One way to improve targeting is to incorporate and coordinate more sensors across a wider field, so that missiles can be detected earlier and the most relevant ways to stop them can be brought to bear against the target. Sometimes, these tools for stopping weapons will be missiles, like the Patriot interceptors, or the older HAWK missiles the US is preparing to send to Ukraine. 

Other ways of stopping an attack may be rockets, like the Vampire anti-air and anti-drone system. Laser weapons, like one tested by PopSci, are another component of modern anti-missile tech, and could be incorporated into a command system.

There are many ways to stop a missile, or a drone, in flight. Grouped together, jammers, guns, missiles, lasers, and other answers to aerial threats are called “effectors,” in military and industry parlance. The effect can be everything from explosion by missile, puncture by bullet, melting by laser, electronic disruption by jammer, but what is essential to the IBCS is that a commander has the sensors that can say where the attack is and the tools to stop it. 

“Once fielded, IBCS will extend the battlespace beyond what a single sensor tied to a single effector can provide, allowing the use of a sensor or effector’s full range and enabling the warfighter to quickly see and act on data across the entire battlefield,” said Northrop Grumman, maker of IBCS, in a release.

Many legacy weapon systems are designed to work with a specific sensor, making a self-contained and compact kit that matched the capabilities and limits of the technology at the time of introduction. It also meant that commanders in the field were limited to working within that system’s information and weapons, even if another system could see the same target. By designing IBCS to incorporate information across sensors, it can match the Army’s desired plug-and-play information environment of the future, where the tools on hand are used to share information, and then the coordinating node matches signal to weapon.

The testing of IBCS at White Sands started in January, and over 10 months soldiers learned how to use the system in a range of scenarios designed to resemble what might be seen in combat. This included two flight tests prior to November 17 where “IBCS detected, tracked, and intercept threats that included: a high speed, high performance tactical ballistic missile and two cruise missile surrogates during a stressing electronic attack,” according to Northop Grumman. 

Provided the system can withstand electronic attack in the field as well as it did in testing, the coordinated system should let the Army better protect soldiers from a range of incoming assaults, using whatever tools are on hand to build a defense that’s stronger together.

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At a range in southern England, researchers tested a new laser, making it one step closer to military use. Developed for the Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is intended to be a long-range answer to incoming threats, a way to defeat projectiles in mid-air through the concentrated power of intense light. On November 8, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced it had conducted long-range laser trials at the Porton Down site. During the live fire test, the laser hit and neutralized a small drone at a range of 2 miles.

The laser was developed for the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). Like most laser weapons, it is a composite technology, a sum of multiple systems put together into one more functional package. This included controls and image processing from defense contractor MBDA, a beam directory to track and point at targets made by defense contractor Leonardo, and a 50-kilowatt laser built by QinetiQ. In the future, the plan is for this laser to be able to “scale fire-power levels,” likely letting the user increase or decrease power to match the target. That saves energy otherwise wasted on overkill, while ensuring the laser can defeat tougher targets when they exist. 

“The trials involve firing the UK DragonFire demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director,” DSTL said in a release. “These tests improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers and their associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets.” 

To develop the laser, the Ministry of Defence and industry have spent “around £100 million,” or roughly $118 million dollars. Laser weapons are heavily front-loaded on cost, with the research and development expense in the name of creating a weapon that can destroy targets cheaply, relative to using high-caliber bullets, rockets, or missiles instead.

“Laser directed energy weapons have the potential to provide lower cost lethality, reduced logistical burden and increased effectiveness when compared to other weapon systems – the technology could have a huge effect on the future of defence operations,” said DSTL in the release.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

Laser weapons work by combining and focusing powerful light, and then holding that light steady on a target until the heat of the laser can damage it. The effectiveness of the laser depends on a host of factors, from the amount of power going in, to how well the tracking system can keep the laser focused on the same part of an object. Even the location of where a laser is focused on a drone can change the speed at which it is disabled: a laser aimed at plastic casing and circuits will disable a drone much faster than a laser aimed at igniting a battery.

That means simply developing a powerful laser is not enough to ensure a quick takedown of a drone, or a missile, or other threats like mortar rounds and rocket fire. The sensors and automated tracking systems that go into laser weapons are important for reducing the amount of time a laser needs to fire per target. On the range, a laser can focus on one object without distraction, but in a realistic combat scenario, a laser may have a few seconds to disable a projectile before moving onto another. 

The Ministry of Defence has been looking to develop a laser weapon since at least 2015. One of the durable challenges of making a laser weapon is that the beam’s effectiveness can be diminished by particulates in the air, from smoke or dust or even moisture like fog and rain. The 2015 request stated that the goal was for a laser which can “detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions, with sufficient precision.”

Some of those conditions, like billowing dust or thick fog, are also obstacles to drone flight and sensors. But with laser weapons also taking an anti-projectile role, an inability to stop attacks in bad weather could turn a gloomy day into a grim one in combat.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

DragonFire has been in the works since at least 2017, as a way to defeat and disable aerial targets, like drones. Drones are an ideal target, in part because they fly slow enough for lasers to track, and because there is no onboard pilot that a laser can blind. Laser weapon use against people is governed by the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, part of the Geneva Conventions on Certain Conventional Weapons, which entered into force in 1998. Both the United States and the United Kingdom are among the treaty’s 109 signatories, agreeing to not use lasers specifically to blind people in war. 

That makes DragonFire, like other laser weapons, a modern solution to a modern threat. It’s a way to stop flying robots and uncrewed enemies, protecting humans from inanimate attackers.

Watch a video about it below:

The post The UK’s DragonFire laser is designed to burn drones out of the sky appeared first on Popular Science.

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On November 4, the Department of Defense announced a $400 million package of aid and weapons for Ukraine. This latest installment joins a long list of previous aid to the country as it continues its fight against Russian forces, which invaded Ukraine in February. The shape of the war is reflected in the aid sent, which in this package includes funding for anti-air missiles, river boats, and armored vehicles. But what is most striking about this latest aid package is the juxtaposition of both vintage and modern weapons: among them are refurbished T-72B tanks, a design that is decades old, and 1,100 new Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems. 

The package, the announcement states, is designed to support Ukraine “by meeting their most urgent needs, while also building the capacity of Ukraine’s Armed Forces to defend its sovereignty over the long term.”

Some of the $400 million is going to funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment, ways that the Ukrainian forces can keep fighting at a professional level. It’s also important for incorporating a range of modern and older equipment into one effective military force.

Here’s what to know about both the old and new tech that’s going to Ukraine.

Old equipment

Two of the systems included in the package are, at least in origin, decades old. Included is funding to refurbish old HAWK missiles so the US can deliver them to Ukraine in the future. HAWK missiles were first developed by the US in the 1950s, and deployed in the 1960s, with upgraded versions introduced in the 1970s and 1990s. The missile was named after the bird first, before retroactively getting the acronym “Homing All the Way Killer”

While their role in the US military has been supplanted by Patriot surface-to-air missiles, HAWK missiles can reach altitudes twice that of human-portable anti-air missiles like the Stinger or Strela, and fly nearly ten times as far, hitting planes as far away as 25 miles. Spain has already sent HAWK missiles and launchers to Ukraine, so the US announcement will expand the inventory of missiles.

Also included in the package are T-72B tanks, a Soviet design whose base T-72 model was first prototyped in 1968. T-72s entered production in 1972, with the B model first produced in 1986. This is a main battle tank, one of three lines maintained and produced by the USSR, with a 125mm gun designed to destroy the armored vehicles of NATO in any war in Europe. What sets the T-72B apart from other variants is especially thick turret armor, as well as a better engine. In addition, the tanks have a laser designator and can fire laser-guided rounds from the main gun, though this was designed as an option rather than the default. 

Because the T-72B is a Soviet design, the vehicles designated for Ukraine will come from a former Soviet stockpile, in this case the Czech Republic. The announcement notes that these tanks will be refurbished with “advanced optics, communications, and armor packages.” A separate announcement of the deal says that the United States and the Netherlands are partnering with the Czech Republic for the refurbishment. The first of these tanks are expected for delivery to Ukraine in December 2022, with more to come in 2023.

New weapons

The war in Ukraine is being fought with legacy systems from decades of Cold War buildup, and it is also being fought with new and modern tools, some of which specifically debuted in this war. The Phoenix Ghost, announced in April, is a self-detonating drone. These kinds of weapons have seen prolific use on Ukrainian battlefields, along with US-made Switchblade systems already in use.

When Phoenix Ghost was first announced, it was as a delivery of 121 of the systems. This latest announcement is an order of magnitude larger, at 1,100. These weapons fit in the increasingly crowded low skies above Ukraine, where quadcopter scouts and small remotely piloted missiles give soldiers on foot better information and greater reach.

A toolbox of tech 

The package is best seen as not a hodgepodge of old and new tech, but a coherent picture of what a modern military, at war for months against a similarly equipped foe, needs to win battles and fronts. The tanks in the announcement are listed alongside M117 armored wheeled vehicles, which allow soldiers to fight and move on routes with unexploded bombs or hidden landmines. The Armored Riverine Boats will help forces move and fight on the waterways of the country, of which none is likely more important than the Dnipro that runs through both Kyiv and Kherson.

This will all be coordinated with new communications, soon to be under the watchful protection of anti-air missiles, and with new drone-based weapons hitting gaps in defensive lines. War is a combined arms affair, and all of the items in the November 4 package offer tools for Ukraine to break out from the static artillery duels that can hold fronts in place.

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Before I could lock the laser weapon’s crosshairs on the DJI Phantom drone, I had to make sure it was in the right position. With the drone against a cloudless blue sky, the weapon’s sensors could clearly see and track it, but hard-coded rules of engagement prevented the weapon from firing until the target had an earthen backdrop. Light travels far, and we don’t want to accidentally zap the wrong thing that’s far away.

The target drone’s pilot directed the Phantom below the horizon line, with some landmass behind it. On the laptop in front of me, I placed a tracker marker just to the side of the drone, a push of the left joystick of an Xbox controller fixing the tracker to the target. With a slight nudge of the right joystick, I moved my crosshairs onto one of the quadcopter’s rotors, and then held the trigger. The Phantom lit up on the infrared view, and 15 seconds later it crashed down, the molten plastic of the rotor arm bending on impact.

I set the controller down and an engineer flicked the “armed” switch to the off position. It was my first time firing a laser weapon.

The 10-kilowatt laser in question was a High-Energy Laser Weapon System built by Raytheon, and I was invited by the company to observe it in operation at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, part of New Mexico Tech, in Socorro, New Mexico. 

To get to the range, we had to take a four-wheel drive vehicle onto the dirt roads, about six miles behind Socorro Peak. While New Mexico Tech has its origin in mining, its proximity to White Sands Missile Range (and the availability of EMRTC itself) have kept other defense contractors, like Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as range tenants.

Some of what is tested at the range is explosives. The shape, composition, and aerodynamics of artillery can all be studied through live fire. On the other side of the ridge from where Raytheon has set up its work station came the unmistakable thunder of artillery. Around the testing area were several M110 Howitzers, artillery pieces on treads that the US retired in 1994. 

This old artillery, juxtaposed against a field demonstration of lasers disabling drones, illustrated one of the realities of modern warfare. Artillery can remain effective for decades after it enters service, but drone scouts are changing how armies move and fight, and how armies direct artillery fire, too. The lasers are a reaction to those drones, and an attempt to make drone destruction simple, effective, and in the long run, affordable.

As we arrived on site, past the weathered cannons, I disembarked from the SUV and saw a launch zone of roughly ten or so DJI Phantom 4s. Depending on the model, these drones can cost up to $3,500 each. That’s on the higher end of DJI’s commercial offerings, but an order of magnitude cheaper than the most bare-bones drones designed for military use. At the range, these Phantoms were lined up like clay pigeons, waiting their turn in the sky before being shot down. 

Frying these drones would be a pair of High Energy Laser Weapon Systems (HELWS), made by Raytheon. One was mounted on the back of a Polaris MRZR, a military grade dune buggy. The MRZR still had the two front seats, and in the back sat the power supply and targeting system for the HELWS. Next to the buggy-mounted laser weapon was an identical system, only this one was on the bed of a large truck. In the field, HELWS is designed to be battery powered, but for today each was running off a portable generator, burning gasoline.

Cost comparison

A relatively small amount of fuel would power the two lasers in use that day for the whole of their operations. By the end of the day, 10 DJI Phantom 4s would lie, collected, in various states of destruction. At roughly $3,000 apiece, depending on the model, that’s $30,000 in drones destroyed for roughly what it takes to fill up a small car.

This cost disparity, between cheap drones and even cheaper laser takedowns, is an explicit reason for developing laser weapons. Current means of destroying drones in the field can risk overkill, and come with various drawbacks.

“It has to be a cost-effective solution for soldiers to be able to use it,” said Annabel Flores, chief operating officer of Global Spectrum Dominance at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. “It makes no sense to shoot something that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million-dollar missile into something that’s a thousand dollars.”

In 2017, a US ally reportedly fired a Patriot anti-air missile at a hobbyist quadcopter. Patriot missiles are designed to intercept cruise missiles and airplanes, and they cost about $3 million apiece. Patriots are also made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and while the missile was effective against the drone, the cost difference is so great it was at best a Pyrrhic victory. It’s like killing a mosquito using a grenade.

“That’s just the wrong side of the cost equation that you wanna be on,” said Flores. “What fundamentally drove us down this path is that this is a real need and a real solution.”

The cost of each laser activation is only part of the equation. Raytheon has been awarded at least $52.4 million to develop and deliver HELWS systems to the Department of Defense. Those prototypes and models have been put through the paces, with deployments outside the United States and 25,000 hours operational hours. 

“The next step for us is really being prepared so that it’s not just a cool demonstrator, a cool prototype, but these are producible systems that assembly technicians are putting together today,” said Flores. “Originally physicists were the ones that were working with lasers, then it became engineers while we were doing these proofs. Now it’s assembly technicians that are pulling these systems together.”

What I saw on the monitor in front of me

On the drive to the range, my hosts asked if I play video games. It’s been a decade since I really spent time on a first-person shooter, but there’s a muscle memory to video game controllers that persists. The controls for the laser were set up inside a nearby trailer with plywood walls, but they could fit into a backpack easily.  Firing the HELWS laser is done through a program running on a laptop, which is fed information by ethernet or fiber-optic cord. In my hand, controlling the turret and the laser, was the plug-in Xbox controller.

The laptop’s screen was divided into quadrants of different sizes. In the upper-left, there’s a wide view from the electro-optical camera, showing a slice of surrounding terrain. In a smaller window on the upper right is a narrower view, looking down the “sight line” of the laser. (More on that in a moment.) Below the narrow view is a compass on a map, showing the direction the vehicle is facing, the orientation of the laser, and when designated, any targets in view. That quadrant also has columns for “cues” that the camera can quickly pivot to, which could be predetermined points to focus on or could be new drones added to the system by sensors. 

In the bottom-left of the screen was a landscape-oriented photographic panorama of the area surrounding the laser. This image was captured by the camera pod, and it has layered data on top. A bright red line traces the horizon, hard-coding a boundary that, for this range on this shoot, the laser is not permitted to fire above. In a cluster, beneath a high slope, sit several green rectangles, marking fields of vision and fire zones. Within those settings, the laser turrets can track and then fire and melt drones, but above the horizon line or outside the box, the trigger pull on the laser won’t work. 

This capability, which was set by other menus, is useful on the training range, and has applications in the field. A laser deployed to protect a power plant, say, may want to be hard-coded with certain areas as off-limits, to be absolutely sure the laser doesn’t hit infrastructure by accident. 

Arming the laser

Before firing the laser, it needs to be armed. A safety interlock box with two toggles lets users turn on the laser weapon, and turn on a laser illuminator, which is distinct from the laser weapon. The illuminator is used for targeting, but can also cause harm and disorientation if pointed in a person’s eyes. To ensure that the laser cannot be set up without command authorization, the toggles can be locked off by a key, carried by a commander.

With the controller in hand, targeting the laser is something like playing a video game, though one where the difficulty of aiming in infrared is hard to ignore, rather than eased for sake of playability. Once an object is designated as a target, the turret can follow it well, but zooming around to find the object can be tricky, especially against the juniper-speckled hills of the high desert.

In the field and at other ranges, optical identification can be aided by radar data, which can ping and track new drones arriving within range. With this, a laser gunner can “Slew to Cue,” or toggle between tracked objects the way a remote flicks between favorite channels.

Firing the laser

The laser of the HELWS is housed in the body beneath the turret, and it points upwards at a lens that focuses it. This orientation also lets a camera point in the same direction, giving the video feed a perspective that’s equivalent to looking down the barrel of a gun, though the laser has no barrel and is not a gun. 

The HELWS laser is built into an existing Raytheon camera and laser designator pod. Remove the laser weapon, and the pod’s infrared and electro-optical cameras, as well as the laser illuminator, can be found on vehicles like Predator drones and C-130 planes. The illuminator can seem redundant, but in action it can even out the image on the camera while the laser weapon itself is powered on. In the infrared view, the heat of the laser distorts the target, a bright glowing spot over what was once clearly drone features. With the illuminator, the heat appears washed out, and the laser on the target can clearly be seen. 

The laser has an effective range of 3 kilometers, or just over 1.8 miles. The speed at which the laser can burn through a target depends on a host of factors, not least of which is the air itself. Had the day been rainy, or windy and dusty, the visit would have been rescheduled, as the particles in the air can hinder its function. The laser’s time to destroy a target is also determined by the steadiness of its focus, the wattage of the weapon, and the material of what it was firing against.

To get a feel for the laser before firing it at drones, some targets were set on a board, with another board on a stand behind it. These included inert 20mm rounds with rubber tips, mock grenades, cans of energy drinks and soda and, later, an ammunition box. One of the 20mm rounds lit like a candle under the laser fire, as the heat from the metal moved upward to burn off part of the rubber tip. The soda cans popped and drained, thin metal heating quickly and bursting outwards. The empty ammo box burned open in seconds. The grenades were uneventful. The cement backing of the board behind the objects melted, cement and fiber looking glassy, crystalline upon examination afterwards.

Against drones, the key factor for how long a takedown took was what part of the drone was hit. Battery casings took the longest. A clean shot into the hull and electronics could down a drone in 8-10 seconds. My long shot on the rotor, which melted part of one arm, was the slowest of the day, at 15 seconds.

Modern weapons for modern battlefields

Ultimately, it’s hobbyist drones used as cameras that have sustained the Pentagon’s interest in the HELWS and weapons like it. Prior to drones, aerial surveillance was expensive, requiring planes or helicopters, and could be neutralized with expensive weapons. Now camera drones, even ones cheap enough to buy at a store, are useful enough that forces fighting on both sides in Ukraine see them as essential. The drones can scout, sometimes even attack, and guide artillery fire. In real time, soldiers operating long-range weapons can see not just where to shoot, but the impact of a shot after the dust settles. The lasers, mounted on trucks and buggies, are a way to prevent that, to incapacitate drones and leave foes without that information in the field.

Throughout the day, the boom of artillery would occasionally interrupt conversation, adding extra ambience. The laser testing facility was, ultimately, a trailer and a few four-wheel drive vehicles, parked on a hill with some porta-potties and sparse bunkers. The landscape was beautiful, especially at a distance. Worn and rusted metal collected in certain spots, and hardy plants with sticky seeds dug into everything.

We drove away from the site around 4 o’clock. Behind, in the dirt waiting to be carted out, were the molten husks of several once-useful flying robots.

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On October 21, the Asian American Journalists Association, together with Military Veterans in Journalism, put forth guidelines urging “newsrooms to refrain from use of the Japanese word ‘kamikaze’ to describe the self-detonating Iranian-made drones that Russia is using to conduct attacks in Ukraine.” The letter came in light of a flurry of news stories using the term to describe attacks like a recent one in Ukraine, where Russian forces fired Shahed-136s at military targets and civilian buildings. 

When a Shahed-136 hits, sometimes people die, but a pilot on the weapon never does, because it’s uncrewed.

“‘Kamikaze’ is a Japanese word that translates to ‘divine wind,’ and is commonly used to refer to the Empire of Japan’s military pilots who were ordered to go on suicide missions during World War II, purposely crashing aircraft loaded with explosives onto targets, such as U.S. Navy ships,” reads the guidance. 

With modern loitering munitions—in this case, loitering means the ability to fly around before it impacts a target, if it does—a guidance system, or sometimes a remote operator, makes the decision to aim the uncrewed explosive into a building, vehicle, or people, selected as a target. Yet the term “kamikaze drone” has stuck, with multiple outlets using it in headlines. In 2010, when Popular Science was covering the early development of the Switchblade, it referred to the prototype as both a “Flying Assassin Robot” and “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” 

Another variation, used by news orgs and manufacturers like Switchblade-maker Aerovironment, is “Suicide Drone.” This lacks the same historical or cultural stigma attached to the word “kamikaze,” but also describes a process that does not happen when the drone detonates, because there is no human on board to die by suicide. 

In place of the term, the guidance from AAJA and the veterans organization suggests “self-detonating drones.”

“Kamikaze attacks have nothing to do with modern drone warfare, and there is no good reason for reporters to reference a previous historical warfighting tactic in this context,” Russell Midori, president of Military Veterans in Journalism, said in the statement. “Instead, we recommend using language that more accurately explains how this new technology impacts present-day conflicts.”

“Self-detonating drones” is not an especially remarkable term, though it captures an essential part of what separates this kind of weapon from others. These weapons fly like drones, and they blow up like missiles. 

History: loitering munitions and self-detonating drones

In 1918, the Kettering Bug was built for action in World War I, but never saw it. It was an early ancestor of drones and guided missiles, and was dubbed an “aerial torpedo,” matching the water-based weapons that would seek out ships by means of rudimentary guidance. The Kettering Bug itself would follow a gyroscope for navigation and then would fly a predetermined distance, before shedding its wings and crashing its explosive-containing body into the ground.

The Kettering Bug is useful as a way to understand where drone and missile development diverged. With missiles, engineers and weapon designers regularly improved the guidance and navigation systems, creating a weapon that could fly itself to a target accurately and then explode on arrival. Drones, instead, were developed as remotely controlled systems. 

In World War II, the United States also converted some B-17 bombers to be remotely controlled drone bombs, which were directed from pilots in other bombers flying nearby. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, the older brother of future president John F. Kennedy, died in 1944 while flying a mothership when the drone bomb B-17 it was commanding detonated mid-flight.

As remote control and guidance systems improved, more kinds of drone bombs became possible, blurring the once-clear division between missiles and drones. The Harpy, developed by Israel, is one of the earliest “loitering munitions,” a drone-shaped missile that can detonate into a target, but one that can also be called off from an attack and flown for another mission. 

In short, once fired, missiles fly towards a target and then explode, while drones in the form of loitering munitions can seek out a target in flight, and then be directed to attack or not. And of course, drones not built as munitions can also be used for more traditional tasks, such as intelligence-gathering or launching small missiles. 

Why rename the weapons now?

Loitering munitions and self-detonating drones are in the news because they are being actively used as tools of war. The Switchblade, made by Aerovironment, is a short-range loitering munition that the United States has provided to Ukrainian forces, as they resist the invasion by Russia. Switchblades were first deployed in 2012, though coverage on the use of drones by the US largely focused on larger, Predator- and Reaper-sized drones. Switchblade’s role as a specific weapon given as aid against the invasion, along with the development of the newer “Phoenix Ghost” loitering munition, has given the weapons newfound prominence.

Russia continues to use Iranian-made Shahed-136s against Ukraine. These weapons reportedly cost about $20,000, and so many have been fired in the war that the Ukrainian Air Force can claim it shot down at least 200 of them. The weapons have joined long-range missile attacks as a way for Russia to strike deeper into the country.

Whenever a Shahed crashes to the ground, it’s a hazard and almost certainly a tragedy for all those caught in its blast. The people who perish after such an attack are its targets. The machine, never alive, does not die when it completes its objective.

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When it comes to crossing rivers on bridges, all the technology of modern warfare is still bound by the hard limits imposed by the laws of physics—the structure needs to be able to support the vehicle that’s on it. To try to cope with this problem, the Army is investing in a lighter tank than its current battlefield behemoth, the M1 Abrams main battle tank. This new vehicle, which is still known by its descriptive moniker Mobile Protected Firepower, was promoted at the Association of the United States Army conference held in Washington, DC, from October 10-12. 

The Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) vehicle weighs in at 38 tons, which is heavy by all standards, except it is light compared to the 70 tons of heft of an Abrams tank. That means it can go places the Abrams can’t, expanding how and where the Army can effectively fight war from vehicles. The MPF will also feature fire control and situational awareness sensors, which can allow enemy location data to be shared across vehicles in formation. 

“Bridge classifications being what they are, you know right away whether that bridge can support the weight of a mobile protected firefighter vehicle, or it can’t,” says Tim Reese, the director of US business development for General Dynamics, the company that makes both the Abrams and MPF. “Same thing with the Abrams tank, which requires a much more robust bridge to cross than does the MPF.”

The MPF is designed to accompany Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, which are intended primarily for travel on foot. These formations, which consist of between 3,900 to 4,100 people, incorporate some vehicles, but are distinguished from Armored and Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, which use roughly heavy and medium-armored vehicles to transport soldiers and weapons around the battlefield. 

“It’s designed to help dismounted units when they get into a spot where they cannot maneuver and accomplish their mission because of a threat that is greater than the weapons systems they carry with them on their backs,” says Reese. “Because of [the MPF’s] mobility, it can rapidly move around the battlefield and can be very quickly on call to [assist] that infantry element.” 

“You don’t have to wait for higher coordination for an air asset. You don’t have to try to coordinate helicopters or anything like that,” he adds. 

While Armored and Stryker brigades bristle with heavy weaponry, Infantry brigades are constrained to gear that fits on soldiers’ backs and what can be mounted on vehicles that keep up with infantry over rough terrain, like urban rubble or soft soil. The soldiers on the ground are generally referred to as “dismounts.”

“If they get to any kind of [enemy] fortified bunker situation, or light and light-armored vehicles, that’s something that would hamper the dismounts currently, but [those are threats] that the MPF vehicle’s protected large caliber direct fire power can easily defeat,” says Kevin Vernagus, General Dynamics program director for the MPF. 

The Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, unlike the heavier brigades, can be deployed by aircraft, letting the formation move into action after disembarking from transport planes and helicopters.

“It has to be able to roll off and be able to fight upon roll off,” says Vernagus. “We had to make sure it does everything it needs to do coming out of that aircraft.”

That meant keeping the weight within the bounds of what a C-17 cargo transport plane can deliver. It’s not a tradeoff made lightly: the armor on a combat vehicle is vital for survival, so to lighten the load without compromising protection, General Dynamics says it looked to other parts of design where it could incorporate durable but lighter components.

“Talking about the armor protection obviously is something we can’t really do,” said Reese, “but a more mundane one is the road wheels. They’re the same size as [on] a Bradley vehicle, but they weigh a lot less because they’re made out of a high-strength aluminum.”

Should the Army decide the MPF needs more and heavier armor in the future, the vehicle’s frame is designed to accommodate it.

“We have add-on armor on the sides and the belly plate on the bottom which would allow us in the future, as threats evolve or new materials become available, you simply can take off one set of armor and put on new material or thicker or thinner armor as necessary,” says Vernagus. This system also includes hooks for additional defenses, like active protection systems that explode into incoming anti-tank missiles, mitigating their impact.

To make sure that new tank crews can adapt to the MPFs as they’re delivered, the tank has the same one-in-the-body, three-in-the-turret crew configuration as an Abrams, though the turret itself is situated further back. That’s because, unlike the Abrams or the Patton tanks which preceded it, the engine and transmission of the MPF is mounted in the front. The MPF’s interior look, feel, and controls are designed to closely match that of an Abrams.

The design beat out a competing model by BAE in trials before the Army selected General Dynamics to make the MPF in June. The designers adapted to feedback from soldiers during testing.

“The side skirts that cover over the track in the first phase of the program, we had those as bolt-on,” says Vernagus. “And so anytime the soldiers had to do maintenance to the track or adjust anything, they had to take off these bolts in this big heavy armor piece. What we’ve done now for this next phase of the program is put on hinges, so those skirts actually open sideways and they can get right to what they need to without having to take off a heavy armor piece.”

Deliveries for the production run MPF, which still lacks a proper, non-acronym-based name, are scheduled to begin by the end of fiscal year 2023.

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Every day the world wakes up in the shadows of the Cold War, both metaphorically and literally. The metaphorical shadow is the perpetual specter of nuclear oblivion, stemming primarily from the massive arsenals of the United States and Russia, but also the nuclear arsenals of the seven other nations with atomic weaponry. The literal shadows are smaller but no less real: The built environment of the Cold War, from missile launch sites to blast craters to office buildings of strategic consequence, still dot the landscape of the United States and its territorial possessions.

On October 7, the National Park Service released a new study evaluating Cold War sites for their potential to become National Historic Landmarks. While some Cold War sites are older than the 50 years typically required to be considered for registration or designation as a landmark, some are much younger than that, while still belonging entirely to the Cold War era.

The exact duration of the Cold War is a matter of academic and scholarly dispute, but the National Park Service offers an expansive definition. “For the purposes of this theme study, the Cold War is considered to have begun with the detonation of the first two atomic bombs and Japanese surrender in 1945 at the end of World War II and having ended with the dissolution of the [USSR], America’s principal adversary, in 1991,” reads the report. 

It’s a meaningful choice to stitch the start of the Cold War directly into the end of World War II, a moment when the US and the USSR were still formal allies, rather than waiting for a direct breach in the relationship. It does cleanly tie the first use of nuclear weapons to the Cold War, letting sites integral to early atomic warfighting be part of the Cold War legacy.

In order for a site to be considered for National Historic Landmark status, it has to be tied to nationally significant events, people, ideas, architecture, settings, or scientific discovery. One example of a site already designated as historic, included in the study for point of comparison, is the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The Pentagon is, first and foremost, an office building for the administration of the US military. Or, as the study puts it, it is the “epitome of command and control operations” and was “involved in most major and routine Cold War events.”

The report suggests 24 possible sites for designation as new National Historic Landmarks. Here are three of them.

Atlas ICBM Launch Facilities

Atlas was the first deployed class of US-made Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. These weapons were capable of carrying nuclear warheads at least 5,000 miles. The study notes that “three extant launch facilities for this first generation of ICBM missiles have been identified.” It places one at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, one outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, and one in Weld County, Colorado.

Popular Science first covered the Atlas missile in March 1958, in the story “The Fantastic Problems of Ballistic-Missile Warfare.” The article details the challenges in propulsion, range, and navigation, though the most striking feature is the magazine’s description of the warhead. “The warhead that goes inside the ballistic missile’s nose cone once seemed the ‘impossible’ problem. What help up American ICBM development so long was the seeming pointlessness of spending billions of dollars to send a little A-bomb across 5,000 miles of land and sea, maybe miss by a mile or so, and just get people mad over there.”

The solution was the greater density and explosive power of hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bombs, which can have yields in the megatons instead of the kilotons of the first atomic weapons, while still fitting into a dense package. The range of the weapon, as well as the desire to spread out where missiles launched from, can be seen in the remaining sites existing in California, and along the Wyoming/Colorado border.

Today, the modern class of ICBMs that lurk in silos are the Minuteman IIIs, which the Air Force plans to replace entirely by the 2030s with a missile called Sentinel.

Defense Early Warning (DEW) Line

World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, an event that shortly followed the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs killed an estimated 110,000 or 210,000 people; the US delivered the bombs with B-29 Superfortresses, a long range bomber that could threaten atomic devastation thousands of miles from where it was launched. 

Additionally, developments in rocketry, as both the United States and the Soviet Union employed captured Nazi scientsits from the V-2 program, ensured that bombers would be just one vector for nuclear weapons. Detecting flights, from rockets or bombers, meant investing in permanent sensor networks.

The Defense Early Warning Line, across Alaska and Canada, “was a network of radar and communication facilities established to detect enemy bombers and ICBMs,” says the study. “Most DEW facilities have been demolished or modified, but the most intact examples might be at Point Barrow or Olitok [Alaska].” 

In August and September 1956, Popular Science covered the construction of the DEW Line as the “World’s Toughest Building Project” and “Radar Builders Outfox the Arctic.” In 1961, “Could A Radar False Alarm Trigger Atomic War?” detailed the workings of early warning systems, including the DEW Line.

Today, the US no longer relies on the DEW Line, instead keeping an eye on polar risks with the North Warning System, in use since 1988. Like the DEW Line before it, the North Warning System is part of NORAD, the joint US-Canadian military command tasked with looking for aerial threats to North America. 

Sedan Crater

Of the 1,054 nuclear tests conducted by the United States, 928 of them took place at the Nevada Test Site. While all nuclear detonations were fundamentally weapons tests, some of the tests explored other features of what atomic force could do. Sedan Crater is a 320-foot-deep, 1,280 diameter crater that the National Park Service describes as “formed by a 1962 test that was part of the Atoms for Peace program’s effort to explore using nuclear detonations to excavate earth in large construction projects.”

Much of “Atoms for Peace” was devoted to the production of electricity through nuclear power plants. “Project Plowshares,” which ultimately produced Sedan Crater, was instead designed to see if the explosive force of atomic weapons could reshape the built landscape of the world in useful ways. In “Atomic blasting for peacetime feats,” Popular Science examined Project Plowshares proposals for carbing harbors and creating aquifers through constructive blasting.

The Sedan Crater is a popular site for tourists to the present-day Nevada National Security Site, which the NNSS notes sees over 10,000 visitors a year. 

The above are just three of the 24 sites under consideration in the study. Others include the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site, the Camp David presidential retreat that was the site of diplomatic summits, the Raven Rock mountain bunker designed as emergency military headquarters in a nuclear war, and many more. For the full list, follow this link. 

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The Air Force is testing a new tool for sinking ships with guided bombs, and this month released additional footage of a successful test of the system from April.

In the video captured from the deck of the derelict ship Courageous, the bomb hits as a plume of water and smoke, with the camera’s angle jolted skyward as the now-halved vessel splits and sinks. The footage, released September 19, offers a more complete picture of an Air Force Research Lab weapons test, which originally took place on April 28. Previous footage showed the ship sinking, from the sky. Now, with the footage from the onboard camera recovered, it is possible to see what would be a sailor’s eye view of the destruction, before the falling bomb permanently condemns them to what would be a long stay in Davy Jone’s locker.

The Air Force Research Laboratory describes its new Quicksink technology as a “low-cost, air-delivered capability for defeating maritime threats.” It is, in practice, a target-tracking system that can attach to existing bombs and bomb guidance systems, letting fighter jets and other planes sink ships from the sky with the accuracy and force typically reserved for seaborne torpedoes. 

In the April demonstration, an F-15E Strike Eagle released a roughly 2,000-pound JDAM bomb, hitting and sinking the ship set up as a target in the Gulf of Mexico. (JDAM means “Joint Direct Attack Munition,” and refers to a family of bombs with guidance systems used by both the Air Force and the Navy.) In the first footage released of the test, the target ship can be seen intact, then buckling upward as the bomb hits one-third of the length from the rear of the vessel. The whole of the ship is soon engulfed in a plume of smoke, debris, and blasted water, with the split sections mostly submerged by the time the cloud clears 20 seconds later. 

Sinking into history

Sinking ships with attacks from aircraft is a century old idea. In the summer of 1921, the US Navy and Army competed to see which pilots could sink captured German World War I warships used for target practice. (Previously, some of these warships had been used as target practice for battleship guns.) Planes sinking ships became a crucial part of World War II, with some dedicated planes carrying torpedoes, and others flying harrowing dive-bomb attacks to place bombs on ship decks. 

Precision guidance systems have improved dramatically since the end of World War II and especially since the 1970s, and anti-ship missiles have benefitted as well. 

Current options for sinking surface ships from planes “are the Harpoon AGM-84, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) AGM-158C, and laser guided bombs (GBUs). All achieve functional and mission kills, but sinking a ship may require multiple munitions and all require some level of intelligence knowledge of the ship for mission planning and targeting the critical nodes,” Kirk Herzog, AFRL program manager, told Popular Science via email.

These weapons can prove effective, but long-range flight, navigation, and guidance systems come at a cost. The Harpoon anti-ship missile can be air-, surface-, or submarine-launched, has seen action in Ukraine, and costs over $1 million per missile. The Long Range Anti Ship Missile, a cruise missile built to do what it says on the label, costs over $3.5 million per missile.

Bombs away

Bombs, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, even with guidance systems. In 2020, every JDAM purchased by the Air Force cost about $21,000 apiece. Herzog said that, as a technology demonstration program, there is no target cost per item, but the “objective of the program is to incorporate features, such as Weapon Open System Architecture and open competition, that drive down the overall life cycle cost.” This would make Quicksink a low-cost way for planes to sink ships with JDAMs.

Navy submarines, armed with torpedoes, already perform this patrol function to some degree. The AFRL says that Quicksink “aims to develop a low-cost method of achieving torpedo-like seaworthy kills from the air at a much higher pace and over a much larger area than covered by a lumbering submarine.”

Submarines are an odd direct comparison to aircraft, especially when planes like the Navy’s P-8 Poseidon already carry anti-ship weapons and are used for maritime patrol. What Quicksink offers when used from a stealth fighter, like torpedoes fired from a submarine, is surprise in sinking a vessel. Unlike submarines, which risk revealing themselves in an attack, a stealth plane retains a similar degree of stealth even as it flies away.

The latest video released features a 3D model of the Courageous resting on the seafloor. This 3D model was produced for the Okaloosa County Artificial Reef Office (explore it on their site), and the reefs, which include other wrecks, are promoted by the Office as “excellent sites for fishing, diving, and snorkeling activities.” To make the model, a company called Reef Smart Guides took images captured from an underwater uncrewed vehicle, and then fed it into software that produced a 3D video. “It’s the same technologies used for years to map the ocean bottom, inspect bridges, cables, and other underwater infrastructure,” said Herzog.

One of the videos released by the AFRL shows an animated segment representing a hypothetical future mission where having Quicksink would be important. In that scenario, a navy reconnaissance plane spots a “ship heading to the west coast armed with long range ballistic missile disguised as typical cargo containers,” then dispatches an already-flying F-35 on maritime patrol, which sinks it. 

In addition to its effectiveness at guiding a bomb through a target ship, Quicksink is designed as a “Weapon Open Systems Architecture” tool, or one that can easily plug into existing system. Should the US suddenly find itself beset by cargo ships secretly arming and launching ballistic missiles, the ability to easily and rapidly convert existing bombs into guided anti-ship weapons would prove a direct boon for national security. 

Watch the ship being sunk, below:

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On September 15, defense giant Lockheed Martin announced that it had delivered a 300-kw laser to the Department of Defense. Developed for a program called the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, or HELSI, this laser was delivered to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering (OUSD) in early August. Since August 14, it has been with the Army in Huntsville, Alabama, where it is undergoing further testing. The laser component is designed to be integrated into laser weapon systems on ground vehicles or ships.

“This is yet another step in proving that these systems are ready and are able to be deployed as force multipliers and as part of the directed energy and kinetic energy mix that our war fighters can use to defend against threats like rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, UAVs, and small ships,” Richard Cordaro, a vice president at Lockheed Martin, said at a media roundtable.

Since the US started developing and deploying these systems in the 2010s, the fundamental premise of modern directed-energy weapons—as the military prefers to call high-power lasers—is that they can cost-effectively destroy a range of enemy projectiles. The idea is that a laser weapon on a ship, for example, could zap everything from an inexpensive drone to a pricey incoming cruise missile, with each shot of the laser costing relatively little. 

In Huntsville, the Army will be testing the HELSI laser as part of its broader Indirect Fires Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) program. In IFPC-HEL, the Army is seeking a cost-effective weapon against cheap threats to defend “fixed and semi-fixed sites,” which could be everything from a base to an artillery position. The laser is also expected to “defeat more stressing threats,” making it a system that can easily handle inexpensive weapons like rockets but also expensive and especially deadly ones like cruise missiles. 

[Related: The Navy’s next-gen destroyer concept involves powerful lasers]

A full laser weapon system combines a power supply with a beam of directed light energy, sensors for targeting and tracking, and likely (for ground use) a vehicle to move the whole component around. HELSI is just the laser component of that, and it actually works by combining several lasers.

“We sort of describe it as the cover of the Pink Floyd album where you see the light coming in white light and then splitting off into the different spectrums of color,” said Cordaro, referencing the iconic “Dark Side of the Moon” cover. “Well, it’s doing that in reverse, where we take the different spectrum elements and combine them into one high-energy beam.”

To make the beam, the system needs power. The most common way to generate the electrical power needed to produce a 300 kW beam would be batteries, though generators and other means of electric power could work with the system. Race McDermott, a business development lead with Lockheed Martin, said that the company has a history of producing lasers with an electrical efficiency “north of 30 percent,” which offers a rough sense of how much electrical power goes into producing 300 kilowatts of optical power output. 

[Related: This laser-armed Stryker vehicle can shoot down drones and mortar rounds]

Increasing laser power is done by upping the number of channels, or individual beams, that go into the combined laser, increasing the power of each of those channels, or by doing both at once.

“We focused on doing both and demonstrating that we can combine more individual lasers into one SBC [Spectral Beam Combination] 300-kilowatt class laser, and we increase the power per channel,” said McDermott. “Since you have each of these individual channels, you can sort of throttle the power for each of the engagements. If you wanted to maximize your magazine depth, you may not shoot everything at full power.”

That allows the HELSI laser to punch at full force against a hard target, like a cruise missile or small ship, or to only apply the necessary force and save on power against a target like a smaller drone or an artillery round.

While HELSI has yet to destroy a flying object in testing, Lockheed Martin’s Helios laser—a different system—used its 60 kilowatts of power to destroy drones flying as cruise missile surrogates in a test at White Sands. That laser has since been deployed on the destroyer USS Preble, where it may be used to protect the vessel from threats encountered at sea. Other explorations into laser weaponry include a drone zapper mounted on a heavily armored truck; also, the Navy is planning on laser-armed destroyers to replace its current destroyer fleet.

McDermott said that the power increase of a laser is fairly linear (if you hold variables of target type, range, and atmosphere constant), meaning the 300 kilowatt HELSI laser could destroy targets about five times as quickly as the Helios would destroy them.

The potential of a system like this, once the weapon exists, is for soldiers or sailors to fight with an extra layer of protection, as the laser draws on battery reserves to clear the sky of incoming attacks. Laser weapons alone will not stop attacks, but they could carve a safe pocket of time in which other weapons, like the Army’s own mortars or artillery, could fire back at attackers, potentially tilting the balance of artillery duels in favor of the side with lasers.

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In October, the Army is expected to announce a proper name for its newest vehicle. The machine is essentially a light tank, an armored turreted and tracked vehicle with a big gun. In June, the US Army announced it was spending up to $1.14 billion on this brand-new light tank, which is formally called the Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle. The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Land Systems, will deliver between 26 and 96 vehicles, with the first set to arrive in 2024.

The Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle will be the “Army’s first new design vehicle fielded in over four decades,” the Army said in June. While the Army has developed, deployed, and iterated on many vehicle designs, these have largely been adaptations of existing models. The heavy M1 Abrams main battle tank, also by General Dynamics, has undergone five variations, with a Next Generation version underway. 

By contrast, the last light tank fielded by the Army was the M551 Sheridan, which saw action in Vietnam, Panama, and was also deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield, and then saw combat in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. When the Sheridan was fully retired in 1996, the Army did not have a direct replacement, and before the MPF, it lacked a tracked vehicle to take on that same role. The M112 Stryker Mobile Gun System, an armored and eight-wheeled vehicle with a powerful 105mm gun mounted in its turret, fulfills roughly the same role as the Sheridan, but the Strykers are set to be retired by the Army in 2022. 

Why a light tank?

In 2017, the Army outlined a vision for why they wanted a new, lighter vehicle than the existing Abrams tanks. The MPF, as planned, weighs only 38 tons, relative to the 70 tons of an Abrams. (For context, the new Hummer EV from GM weighs a comparatively wispy 4.6 tons.)

“The Army particularly needs the as-yet nonexistent Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) vehicle to support infantry brigade combat teams–a lightweight vehicle that can be airlifted into battle and maneuver, dispersed if necessary, in close-quarters urban terrain, but with lethal long-range firepower to take out enemy armored vehicles,” read a March 2017 article in an Army magazine. “The idea is to defeat enemy positions and destroy their light armored vehicles pre-emptively to provide U.S. forces with greater freedom of movement. MPF is now the Army’s highest mid-term priority in combat vehicle modernization.”

In every such request, there is a vision of the kind of war the Army expects to fight. For Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles, this war is in cities and it is against an enemy with armor beyond heavy tanks. Enemy vehicles, from technicals to dedicated armor, can carry heavy guns into urban environments, and the Army wants a way to destroy those vehicles directly, without the collateral damage of an artillery barrage. Most notably, this vision includes the ability to be airdropped alongside infantry, a requirement no longer part of the program.

At a March 2017 hearing before Congress, shortly after the announcement of MPF, Lieutenant General John Murray, deputy chief of staff of the Army, emphasized the role of the vehicle specifically for adding punch to Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCT). Against a peer or near-peer nation, like China or Russia, Armored Brigade Combat Teams already have heavy tanks, and Stryker Brigade Combat Teams have many anti-tank weapons, including javelin missiles.

But, said Murray, while an MPF vehicle is not designed to go “toe-to-toe with a Soviet tank,” having the MPFs in an Infantry Brigade Combat Team means they can handle other threats, like bunkers or light armor, that they cannot deal with at present without support. 

Where Abrams do not tread

The Army has, for decades, enjoyed relative freedom where it operates, often complete with air support from Air Force and Navy pilots, to say nothing of its own attack helicopters. This means that Army formations that fight on foot or from lighter vehicles, like Humvees or its JLTV replacement, could reliably call on air support if they encountered a fortified enemy position or armored vehicles. Counter-insurgency, like that fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, meant the US was fighting an enemy without an air force, and so was free to fight from the skies with only minimal risk to pilots.

In a contested war against a country with its own armor, air force, and most importantly anti-air and anti-tank missiles, the Army expects to fight much more on its own. That means when it sends units across difficult terrain, which is where infantry combat brigade teams go, they will have to fight with just the weapons and vehicles they can bring to battle.

In places where Abrams cannot go, and in wars where air support is strained or hard to rely on, the Army will want to bring full firepower to bear against enemy positions. That, more than anything else, is the expected role of the Mobile Protected Firepower.

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On August 24, the Department of Defense announced it would be sending anti-drone weapons called VAMPIREs to Ukraine. The announcement of the VAMPIRE came in a larger, nearly $3 billion package of assistance from the United States to Ukraine as it fights against Russia’s invasion. The inclusion of VAMPIRE highlights the major role that drones are playing in the war, and the challenge of fighting against them without having specialized weapons.

The shape of the war is reflected in the other weapons included in the package. The US is sending up to 245,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition and up to 65,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition, weapons that emphasize how much of the present conflict is an artillery fight. The 155mm artillery rounds, fired by US- and NATO-supplied howitzers, can duel with Russian artillery, while the mortar rounds let soldiers on foot attack enemy defenses from behind hills or otherwise out of sight. Paired with the artillery are two dozen counter-artillery radars, allowing better targeting in artillery duels.

The other half of the package is all drone- or counter-drone related. VAMPIRE is the headlining system, which combines a sensor with an anti-drone missile launcher that can mount on a range of vehicles, but it’s hardly the only counter-drone system in the package. Beyond an unspecified number of VAMPIRE systems, the August 24 announcement included six additional National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, a kind of anti-air missile system already in use in Ukraine, along with ammunition to match. The package includes laser-guided rocket systems, confirmed to be Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II rockets, which have been tested against drones. The drones included are Pumas and Scan Eagles, which can be launched without runways and give forces on the ground a better sense of where enemies and their artillery are.

What is the VAMPIRE counter-drone system?

Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, described the VAMPIRE as a kinetic system that uses small missiles to shoot drones out of the sky. Many counter-drone systems use electromagnetic interference or jamming to disrupt the way a drone flies and communicates remotely with a human operator, but destroying the drone outright is a straightforward solution.

Made by L3Harris, VAMPIRE stands for Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment. “Vehicle-Agnostic” means it can go in multiple vehicles, and L3Harris’ site shows the system mounted in the bed of a crew-cab truck. Civilian vehicles are abundant and often modified for war. When weapons are mounted on such a vehicle, it becomes a “technical,” and the popularity of Toyota Hi-Lux trucks as technicals has led to the whole category of insurgency-by-truck being dubbed “Toyota Wars.”

Modular and palletized both refer to how the VAMPIRE can be transported and modified, and that the system includes its own power supply. ISR is “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” and in the case of VAMPIRE refers to the specific camera pod attached to the system. This camera pod, made by L3 Harris, includes a thermal sensor, optical camera, low-light optical camera, laser rangefinder, and a laser target marker to guide the laser-guided rockets. This sensor system can also include image processing, feature recognition, and video tracking, all of which are features that could enable it to see and track drones in flight.

What will the VAMPIRE hunt?

Drones are extensively used by both sides fighting in Ukraine. Before the invasion, Russia prepared with dedicated military drones to act as scouts and, especially, as spotters for artillery. Since the invasion, both forces have used drones extensively, with Ukraine using bomb and rocket-armed Bayraktar TB2 drones to strike Russian forces and record footage of the act.

As the war progressed, and initial stockpiles of machines and weapons depleted through use or destruction, both Ukrainian and Russian forces turned increasingly to other drone supplies. The United States, as well as NATO allies, continue to supply Ukraine with scout-and-spotter drones like the Pumas and Scan Eagles included in the latest package, as well as armed drone-missiles like the Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost. 

Russia has turned to Iran for extra drone supplies, and provincial governments in Russia have even redirected funds to purchase hobbyist, commercial drones so that their soldiers can go into battle with quadcopter scouts equal to the numbers used by Ukrainian soldiers. Hobbyist quadcopters are so in-demand militarily that Russia is formally training volunteer drone pilots. These drones are much cheaper than dedicated military models, with limited range and more vulnerable to jamming or other kinds of electronic warfare. 

A Mavic quadcopter can cost around $400, and the laser-guided rockets fired by VAMPIRE can cost $27,500 apiece, a disparity that suggests VAMPIRE will instead be hunting more specific military models like Orlan-10 and Orion drones, as well as other aircraft. Larger Iranian-made Mohajer-6 and Shahed drones, now in Russian service, are also likely VAMPIRE targets.

But in the context of the broader artillery duel in Ukraine, and with Ukrainian forces launching a counter-offensive to retake the Russian-held city of Kherson on the mouth of the Dnipro river, the ability to destroy artillery spotters in the form of drones in flight could save lives and preserve the advance. Brought into the open, VAMPIRE shows that modern counter-drone weapons are no longer kept in the shadows. 

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South of Death Valley this spring, the Air Force experimented with electronic warfare. In tests that took place in April at China Lake, California, fighter jets flew 30 training missions, testing the efficacy of an electronic warfare training device called “Angry Kitten.” In an August 3 announcement, the Air Force recommended using Angry Kitten for actual combat.

“Given the success of the pod in training and demonstrated ability to be reprogrammed, Air Combat Command recommended four pods be converted into combat pods to provide attack capabilities against enemy radio frequency threat systems, instead of simulating them,” reads the announcement.

Electronic warfare is a crucial part of modern armed conflict. It involves, broadly, the transmission and obstruction of signals along the electromagnetic spectrum, primarily but not exclusively in the domain of radio waves. These signals are used for communication between pilots; with radar to perceive the location of enemies beyond visual sight; and for weapons guidance. If one side can block the signals of the other side, it can potentially prevent their pilots from communicating, their radar from perceiving, and their weapons from following radar guidance.

The Angry Kitten was developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute to simulate the electronic warfare devices of other country’s aircraft, the kind that the Air Force might encounter in the sky. It is a system that incorporates a software-defined radio, meaning its signal and frequencies can be changed by code. This is in contrast to traditional hardware-defined radio, which is limited by what frequencies the physical components can produce and receive. 

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

“The project, known as Angry Kitten, is utilizing commercial electronics, custom hardware development, novel machine-learning software and a unique test bed to evaluate unprecedented levels of adaptability in [Electronic Warfare] technology,” wrote Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2013.

An adaptable training tool allows the Air Force to train against a range of simulated foes. This work is done by aggressor squadrons, specialized pilots who train against USAF aircraft to try to prepare those pilots for forces they might encounter in a real war. Because the US does not have the highly sensitive top-end fighters built by countries like China’s J-20 and Russia’s Checkmate, it will instead use other aircraft to simulate them, and that means employing a tool to simulate how those jets will conduct electronic warfare.

Angry Kitten “offers the ability to collect realistic, representative jammer data on advanced waveforms. It can be used to represent virtually any known threat – and even hypothetical radar systems that don’t currently exist,” said Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2013.

While countermeasures for radar detection and jamming have existed for decades, the ability to switch techniques and frequencies makes it more likely that the jamming session succeeds. That adaptability was a crucial part of what the Air Force tested Angry Kitten on in April.

“The flight test at China Lake was our final operational assessment event,” said Keith Kirk, the experiment program manager for AERRES, a program examining in part how open software can lead to better electronic warfare tools.

[Related: BAE Systems Wants To Defeat Jammers With Thinking Machines]

“The software was updated within hours based on the performance they were seeing against certain threats and then was improved, and those improvements were verified during flight test the following day. That’s really tough to do with software and tools that are not designed to open standards,” Kirk continued. 

In a future war, the Air Force can be reasonably certain about what kinds of airplane its fighters will encounter, as airplanes are difficult to produce or store in secret. Besides, because fighter jets are often made for military export markets, the airframes are promoted at tradeshows and international arms expositions to be seen by prospective customers.

However, the specific systems of fighters are easier to keep secret. A jammer designed for the future, then, has flexibility if it can perceive and adapt to the specific signals it encounters in combat. If the data can be shared from one aircraft to the entire Air Force, a possibility with open standards and reliable, open bandwidth, then the second day of aerial combat against a hostile jammer could go much more smoothly than the first.

With the recommendation for Air Combat Command, Angry Kitten could move from a versatile training tool to an integral part of future combat. Operating in a contested electromagnetic spectrum is an all-but-given part of future warfare. For the Air Force, a dedicated sensor-and-jammer pod that can perceive the spectrum, adjust, and share what it learned could provide a significant edge across the sky.

Correction (August 16, 2022): The photo caption previously mentioned that the F-16 was in California. The photo was taken in Florida.

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On August 1, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) announced that the next plane in its inventory would be a single-engine prop aircraft. SOCOM will buy up to 75 AT-802U Sky Warden planes, built by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor. These planes will support special operations forces, like Delta Force or Navy SEALs, as they fight irregular wars.

The name of this program is “Armed Overwatch.” The contract announcement says it “will provide Special Operations Forces deployable, affordable, and sustainable crewed aircraft systems fulfilling close air support, precision strike, and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, requirements in austere and permissive environments for use in irregular warfare operations in support of the National Defense Strategy.”

Irregular warfare is a broad term that is easier to define by what it doesn’t include. Regular warfare is when the uniformed soldiers of one nation fight the uniformed soldiers of another. These conflicts usually involve the whole range of conventional military forces, from rifles through tanks and artillery to fighter jets and bombers. Irregular warfare, by contrast, involves fighting against insurgencies, rebellions, and tracking down people linked to terror operations. It can also involve helping other countries’ militaries do the same.

For example, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq with a conventional war, which lasted until the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s military. Armed resistance afterwards to the American military and to the new government of Iraq became irregular warfare, and to this day the US deploys forces in the country to assist in training Iraq’s military in irregular warfare. 

For SOCOM’s purposes, a plane that can support special operations forces doesn’t need to survive in a sky filled with hostile fighter jets or when the enemy brings dedicated anti-aircraft vehicles to the battle. Instead, what is most important is that the plane can fly easily, shoot what it needs to shoot, as well as take off and land if need be on rough runways and cleared fields, instead of dedicated airbases.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup. Here’s what the planes look like.]

Those characteristics, that rugged versatility, are likely why the Sky Warden won out over the four other planes SOCOM considered for the contract last summer. The contract initially awards $170 million, or about the price of two F-35A stealth jets, with a ceiling of $3 billion for the full fleet. L3Harris said in a statement that production will begin in 2023, for the initial lot of six Sky Wardens. 

“We want to deliver game-changing, modular solutions to U.S. special operators for their hardest missions, and Sky Warden does just that,” Christopher E. Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris, said in a statement.

“Armed Overwatch” is a role that involves both scouting for targets and attacking enemies on the ground. While SOCOM considered planes that could also perform a transport role for the special operators, the Sky Warden is built to scout and to attack. To that end, the Sky Warden can carry over 8,000 lbs of payload while armored. The wings can carry a range of weapons, from 500-pound bombs to small missiles to sensor pods, and the center of the aircraft can host two heavier systems as well. The wing station can fit a gun, like a .50-caliber machine gun or a 20mm cannon. With a full load of sensors and weapons, the plane can take off on a runway of just 1,400 feet, and it can land on one 1,200 feet long. The tandem cockpit seats two pilots.

The AT-802 (note the lack of a “U,” which denotes the latest variant, the AT-802U, that SOCOM is getting) first flew in 1990, where its rugged airframe and heavy payload capacity made it an ideal crop duster. As a crop duster, the plane was used to spray crops on counter-narcotics missions, an action that sometimes saw the planes shot at by farmers defending their crops. “Years of coca crop eradication missions in South America resulted in the development of lightweight composite ballistic armor for the AT-802U cockpit ‘bathtub’ and engine compartment,” notes the Air Tractor page for the plane.

In other words, SOCOM is getting a plane with crop duster origins, and one that can be used for the military missions of special operators. The Sky Warden is armored against attack, provided the enemy it is facing is armed mostly with small arms, like machine guns and rifles.

This was a concern 13 years ago, when the Air Force announced a plan to purchase 100 such planes in 2009. Skeptics of the Air Force’s 2009 plan for a light attack plane similar to the Sky Warden noted at the time that insurgent forces could get portable and effective anti-air weapons that could threaten the aircraft. With the award of the Armed Overwatch contract this week, former Popular Science contributor Peter W. Singer, now a fellow at New America, revisited an article he wrote that year, tweeting, “And note, since writing that in 2009, the cropduster [Sky Warden-style plane] has not improved, while both the enemy capabilities and the unmanned alternative has obviously drastically improved.”

As nations like Germany and the United States offload old anti-air missiles to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia, the possibility exists that some of these weapons will make their way onto the black market. While old anti-air missiles may struggle against modern jets or be overkill for modern drones, they are perfectly suited for attacking planes like the Sky Warden. As SOCOM makes a big bet on how to fight irregular wars from the sky, it is also gambling that the enemies it finds will lack anti-air weapons, even as war makes those weapons more available. 

Correction on August 3: This story has been updated to correct a typo that referred to the F-35 fighter jet as an F-25.

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On January 27, 1996, France conducted Xouthos, its 210th and final live nuclear test, detonating a thermonuclear warhead beneath the Fangataufa lagoon in the southern Pacific Ocean. The test had a yield of between 20 and 120 kilotons of TNT, potentially 8 times as explosive as the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Xouthos marked the end of France’s nuclear tests but not the end of its nuclear stockpile maintenance. To ensure that the country’s warheads are in working order, France is working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States to develop a super-cooled laser ignition test facility.

There are eight other nations with nuclear weapons: The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan. In the 21st century, only North Korea has conducted live nuclear weapons tests. For the other countries, maintaining and sustaining nuclear warheads without real-world tests is an engineering challenge. One way to manage this is through computer modeling, which lets nuclear laboratories refine warhead design and study new types of warhead refurbishment.

But testing a warhead’s actual fissile material, the gas around which a plutonium pit condenses until it sparks a nuclear fission reaction, means looking at the actual material itself, and seeing how it behaves under high density and intense heat. Lawrence Livermore describes a process for testing nuclear material with lasers at low temperatures as a “cryogenic target system,” which it runs in the National Ignition Facility. This system, in theory, would allow them to understand how nuclear fuels behave in conditions of high energy density, by creating real if temporary fusion energy under laboratory conditions.

The National Ignition Facility started operation in 2010. That year’s budget request from the National Nuclear Security Administration describes the program as providing “the scientific understanding to assess the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons without nuclear testing.” To achieve that goal, “[s]cience-based weapons assessments and certification requires that these advanced experimental tools have the capability to create and study matter under extreme conditions that approach the high-energy density (HED) environments found in a nuclear explosion.”

Thermonuclear explosions are hot, with the first-stage fission reaction reaching over 100 million kelvin. They are also dense: the conventional non-nuclear components of a thermonuclear warhead use explosive force to compact plutonium into an even more compact form around a gas made of heavy hydrogen, deuterium and tritium.

Another way to achieve this density is to cool a tiny pellet of deuterium-tritium to 18.5 Kelvin (or -426 Fahrenheit). The cooling is the “cryogenic” part of the “cryogenic target system,” and the pellet is the target. Instead of an exploding inwards plutonium sphere, like in an actual warhead, in these tests the energy for ignition is provided by high-powered laser beams. 

At the National Ignition Facility, this process is done through 192 laser beams, which focus 1.92 megajoules on the single super-cooled pellet of deuterium and tritium. The energy released through fusion is akin to that of a star, though much shorter lived. France’s counterpart of the National Ignition Facility, the Laser Mégajoule, “will use 176 laser beams to focus more than one megajoule of ultraviolet laser energy on tiny targets containing a partially frozen mixture of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.”

While the research into nuclear fusion has often been promoted and framed as a path to viable fusion reactors for electrical energy generation, it is fundamentally a weapons evaluation and research tool, with incidental potential for scientific research attached.

[Related: Humans just generated nuclear energy akin to a star]

“NIF was designed to produce extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures—tens of millions of degrees and pressures many billion times greater than Earth’s atmosphere,” reads an explanation from the laboratory. “These conditions currently exist only in the cores of stars and planets and in nuclear weapons.”

When those conditions exist in the lab, they do so only very briefly. “For a few billionths of a second during an ICF experiment, [the National Ignition Facility]’s 192 lasers duplicate the same temperatures, densities, and pressures found within the interiors of stars and planets and detonating nuclear explosives,” says a 2019 report from the laboratory. That’s still enough time for researchers to study the effect of those conditions on relevant materials, crucial in stockpile stewardship. “About 15 experiments per year are aimed at researching materials’ equations of state,” or a mathematical modeling of how the material handles the conditions of a nuclear reaction.

While the National Ignition Facility has been operational for almost 12 years, the closest it has come to creating energy-producing fusion was with a test on August 8, 2021. That shot yielded 1.35 megajoules from igniting the near-frozen pellet, marking an almost 70 percent conversion of laser energy to reaction. 

“For the Stockpile Stewardship Program,” the laboratory said in a statement from February, “the record shot provides access to a new regime of high-energy-density plasmas to test and verify the Laboratory’s nuclear weapons-related simulation codes. [National Ignition Facility] performs experimental studies of fusion ignition and its subsequent thermonuclear burn, which provides the immense energy of modern nuclear weapons.”

Creating the conditions of fusion without outright detonating a nuclear warhead is still a work in progress. By working with France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the national laboratories are ensuring both countries can benefit from parallel and collaborative research. When compared to the alternative of resuming live nuclear tests, a hard physics problem in a controlled laboratory setting is a small challenge, relative to the geopolitical risks of a resumed international arms race.

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The rising oceans of the 2040s will be battlefields for both crewed ships and robotic ones. In a document called Force Design 2045, the US Navy’s strategy guiding the next decades of ship and vehicle development, anticipating what war will be like in the middle of the century is crucial to ensuring peace or, failing that, seizing victory. In announcing the strategy, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday wrote that “the world is entering a new age of warfare, one in which the integration of technology, concepts, partners, and systems—more than fleet size alone—will determine victory in conflict.”

The strategy is couched, first and foremost, in continued open, free, and lawful trade across the seas, including the familiar commerce of goods and materials, but also incorporating the undersea cables that connect the internet as vital infrastructure. To ensure this peace, the plan says the Navy must maintain a nuclear deterrent (presently missile-carrying submarines), control the sea to deter invasion (and land Marines as needed), and to defeat enemies in ocean battles should it come to that.

To meet this need, the Navy plans to maintain its crewed fleet of aircraft carriers, nuclear-armed ballistic submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, as well as crewed destroyers and frigates. The Navy also plans to introduce over a hundred robotic ships. Here’s how it’s all going to shake out.

How many ships?

Variations of this strategy have existed since the dawn of nuclear-armed submarines. Beyond submarines, the question for the Navy has been how it meets those objectives, and what composition of ships it needs to get there. In the latest strategy, the Navy offers clear numbers.

“In the 2040s and beyond,” reads the strategy, “we envision this hybrid fleet to require more than 350 manned ships, about 150 large unmanned surface and subsurface platforms, and approximately 3,000 aircraft.”

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The exact number of ships needed by the Navy has been the subject of presidential campaigns, with then-candidate Trump proposing a 350-ship Navy when running in 2016. In October 2020, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called for a Navy with more than 500 ships. At present, the US Navy has 298 ships, with previous plans floated this year suggesting the Navy aim for a goal between 316 and 367 ships.

With the new strategy, the Navy sets an ambitious goal for 52 more crewed vessels than at present, while also showcasing that to get the reach and numbers promised by a 500-ship fleet, the Navy will have to lean heavily on uncrewed ships, like those tested this month at the major RIMPAC naval exercises.

So what will the drone ships do?

The most immediate use for uncrewed ships and robotic submarines will be as scouts. The ocean is vast, and scanning the seas in real time allows the Navy to see some of it and plan accordingly.

“The integration of autonomous USVs with manned combatants will give fleet commanders much-needed enhancements to maritime domain awareness, thereby increasing decision speed and lethality in surface warfare,” Captain Scot Searles, Navy program manager for unmanned maritime systems, said in a release describing the use of uncrewed ships at RIMPAC.

Sensors on robotic ships represent an ideal initial use case, because that approach offers an immediate benefit without requiring constant human supervision or careful monitoring. These roles are also good testing opportunities for autonomous navigation and remote direction, both features that will be crucial should oceans become battlefields.

[Related: A Navy ship got a giant liquid-metal 3D printer earlier this month]

“Unmanned surface and subsurface platforms to increase the fleet’s capacity for distribution; expand our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage; add depth to our missile magazines; supplement logistics; and enhance fleet survivability,” reads the strategy. “This transition will rebalance the fleet away from exquisite, manpower-intensive platforms toward smaller, less-expensive, yet lethal ones.”

Scouting will likely be the first mission for these ships, but future missions will include resupply and transport, allowing extra ammunition and other vital cargo to be carried on ships without sailors. To get to “lethal,” these uncrewed ships will need to have weapons, as the Navy has already demonstrated. 

Under remote operation, a missile battery on an uncrewed ship could still be under human control, with the decision to fire handled by humans who are located on a different vessel. As with any autonomous sensor-and-weapon system, the possibility exists that targeting and firing could be made autonomous in the future, though nothing in the strategy indicates that as an approach.

Armed uncrewed ships, like the planned Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, will carry vertical launch system missile tubes, expanding the number of missiles that can be brought to battle. Uncrewed armed ships can’t do everything a crewed missile-destroyer can, like relief missions or dissuading attacks of opportunity. In a ship-to-ship naval battle, the available number of missiles ready to launch may be more important for victory than the number of ships in a flotilla.

In addition to the uncrewed ships, the strategy says the Navy will “augment the force with an evolving complement of thousands of small, rapidly adaptable, and attritable unmanned platforms.” These many small and expendable drones in land, surface, and underwater will include models that scout ahead of ships, ones that wait in the ocean a long time, and ones that can hurt enemy vessels, through electronic warfare or explosive power, all with the goal of enhancing the fighting ability of the crewed fleet.

Putting it all together

As the Navy plots a strategy for a course between now and the 2040s, it is focused primarily on a singular potential threat: the growing naval capabilities of China. Where once Russian and before that Soviet navies were the focus of US fears, China has overtaken the country in the imagination and warplanning of the Pentagon. Fighting a future war against China, should it occur without a world-ending nuclear exchange, means adapting to a very different reality, a kind of naval warfare that has not yet been attempted.

In the decades since the Pacific campaigns of WWII, missile technology has improved tremendously, not to mention the development of modern hypersonic weapons. Missiles shift the calculus for fleets, as a successful missile hit can sink a massive and expensive ship for a fraction of what it cost to produce the vessel. Replacing a ship takes years even in ideal conditions, and even if a ship is damaged, it can still be out of commission for months.

While the Navy’s plan still relies on aircraft carriers, submarines with nuclear missiles and those without, and big crewed escort ships, adding in uncrewed vessels means the burden of resupply can gradually be removed from crewed ships, preserving sailors for the vessels on which they’re most needed. The ability to scale up ship operations, without training new human crews, means the Navy could operate more and smaller resupply vessels, minimizing the harm from each loss. 

While the Navy sets out a strategy for 2045, the immediate impact will be seen in spending, on what ships and programs the Pentagon decides to build out for its fleet now. If the future of war is human-crewed fighting ships with uncrewed resupply and robotic scouts, that future will start to take shape in shipyards.

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On July 14, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC held a one-day conference premised on a specific threat: What if, in the future, war comes to the United States via cruise missile? Pointing to new developments in cruise missile technology, and the limitations of existing early warning systems that are focused on the high arcing trajectories of ballistic missiles, the CSIS conference and accompanying report suggests that to defend the continental United States from such a threat, the military should adapt and deploy the kind of cruise missile defenses presently used as regional weapons.

Unlike ballistic missiles, which arc up into space before traveling back down towards earth, cruise missiles fly close to the ground, making it hard for radar on the ground that’s pointed up at space to see them.

The perceived threat from new cruise missiles is driven by tech developments occurring across the globe, as new materials, better aerodynamics, and sophisticated sensors and guidance systems make possible the fielding of weapons, like hypersonic missiles, that had mostly been just theoretical decades ago.

For the United States, the development of long-range bombers in the 1940s, followed by the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, shattered the notion that the enormous distances of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were enough to protect the continental US from direct attack. (During World War II, US territories in the Pacific came under direct attack, but the only long-range assault on the 48 states came in the form of incendiary-carrying balloons launched by Japan into the jet stream and carried over to the US.)

With atomic and then thermonuclear payloads, bombers and long-range missiles threatened devastation on an unprecedented scale, and the United States built an elaborate system of early warning sensors focused on detecting early signs of launch, and expanded its first-in-the-world nuclear arsenal to deter attack. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is run by both Canada and the United States, and maintains a series of radars and other sensors designed to detect early attacks across the Arctic or elsewhere. (Every December, NORAD highlights its existence by tracking Santa Claus, turning a system designed to detect oblivion into a kid-friendly Christmas tradition.)

At the conference held by CSIS, the threat from cruise missiles was discussed as a way that other countries could attack the United States that is hard to detect by employing existing, ICBM-focused measures. It is also considered hard to deter through threat of nuclear retaliation, operating on the assumption that if a cruise missile with a conventional warhead destroyed a building or killed people in the United States, the President would not immediately respond with a nuclear strike.

“You know, our adversaries are building diverse, expansive ranges of modern offensive missile systems, and we see them – we see them in the news every day,” Stan Stafira, Chief Architect of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, told the panel. “They’re capable of maneuvering in the midcourse and the terminal phases of their flight, like maneuvering reentry vehicles, multiple independent reentry vehicles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and cruise missiles.”

Part of the broader appeal of hypersonic weapons to nations like Russia, China, and the United States is that the speed and trajectories of the missiles make them harder to detect than ICBMs. The ballistic arc of ICBMs means the launch is visible to radar while it is still ascending, once it clears the horizon line. Meanwhile, both hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles, which travel at Mach 5 or above, are designed to fly below that radar horizon, with the cruise missile keeping a close trajectory to earth and the glide vehicle flying in the high atmosphere.

“I want to state that we absolutely believe that nuclear deterrence is the foundation of homeland defense,” said Lieutenant General AC Roper, deputy commander of Northern Command, the part of the US military responsible for North America. “However, we also must have credible deterrence options below the nuclear thresholds, options which allow for a balanced approach of deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment or cost imposition.”

Deterrence, at its most straightforward, is a strategy of making a big threat on a condition: One country publicly declares it will launch nukes at another if it launches nukes at it, with the intended effect that neither country launches nukes. But because the payload of a cruise missile—it could be nuclear or conventional, unlike ICBMs, which are always nuclear—is unlikely to be known until impact, generals like Roper would prefer to have a range of weapons with which to respond.

Missile defense is one of those options, and the US already employs a few forms. Part of any missile defense system is the sensors, like specially focused radar, that can detect incoming attacks, and then track those weapons as they travel. These radars then send that tracking information to interceptors, which are missiles launched to fly and destroy the incoming attacking missile. Shooting missiles at other missiles is a hard problem because an incoming threat arrives at great speed, and because the cost calculus can favor an attacker. Interceptors, like shorter-ranged Patriot missiles or longer-ranged ballistic interceptors, are often more expensive than the missiles they are intercepting. And unlike interceptors, which have to hit precisely to work, missiles launched in attack can deploy decoys or countermeasures to redirect interceptors away, or can instead be fired in a greater volume, overwhelming interceptors through sheer numerical advantage.

“The resulting 20-year cost to provide even a light defense of a vast area ranged from $77 billion to $466 billion,” reads the CSIS report, citing an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office studying a range of cruise missile defense options. “The considerable cost variation is due to alternative combinations of sensors and interceptors and varying desired warning times of 5 or 15 minutes.”

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The middle of July saw a whopping three successful hypersonic missile tests by the United States—tests of missiles designed to go at least five times the speed of sound. On July 13, DARPA announced the successful test of the Operational Fires (OpFires) missile at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Also on July 13, the Air Force announced a successful test of the booster for the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), used in a flight off the California coast. And on July 18, Raytheon announced the second successful flight test of its Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) hypersonic missile for the Air Force.

While the first human-made objects to reach Mach 5 were launched in the 1940s, there has absolutely been a recent uptick in missiles built to go that fast. The other new aspect is that, while in the past hypersonic speeds were a feature of other weapons, today nations such as the United States, China, and Russia are specifically developing weapons to travel at this speed. “Hypersonic” has become a category term for the development of very fast and maneuverable weapons. 

To illustrate how we got to this hypersonic moment, below is a timeline of military hypersonic milestones, starting with ballistic rockets.

1944: Hypersonic descent

German V-2 rockets reached a speed of Mach 4.3 in ascent, and then became hypersonic in descent, clearing Mach 5 as they struck targets in England. The V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile. With a range of about 200 miles, it carried a one-ton warhead. It was built using concentration camp labor, a process in which at least 10,000 people in those camps died. It was designed by Wernher von Braun, who would go on after the war to have a long career designing ballistic missiles for the US Army and rockets for NASA.

1949: Hypersonic ascent

A rocket launch called Bumper 5 was the fifth in a series of tests at White Sands. The Bumper series tested a kind of two-stage rocket built by putting one rocket on top of another. The rocket on top for the Bumper tests was a sounding rocket, or a small rocket designed to carry instruments into the upper atmosphere to collect data. For the base and booster, Bumper used a V-2 rocket, which functioned as the first stage, allowing the sounding rocket to reach a speed of Mach 6.7 and an altitude of 250 miles.

1959: Hypersonic weapon deployed

The Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile fielded by the United States. Its life in service was short, with the missiles recalled from active duty in 1965. Atlas set the template for many ballistic-trajectory hypersonic weapons to follow. With a range of between 6,400 and 9,000 miles, Atlas could arc up into space and then continue its ballistic trajectory back towards Earth, reaching Mach 21 as it did so. 

Developing Atlas meant designing special heat shielding to ensure that the missile and its thermonuclear payload arrived intact to the target, as the friction and heat from traveling through air at such great speeds could damage the weapon and render it less useful. Today, the US still deploys Minuteman III ICBMs, which are hypersonic missiles like Atlas, but because they travel at detectable ballistic arcs they are not what policymakers or military planners refer to as “hypersonic weapons.”

1980: Hypersonic glide maneuvering

Much of the hypersonics research of the 1960s and 1970s was focused on vehicles that carried people, from the X-15 rocket plane to the proposed and never finished Dyna-Soar space plane. This crewed vehicle research led to the development of “lifting body” vehicles, most famously the Space Shuttle, in which the body of the plane would generate lift at hypersonic speeds (as it glided back towards Earth) the way wings work at subsonic speeds. 

When it comes to weapons development, one of the bigger hypersonic efforts built on this “lifting body” research and created the Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (MaRV). The Air Force tested the Advanced MaRV in 1980, and it demonstrated the ability of a warhead-carrying reentry vehicle to change its flight pattern at high speed, allowing it to hit targets beyond the initial arc of ballistic trajectory. That maneuverability is crucial to the modern field of hypersonics. Advanced MaRVS were mounted on Pershing II missiles, before those missiles were withdrawn from service as part of an arms control treaty between the United States and the USSR in 1987.

1998: Joint hypersonic scramjet test

The Kholod was an experimental design, Soviet in origin, that ended up being tested by both the United States and the Russian Federation in a project of mutual research. Scramjets take in air at supersonic speeds, then combine it with fuel, ignite the fuel, and express the injected fuel out a back nozzle. To get to supersonic speeds, the Kholod needed to ride on the tip of an anti-air missile. In a 1998 test in Russia with NASA involved, the Kholod reached Mach 6.5.

2010: X-51 WaveRider ushers in modern hypersonics 

Building on previous scramjet knowledge, the Air Force tested the Boeing-built X-51 Waverider from 2010 to 2013. For these tests, the WaveRider was attached to a cruise missile that was carried aloft by a B-52 bomber. The missile worked as a first stage, with the WaveRider accelerating from there to at least Mach 5.

2011: Too fast for thick skin 

In October 2011, DARPA lost contact with its Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 nine minutes into flight. A report published in April 2012 concluded that traveling at Mach 20 wore through its protective outer coating, damaging the ability of the vehicle to self-correct in flight. 

2014: Advanced hypersonic failure

In a 2014 test at the Kodiak Island launch facility in Alaska, the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon failed. Later investigations revealed the flaws to be in the launch vehicle, not the hypersonic weapon itself. 

September 2021: HAWC

In September 2021, DARPA first tested the Raytheon-built version of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, which reached speeds at or exceeding Mach 5. Then again in March 2022, DARPA tested the version of the HAWC built by Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne. In July 2022, Raytheon successfully flew its version of HAWC a second time. 

October 2021: Glide vehicle

In October 2021, China demonstrated an object launched partially into orbit that crashed back down at hypersonic speeds. It was most likely a glide vehicle known as a “fractional orbital bombardment system,” a kind of trajectory that can cross the globe without the high arc and sharp descent of a traditional ballistic missile.

May 2022: ARRW

In a test off the coast of California, the Air Force launched an Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon. This test checked the bare minimum of boxes for a successful flight: It detached successfully, its engine started, and it reached Mach 5, all feats that previous tests of the ARRW had failed to achieve. In July 2022, the ARRW again hit its mark.

July 2022: OpFires

In testing at White Sands, DARPA successfully deployed and launched an Operational Fires missile from a Marine Corps logistics truck using Army artillery controls. The intent of the program is to have a hypersonic weapon that can be fired from standard available trucks, hitting targets at speed and range that cannot be safely reached by aircraft.

Watch a video of OpFires below: 

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On July 11, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, told reporters that the government of Iran was prepared to send several hundred drones, including armed drones, to Russia. And in late June, the impoverished Buryatia region of Russia reportedly raised 200 million rubles of its own funding to buy equipment for soldiers, including quadcopters. Taken together, these stories offer a portrait of how Russia is trying to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, with both foreign and hobbyist drones being pressed into military service.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, it did so with an army that had some experience with modern warfare, but nothing on the scale of the massive three-pronged tank-led assault it undertook. In the four and a half months since, the Russian military consolidated its hold around southern Ukraine, withdrew its failed attempt to capture the capital of Kyiv, and concentrated a major advance on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. 

With an increasingly static front line, Russia is relying on its numerically superior artillery to destroy Ukrainian forces. Ukraine, in turn, has received new long-range artillery from the United States and NATO countries, which it is using to destroy Russian ammunition depots near the front. To make every artillery shot count, both sides are relying on drones to find targets, and also to reveal if the targets were destroyed.

Russia’s push for new and more drones comes in the context of these artillery duels.

No longer ‘blind kittens’

Drones give forces an eye in the sky. “These commercial drones are used to conduct surveillance, provide timely intel on the Ukrainian forces, as well as to direct artillery/MLRS/mortar strikes,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “Russian efforts now also involve using these commercial quadcopters to drop munitions, something that Ukrainians have excelled in during the conflict.” Videos of drones dropping bombs in Ukraine date back to the earleir Donbass war, and have proliferated ever since the invasion.

While there are dedicated drone models built for and deployed by the military, Russian units, from infantry formations to tank crews to artillery teams, have supplemented military drones with commercial and hobbyist models, the kind that can be found in stores. 

These hobbyist drones, like those made by China’s drone giant DJI, are not part of standard issue kit. In April, DJI specifically halted sales of its drones to Russia and Ukraine.

Regardless, soldiers are finding ways to get the drones on their own, or in the case of the regional government of Buryatia, using its own meager governmental funds to supply soldiers.

[Related: Calling all ‘dronations’: a new way to help Ukraine]

Buryatia “is one of the poorest regions in the country, and it’s no surprise that many of its soldiers are fighting in Ukraine, many for the monetary reward promised by the Ministry of Defense,” says Bendett. Siberian news service Tayga published an account from the government of Buryatia, where soldiers returning from the front described fighting without quadcopters as being like “blind kittens.” These quadcopters give soldiers the ability to see 5 km (3.1 miles) from where they are, whereas going into battle against enemies that do have quadcopters risks being spotted miles away.

Additional funds being raised for deployed soldiers is not uncommon in war. During and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, stories of national guard soldiers buying their own body armor proliferated, as did reports of bake sales to equip soldiers already serving in the best funded military on Earth. In Russia, the invasion of Ukraine is still described by the government and press as a ‘special operation,’ but published appeals for more direct aid to soldiers show at least some acknowledgement that the military is struggling.

“What’s unusual so far is the language critical of Russian military capability gaps, like soldiers talking openly that they lack [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] equipment at the tactical edge,” says Bendett.

What to know about the Iranian drones

“It’s unclear whether Iran has delivered any of these [drones] to Russia already,” Sullivan told press on July 11. “But this is just one example of how Russia is looking to countries like Iran for capabilities that are also being used, I might add, or have been used before we got the ceasefire in place in Yemen, to attack Saudi Arabia.”

Sullivan was specifically referring to the kind of drone strikes launched by Houthi forces in Yemen, as part of the ongoing war in that country between various factions, including Saudi Arabia. These attacks include loitering munitions fired at oil refineries in Saudi Arabia, a kind of long-range attack that was previously difficult for armed factions without air forces to conduct. 

Using drones for long-range strike would augment a persistent limitation of Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, which is that its helicopters, fighters, and bombers are vulnerable to anti-air missiles. As noted by The War Zone, “Iranian armed drones would be much cheaper than using cruise or ballistic missiles.”

It is possible that the Iranian drones mentioned by the White House are instead the more traditional scouting type, in which case they would augment existing scout and spotter drones flown by Russian forces. But if Russia is turning to Iran for drone-like missiles, it suggests that Russia sees a path to victory in the war through hitting Ukrainian targets far from the front line.

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A traditional airplane gets the lift it needs to stay in the air from its wings. A helicopter, meanwhile, has large spinning rotor blades on top that provide lift, allowing it to do fantastic things, such as hover over the ocean and rescue someone at sea. 

But a sleek new prototype from Bell partially fuses these concepts together, giving its new military helicopter a detachable wing that can help it achieve fast speeds of around 180 to 200 knots (207 – 230 mph). 

Bell’s aircraft, called the 360 Invictus, is a candidate to be the US Army’s next armed reconnaissance helicopter. It’s competing directly against an aircraft from Sikorsky, called the Raider X. Both competitors’ prototypes are part of an Army program called FARA, which stands for Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. 

Bells says that their prototype is more than 90 percent complete. The design features a tandem construction, so pilots could fly it from the front seat or the rear. “It’s very narrow,” says Chris Gehler, the director for the 360 Invictus program at Bell. That, plus retractable landing gear and retractable weapons pylons, help reduce the helicopter’s drag. 

Here’s what to know about how this aircraft works. 

Winging it

Protruding from each side of the helicopter’s narrow body is a wing. That wing measures about 7.5 to 8 feet out from each side, Gehler says.

A typical helicopter does not have a wing like this. But there’s a reason why Bell chose to incorporate it in their design, and that’s because the Army would like this bird to be able to travel fast, at speeds north of 160 knots (184 mph) or so. When a helicopter tries to go very quickly, a phenomenon called retreating blade stall becomes a concern. As the whirlybird cruises forward through the air, and the rotors up top are spinning around in circles, at any given time one of the rotor blades is moving against the flow of oncoming air, and one is moving with the air, as it retreats compared to the helicopter’s direction of flight. That can affect how much lift the rotor blades produce at any given position. (This same issue is why Sikorsky’s design has two top rotors that spin in opposite directions.) 

“You get into a dissimilar lift situation, where the advancing blade is producing more lift than the retreating blade, and you get out of balance, and it becomes an unstable situation,” Gehler says. He notes that it tends to become an issue when the rotor blades are spinning fast enough that the tips’ speeds approach the sound barrier. 

[Related: Take a peek at Sikorsky’s scout helicopter prototype]

That’s where the “lift-sharing wing” helps, says Gehler. It assists when the helicopter passes the 160-knot threshold, and at that point, it provides about 30 percent of the lift that the aircraft needs. Because the wing is giving that extra lift, the helicopter can automatically slow down the speed at which the rotor is spinning, avoiding that blade-stall issue. While the Invictus itself would still be traveling quickly, the rotor blades themselves would be slowed down enough to keep them at a safe speed. (Another factor is the angle at which the rotor blades bite into the air, and thanks to the help of the wing, the Invictus’ retreating blade can be positioned with a lower angle of attack.)

The design of the Invictus and its wings features another trick: They are partially removable. While the initial 3.5 feet or so of them are permanently attached to the aircraft, the remaining 4 feet or so can be taken off. If a helicopter crew doesn’t anticipate that their mission would involve high speeds, removing the wing tips in advance would save weight. Also, detaching those wing tips when needed could help the aircraft’s hover performance, because “there’s a little bit of penalty in hover” with having the wing there in the first place, Gehler notes. 

An aircraft with 1.25 engines

Whichever aircraft the Army eventually chooses to go with—and that’s a decision the Army said it will make in fiscal year 2025—the engine it uses has already been determined. That power plant is called the GE T901. 

But Bell has decided to accompany that engine with another onboard machine—a supplementary power unit, or SPU. This smaller engine is like an auxiliary power unit (more on how APUs work here), which play a key role in getting aircraft started. On the Bell design, Gehler notes that the SPU can also act as an additional engine during flight to help actually power those top rotors. First, they use this engine to get the helicopter started, like a normal APU. “But we clutch it into the drive system, and that allows us to provide power into the drive system at a hover, at high speed, at any time the pilot might need it,” he says. 

This power plant burns jet fuel, like the main engine does, and can produce in the ballpark of 600 to 900 horsepower. The main GE-made engine will be 3,000-shaft horsepower. Between the main engine and the SPU, this aircraft can be thought of as a 1.25-engine machine, Gehler says. 

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

The SPU can also help out if the main engine fails and the pilots need to make an emergency landing. “The supplemental power unit would kick in, and drive the rotor system to enable a softer landing approach,” he says. To be sure, it’s not powerful enough to keep the bird totally flying, but it would help “to give the pilot more time, and more options to land safely.” 

Like Sikorsky’s option, this prototype from Bell has not flown yet, because it needs that main engine to do so. Gehler expects the Invictus to first fly in the fall of 2023; it should be a couple years after that before the Army decides which option to select. Finally, don’t confuse the FARA program with another one called FLRAA, which also has Bell and Sikorsky competing with two different, larger aircraft. 

Take a look around the Invictus design in the video, below:

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South of Death Valley and north of Los Angeles, the Air Force is testing a new weapon designed not to kill. Together with the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting two months of testing on a device called the High-Powered Joint Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike Weapon, or HiJENKS. It’s the culmination of a five-year project to create a machine that can destroy electronics in a targeted way. 

HiJENKS is the successor to a similar weapon, the Counter-electronics High-Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP. Both weapons were designed to disable electronics without using physical force, such as an explosive blast or the kinetic force from impact. Making a weapon that can disable electronics without causing physical damage to its target is hard, and it might be part of why the Air Force is open to new delivery systems, other than a missile, in this latest iteration.

In short, HiJENKS is a high-powered weapon that fries electronics with pulsed bursts of microwave energy. When it comes to targets, many weapon and sensor systems require smooth functioning of electronics to work, and a disruption that fries circuits could halt a threat while leaving the physical parts of the system untouched. 

CHAMP, which HiJENKS is designed to improve upon, was built to fit in the case of a bomber-launched cruise missile. Little about the exact form of HiJENKS is known at present, though it could be mounted on a new cruise missile. Alternatively, HiJENKS might be carried in a weapon pod that draws power from a plane, or it could even become the primary weapon system of a drone flown as a wingmate to a crewed fighter.

“We’ll start looking at more service-specific applications once we’ve done this test that demonstrates the technology,” Jeffry Heggemeier, chief of AFRL’s high-power electromagnetics division, reportedly told press at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

“Heggemeier said the program hasn’t yet designated a platform for the weapon, but noted HiJENKS’ smaller footprint means it could be integrated on a wider range of carrier systems,” reports C4ISRNET.

To grasp the full ambition the Air Force has for HiJENKS, it helps to first understand its predecessor, CHAMP. 

Thanks CHAMP

The origins of CHAMP, possibly the first non-kinetic-effect missile deployed by the Air Force, can be traced back to 2009. The Air Force was looking for a weapon that could disable electronics without causing physical damage. Functionally, CHAMP was a cruise missile that replaced an explosive payload for one that targeted electronics with high-powered pulsed microwaves. Possible targets for disruption could include the navigation computer in a missile, or the radar and targeting system of an anti-air missile installation. The Air Force demonstrated CHAMP in a test in Utah in 2012, but then the program stalled. 

In 2017, CHAMP briefly gained some wider attention as a possible tool for the United States to use against a North Korean nuclear launch, though that possibility had real limits. The first is that, while not all electronics are hardened against electromagnetic energy attacks, nuclear missiles and warheads tend to be. (This is because a nuclear blast is the one kind of weapon guaranteed to produce an electromagnetic pulse, which is part of the overall horror of a nuclear detonation, though not the primary risk to people.) 

Regardless of its specific limitations in that mission, CHAMP was designed to give the Air Force an option for neutralizing an electronics-dependent threat without having to kill people or destroy a building or vehicle. 

When a cruise missile outfitted with CHAMP was fired at a specific building, reports Popular Mechanics, “The resulting pulse of electromagnetic radiation would fry enemy electronics, rendering vital equipment worthless without, as the Air Force Research Lab put it, ‘damage to infrastructure and danger to life.’”

And HiJENKS ensue

In 2019, the Air Force retired the missile that carried CHAMP. HiJENKS could be in a new missile, or it could be in a range of weapons from drone payload, to plane-mounted weapon pod. Whatever the new form factor, HiJENKS appears to be developed to make it a more immediately useful weapon than CHAMP.

“HIJENKS will include improvements that ‘resolve operational issues’ that the CHAMP team experienced with the first airborne [high-powered microwave] system,” wrote Jack McGonegal of the Air Force in the spring of 2020, as part of an Air Force task force analyzing future weapons. “These improvements will most likely involve decreases in size and weight of the [high-powered microwave] payload while seeing an increase in maximum power.”

However HiJENKS develops, it carries with it some of the inherent risks in a new weapon loaded inside a familiar casing. Because the effect of the high-powered microwave is range-limited, a commander targeted by HiJENKS would be unable to tell if the missile fired is carrying deadly explosives, or tactically frustrating but nonlethal microwaves. When fired upon by HiJENKS, it would be reasonable to assume most people would respond as though under attack by a traditional weapon. 

In battle, that may not make much of a difference at all. But if commanders and presidents are hoping a non-kinetic weapon like HiJENKS may expand their options in a conflict, that assumption carries the risk that it will be seen as a conventional threat, regardless.

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On June 23, the Department of Defense announced it was supplying four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, to Ukraine. These systems, which will join the four already sent to the country, are part of an ongoing effort to bolster its military in its fight against the Russian invasion. Eight artillery systems might seem small in the scale of a war that has killed thousands of people in just months. But HIMARS is a specific kind of artillery, and understanding rocket artillery is crucial to understanding how this particular stage of the war is being fought.

The additional HIMARS were part of a broader $450 million aid package, part of a cumulative effort of over $6 billion sent to the country. As enumerated by the Pentagon on June 24, this aid also includes over 1,400 Stinger anti-air missiles and over 6,500 Javelin anti-tank missiles. These weapons, while potent, have two big limitations: They are short range, and they are carried by soldiers into battle. A Stinger or a Javelin is effective if the soldiers can survive to get close enough to the enemy vehicle to use it, but artillery poses a big threat to soldiers on foot, and even in vehicles.

What is a HIMARS?

Developed by defense giant Lockheed Martin, the HIMARS is a rocket launcher mounted on the back of a dedicated truck. The HIMARS can carry six Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rockets, which each have a range of more than 43 miles. Other ammunition can extend that range, but even with just the baseline rockets for it, the HIMARS can greatly outrange towed artillery. Other kinds of ammunition can greatly extend that range, but US supply to Ukraine is firmly limited to just the 43-mile ranged ammunition.

While towed artillery can be set up, fired, and then driven away from where it fired, self-propelled artillery like the HIMARS lets the vehicle drive away immediately after firing, taking full advantage of its range and mobility to attack enemies and escape retaliation.

[Related: Everything to know about Switchblades, the attack drones the US is giving Ukraine]

Each rocket carries a 200-pound explosive warhead, which is powerful enough to destroy a building, a group of soldiers in the open, other artillery, and any vehicle unfortunate enough to be hit. By firing a salvo of up to six rockets, a HIMARS can attack a whole armored column, blast a hole through a front line, or cause tremendous damage to an enemy camp near but not on the front line.

One possible use for the HIMARS is to shoot beyond the front lines and hit supply depots, hobbling the ability of Russian forces to resupply themselves close to the fighting. 

How long does it take to train a HIMARS crew?

The HIMARS is still a human-driven and human-operated system, and delivering a weapon also means training a crew on how to use it in combat. Lockheed Martin says it takes a three-person crew to operate in combat, though the whole apparatus of training, resupplying, and ensuring there’s a durable artillery corps can involve many people. 

Speaking to the press on June 27, a senior defense official said: “So in this case for the HIMARS training, you know, [it takes] a couple weeks.”

What about other artillery?

While HIMARS is the headlining artillery item, the United States has also provided Ukraine with 126 155mm howitzers and 260,000 rounds of ammunition for those howitzers. These are towed artillery, pulled into place by a truck and then set up to fire. These weapons can launch explosives at targets 14 miles away, further if the artillery shell is rocket assisted. This range makes artillery potent and powerful, and the mobility provided by trucks allows crews to “shoot and scoot,” moving away from a firing location before return fire can hit.

Both Ukraine and Russia inherited arsenals from the Soviet Union, which built a massive military that was heavy on artillery. That shared heritage meant that both countries used the same kind of 122mm and 152mm artillery pieces and ammunition. (Artillery pieces, like other guns, are measured by caliber, or the internal diameter of the gun barrel.) As the Washington Post reported, Russia was able to take advantage of this shared supply need by both targeting Ukrainian ammunition stockpiles and by buying up ammunition held by other countries.

As Ukraine switches to incorporating more US and NATO-made artillery pieces, its military is also transitioning into a different kind of targeting logic. Much US artillery relies on not just targeted salvos but guided shells, and the Pentagon is training Ukrainian forces to use Excalibur rounds, which can hone in on GPS and fall within 7 feet of the coordinates provided.

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Someday, the Army could welcome a new scout helicopter into its fleet. Two companies are competing against one another in a program called FARA (Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft) to create the whirlybird that will fill that role. One of them is Bell, which is working on a candidate called the 360 Invictus. The other is Sikorsky, whose flying machine is called the Raider X. 

Sikorsky’s candidate features coaxial top rotors: The two large rotors on top of the helicopter, which give it lift, spin in opposite directions, negating the need for a traditional tail rotor. 

Two images of Raider X in a hangar in West Palm Beach, Florida, shared recently by Sikorsky, reveal how the company’s prototype is coming together. “The aircraft build is 90-percent complete,” says Pete Germanowski, the chief engineer on the FARA program at Sikorsky. “The basic airframe’s there, the cockpit doors are installed, the weapons bay doors are installed, the landing gear is installed and serviced, [and] many of the electrical and hydraulic subsystems are fully installed and going through their acceptance test procedures.”

In the photo above, a few details stand out. At the aircraft’s nose is a simulated weapon—a 3D-printed substitute for the actual 20mm cannon that would someday hang from under the aircraft in the same spot. That cannon is attached to a turret. “The turret that’s installed on the aircraft is the real deal flight-worthy turret,” Germanowski says, “with the actuation motors, and the motor controller unit, and all of the electronics that allow us to swivel the gun in azimuth, and pitch the gun in elevation.” 

[Related: Sikorsky’s fancy new helicopter completed its longest flight yet]

On top of the helicopter is another component that’s 3D-printed, as a stand-in for what will be the hubs for the top rotors and the gearbox. Germanowski refers to that 3D-printed component as a “shop aid,” which he says “allowed us to verify the installation procedure for the gearbox on the actual aircraft.” Ultimately, the hub that holds the two top rotors—which aren’t shown in these images—will be forged from titanium. 

At the helicopter’s tail will also someday be a propeller that can help the aircraft accelerate or decelerate. Whichever helicopter becomes the Army’s choice for the FARA role will be powered by a single engine, which is General Electric’s T901.

In another image, below, additional 3D-printed components protrude out of the weapon’s bay, which is open. What’s visible is a simulated version of a system called the modular effects launcher, which someday could carry missiles, rockets, or other kinetic objects, like drones or other sensors. The same section of the helicopter could also hold six people on troop seats, an auxiliary fuel tank, or other gear. 

If this scout helicopter sounds similar in design to another from Sikorsky, that’s because it is. While the Raider X is part of the FARA competition, Sikorsky’s Defiant X is part of another Army competition called FLRAA, which stands for Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft. Both helicopters, Raider and Defiant, have similar design elements: two counter-rotating top rotors, and a propeller in back.

[Related: Tilting rotors could help make Bell’s speedy new aircraft the next Black Hawk]

“It looks similar to Defiant,” says Germanowski, referring to the Raider X. “It’s significantly smaller than Defiant.”

Meanwhile, over at Bell, their FARA candidate—both companies refer to the aircraft they are working on as a competitive prototype—is the 360 Invictus, which in March was reported to be 87-percent finished. Some obvious design differences present themselves between the two aircraft prototypes: Bell’s aircraft employs a single main rotor up top, and a tandem cockpit, meaning the two pilots sit with one person in front of the other, as opposed to side-by-side. Also, the Invictus has a wing. 

Both Sikorsky and Bell might see their FARA competitive prototypes fly for the first time next year. And while the two companies are going head-to-head in the FARA program, with the Raider X pitted against the 360 Invictus, they are also competing in the aforementioned FLRAA program, with the Defiant X up against the V-280 Valor.  If FARA is about finding a next-gen armed scout helicopter, then FLRAA is all about choosing a larger, Black-Hawk-type helicopter. 

While it’s unclear when the Army will make a decision as to which aircraft it wants to go with for the FARA program, the FLRAA competition is further along. “The review board is being very thorough and the contract awardee will be announced when the board completes its review,” an Army spokesperson said via email, regarding FLRAA. The Drive reports that that FLRAA decision could happen in September. Update: In an email, an Army spokesperson says the service plans to make a decision for one FARA aircraft in fiscal year 2025, which for the US government begins Oct. 1, 2024.

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Russia has been reliant on heavy artillery for centuries, and the way it is conducting its war in Ukraine is proving that little has changed. Modern artillery can fire expensive munitions that can be guided precisely to, in the best possible scenario, hit only the target, but it seems clear from the damage being inflicted on civilians in Ukraine that Russian artillery is using cheap, unguided shells or rockets.

To counter this massive artillery fire, Ukraine has asked allies to supply it with modern artillery systems that can shoot and scoot—in other words, fire the munition from a vehicle and then drive away before the shell has even hit its target. That makes it very hard for the enemy to counter-attack, because by the time it has worked out where the shell was fired from, the gunners have scampered.

France has said that it loaned a dozen in April, then another six earlier this month, of its Caesar truck-mounted howitzers that the French Army has previously used in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mali. Other nations that own the Caesar include Czech Republic, Denmark, Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand.

Here’s what to know about the Caesar.

It’s said to be easy to use

It took Ukrainian soldiers just two weeks at a training ground in France to learn how to use the 19.5-ton Caesars, which are made by French company Nexter. The gun is mounted on a 6×6 truck whose 245-horsepower engine can propel it to a top road speed of 50 mph and an off-road speed of more than 31 mph. The 33-foot-long, 8-foot-wide and 12-foot-high truck has a cruising range of 373 miles and can fit in a transport aircraft to be flown to its destination.

Popular Science spoke to a Caesar crew at last week’s Eurosatory land armaments show in Paris; they said the gun could be operated by a crew of four, “but five makes it faster.” All but one of its operators are rank-and-file soldiers. 

[Related: How technology, both old and new, has shaped the war in Ukraine so far]

The vehicle’s driver positions the truck, then lowers the hydraulically controlled platform at the rear. It pushes down, lifting the truck’s back wheels off the ground a few inches. That’s necessary to help handle the vibrations caused during firing. The munitions purveyor carries the ordnance to the charger, who slots the shells into the semi-automatic system. Meanwhile the gun-layer (the person aiming the artillery) sets the coordinates either using a satellite positioning system, such as GPS, or a map, and fires the weapon. 

It’s fast

It takes less than 60 seconds for the Caesar to get into action once the vehicle has been parked, and less than a minute for the 155mm/52 caliber ordnance, semi-automatic gun to hurl six shells at a target between 3 to 31 miles away in any weather. Less than 40 seconds after the last shell has been fired, the Caesar can have driven off. Shoot, and scoot. 

[Related: Why the threat of explosives will persist long after the war in Ukraine ends]

Meanwhile, the US Army uses the M777 towed 155 mm artillery piece which, as the name suggests, needs to be towed into position and unshackled from the towing vehicle before a minimum of eight soldiers can operate it. The Department of Defense is seeking to replace it with a truck-mounted system such as those manufactured by France, but also Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, China, Israel, Japan and South Africa.

It’s powerful

The gun’s detonation chamber, or the part of the system where the propulsive charge explodes, is 23-liters, compared to 18-liters on the US Army’s M777 towed howitzer, which means it can be packed with more propellant that then expels the shells faster and further. It fires all 39/52 caliber munitions that meet NATO standards or ERFB (Extended-Range Full-Bore) or intelligent munitions such as BONUS and SPACIDO.

It’s about to get a refresh

The new version, called the Caesar NG (for New Generation), will be mounted on an 6×6 truck and has already been bought by Belgium and Lithuania. The Caesar NG will weigh 27.56 tons, almost 8 tons heavier than the first-gen, because the truck cabin will be armored to level 2 STANAG (that’s a NATO standard) instead of being optionally protected with armored kits bolted onto the cabin as is the case with the gen-one version.

[Related: Everything to know about Switchblades, the attack drones the US is giving Ukraine]

Level 2 STANAG protects the occupants from a 7.6×39 mm round fired from 30 meters (98 feet) away, from a 6 kg (13 pound) explosion mine under any wheel or truck or under the center, and from a 155 mm high explosive fired from 80 meter (262 feet) away. 

Because the truck is heavier, it will be powered by a 460 HP engine instead of the 245 HP engine on the gen-one, enabling it to reach the same on-road and off-road speeds. It will also have a new automatic gearbox and a new chassis. The Caesar NG is bigger overall: 40 ft long, 9 ft wide and 10 ft high. 

The Caesar NG should be ready by 2024. France will then have to choose whether to order 109 of them or else order only 33 and upgrade the 76 it already has—assuming none of those loaned to Ukraine are destroyed.

Correction on June 29, 2022: This article has been updated to correct an error regarding the Caesar NG, which will be a 6×6 vehicle, and not an 8×8.

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On May 14, above the sea off the coast of California, one of the Air Force’s oldest bombers tested one of its newest weapons. Carried by a venerable B-25H Stratofortress, the projectile the military released and successfully tested is officially called an AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW). After release, the ARRW blasted forward, reaching five times greater than the speed of sound, making it hypersonic.

“The team’s tenacity, expertise, and commitment were key in overcoming the past year’s challenges to get us to the recent success,” Heath Collins, the Air Force Program Executive Officer for Weapons, said in a release.

That tenacity likely refers to the previous failures of the ARRW in testing. In April 2021, an ARRW failed to leave the wing of the bomber carrying it. During a July 2021 test, the ARRW’s rocket engine failed to start after it was released from a B-52. In December 2021, an ARRW test was aborted with the missile still on the wing. This most recent successful test means the fourth time was the charm.

After this string of failed tests, the Air Force is celebrating that its hypersonic missile met the minimum requirements for a hypersonic missile: It was released from the plane carrying it, the engine started when it was supposed to, and it reached Mach 5.

[Related: The US flew its most iconic Cold War bomber over Europe]

The missile is distinct from other hypersonic weapons, most notably the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) tested by DARPA in 2021 and again in March. HAWC is a concept for a future weapon platform, making the project somewhat lower stakes because its promise is more firmly anchored in the future. But the ARRW has been envisioned as a weapon that could move straight from prototype to service and production once it has proven capable, giving the US an operational weapon.

The ARRW just needs to prove it is reliable, first.

By design, the ARRW system includes a booster rocket that reaches hypersonic speed, at which point the booster separates from the hypersonic glide vehicle, which would be the actual weapon. The ARRW’s test plan calls for this booster and glide vehicle separation to take place in testing, but, as noted by our colleagues at The War Zone, “It’s unclear if this flight test included the vehicle separation aspect.”

Lockheed Martin, the lead contract for the ARRW, emphasized in a release the safe separation of the test system from the bomber in flight, while not addressing if the glide vehicle had separated from the booster in the test. 

Lockheed Martin instead noted that “[T]he successful flight demonstrates the weapon’s ability to reach and withstand operational hypersonic speeds, collect crucial data for use in further flight tests, and validate safe separation from the aircraft to deliver the glide body and warhead to designated targets from significant standoff distances.”

That data should prove useful for future tests, as should finally having a successful release of the ARRW and ignition of its booster in flight.

[Related: DARPA quietly tested a hypersonic weapon last month]

“Significant standoff distances” means that the bomber carrying the missile can use it to hit targets far beyond the reach of any anti-air defenses. This is part of the role of the B-52 in tests. Not only is the plane a general workhorse of a bomber, it is an old machine, designed and first flown in an era with only limited anti-air missiles. In the 70 years since the first prototype B-52 took its first flight, anti-air weapons have improved immensely, making the kind of bombing Stratofortresses were designed for at best anachronistic, unless fighting against poorly supplied and equipped foes.

Putting a long-range missile on a B-52 allows the bomber to still attack enemies far away. Making that missile hypersonic decreases the flight time between the launch of an attack and lethal impact, and also makes the work of any interception and missile defense that much more difficult.

“ARRW is designed to enable the U.S. to hold fixed, high-value, time-sensitive targets at risk in contested environments from stand-off distances,” writes the Air Force. “It will also expand precision-strike capabilities by enabling rapid response strikes against heavily defended land targets.”

Should the ARRW continue to have success in tests, the missile will give the United States a weapon that its oldest bombers can use to destroy fortified and armored positions and buildings from a great distance. 

Weapons, especially ones as long-range and high-powered as hypersonics, can have geopolitical effects just by being tested. As indicated by the delay in announcing DARPA’s successful March hypersonic test until May, these weapons exist in the shadow of existing nuclear arsenals, and might change the nuclear launch calculus of leaders afraid they might no longer have a deterrent against hypersonic assassination. 

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On May 10, Sweden’s military announced it would be purchasing a new kind of ammunition for a weapon it already owns: the Carl Gustaf Recoilless Rifle. While bearing a superficial resemblance to the bazooka anti-tank gun used by the United States in World War II, and common among plastic toy soldiers to this day, the Carl Gustaf belongs to a tradition of recoilless rifles—those are hollow tubes for large-caliber explosives that have spiral grooves in the barrel to enhance the accuracy of the rounds fired. Unlike typical rifles, recoilless rifles can be big enough to mount on vehicles, and fire explosives much larger than bullets. Like bazookas, recoilless rifles are open in the back, allowing exhaust from the fired explosive to vent directly backwards, so shots can be fired without producing any recoil.

Made by Swedish defense giant Saab, the Carl Gustaf is a venerable weapon, a sophisticated and durable rifled tube that first entered military service in 1948. With this latest type of ammunition, called High Explosive (HE) 448, the rifle can pull off a new trick: It can automatically program the round with information from the rifle’s fire control software, promising faster, more accurate firepower on the move. In other words, the weapon and its ammunition are able to communicate with one another while the round is loaded in the weapon.

The Carl Gustaf M4 pairs its rifled metal tube with a sophisticated set of sensors and computers, and the explosive ammunition that goes inside. Weighing roughly 15 pounds and stretching about 3 feet in length, the body of the weapon has been shortened and lightened from previous versions. On the weapon, the Fire Control Device, FCD 558, includes sensors for temperature and air pressure, which help it calibrate how the round will travel through the air in the exact atmospheric conditions at the moment of firing.

[Related: What we know about the ‘Phoenix Ghost’ drones going to Ukraine]

“Using a toggle on the FCD, the gunner is able to choose either direct fire or air burst, and this information is electronically communicated to the fuze inside the round before firing,” says a Saab release. (Saab has also produced a short video on the weapon.) “The gunner uses the same toggle to enter the range to target. Equipped with information on range, round type, propellant temperature and the required mode, the FCD’s ballistic computer calculates the best possible trajectory to achieve success.”

That lets the person firing the weapon determine if an airburst or a direct impact is the better way to attack a target, and trust the weapon to calculate as much of that information as possible. With an airburst, the HE 448 detonates above or near a target, letting the fragments and blast travel through the air above a group of enemies, a machine gun nest, or even next to the light armor on the side of a vehicle. 

“The HE 448 round provides the FCD 558 with the exact information on round type and propellant temperature and combines this with target distance entered by the operator to determine the best trajectory. This means that Carl-Gustaf operators will be able to quickly configure a chambered round and so increase their operational effectiveness,” said Saab in an announcement of the order.

While the most straightforward way to operate the weapon is to fire directly at a vehicle within range, that’s not the only option, and this is where programmability matters. If the enemy is within range but exposed, like behind a small wall or hiding in a trench, programming an air burst from a high explosive round above the enemy position will be deadlier than a direct shot. That’s where the fire control, range finding, and mode selection matters most.

High explosives are just one kind of ammunition that can be fired with the weapon. A 2017 brochure for the weapon lists 10 rounds available at the time, divided by function. These include anti-personnel rounds that produce smokescreens or blinding light, anti-armor, and versatile or anti-building rounds. The HE 448 is designed as a specific replacement for the HE 441 RS, an anti-personnel round, designed to incapacitate and kill people caught in its blast.

This makes the weapon useful for ambushing transport vehicles, as well as soldiers fighting in open terrain, hiding behind cover, or nestled into foxholes. The Carl Gustaf, with the HE 448, has a range of over 4,200 feet, or at least 4/5ths of a mile.

At the same time in the 1940s that Saab first developed the Carl Gustaf, the United States was experimenting with a range of larger recoilless rifles for its own forces. In 1945, Popular Science covered the 57-MM as a “Kickless Cannon for GI’s.” The 57-mm is a large two-person anti-tank weapon that “can be fired as accurately as the [M1] Garand” standard infantry rifle, hurling a 2.75 pound shell 2.5 miles. A 75-mm version was developed around the same time, with a 90-mm version fielded by 1960.

Some recoilless rifles saw use in World War II, with the Carl Gustaf first introduced into service in 1948. By the Korean War, recoilless rifles became a standard part of how infantry fought against tanks, and in “New GI Weapons” Popular Science paired coverage of the 75-mm with the improved “Super Bazooka” as anti-tank tools of the infantry. Mounting recoilless rifles on jeeps made them more mobile while also making them bigger targets for enemy fire. The ability to attack armor while moving into position and then out of range is a durable feature of recoilless rifles, which offer a lighter alternative to heavier artillery. 

[Related: The US is looking for a new anti-air missile]

Unlike many Cold War weapons, the Carl Gustaf has remained in service since its creation, though modern versions can carry and use sensors that were unimaginable when it was first created in the 1940s. Today, the Carl Gustaf is fielded by a range of militaries, including Ukraine, which in March received a shipment of 100 recoilless rifles and 2000 rounds from Canada. A Ukrainian brigade commander has even claimed that a Carl Gustaf was used to destroy a modern T-90M Russian tank, the kind of vehicle that should be beyond the scope of most Gustaf ammunition.

In its announcement, Saab said the first deliveries of the HE 448 to Sweden’s military will take place in 2023 and continue through 2025. Whether or not the fire computer and programmable round live up to its expectations in combat will have to wait to see how and when the new rounds perform once delivered. In the meantime, the weapon is one of many modern tools that shifts some of the precision targeting to the launcher, letting the actual projectile fly a plotted course, until it meets an explosive end.

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Films of the first atomic bomb detonation—a 1945 test called Trinity—are silent. Their quiet is unnatural, eerie. But in that hush, which you can not-hear on YouTube, it’s easy to imagine the sound that should assault your ears after the explosion’s flash, and the ensuing mushroom cloud’s expansion and rise. The cloud soon resembles a self-perpetuating storm, its edges turbulent, conflagrant, sucking up the planet beneath it as if for sustenance.

The scientists who’d made this bomb watched the Trinity test from a distance, welder’s goggles over their eyes and sunscreen on some cheeks. As part of the Manhattan Project, they had developed and built the so-called Gadget in just a couple calendar swaps, from a secret base in the New Mexico Mountains—a location named Los Alamos, which marks its 79th birthday this April, when the University of California signed a contract to operate the laboratory.

The modern Los Alamos National Laboratory was once part of a closed city. Today, a replica of the main gate is a public restroom and popular selfie spot. The city and the lab, though, pride themselves on their first raison d’etre: to figure out how to make a deadly device—and then do it, stat. 

So when the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test came around in 2020, Los Alamos of course planned to mark the occasion. 

Given what we all know of 2020, the typical sorts of commemorative events didn’t exactly come through. But one physicist, named Mark Chadwick, had a slightly unconventional commemoration idea that happened to be perfect for a pandemic: He proposed virtual lectures, followed by journal articles, that would reexamine Trinity’s science through the lens of modern tools and computers, thus both preserving and squeezing more knowledge out of that test, and its consequences. Understanding Trinity, and other past weapons tests, better helps scientists gather information about the state of current nuclear stockpiles.

The 46 resultant papers—covering everything from subatomic particles’ behavior to plutonium’s evolution to bombs’ yield to cancer risk—initially appeared in the internal Los Alamos journal Weapons Review Letters, a classified zine of sorts. And, after peer review and also security review, 23 papers went on to form a special issue of the journal Nuclear Technology, dedicated to the reexamination of Trinity.

The scientific focus of Chadwick’s lecture-paper project appealed to lab researchers like Susan Hanson, an inorganic chemist. “There’s a bunch of history of the Manhattan Project written by historians already,” she says. Not so much history written by scientists.

Los Alamos National Laboratory historian Alan Carr has heard a lot of quips and insights about that experimental day that took place almost 77 years ago. But his favorite comes from physicist Victor Weisskopf, because—like a weapon’s radiation—it spoke to a spectrum. “Our first feeling was one of elation,” said Weisskopf. “Then we realized we were tired, and then we were worried.” 

The Gadget worked (elation :)); the scientists had worked hard on it (tired (-,-)); and they could sense how it might change future conflicts (worried (✖╭╮✖)).

Trinity, after all, resulted in devastating drops on Japan and ushered in the atomic age, the Cold War, a couple thousand more nuclear tests, the supercomputed simulations and experiments that eventually replaced those tests, and the current world order that relies in large part on who has nuclear weapons and who doesn’t. If knowledge is power, knowledge of this sort of power is maybe even more dynamite.

Chadwick, chief scientist and chief operating officer of weapons physics at Los Alamos, had long run a seminar series for his colleagues. But that became a problem around the same time the Trinity anniversary did: Typical talks contained classified information, which you can’t Zoom about from your home office in your pandemic soft pants (unless you’re into being arrested). And so, Chadwick thought, why not solve both problems at once? He could ask his peers to look at what photons modern science could shed on declassified aspects of Trinity’s near-century-old results. They could give lectures, and then (after a bit of conventional arm-twisting) write up their findings—an extra effort many agreed to, some simply because they couldn’t do their usual classified stuff from the kitchen table but needed to fill work-from-home hours.

Not being a hypocrite, Chadwick wrote one, focusing on how (and how well) his predecessors had done critical mass-related calculations: working out how much nuclear material they needed to create a weaponizable chain reaction. That question-mark was especially difficult to turn into a period, given that Manhattan-Project scientists had only tiny amounts of uranium and plutonium. “The country was working like crazy to produce enough material to actually make bombs,” says Chadwick. After a year or two of work, Chadwick found, the scientists were able to get their math within 10 percent of what we consider correct today—and he was able to add their original analysis to a modern database called Experimental Nuclear Reaction Data.

Inorganic chemist Hanson agreed to do back-research on Trinity’s radiochemistry, detailing how scientists first developed and then deployed radiochemical methods to calculate the Gadget’s “efficiency”—how good it was at making an atomic bang, and so how big that bang was. The device’s actual yield has always been uncertain. 

The original radiochemistry team needed to collect samples of material in the crater Trinity left behind. From them, they could figure out what portion of the plutonium had split and how many fission products there were. “You couldn’t just walk in there and pick them up with your hands,” Hanson says. At least not if you liked your hands, or your life. 

Instead, the researchers lined two tanks with lead. One, with a trapdoor underneath, drove straight into the crater, and sucked samples from its center. The intrepid, air-filtration-wearing explorers inside this extra-armored vehicle were the first to see “trinitite”—the glassish substance that formed when the hot, hot heat of the atomic blast met the desert sand. To the second leaden tank, scientists attached rockets, their noses equipped with scoops, their tails attached to cables. After the rockets passed over to the crater, workers could wind them back into the tank as if they were fishing lures.

These samples, and the ratio of their plutonium to fission products, led scientists to calculate the Gadget’s yield to be 18 kilotons—the equivalent of 18,000 metric tons of TNT. Later, that figure was revised upward to 21 kilotons. 

As part of the anniversary project, Hanson and colleagues worked to re-recalculate that yield, by dissolving 13 original samples of trinitite. New methods—a combination of nuanced techniques like inorganic separations chemistry and ultra-precise mass spectrometry—can pull out an element of interest, and then more precisely measure the isotopes within. Computer-aided analysis of those ratios gave a new quantification: 24.8 kilotons. 

Trinity, in other words, has gotten more powerful with time.

Much of the work on these papers wouldn’t have been possible without a strange place called the National Security Research Center. “Think of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” says Chadwick. It’s a library of Los Alamos archives, many not available for public consumption, dealing with the lab’s history—which is in a lot of ways the history of nuclear weapons themselves. The library, one of the larger libraries of any kind, houses around 20,000 documents about the Los Alamos branch of the Manhattan Project, called Project Y. They live here in carbon and, when someone has taken the time to scan them, silicon format. 

Even Carr, the lab’s historian, hasn’t explored it all. In fact, his Trinity-anniversary work—on a paper called “Thirty Minutes Before Dawn”—led him to a banker’s box of records he’d never seen. Field notebooks contained the original information about potential health hazards from Trinity: pages of the pencil-scrawled radiation readings from workers who trekked to areas near the explosion site and took Geiger measurements. “As I’m going through records, I’m like, ‘Wow, these were in the fallout produced by Trinity,’” says Carr. 

History was literally washing—or zipping—over him. Maybe, he thought, he should have someone come Geiger-count these papers, before he started poring over them.

It’s mostly a joke. That particular history isn’t really dangerous to him now, time having rendered it inert enough. But it’s also true that scientists can only estimate how radiation from weapons tests like Trinity affected people’s health and the environment, in part because of the limited data that exists. 

The radiation from that earliest test does, after all, still persist—not just in archived papers but also in the parts of the planet close to the test. At the site of the Trinity test, you’d get half a “millirem” of radiation in an hour, which, if you stood there doing nothing else for a year, would be about seven times the average dose from all natural and human-made sources. That lingering is, in fact, part of the point of the first and subsequent gadgets. Radiation doesn’t just go away. 

And neither do nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. That’s part of why, at a place like Los Alamos, looking to the past isn’t just about revisiting the (ethically complicated) glory days: It’s about evaluating the present and presaging the future. 

After Trinity, the national labs conducted bomb tests on the regular, both above- and below-ground, gathering data on whether and how the weapons worked. “Those are things that we can’t do anymore,” says Carr, the US having signed (but not ratified), the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

It’s more difficult to tell if our existing nuclear stockpile is, as insiders are fond of saying, “safe and reliable” if you can’t just blow a few of its weapons up and see if they detonate when and how they’re supposed to, and don’t detonate at all when they’re not supposed to. That okay-or-nay assessment involves, instead of a cloud-anticipating countdown, smaller-scale experiments and computer simulations that together can help reveal the weapons’ internal states. 

Understanding what all of that not-quite-a-test information means for a full-scale bomb is where the archives come in. “A lot of this relies on data that was created during the Cold War,” says Carr, during the full-scale testing era. That’s why Carr’s job is to know what was done in the past—so it can inform the present, and help new employees with their strange orientation. After all, says Carr, “they don’t teach you things like nuclear weapons design in college.”

“Fortunately,” he adds.

Designing the Gadget, and doing the Trinity test, were formidable technical achievements, taking a nascent branch of physics and turning it into a physical (and physically destructive) object in less time than it takes to add some lanes to an interstate. The Manhattan Project was arguably the first Big Science program, a meeting of famous physics minds high on Enchanted-State mesas, and involved the labor of more than 100,000 workers across the country. But making an atomic bomb wasn’t just a technical wow showcasing new science, innovative engineering, and the military-industrial-academic complex: It was a long-term, people-killing plan that would alter international relations forever. “You have to acknowledge that within a few weeks, these weapons were deployed over Imperial Japan,” says Carr. “That’s a loaded history.” 

The motivation for having kept nuclear weapons around is somewhat different from the motivation for developing the Gadget in the first place. Trinity represented a proof of battlefield concept, and, in a lot of ways, a simple if-then query: Did the bomb work? If yes, then explode one or more above the heads of our enemies.

Today, meanwhile, nuclear weapons exist to act as a deterrent (or so the philosophy goes). We keep them so that they keep other countries from exploding their nuclear weapons in our general (or our allies’) direction. The strategy, though, only holds if the weapons will work when called upon, and if the other side believes they could credibly be called upon. “Their value as a deterrent relies on their ability to perform—without question—in combat,” says Carr. 

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing war, show, deterrence is not simple. “Deterrence is neither as stable as some strategists insist nor as easy to escape as some disarmament advocates hope,” Matthew Harries, a senior fellow at a UK think-tank called the Royal United Services Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy. “Wherever the war goes from here, it’s clear that nuclear deterrence is not automatic or inherent to the mere possession of nuclear weapons.”

It was Trinity that first ushered in that delicate, counterintuitive, contested balance in the first place. We have nuclear weapons to keep the peace; we have nuclear weapons because the Trinity test worked; the Trinity test only worked because we had a nuclear weapon. 

“There’s always been a debate about this: Are nuclear weapons our damnation, or are they our savior?” says Carr. “A lot of this is unknowable.” That uncertainty holds regardless of how powerful your supercomputers or modeling methods are. Yet there’s even more greyness to it. For instance, the benefits of deterrence aren’t evenly distributed. In Ukraine, Russia’s nuclear-armed status has made NATO countries act more cautiously, Harries pointed out, which means more damage to the invaded country and its people. And the whole philosophy relies on the destructive threat being credible. “Because deterrence is neither automatic nor static, there is no way to reap its prime benefit—discouraging war between nuclear-armed states—without some real chance of nuclear weapons being used, even if the probability is low,” he continued.

That probability is now, and always has been, unknown—if not unknowable. So too, though, are the pure, precise details of how nuclear weapons work and how they age. The digital codes and models that scientists use to mimic bombs involve estimation (like most codes and models do), because we can neither write nor run software that truly replicates the physical weapon. These are very good estimations, but they nevertheless have assumptions and approximations embedded inside—about how atoms and materials and explosives behave in various configurations and environments, and are not exact reflections of reality. You can create something, in other words, and not fully understand it.

Correction 5/2/22: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that 18,000 kilotons of TNT is equivalent to 18,000 sticks of dynamite. It’s way more than that.

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The US Army wants a new human-portable missile that soldiers can use to shoot down aircraft. Looking to replace the venerable Stinger anti-air weapon, the Army put out a request for information on March 28, and wants the weapon in production by 2027. A new anti-air weapon program for the Army has long been in the works, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cast the issue in stark relief. The ability of soldiers on the ground to destroy aircraft, or at least make the threat of airstrikes a risk to pilots, has greatly constrained how Russia is fighting the war. 

The solicitation dryly notes that “The current Stinger inventory is in decline,” which is one way to describe the US Army sending thousands of the missiles from its own inventory to Ukraine’s military. The missiles cost $38,000 apiece, which partly explains why units like the 173rd Airborne Brigade had trained with replicas instead of live missiles, a practice that changed this month. 

These missiles join even older anti-air weapons, like the Soviet-made Strela anti-air missiles Germany sent to Ukraine, in bolstering the defense of Ukraine without actively joining the fight in the sky above. These weapons are both MANPADS, or man-portable air defense systems, and both Strelas and Stingers were developed in the 1960s as an answer to jets and helicopters on the battlefield. The missiles have also been incorporated into launchers on vehicles, which can carry more weapons and incorporate more advanced sensors to detect and track hostile aircraft before firing.

A combination of human-carried and vehicle-mounted anti-air defenses allowed Ukraine’s military to inflict significant damage on Russian aircraft flying low attack runs, an approach that in turn drove Russia’s air force to adopt less accurate higher-altitude bombing runs as a means of preserving aircraft.

In 2022, human-carried anti-air missiles still have a role in attacking helicopters and planes, but they will also need to operate in skies full of drones, with far better sensors and countermeasures than were possible decades ago. To understand the Stinger replacement, first it helps to understand the Stinger.

Meet the old Stinger

“The basic Stinger weapon is a Marine-portable, shoulder-fired, infrared (IR) radiation homing (heat-seeking) guided missile that requires no control from the gunner after firing,” explains the Marine Corps’ Low Altitude Air Defense Gunner’s Handbook. Complete with a launcher, it weighs 34.5 pounds, of which 12.5 pounds is the missile, which itself contains 2.25 pounds of explosive warhead.

It is useful against fast, low-flying aircraft used to attack people, vehicles, or buildings on the ground. It can start tracking targets at a range of 15,700 feet, or just shy of 3 miles, and it can hit vehicles as far away as 12,500 feet, or 2.4 miles. Upgraded and modern versions of the missile have a processor to help ensure it only targets hostile vehicles and not friendly ones, and these missiles also carry a different processor that’s useful against infrared countermeasures. 

Heat-seeking against the engine of a helicopter or jet is a particularly reliable way to find and track the vehicle. 

“The Stinger seeker can discriminate between radiation from a small point source such as the tailpipe of a jet and large background sources such as clouds and terrain,” the manual notes. “Except for the sun, the target’s engine exhaust is usually the smallest and hottest object in the environment and will be tracked by the missile seeker.”

The missile design dates back to the 1960s, when it replaced earlier Redeye shoulder-fired missiles that struggled to catch, pursue, and correctly identify enemy aircraft. One of the big changes in design of the Redeye II, which became the Stinger, was to move some sensors from the missile itself to the launcher component. Stingers entered into service in the 1980s, and besides the US military, they were famously distributed to insurgents fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan starting in 1986.

The new Stinger 

In seeking a Stinger replacement, the Army wants to keep much of existing Stinger infrastructure in place. The notice says the new “system must be capable of integration with the Stinger Vehicle Universal Launcher,” and also that it must be soldier-portable. 

What will be new in the Stinger replacement, then, is that it must do everything an existing Stinger can do, but better, with an explicit call for better target tracking and greater range than exists at present. These missiles must also destroy helicopters and planes “with capabilities equal to or greater than the current Stinger missile,” as well as destroying “Group 2-3 Unmanned Aircraft Systems.” Russia’s Orlan-10 drones, used for artillery spotting and scouting in the Ukraine invasion, falls on the smaller end of that category. The Bayraktar TB2 drone, made by Turkey and prominently featured by Ukraine’s military, is just on the edge of the maximum size of Group 3. 

Drones like the Orlan-10 and TB2 are features of modern warfare, used by major and mid-sized militaries, and play a role in combat that the drones used for scouting in the 1960s and 1970s never could. It makes sense, then, that any new anti-air weapon should be capable of protecting soldiers from aerial discovery or drone-guided artillery barrages.

One way to defeat those drones, included in the posted notice and in videos like this from Stinger-maker Raytheon, is a “proximity fuse.” Instead of having to hit the drone directly, a Stinger with a proximity fuse has to just get close enough that it can catch the drone in the blast radius of its own detonation. 

While the new notice is explicitly for Stinger missiles that can be used from vehicle-based launchers, because the same missile must be compatible with existing launchers, it can likely be thought of as a planned replacement for all existing inventory of Stinger missiles, both human- and vehicle-carried. 

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On April 13, two Ukrainian missiles hit the guided missile cruiser Moskva, flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The vessel sank as it was being towed back to port, bringing to the bottom of the sea Russia’s most capable ship in the region, as well as a religious artifact. While Russia initially reported the damage and sinking as the result of a fire on board the vessel, US defense officials confirmed to NPR that it was Ukrainian missiles that destroyed the ship.

Those missiles were two Neptunes, a Ukrainian design based on an older Soviet anti-ship missile model, but upgraded for modern warfare. Those upgrades appear to have paid off, giving Ukrainian defenders on land the reach and power to destroy a hostile enemy. 

The ability of missiles to destroy ships with existing anti-missile defenses will shape future planning. The US Navy is already investing in anti-missile lasers to protect its own vessels from such attacks, and any navy considering future wars near coasts will have to take into account the possibility of powerful anti-ship missiles in the arsenals of its enemies.

To better understand the threat, it’s important to understand the specific missile.

Meet the Neptune

The Neptune missile is named for the ancient Roman god that was sovereign over the sea. It is based on the Kh-35 missile, a subsonic anti-ship cruise missile the Soviet Union began developing in 1972. As designed, the Kh-35 missiles would be launched from a special truck on the shore, and then deliver a 330-pound warhead into the side of a ship up to 75 miles away. 

This missile travels at around 671 mph, which is below the speed of sound, and it flies close to the water, especially as it approaches its target, making it much more likely to hit the ship at the water line. To travel towards its target, the Kh-35 uses both inertial guidance, which lets the missile know where it is and where it isn’t, and then an active radar to guide it directly to the part of the ship it is supposed to hit. While the Kh-35 was Soviet in origin, it took until 2003 for it to enter service with the Russian Federation. 

Kyiv’s Luch Design Bureau started developing the Neptune missile in 2013, with the goal of testing by 2016. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatists forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in response to Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests and change of government. That might explain in part why it took until January 30, 2018 for the Neptune to have its first test flight. Later that year, a Neptune hit a target in the ocean 62 miles away. At the time of the later test, Neptune’s range was given at up to 174 miles, though a brochure for Luch Design puts the range at just over 186 miles. The missile was again tested in April 2019 and April 2020. The missile weighs a total of 1,477 pounds, including a payload of 320 pounds of explosive.

“[Neptune] is intended to defeat warships such as cruiser, destroyer frigate, corvette, airborne, tank landing ships and vehicles, which operate both independently and as part of the ship groups and amphibious groups,” reads a Luch Design Bureau brochure for the missile from 2020. The Neptune is also, the brochure notes, designed to work in all kinds of weather, at night or day, and it works despite any enemy countermeasures, like jamming or shooting at the weapons

By initial accounts, the nine-year process from design start to the sinking of the Moskva appears to have been a major success. The missile had the range and punch needed for a pair of them to destroy a large, hostile ship, and the missiles do not appear to have been stopped by any defensive precautions. 

Defeat the Neptune

Guided missiles like the Neptune have real constraints. There is only so far out to sea they can hit, and there are ship-board countermeasure systems like jamming the electronics of the missile, or hitting it with an anti-missile missile, that could thwart it. Newever developments, like directed energy or laser weapons, may someday defeat missiles. 

The other way to avoid getting hit with a missile is to operate beyond its maximum range. This appears to be the approach adopted by the Russian Navy. One immediate effect of the sinking of the Moskva was that Russia’s Black Sea fleet moved further away from the Ukrainian-controlled coast, out of range of the Neptune missiles. Another is that Russia is using its ships with cruise missiles to attack targets further inland.

In naval warfare circles, missiles like the Neptune are seen as part of an “Anti-access/area denial” strategy, which is one of the more straightforward pieces of military jargon. In essence, it means that the existence of such missiles makes approaching within their range dangerous. If a navy wants to cross a contested passage, its ships will have to rely on their own defenses and will likely want to try and destroy the anti-ship missiles first. Because the Neptune missiles are launched from the back of a dedicated truck, the missiles can fire and the truck can be gone before any return attack hits.

Missiles make it harder to move with impunity, and for a ship to destroy anti-ship missile launchers it will need its own missiles. It will also likely need the support of scouting aircraft to direct the fire and possibly to hit missiles on the ground. (This, too, means flying aircraft into anti-air missile range.) 

As planners and observers watch what is happening in the Black Sea, what plays out there could have implications for how countries either contemplating or threatened by future naval assault develop weapons for the future. Nations like Taiwan were already investing heavily in anti-ship missiles, for example. After the sinking of the Moskva, it’s likely more navies will change how they operate when worried about encountering missile-armed foes.

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In the sky above the desert, the Navy’s laser destroyed a drone pretending to be a missile. This demonstration is part of the Office of Naval Research’s test of a counter-missile laser weapon in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range in February. Trialing the new weapon against a target drone imitating a cruise missile brings a future of laser defense one step closer to reality—at a time where ship-bound missiles are being actively used.

While the test took place in February, the Office of Naval Research announced the results April 13. Earlier that day, the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Flagship Moskva, a missile cruiser, caught fire. Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed the fire set off an internal ammunition detonation while the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said the ship had been hit by Neptune anti-ship missiles. On April 14, while being towed back to port, the Moskva sank. A senior US defense official told multiple outlets on April 15 that they confirmed two missiles from Neptune did in fact hit Moskva.

Laser weapons bring with them the promise of protecting ships from increasingly advanced and capable anti-ship missiles. Missile cruisers like the Moskva can be powerful weapons, launching attacks on ships, submarines, and defenders on the shore alike. But in order to deliver that promise, a ship needs to be able to stay afloat and defend against any attacks that come its way.

This laser weapon, the “Layered Laser Defense” (LLD), was built for the Navy by Lockheed Martin as a demonstration device. As envisioned, it will stop drones, small boats and subsonic cruise missiles. Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles, like the ones that Ukraine’s military claims hit the Moskva, are subsonic, though not all anti-ship cruise missiles are.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

To identify targets, the LLD also includes a telescope that can track flying objects, aid in identifying incoming vehicles, and examine how damaged an enemy vehicle got from laser fire. 

“Innovative laser systems like the LLD have the potential to redefine the future of naval combat operations,” Chief of Naval Research Lorin Selby said in a release. Selby said the system could “address diverse threats, and provide precision engagements with a deep magazine to complement existing defensive systems and enhance sustained lethality in high-intensity conflict.”

Drones, missiles, and small boats all pose threats to ships that take advantage of an asymmetry of attack, which refers to using an assemblage of cheaper technologies to strategically take on a bigger, more expensive weapon, like a ship. Because ships are such big targets, navies invest in defenses to stop attacks, but that only scales to a point. It is easier for someone trying to sink a ship to have more missiles, or more small boats, or more drones, or a combination of all of the above, than it is for a ship to have enough weapons on hand to stop every incoming attack.

[Related: General Atomics and Boeing will build a giant laser for the US military]

That’s where the “deep magazine” of the LLD comes in. Instead of relying on a finite supply of anti-air missiles, or even a stockpile of bullets like a Phalanx close-in weapon system, the LLD just pulls its firepower from the electricity generated by the ship’s engines. That also, incidentally, means adding an LLD to a ship doesn’t come with the risk of adding another pile of explosives which could be set off by a fire on deck.

Laser weapons are also potentially much cheaper to use than other protective weapons on a ship. A report from the Congressional Research Service noted that “[d]epending on its beam power, [a Solid State Laser] can be fired for an estimated marginal cost of $1 to less than $10 per shot (much of which simply is the cost of the fuel needed to generate the electricity used in the shot).”

The 20mm rounds fired by the Phalanx cost $27 per bullet, though it’s not a direct comparison, as many bullets are fired for each intercept. The C-RAM, which is the Army version of a Phalanx and used on land, fires 300 rounds per target destroyed, making the cost per destruction about $8,100 on the low end.

That low cost, potentially as cheap as a dollar per use, has been part of the selling pitch of modern laser weapons for nearly a decade. When the USS Ponce mounted the Laser Weapon System in 2013, it too came with a “$1 per shot” claim. Depending on price, that can be cheaper even than some of the bullets used on ship-board machine guns. Unlike bullets, which do their damage all at once, a laser needs to stay focused on a target long enough to disable it through burning. The more powerful the laser, the less time on target needed, which is one reason laser weapons are paired with sophisticated tracking systems, maximizing burning time through a drone’s wing, a small boat’s engine casing, or even the guidance fins of a flying missile. 

“It’s a challenging problem, but Navy leadership at all levels see potential for laser weapons to really make a difference,” said Frank Peterkin, ONR’s directed energy portfolio manager.

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An unexploded bomb is a terrible threat, and the Air Force is investing in armored vehicles with powerful lasers and robot arms to safely clear them off runways. In February, the service branch announced that in the fall of 2022 it will start fielding these new bomb disposal vehicles. These machines, and the people inside them, will work to ensure runways, both at home and nearer to combat abroad, are able to launch and receive aircraft without sending pilots into an accidental inferno on the ground.

These vehicles are called “Recovery of Airbase Denied By Ordnance” or “RADBO,” and they are based on MRAPS, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles that the Pentagon used for patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan. MRAPs are already built to ensure the survival of their passengers against explosives, with special v-shaped hulls directing the blast force away. There is enough of a surplus of MRAPs that NASA has some, and the military has offered many to police departments as overqualified crowd control vehicles.

Bombs can end up on runways for a host of reasons. The most dramatic are enemy attacks, with cruise missiles cratering the surface from afar, or hostile air forces flying close enough to try bombing an airbase from the sky. Ground attacks, too, can place explosives on pavement, like army artillery or bombardment by nearby mortars.

Also possible, while less flashy, is the Air Force accidentally having a loose bomb on takeoff or landing end up on the tarmac. In every instance, clearing the runway of explosives, however those explosives got there, is essential for returning the runway to service so aircraft can safely take off and land.

An explosion on a runway is an immediate problem, and provided the debris can be cleared, has an easy fix: repair the runway, and continue moving. An unexploded bomb is more complicated, as the explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) crews may not know if the bomb is a dud, or if the process of clearing it will cause it to explode. 

“Current procedures require an EOD technician in a bomb-resistant suit to place a charge on unexploded ordnance or to attempt to defuse it, a procedure that is ‘time- and manpower-consuming’ as well as highly dangerous,” an Air Force Life Cycle Management Center spokesperson told Air Force Magazine in February.

Instead of sending a highly skilled human in a protective suit to defuse a bomb by hand, what RADBO proposes is: What if a truck shot it with a laser instead? The RADBO MRAP will mount a three-kilowatt Zeus III laser and a robotic arm, in a vehicle that weighs approximately 18 tons.

Together with the Army, the Air Force started exploring the laser part of RADBO vehicles in 2015, with a vision for both battlefield and air base use cases. As a 2015 press release noted, RADBO vehicles were also proposed for immediately clearing the live fire area after a practice bombing run, allowing more pilots to train for attack runs without having to wait for the target area to be reset. 

With enough power and time, a laser could burn through a bomb casing, blowing up the explosive from a safe distance for humans and vehicles. The robot arm on the vehicle is there to allow crews to investigate craters without physically getting in them, and to move bombs to places where it is better to detonate them.

Much of this work can be done, in part, with human crews or ground robots, but the process is time intensive. The RADBO vehicle as designed becomes a holistic answer to clearing potentially explosive detritus from a space it should not be.

For now, the Air Force envisions RADBO vehicles as better safety equipment at existing bases. In the future, a conflict could call for the creation of new runways closer to the front of that conflict, and RADBO vehicles could ensure those ad-hoc and rapidly assembled airstrips remain operational even in the face of hostile attacks.

“We have an air superiority mission,” said Tony Miranda, RADBO program manager. “If we are in a high threat environment, and there are unexploded ordnance on the airfield, maintainers can’t take care of the aircraft and the aircraft can’t get off of the runway. These RADBO vehicles will be utilized by Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians to detonate the unexploded ordnance (UXO) from a standoff range, so we can get back to the business of flying planes.”

In the meantime, having the vehicles on hand can turn an dropped or otherwise inadvertent unexploded ordnance on a base into an imminently solved problem, instead of a hazard that persists for weeks, years, or even decades.

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This story was published in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity. This is the eighth in a 10-part series on nuclear risk, military technology and the future of warfare in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On March 22, a construction crew in Germany found an unexploded bomb in Essen, Germany, decades after it had been dropped during World War II. The area was evacuated, including part of a nearby hospital and a home for seniors. Late that night explosive ordnance disposal crews defused the bomb.

The old weapon is a reminder, as war continues 1,000 miles east of Essen in Ukraine, that unexploded weapons are a multigenerational burden. When wars end, and even as they continue, the painstaking work of clearing lethal detritus must be done to prevent future deaths.

“A huge number of shells and mines have been fired at Ukraine, and a large part haven’t exploded. They remain under the rubble and pose a real threat,” Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky told the Associated Press on March 19. “It will take years, not months, to defuse them.”

Before Russia invaded in February, Ukraine had already spent decades of work clearing up unexploded bombs and ammunition. In 2001, Ukraine authorized a program of clearing out unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. This included clearing the Inkerman Adits, horizontal mine shafts in Crimea where the USSR had stored over 10,000 tons of ammunition. A 1942 explosion rendered the stockpile unusable, detonating many of the weapons stored within, but left an estimated 1,000 to 3,000 tons of ammunition undetonated. The Adits were a particularly complex clearing problem, and just one of many areas where leftover war explosives had to be cleared in Ukraine.

More recently, a May 6, 2004, fire at the Novobogdanovka ammunition base, just south of Mykolaiv, scattered bombs across an area of over 115 square miles. Accidents and human error at dozens of other ammunition facilities across the globe have resulted in fires, explosions and the scattering of unexploded ordnance. 

But most of the unexploded weapons left in Ukraine are from deliberate attacks in war. The fighting in Donetsk, which started in 2014, has left unexploded artillery, landmines and cluster bomblets – weapons that persist and kill civilians. In the first nine months of 2021, landmines and unexploded ordnance killed 11 civilians in Ukraine and injured 38 more. The previous year, such weapons killed 11 civilians and injured 46. 

Stepanivka, a village in Ukraine’s occupied Luhansk province, was the site of fighting between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in 2014. Viktor Bykadorov, then acting mayor of the village, told the Wall Street Journal at the time that people won’t go out to chop wood or let their children out to play, fearing mines and unexploded ordnance. Many of the explosives villagers observed in the woods were recent, but some of them date back to WWII.

Iron harvests

In 2015, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe announced it was expanding its explosive ordnance disposal team training program in Ukraine, with the goal of helping Ukraine develop its own program. 

“Children play a lot outdoors and tend to be drawn to the occasionally brightly coloured remnants, which almost always lead to death,” explained Alexander Savelyev, OSCE Vienna-based associate project officer.

The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, which tracks the conflict, reported that in 2020, mines and other explosive objects killed and injured more civilians than artillery shelling or gunfire.

This total number of deaths includes those from landmines, which are explosive weapons used specifically because they persist in an environment. Militaries will place landmines to block off terrain from enemy advances, letting the buried explosives form a deadly barrier. International treaties ban the employment of landmines in part because of the harm they cause to civilians. Ukraine remains a party to the Mine Ban Treaty, though as recently as 2020, the country asked for an extension to fully comply with the treaty’s obligation to destroy all anti-personnel mines within its borders.

By 2019, Ukraine already had destroyed over 70,000 landmines and explosive weapons remains, according to a Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor report. This work was done by the military, police forces, national guard and nongovernmental organizations, among others. Ukraine has relied in part on donations for its de-mining equipment, with nations like Canada providing specialized landmine detection and monitoring tools. One such tool is a ground penetrating radar, which can help de-mining teams distinguish between metallic debris in soil and larger anti-vehicle mines.

This work predates the present war, and will continue long after the fighting stops. For example, northeastern France still bears the scars of the first World War. Its 65-square mile “zone rouge” is cordoned off as unsafe until it has been fully cleared, which will take an estimated 300 years. Beyond the zone rouge, French and Belgian farmers experience an annual “iron harvest,” when they unearth more military material when plowing fields. 

Beyond Europe, a 2021 Congressional Research Service report estimated that at a minimum Cambodia had 739 square miles of land contaminated by landmines and unexploded American bombs, largely dating back to the Vietnam war. In Syria in 2021, landmines and other leftover explosives were the leading cause of death of children. This is what living with the slow work of explosive ordnance disposal means.

While some bombs unearthed are truly duds, others can persist with deadly potential for years, even centuries. In 2008, U.S. Civil War enthusiast Sam White died while restoring a recovered cannonball, still explosive 140 years after it had been made. 

“Explosive weapons are prone to creating effects … that the users of these weapons cannot accurately foresee or control,” wrote Richard Moyes, Director of Policy and Research for Landmine Action.

Some of the bombs dropped on Ukraine today, like all explosives used in war, will threaten lives in the future long after the war is over.

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This story was published in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity. This is the seventh in a 10-part series on nuclear risk, military technology and the future of warfare in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought renewed attention to tactical nuclear weapons, with the White House announcing on March 24 that it had a team of experts briefing NATO on contingency plans in case any such weapon is used. 

As a defensive alliance, NATO has formally stayed out of the war, though many member countries have sent military supplies to Ukraine, from tiny Luxembourg to the United States. 

According to a March 23 New York Times report, this contingency planning included options for what might happen if Russia used a “small” tactical nuclear bomb. These shorter-range weapons, often with small yields, are known as tactical nuclear weapons. Developed early in the Cold War and still in existence now, these weapons persist as part of the broader nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia. 

On March 28, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, told PBS that “no one is thinking about using, about even the idea of using a nuclear weapon.” 

But the war offers a good moment to take a look at just what a tactical nuclear weapon is, and how they differ from the kinds of warheads that are in ICBMs. From the dawn of the Cold War in the 1940s through the 1980s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union invested tremendous amounts of time, energy and resources strategizing around nuclear weapons with the expectation that they would be used in a war over Europe. This led first the United States, and then the USSR, to develop and field nuclear weapons for the battlefield.

No nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in war since the U.S. did so twice over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing as many as 210,000 people. That destructive power, carried compactly in the bays of just two bomber planes, had no special taboo against its use until President Harry Truman made the decision for the Army to stop using it.

Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had a yield of 15 kilotons, or the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a yield of 21 kilotons. These attacks followed the Trinity Test, and preceded hundreds of nuclear tests by the United States in Nevada and across Pacific islands, many of which spread fallout on the people downwind of the blasts.

The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, and both nations went on to develop hydrogen bombs, or thermonuclear weapons, which use fusion reactions to create much more explosive yields than the fission reactions of atomic warheads. The U.S. detonated its first thermonuclear device as part of Operation Ivy in 1952  at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands; it had a yield equivalent to 10.4 million tons of TNT. 

Thermonuclear weapons were designed for total war, capable of destroying whole cities on a scale far outpacing the devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Carried by long-range bombers and, later, intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from submarines, underground silos, and mobile launcher vehicles, these became the strategic nuclear weapons. In 1960, the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower put together its strategy, classified until 2004, for overwhelming nuclear assault on cities in the Soviet Union and its allied countries in the event of a war, based on the power and multitude of U.S. nuclear weapons. 

Tactical nuclear weapons

At the same time that the U.S. was developing these powerful warheads for long-range nuclear attacks, it was also working on smaller, shorter-range weapons that could function as a kind of super artillery if Soviet armies attacked into Europe. One of the more infamous of these tactical weapons was the “Atomic Annie,” a large artillery piece deployed to Europe in the 1950s. The cannon could fire a 15-kiloton nuclear warhead a distance of over 18 miles. By contrast, the Enola Gay B-29 bomber, which dropped the 15-kiloton warhead on Hiroshima, could fly 2,900 miles to a target before having to turn around.

Then there was the Davy Crockett warhead, which had a yield equivalent to just 20 tons of TNT. The recoilless rifle that fired it had an even shorter range than the Atomic Annie, up to just 2.5 miles. The shortest-range tactical nuclear device was the Special Atomic Demolition Munition, which was functionally a backpack-carried bomb designed to be set in place and detonated, in what was assumed to be a suicide mission.

The U.S. Army would eventually replace these nuclear novelties with warheads on short-range rockets, designed for use in battle. The weapons were deployed with the U.S. military in Europe, in part, to indicate a willingness to use American nuclear weapons to defend European countries.

NATO, still a young alliance in the 1950s and ‘60s, was backed by the strength of the American military, but most U.S. forces were at least one ocean away. The USSR-led Warsaw Pact bordered the countries in which both alliances assumed any war in Europe would be fought, most especially West Germany. The USSR had the numbers of soldiers, tanks, and artillery on the ground to win a conventional war. U.S. nuclear weapons were proposed as a way to even those odds, but European allies had to be convinced that the U.S. would risk a nuclear war to defend Europe. 

Deploying short-range tactical nuclear weapons in the path of any Soviet advance, wrote Tom Nichols, professor at the Naval War College, “warned the Soviets, in effect, that if Europe were invaded, the choice to use nuclear arms would be forced upon NATO by the successes of the Red Army.”

Had such an invasion ever come, the commanders in the field, given authorization to use nuclear weapons to avert defeat, would retreat after deployment. (Soviet plans for war were to specifically attack tactical nuclear sites.) The war would then either end in hours with an exchange of ICBMs, or with a ceasefire negotiated to prevent armageddon.

The escalation ladder 

Defense intellectuals describe the steps between peace and thermonuclear oblivion through an “escalation ladder,” with the leadership of both countries at war taking actions that invite the other country to either escalate, by increasing the stakes and tensions, or de-escalate, by backing away from further conflict. Tactical nuclear weapons are the rung separating conventional battle from a nuclear war.

Soviet leaders developed their nuclear weapons and doctrine as a response to U.S. nuclear war planning, and awareness of U.S. nuclear deployments to Europe. Both the U.S. and USSR assumed that once tactical nuclear weapons were used, it was more likely that thermonuclear exchange, not deescalation, would follow.

“As we now know, the Soviet High Command wrestled with this dilemma, since taking a Europe in ashes defeated the whole point of invasion in the first place,” Nichols wrote. “They worked out their own plans for first-use of tactical nuclear arms, for massive use of tactical arms, and for nuclear retaliation. All of the options led to the same dead end of escalation, strategic retaliation, and catastrophe.”

That the inevitable end of a war in which tactical nuclear weapons are used is a catastrophe did not prevent the Soviet Union from developing the weapons, much as the U.S. had. Soviet tactical nuclear weapons included suitcase bombs, nuclear mines, nuclear artillery shells, missiles, short-range missiles fired from planes, and air-dropped bombs. Like the U.S, the USSR deployed its nonstrategic nuclear weapons at bases in allied countries.

Many of these weapons still exist. The U.S. legacy of tactical nuclear weapons continues with 100 B61 nuclear bombs deployed at bases in Europe. The B61 bomb, currently in the process of being upgraded, can be carried by a range of fighter jets, as well as inside B-2 bombers. The B61 is also the smallest yield of any nuclear weapon presently in the U.S. arsenal. Under the B61 mod 12, that yield can be toggled from a low of 300 tons to a maximum of 50 kilotons, the latter of which would make it 3.3 times as powerful as Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

Russia, which inherited the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union, has had to adjust its doctrine in light of changes in geopolitical realities. While the conventional army of the USSR and Warsaw Pact was massive enough that Soviet planners expected to never lose a conventional war in Europe, today several former Soviet republics are NATO members. The USSR could count on forces drawn from Ukraine for any war in Europe; in February Russia invaded Ukraine, an invasion that has struggled against massive resistance. 

The end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, changed the balance of conventional power between Russia and Europe. Both the United States and Russia continued to reduce their nuclear stockpiles, but many weapons persist. Russia maintains roughly 1,600 warheads paired to missiles or planes that can reach the U.S., while the U.S. maintains 1,650 warheads that can reach Russia, and 100 tactical nuclear bombs stationed in Europe.

In addition, Russia maintains an estimated arsenal of 1,912 nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Writers in the U.S. have theorized that such weapons may be used in battle as part of a bid to force a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, though nothing observed in modern Russian military doctrine suggests this is the case.

Instead, tactical nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, an inherited legacy of intricately planning all the stages of the kind of war that should never be fought.

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This story was published in partnership with The Center for Public Integrity. This is the sixth in a 10-part series on nuclear risk, military technology, and the future of warfare in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The city of Mykolaiv sits just northwest of the mouth of the Dnieper River, in southern Ukraine. While the city has not yet been occupied by Russian troops, it has not been spared from attack. A Russian missile tore through a government building in the city on Tuesday, leaving at least 12 dead. Just over two weeks earlier, on March 13, nine civilians were killed by Russian cluster munitions in the city, according to a report from Human Rights Watch, and that was just one of multiple uses of the widely condemned weapon so far in the war.

Both Ukraine and Russia have cluster munitions in their arsenals. The devices, inherited from the Soviet Union era, are munitions containing smaller bomblets that scatter over an area, usually with deadly consequences. Cluster munitions are also deadly after the fighting, as unexploded bomblets can kill civilians long after the fighting has formally stopped.   

Today, both Russia and Ukraine field weapons inherited from the Soviet arsenal, and developed in accordance with Soviet doctrine. Neither country is a signatory of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and neither is the U.S., which also developed and fields some multiple rocket launch systems of its own. 

Colin Kahl, U.S. under secretary of defense for policy, told Reuters that Russia is running out of precision-guided munitions for its war in Ukraine, which means the country is more likely to rely on artillery and unguided bombs, including unguided cluster munitions. 

Modern cluster munitions, like precision-guided munitions, are products of divergent weapons development, built to answer the same question during the Cold War: In the event of a massive tank-led invasion of a country in Europe, what’s the best way to stop that army in its tracks?

The first answer pursued by the U.S. was deterence in the form of overwhelming nuclear superiority, with the U.S. using its advantage in missiles and bombs to threaten either a cataclysmic first strike, or to deploy those weapons for mutually assured destruction in the event of a Soviet first strike. This U.S. nuclear superiority ended in 1978, when the USSR’s arsenal of nuclear warheads surpassed that of the U.S.

Instead of trying to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, in the late 1970s U.S. defense planners looked for an area where American technology could deliver an edge, and turned to nascent developments in precision-guided weapons as the way forward. (While some cluster bombs include guidance systems, the vast majority of cluster bombs fielded lack guidance systems.)

“Precision-guided weapons, I believe, have the potential of revolutionizing warfare,” William Perry, then-under secretary of defense for research, said in congressional testimony in 1978. 

Advancements in precision 

The U.S. had already developed and fielded some precision-guided munitions in the 1960s and 1970s. One precision weapon that entered service in the 1960s was the Walleye television-guided bomb, which had a TV camera inside. Before it was fired from a two-seater F-4 Phantom fighter jet, the camera would transmit the signal to the jet’s weapons officer, who would select the target. Then the bomb would continue to use the camera to steer itself as it fell. Another kind of precision munition was laser-guided bombs, which could follow a laser beam to a target. 

“If we effectively exploit the lead we have in this field,” Perry told the House Committee on Armed Services, “we can greatly enhance our ability to deter war without having to compete tank for tank, missile for missile with the Soviet Union.”

These new advances were designed to be paired with better sensors for finding targets. If the guided munitions and sensors worked together as promised, Perry said, it would give the U.S. military the power to see all the important targets on a battlefield, and then destroy them with direct hits. 

This accuracy, developed as a way to more efficiently place explosives for maximum effect in a large battle, had a follow-on effect of making it possible for militaries to launch airstrikes in cities with the intent of hitting only suspected insurgents or militants. Unlike artillery fire, which destroys an area, it is possible that a guided weapon fired from a drone only hits its intended targets and no one else, though as the Aug. 29 drone strike by the U.S. in Kabul showed, accurate targeting requires not just precise weaponry but also accurate information about who is in the crosshairs.

On a fighter jet with a finite capacity for bombs, making it so that almost every bomb dropped is a bomb that destroys an enemy vehicle or squad ultimately increases the effectiveness of each attach run. That accuracy and space efficiency comes with a price. A 500-pound unguided bomb costs about $4,000, while that same bomb with a guidance system costs $21,000. When the U.S. drops a guided bomb, it not only destroys the target, but also loses $17,000 worth of sensors and guidance systems.

The Soviet approach 

The U.S. developed precision weapons in part because the nascent miniaturized electronics industry in the U.S. could, with funding from the Pentagon, support it. The Soviet Union, at about the same time, started to develop its own precision-guided munitions, but did so with a narrower strategic focus. A 1986 CIA report on Soviet precision weapons, declassified in 2000, expected the weapons to be primarily useful against tanks or “high-value soft targets,” like soldiers with anti-tank weapons. Instead of the U.S. approach of hitting all targets with precision weapons, the USSR reserved precision weapons for the targets it wanted to assure were destroyed, while trusting the scale of unguided artillery fire to deal with the rest.

This research into precision weapons was joined with already-existing Soviet doctrine, which emphasized the importance of ground-based artillery. This artillery included towed guns, artillery guns mounted on trucks so they can relocate after firing, and multiple-launch rocket systems, or heavy duty vehicles that can fire many rockets all at once from a rack mounted on the back. 

It was one such artillery piece, the Smerch, that killed civilians in Mykolaiv this month.

The ammunition from these weapons are largely unguided, though some forms of precision rounds exist. Instead, to better direct fire, battlefield computers were used to calculate firing trajectories for the weapon, rather than the ammunition. To ensure that the artillery destroyed what it was aimed at, the weapons would blanket an area with artillery barrage, ensuring that a quantity of explosives got the job done.

Soviet precision-guided weapons, by a contemporaneous U.S. estimate, were then used to supplement this existing array of weaponry, allowing for some precise targeting in the overall mix.

“The Russians appreciate the potential for surgical strikes with precision munitions and have developed their own precision systems,” according to a 2017 report on Russian military doctrine by the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office. “However, they also believe that massed artillery fires will continue to hold pride of place in future maneuver combat and are effective when precision fires are not.”

Whether or not a country builds military strategy around precision weapons depends on the kinds of wars it intends to fight. Russia’s military, inherited from Soviet plans for an invasion of Western Europe, emphasized the power of mass artillery. Those choices, made decades ago and carried into the present, can partly explain how Russia is fighting its war against Ukraine, and why precise weapons are in shorter supply. 

For other stories in the series, navigate here.

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On the evening of March 24, North Korea launched an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile on a test flight. The missile flew for over an hour, in a high and narrow arc, before crashing down into the sea. The launch, North Korea’s first full-scale demonstration of an ICBM since 2017, was a demo of a new missile, a display of the country’s capability, and a reminder from the world’s most recent nuclear power that it, too, can cause tremendous destruction and loss of life from afar if pressed.

The missile, dubbed the Hwasong-17, reached an altitude of about 6,249 km, or over 3,900 miles, according to North Korea. The patch of sea it sank into was 680 miles from where it had initially launched, though the exact location of the launch site is subject of dispute between North Korea’s official account and outside observations.

For years, North Korea has devoted a tremendous amount of resources and time to developing a nuclear program, capable of building warheads and missiles. Here’s what you need to know.

How far could an ICBM like this travel? 

By extrapolating from the flight time, altitude reached, and distance traveled, analysts expect that the Hwasong could reach almost anywhere on the globe, with the exception of parts of South America and Antarctica. That is, if it is as capable fully loaded as it was in a test flight. 

The vertical altitude it reached on its test flight, extrapolated to a more linear trajectory, means the missile tested last week could have a range of up to 9,300 miles. That’s a substantial increase over the Hwasong-15, the last new North Korean ICBM, which it tested in late 2017 and had a range of over 8,000 miles.

When did North Korea become a nuclear power?

North Korea first detonated a nuclear bomb in a test in 2006. That made North Korea the 10th country to successfully develop a nuclear weapon, after the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, and Pakistan. 

Both South Africa and Israel developed nuclear weapons without explicitly testing them, and South Africa dismantled its nuclear arsenal instead of handing it over to a post-apartheid government.

North Korea remains the only country to have detonated a nuclear weapon in the 21st century, with tests in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016, and 2017. Having a warhead isn’t the same as being able to deliver it—for that, a nation needs to be able to put it on top of a missile—but North Korea has also shown steady development on launch vehicles to do exactly that.

While North Korea had tested other short-range missiles before, 2017 saw the most expansive demonstration of new missile capability. In July 2017, North Korea tested its first ICBM, the Hwasong-14, which could reach cities along the Pacific Coast of the United States, including as far south as San Diego. In August and September 2017, North Korea tested the shorter-ranged Hwasong-12, capable of reaching the US military bases in the colony of Guam in the eastern Pacific. And in November 2017, North Korea tested the Hwasong-15, capable of reaching anywhere in the continental United States. 

Fitting a nuclear weapon onto a missile requires that the warhead be small enough and secure enough to stay intact during flight. On that front, North Korea also claims success in 2017 with miniaturizing a warhead that could fit onto a missile.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles represent a major weapon system, but they are also largely 1960s technology. 

What is new from this test?

No missile tested by North Korea has ever flown as far, nor has it been this large. Both qualities suggest that the country, ruled by Kim Jong-un and economically isolated from much of the world, is working on a missile capable of carrying and releasing multiple warheads. This kind of system, known as a “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle,” or MIRV, follows a pattern of design developed in the Cold War and still in service with many countries today.

A MIRV system turns one big missile into a way to launch many smaller missiles as it approaches the target. The United States tested MIRVs on its Minuteman ICBMs in 1968, and then put missiles into service in 1970. The design was adopted as a way around missile defenses. By spreading its explosive payload into several reentry vehicles, a multiple-warhead ICBM ensures that at least some of the explosives can get through even if missile defenses stop a few in flight.

For a country that might be attacked, missile defense is a hard challenge and the stakes are as high as they can be. It requires identifying a missile at launch or in flight, understanding its trajectory, and then launching another missile to hit the incoming ICBM in flight. Multiple warheads, as well as decoys and other countermeasures released from an attacking missile, make this task harder.

“The offensive arithmetic will be in their favour soon; they may be able to keep up with advances in American defences,” Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters, referring to North Korea and its recent test.

Does the missile pose a new threat?

Despite the reach of the missile, it still has some major limitations. It appears to be liquid-fueled, a process that is slow, and makes it harder to transport. Other countries with liquid-fueled missiles typically put them in silos, where they can be fueled without being seen. (The US’s Minuteman ICBMs use solid fuel.) North Korea is slightly smaller than Mississippi, which limits the ability to hide missiles in silos. Instead, missiles are deployed by a special kind of truck, which transports the missile and then lifts up a launch rig to hurl it into the sky. 

While every nuclear weapon is a promise of horrific destruction until it is dismantled, the new missile should reinforce what has already been known about the country’s nuclear program. North Korea is a nuclear-armed state, working on improving and modernizing its arsenal. The country has not yet tested a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, though it is likely safest to assume it is capable of doing so.

For governments worried about the possibility of overthrow by foreign powers, nuclear weapons are often described as a tool of “regime survival,” by threatening massive retaliation against any attacks. For Kim Jong-Un, who inherited his father’s nuclear program and continues to pour North Korea’s labor and resources into developing it, the Hwasong-17 is not just a powerful weapon, it’s a signature accessory for his personal brand: The latest test also came with an unsubtle video from Kim Jong-un. Watch it below. 

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On Friday, March 4, American B-52 bombers flew a patrol from the UK, over Germany to Romania, and back. The bombers stayed within uncontested NATO airspace for the entire route, and the patrol was repeated on Monday, March 7. The sorties were unremarkable in many ways, except this time the flights took place against the shadow of Russia’s war on Ukraine. In light of that war, which the US has adamantly committed to not fighting, what was the most iconic Cold War bomber doing flying over Europe?

Normally, the B-52s of the 5th Bomb Wing are based in Minot, North Dakota. Their March 4 mission, as the Air Force command responsible for Europe and Africa described it, was to conduct “a long range integration flight through Europe connecting with Germany and Romania.”

In that role, the bombers carried out a close air support training exercise, in which they partnered with German Joint Terminal Attack Controllers—soldiers whose job it is to direct airplanes to the targets they are supposed to attack. After training with the German soldiers, the B-52s also conducted close air support training with Romanian forces. Germany and Romania are, along with the United States and 27 other nations, members of NATO, a longstanding defensive military alliance with roots in the Cold War.

The earliest models of the B-52 entered service in 1955, just six years after the creation of NATO. In June 1952, Popular Science wrote about a prototype B-52 with the headline “Eight-Jet Giant Designed to Carry A-Bomb Anywhere in the World.” The B-52 is a successor plane to the longer range B-29 bombers the US used to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Atomic payloads were built into the design from the start. By 1957 Popular Science was referring to the plane as a “hydrogen bomber,” reflecting the change from atomic to thermonuclear warheads in the bombs carried

Bombers were the first means that nations had to attack with nuclear weapons, and for both the United States and Russia, bombs carried by planes remain part of the “nuclear triad,” a term that refers to the US’s three ways of attacking with nuclear weapons. (The other two legs of the triads are ground-launched ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles.) That the B-52 had a starring role in director Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1964 Cold War atomic apocalypse comedy Dr. Strangelove no doubt contributed to the bomber’s durable image as an annihilation machine. To this day, the United States includes B-52 bombers among its nuclear-capable aircraft.

[Related: A closer look at Russia’s nuclear arsenal—and the rest of the world’s]

Two big changes have altered the way B-52s are used today compared to how they were intended at launch. The B-52 is formally called the “Stratofortress,” descending from the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress, and to that end it still had a crewed tailgun when it was first delivered, as a way to protect the plane against enemy fighters. The durable threat to bombers instead turned out to be anti-air missiles, capable of tracking and destroying B-52s at distances that made conventional bombing runs unsafe.

To adapt, in recent decades the US Air Force has only used the B-52 for traditional bombing runs against enemies without sophisticated anti-air defenses. Over uncontested airspace, like during the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, B-52s were used for carpet bombing, including with cluster bombs as Human Rights Watch alleges.

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

Against sophisticated anti-air missiles and sensors, which can detect and attack planes hundreds of miles away, the B-52 has been outfitted with long-range cruise missiles. These missiles are mounted in two racks under each wing, with each rack holding three cruise missiles, and an internal 8-missile rotary launch system that fits into the bomb bay. The primary missile carried in this bomb bay is the JASSM-ER, a conventional cruise missile with a range of roughly 1,100 miles. 

The B-52 still retains its role as a nuclear-capable plane, but bombing duties are now relegated to B-2 stealth bombers as well as F-15 and F-16 fighters. Should it be outfitted for a nuclear mission, the B-52 would be armed not with nuclear gravity bombs, but with nuclear cruise missiles. 

[Related: Ukraine’s answer to Russian tanks involves a classic tactic: metal ‘hedgehogs’]

Like with the conventional JASSM-ER, when the B-52 carries the nuclear AGM-86 Air Launched Cruise Missile, it holds six under each wing and eight internally. With a range of 1,500 miles, AGM-86 missiles have the reach to hit targets far away from where the bombers are actually flying. 

The Air Force formally acknowledges the storage of these missiles at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. The United Kingdom, where the bombers of the 5th Bomb Wing are based, does not house any US nuclear weapons. There are six sites in NATO countries that store US nuclear bombs, but not cruise missiles.

All of this means that the B-52s flying over Europe were not any special nuclear signal being sent to Russia. Instead, the bomber flights are part of the routine machinery of preparation for a war waged directly against NATO, and the signal sent by their flights is one of continued US commitment to use American aircraft to defend NATO members. It is this mission, rehearsal for a live war against Russia in defense of a NATO member state, that B-52 bomber crews have practiced for generations.

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When Russia launched its war on Ukraine on February 24, it did so with missiles and helicopters. Not far beyond, stretching for miles, was the slower work of armored vehicles. Tanks and artillery, brought to staging areas near the border over several months, rolled into Ukraine. With them the war moved from an attack to an invasion, and some people in Ukraine set to work building defenses against the advancing army.

In Lviv in western Ukraine, locals started assembling anti-tank metal barriers, Agence France-Presse reported. The form, which looks like a child’s toy jack made out of steel I-beams, is known as a “steel hedgehog.” Early versions of this obstacle date back to defensive fortifications built in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Some of these Czech fortifications may even have been repurposed by the occupying German forces as barriers on the Normandy beaches before D-Day. It is this use that lends the obstacle the name “Czech Hedgehog,” which is how the Ukrainians that AFP interviewed in Lviv referred to what they were creating. 

A US Army Engineer School correspondence course on fortifications describes steel hedgehogs as “relatively lightweight for the obstacle effect they provide, and they are quickly installed or removed. They are designed to revolve under wheeled vehicles and puncture them or to belly up tracked vehicles. Unless kept under observation and covered with fire, the enemy can readily move them aside.”

The last line is key: Steel hedgehogs are an especially minor obstacle if they are not actively defended, as they can be lifted, towed, or even rolled out of place, opening a path. If, however, the steel hedgehog row is defended by soldiers, it can add extra protection to infantry, and reduce one of the main advantages of armor.

[Related: The tanks, rockets, and other weapons that Russia has in its arsenal]

Tanks, along with other heavier vehicles like armored personnel carriers, are at their most effective when they have the freedom to move. A turreted gun is a powerful weapon, and in open environments like plains, soldiers on foot are at a huge disadvantage against vehicles.

Move into any kind of denser terrain, and tanks have less freedom to operate. Trenches, fighting in forests, narrow roads through marshes, and any fighting in cities all compound the circumstances where a tank might struggle in combat. Given the choice to fight through a path with hedgehog obstacles in it or go around, tanks with an ability to reroute will likely do so.

Should they drive forward, they risk driving onto one of the hedgehogs. When a tank does drive over a hedgehog, the obstacle rolls under the tracks and lodges in the vehicle, lifting the tank in the air. If a tank does get stuck on such a trap, it’s a sitting target until it can be towed away, and its crew would be faced with the choice to evacuate under fire or sit and hope no one with anti-tank weapons finds them.

In the years between World War I and World War II, as militaries experimented with a range of approaches to tank design, military engineers similarly set to work on designing tank obstacles. In October 1936, a Popular Science illustration of France’s Maginot Line fortification showed steel rails sunk vertically into the ground as an anti-tank barrier. A May 1938 Popular Science story declared that the British military had found success using coils of wire and up-ended steel rails as obstacles, though that report also notes these barriers were secured by “antitank guns firing armor-piercing shells.” 

Once WWII broke out, militaries adopted new approaches to stop tanks and overcome battlefields. At Fort Belvoir in Virginia in 1942, Popular Science reported on the work of Army Engineers devising new tank obstacles, and the tank drivers with the Virginia National Guard who repeatedly drove tanks into those barriers to see if they worked.  

Likely drawing on this experience, a 1943 Army Engineer Field Manual outlines the use of ditches, fallen logs, and posts as ways to disable tanks. “Abatis,” or felling trees on a road to prevent enemy advances, is such a durable tactic that NATO forces released a video explainer about the method, made at a training exercise conducted in Lithuania in 2016. In 1943, the same year the Army was teaching ditches and abatis, Popular Science included hedgehog-like “jacks” as one of several types of barriers used to stop tanks, alongside cement “dragon’s teeth” and pyramidal tetrahedrons.

[Related: These are the weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal]

Steel hedgehogs have endured as an anti-tank tool in wars in part because their strength is due to their geometry. While other barriers can be blasted apart at a distance, removing hedgehogs requires being up close. Even with dedicated vehicles to clear the path, the existence of a hedgehog barrier suggests that lurking nearby are other soldiers with guns and anti-tank missiles, ready to kill enemies as they approach. Artillery supporting tanks is one grim answer to this tactical challenge, which can destroy the hiding places of defenders in urban areas, and at the same time threatens the lives of any civilians still living in a neighborhood turned into a battlefield.

It is in preparation for future urban battles that these barriers are mostly built. Deployed in Ukraine, the hedgehogs have created surreal images of modern warfare. One of the most striking is that of a Tesla electric car, stopped behind a line of steel hedgehogs in Kyiv.

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Russian war machines, from tanks to helicopters to artillery, have featured prominently in the war in Ukraine since it began a week ago. In fact, starting in October 2021, it was the assembly of these weapons along the border with Ukraine that first suggested to the outside world that Russia was planning a larger invasion than just its ongoing support for the separatist republics in the east of the country.

Since the invasion, Ukrainian forces have destroyed many of these tanks, helicopters, and artillery pieces. Accurate numbers of destroyed equipment are hard to come by. Governments in a war have a vested interest in exaggerating the accomplishments of their own forces, and downplaying their own losses. This is compounded by the “fog of war,” a military term for the uncertainty of information in conflict. This uncertainty can cover the location of enemies, whether militias are friendly or not, and even if an abandoned tank was destroyed in a fight or simply left on the road because it ran out of fuel. 

Despite the uncertainty, understanding some of the weapons used by forces fighting in Ukraine can help shed light on the larger conflict. Here are three weapon systems, and how they have been observed in use so far.

The Strela anti-air missile

Germany, which before the invasion had pledged military support of just 5,000 helmets to Ukraine, announced March 3 that it will send 2,700 Strela anti-air missiles to Ukraine’s military.

First developed by the Soviet Union, the Strela weapons are a kind of MANPADS, or man-portable air defense system. They are fired from a shoulder-mounted tube. The first Strela missiles were fielded in 1968, and the weapons were fielded by many of the Soviet-aligned militaries, including East Germany, a different nation than the rest of Germany from 1949 to 1990. The weapons Germany is giving to Ukraine date back to this East German arsenal, which makes them at least 31 years old.

There are three main variants of the Strela missile, and all of them use infrared sensors to track targets. The first version of the Strela, the Strela-2, used an infrared sensor to track the engines of helicopters and other aircraft. (Confusingly, the Strela-1 is an unrelated vehicle with anti-air weapons that also debuted in 1968.) Because it had to look for engines and their heat, the missile was primarily used to shoot at the rear of aircraft, after they had already passed on an attack run. This sensor was easily confused by flares, which an aircraft could release to steer the missile off course. The Strela-2M and Strela 3 versions are sophisticated enough to somewhat distinguish between the engines of aircraft and flares, and can also be fired at approaching as well as fleeing aircraft.

As the most sophisticated version, the Strela 3 can hit aircraft at altitudes as low as 33 feet to as high as 9,800 feet, and from a distance of as close as 1,600 feet to 2.6 miles. This makes the weapon most useful against helicopter or low-flying jet attacks, and also possibly of some use against drones, though when the Strela was developed, modern military combat drones were still decades in the future.

[Related: A closer look at Russia’s nuclear arsenal—and the rest of the world’s]

The age of these weapons means that the batteries used to power the missile launcher might have drained and degraded since they were built. In 2014, The New York Times reported that rebels using Strelas had resorted to recharging the batteries themselves. 

The NLAW anti-tank weapon

Luxembourg, the small western European country and a founding member of the NATO military alliance, announced February 28 that it was sending “100 NLAW anti-tank weapons, jeeps, and 15 military tents to Ukraine.” The 15 tents, sent by a country with a smaller population than the city of Louisville, caught a lot of internet attention and humor, but the anti-tank weapons stand out as a direct aid of the sort sought by Ukrainian forces.

The NLAW, for “Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon,” is produced by Swedish defense firm SAAB and British defense giant Thales. It is human-portable, with a manufacturer-promised range of 65 feet to nearly half a mile. 

NLAWs have already been observed in use, with Russian media reporting the capture of one by Russian soldiers, and with a widely-seen clip of a Ukrainian soldier holding an NLAW and walking in a street full of destroyed vehicles. 

The NLAW is but one of many anti-tank weapons used in the conflict. The US-produced Javelin shoulder-fired missiles are popular among militaries with access to them, including Ukraine. These missiles have already been turned into a meme for their use in destroying tanks, and the people inside. 

The TB-2 Bakraytar drone

Made by Turkish defense firm Baykar, the TB-2 Bakraytar has been used in war by Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine. The drone is a remotely piloted vehicle, with a ground crew of three operating it. 

The TB-2, in use by Azerbaijan, contributed to that country’s success in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war against Armenia. Part of that is from the utility of the drone: the TB-2 can fly for up to 27 hours, at a range of over 90 miles from where it was launched. In addition to optical and infrared cameras, the TB-2 can carry up to 330 lbs of laser-guided missiles and rockets, including anti-tank rockets.

[Related: Russian forces just captured Chernobyl. What are the radioactive risks?]

While Ukraine used the TB-2 drones as part of its long-running war against the separatists in the eastern part of the country, the drones have risen to new prominence in the invasion, in no small part because of spectacular drone-recorded footage. One such video, apparently recorded from the ground control station of a TB-2, shows the drone releasing weapons on a Russian Buk anti-air missile truck.

For operators, the drone also offers another tool: Militaries have chosen to selectively release footage recorded by the TB-2. This imagery, in part, can exaggerate the influence of drones on battlefield outcomes, building the mythology of the weapon outside of its actual importance. 

What has it meant for the war so far?

It is hard to know what weapons have resulted in what deaths in the war. While drone-recorded video footage offers some clear evidence, a comprehensive understanding of impact of bombs and missiles on people, vehicles, and buildings will come later.

For now, broad estimates of deaths and injuries offer a first assessment of the human cost of the war.  As of March 2, the United Nations reported 752 confirmed civilian deaths in Ukraine, and noted this was likely an undercount. The Russian defense ministry confirmed that at least 498 of its soldiers had died so far in the war, while Ukraine claimed to have killed at least 5,300 Russian soldiers by March 1. The US government has estimated deaths in the war up to this point at 2,000 Russian soldiers and around 1,500 on the Ukrainian side.

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is taking place in the shadow of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. These arsenals, built during the Cold War, persist as a very real threat, with the potential for a nuclear strike theoretically little more than the duration of an ICBM’s flight time away. This reality, of the ever-present risk from nuclear weapons, reemerged in the public consciousness on Sunday, February 27, when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s nuclear forces placed on high alert.

The order, which Reuters reports was carried out by Russia’s defense ministry on Monday the 28, includes adding more personnel to the military departments responsible for launching nuclear strikes. Staffing increases are one way to signal a readiness to launch nuclear weapons as a first strike, or to prepare to launch those same weapons in response to another country’s first strike.

It is hard to know what, if any, other changes were made as part of Russia’s move. That’s in part because of the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons complexes, which is a term for everything from the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons, to the placement, preparation, and command decisions regarding those weapons.

In response to Russia’s move to high alert, on February 28, President Joe Biden told a reporter that Americans should not worry about a nuclear war breaking out. 

Nuclear weapons and command structures can be harder to understand than the movement of a weapon like tanks or artillery, but even when they are not used, their existence and readiness can shape the war in big ways. Here’s what to know.

What are nuclear weapons? 

First demonstrated in New Mexico at the Trinity test site on July 16, 1945, nuclear weapons use explosives to compact dense nuclear fuel, usually uranium-235 or plutonium-239 isotopes, setting off a fission reaction. By using explosives to force these isotopes together, the warhead splits the nucleus of the atom which sets off the fission chain reaction, splitting more and more atoms and in the process releasing a tremendous amount of energy. Fission bombs, also called atomic bombs, were used in the Trinity test, as were the two bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. The low estimate for the combined deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is 110,000, and the high estimate is 210,000.

[Related: Russian forces just captured Chernobyl. What are the radioactive risks?]

Modern nuclear weapons are different. They use both a primary stage, like a plutonium pit, to create a fission reaction, and a secondary stage that creates a fusion reaction. When a warhead has both of these components, it is also known as a thermonuclear or a hydrogen weapon, and this type of reaction can produce an explosion orders of magnitudes more powerful than the energy released in an atomic bomb.

The yield of “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, was estimated at 15 kilotons of TNT, or the same as 15,000 tons of TNT. The B83 nuclear bomb, currently the most powerful thermonuclear weapon in the inventory of the United States, has a yield of 1.2 megatons of TNT, making it 80 times more powerful than Little Boy.

In addition to bombs and cruise missiles carried by planes, nuclear warheads can be launched by intercontinental ballistic missiles or by submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Some of these missiles can have multiple warheads per missile.

How many nuclear weapons are there?

The Federation of American Scientists estimates that there were a total of 12,700 nuclear warheads at the start of 2022. Those weapons are held by nine countries: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. South Africa once had nuclear weapons, but dismantled them in 1989 in anticipation of a change of government.

Russia inherited the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union, which before it was dissolved in 1991 also stored nuclear weapons in Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Those warheads were all returned to Russia in the 1990s. Russia had the ability to maintain and authorize the use of those warheads, in part because Russians staffed nuclear divisions. Also, the actual controls preventing unauthorized use of nuclear weapons were held in Moscow. 

Russia has the largest arsenal, which FAS estimates at 5,977 warheads, with the United States having the second-largest arsenal, at 5,428. China has the third largest at an estimated 350 warheads. The US’s fellow NATO defensive alliance members France and the United Kingdom each have 290 and 225 warheads, respectively. 

Many of those warheads are held in reserve, for maintenance or potential future dismantlement. Russia and the US both have a smaller portion of their overall nuclear arsenal deployed at places like air force bases, at roughly 1,600 and 1,650 warheads, respectively. That is the baseline level of nuclear readiness between the two countries.

What does nuclear readiness mean?

Each country with nuclear weapons has its own command and control process that leaders use to decide if, when, and where to launch nuclear weapons. Informing this decision can be everything from early warning sensors—like satellites that can detect the flash of light from launches—to radars which can pick up incoming missiles. Because missiles carrying nuclear weapons move fast, many decisions about how to respond need to be made quickly. 

Sometimes, decisions are made in the detection stage of the process. In 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov saw an early warning of a launch detected by a satellite, but reasoned that the number of launches detected was too few to actually indicate a surprise attack, and chose not to escalate the warning. It was later revealed that what the satellite computer interpreted as a launch was instead the reflection of the sun on a cloud.

The decision to launch weapons in retaliation to a detected strike is called “launch on warning,” while a decision to launch nuclear weapons after missiles hit is called “launch on impact.” Pavel Podvig, an arms control researcher, has argued that the Soviet Union had a formal policy of “launch on impact,” which structured how the country built its nuclear command and control. A launch detected by early warning would then give the Soviet leadership time to increase the readiness of its nuclear forces, and issue orders for possible retaliation, if the warnings were accurate.

It has been over 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but Russia inherited the nuclear enterprise of the USSR, and it is possible the country has not updated its posture since. One possible meaning of a shift to high readiness is the physical connecting of circuits that allow a launch command to go through.

What does NATO have to do with all this?

Nuclear weapons are a devastating technology. Nukemap, a popular online tool to simulate blast radiuses and other effects from potential nuclear explosions, has been overwhelmed by traffic this week. Because of the short time between a nuclear launch and impact, political leaders often try to set expectations about what will and will not constitute a threat worthy of nuclear retaliation.

Even as the United States and other countries in NATO supply Ukraine with weapons and other aid for its fight against Russia’s invading armies, the Biden administration has been clear that the US will not directly fight Russian forces unless one of the NATO countries is attacked.

On February 11, before the invasion began and while Russia was still amassing forces to invade, Biden warned Americans in Ukraine to leave the country. Asked if there was a scenario where he would send US troops to rescue Americans in Ukraine, Biden said “There’s not. That’s a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another.”

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On February 24, following the launch of its unprovoked yet long-prepared invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces captured the disused Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 melted down in 1986, a disaster of design and mismanagement that killed 31 people in the immediate aftermath and sent plumes of radioactive fallout across Europe, causing potentially thousands more premature deaths. Chernobyl stopped being an active site of power generation in 2000. But its occupation, even as a disused and contained facility, offers some insight into nuclear power in Ukraine, the war, and the potential risks from fighting around the old infrastructure.

The occupation of Chernobyl took place during Russia’s dramatic and violent invasion of Ukraine. On Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden addressed the country about the events. “At the very moment the United Nations Security Council was meeting to stand up for Ukraine sovereignty, to stave off invasion, Putin declared his war,” Biden said. “Within moments, missile strikes began to fall on historic cities across Ukraine; then came the air raids, followed by tanks and troops rolling in.”

That Russian troops captured Chernobyl is just one element of a broader war. Here’s what to know. 

Why did Russia capture the Chernobyl site?

Russia’s capture of Chernobyl has less to do with any specific radioactive ambitions than it does with simple geography. Pripyat, the evacuated ghost city that houses Chernobyl, sits along a direct highway to Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv. It is also surrounded by marshes. Holding a clear, reliable road on the western side of the river allows Russia to drive its tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery into position, without getting swallowed or stuck in the much of the marshes.

As Russian helicopters and other aircraft race ahead to secure airports or at least deny their use to the Ukrainian military, the slower-moving ground forces are taking and holding secure routes between difficult terrain. Chernobyl, despite its infamy, just so happens to be a safer staging area, and one along an important route.

At the same time, Russian forces there have reportedly taken hostages.

What is contained at the Chernobyl site?

The Soviet Union completed construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1977. The 1986 disaster stemmed from a poorly managed safety test, which went so badly that it triggered a catastrophical meltdown and explosions. In December 1986, a steel and concrete “sarcophagus” was built on top of the ruins of Reactor 4, containing the material inside but porous enough to let rainwater in.

[Related: The tanks, rockets, and other weapons that Russia has in its arsenal]

The other three reactors at the site continued to operate for years, with the last one shut down in December 2000. The three non-exploded reactors are in a process of gradual decommissioning, a process that will take decades.

Today, Reactor 4 sits under a massive structure of steel and concrete called the New Safe Confinement, which was completed in 2016. As of 2018, an estimated 200 tons of radioactive fuel remained inside the wreckage of Reactor 4 beneath that structure.

The New Safe Confinement is rated to withstand a tornado. That makes the contents secure against natural disaster, though war is full of unnatural disasters. Explosions, from bombs that deliberately or inadvertently hit the containment, could possibly breach the containment, though there is little military utility in doing so.

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

That is because the actual radioactive material has been decaying for a long time. Much of that material melted and flowed together in the initial disaster, a human-created lava of uranium, sand, graphite, and zirconium, which then solidified. What could be made airborne with enough targeted explosive force is the congealed detritus of two isotopes, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90.

“The dispersed material has had more than thirty years to decay, so the only hazardous radionuclides left are Cs-137 and Sr-90,” tweeted Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist who used to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  “Explosions would further disperse them, making them less dangerous.”

What Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 remains on the site exists as grime attached to other debris. Exposure to large amounts of Cesium-137 can cause burns, radiation sickness, and death. Strontium-90 is most harmful when ingested, where it can contribute to bone cancers in individuals. Ingestion should be avoided, but cancers operate on a time scale far removed from that of military occupations, likewise making the targeted release of Strontium-90 a poor choice of weapon. Dispersing either by an explosive would eject some into the air, but it would also spread out the grime, lowering the concentrations encountered by any individual person.

[Related: What a key natural-gas pipeline has to do with the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

In a war where both sides have finite weapons and an abundance of targets, spending any effort of ammunition on destroying a contained disaster from decades ago likely confers no advantage.

“I can’t imagine how it would be in Russia’s interest to allow any facilities at Chernobyl to be damaged,” Edwin Lyman, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Associated Press. 

Lyman added that he is most worried about the disruption of electrical power to the site, where cooling pumps are used to keep conditions calm inside spent fuel storage tanks, according to the AP.

What other nuclear risks are there with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

Ukraine does have 15 other nuclear reactors, dispersed across four locations. Such sites have modern safety protocols in place. Six of these reactors are located at two sites deep in western Ukraine, near Rivne and Khmelnitsky. The south Ukraine site, near Mykolayiv, houses three reactors, and is on the western side of Dnieper river. The Zaporizhzhya site houses six reactors and sits between Russian-annexed Crimea and the declared separatist republics in eastern Ukraine.

Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency statement this morning, saying the IAEA “is following the situation in Ukraine with grave concern and is appealing for maximum restraint to avoid any action that may put the country’s nuclear facilities at risk.”

In the United States, nuclear reactors are built to withstand the impact of a jet aircraft slamming into the building. The IAEA notes that “Penetrating (even relatively weak) reinforced concrete requires multiple hits by high speed artillery shells or specially-designed ‘bunker busting’ ordnance,” which would make the specific destruction of a nuclear power plant a planned and deliberate act.

The far greater nuclear risk in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the chief reason the United States and other NATO allies have not intervened, is that Russia possesses a large nuclear arsenal. NATO members France, the United Kingdom, and the United States all also possess nuclear arsenals, with the United States possessing by far the most nuclear weapons of any country besides Russia.

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When Russian forces occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in February 2014, the Russian Navy reportedly jammed cell phone signals in the process. This kind of attack, paired with the physical destruction of communications infrastructure, as well as online attacks on internet-connected sites and services, is broadly categorized as electronic warfare.

War is still primarily an undertaking involving bombs, bullets, and broken bodies, but the placement of those bombs and bullets is increasingly shaped by fights waged in the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic warfare is often paired with attacks on computer systems carried out over the internet, which are broadly called cyber attacks.

Understanding how modern wars are fought means understanding the invisible fights waged by signals and over code.

If Russia does launch an attack on Ukraine, as the mass of Russian forces that have been assembled for months along their shared border suggest it might do, electronic warfare will likely be part of the attack, as it was when Russia occupied parts of Ukraine in 2014. The 2014 occupation included the Russian capture of Crimea, complete with physical destruction of communication links to the rest of the country, and led to Russian support for two self-declared breakaway republics of separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

[Related: The tanks, rockets, and other weapons that Russia has in its arsenal]

That bloody war is still ongoing, though now it takes place against the backdrop of at least 140,000 Russian forces bordering Ukraine. Should that shooting war between Ukraine and the separatists escalate into a ground war and possible Russian invasion, it will likely start with artillery fire and electronic warfare. The impact of explosives will be visible. The invisible war over signals will be much harder to immediately perceive, but no less a part of the conflict. Here’s what to know about the basics of electronic warfare.

What is electronic warfare?

The Department of Defense defines Electronic Warfare as “military activities that use electromagnetic energy to control the electromagnetic spectrum (‘the spectrum’) and attack an enemy.” The spectrum encompasses everything from radio waves through visible light to gamma rays.

How old is electronic warfare?

One way to understand warfare in the electromagnetic spectrum is to go back to its early use in World War II. Radar, a new sensor at the start of the war, works by sending out a radio wave and then interpreting the way that beam gets reflected back towards the sensor that sent it. One of the earliest radar countermeasures, also in World War II, was chaff, or reflective metal strips that would distort any radar beam they hit, masking the presence of planes behind the chaff. 

[Related: Russia is building a tank that can pick its own targets. What could go wrong?]

In the Vietnam War, both sides used multiple kinds of sensor and signal interference, obstructing not just the movements of planes but the guidance of anti-plane missiles. Chaff, which jams by physical properties, remains a tool to counter electronic detection, and it has been joined by others, like sending out targeted signals on the electromagnetic spectrum that frustrate sensors such as radar. Jammers often draw on a lot of power to specifically jam other sensors, which can limit the range or duration of jamming, but it can still make the difference between a plane being seen and shot by enemies, or the plane sneaking through to get a first strike.

What makes electronic warfare so important in modern conflicts?

While radar debuted in World War II, much of combat was still fought within visual range, with pilots and soldiers alike trusting their eyes first to spot any enemies, or relying on map coordinates recorded by observers. Now, the increased range of weapons and the proliferation of sensors means everything from tanks to artillery to aircraft rely on sensors detecting signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Jan Kallberg, a scientist at the Army Cyber Institute, puts it bluntly: “Every modern high tech weapon system is a dud without access to spectrum.”

For example, GPS signals, which are vital for many vehicles to know where they are, are radio signals. A radio-emitter that can block a drone from receiving those signals can prevent drones from flying. Russia’s truck-mounted Krasukha-4 system is a system that has been shown to jam drones at range in Syria. Other nations have demonstrated jammers that work at some range, like the MRZR LMADIS tested by the US Marine Corps in 2019.

What about cyber?

While electronic warfare encompasses a spectrum of activities, the Department of Defense treats attacks on computers over the internet differently. The Department defines “cyberspace” as “a global domain” that includes “the internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

Or, more plainly, the connection between computers, networks, and the tools to use them is seen by the Pentagon as a place where war can happen. Sometimes, these attacks can take place through the electromagnetic spectrum in which a signal is used to inject code into an enemy’s computer. More often, these attacks travel over the existing infrastructure of the internet. 

Defining “cyberwar” is a tricky topic, as it can be hard to draw the lines between what is espionage, what is sabotage, what is fighting, and especially, between what counts as civilian or military targets.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has already reported major cyber attacks on its infrastructure this week. If Russia does launch an invasion of the country, it is likely that cyber attacks and electronic warfare would play a role in the conflict, alongside more visible weapons like artillery and tanks.

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As Russia shuffles its accumulated forces around the borders of Ukraine, observers are watching to see if an invasion will actually come. It remains uncertain if Russia will demobilize its forces on its own, if a diplomatic settlement can be reached that would persuade the country not to invade, or if an invasion will proceed regardless. What is clear is that Russia has moved forces into a position to allow it to launch a war of choice, should its political leadership so desire.

A land war in Europe would be a tragedy for the countries fighting the war, and a crisis for the international community, which has taken steps to see if a path towards deescalation remains. On February 15, President Joe Biden gave a speech about how the United States might respond to a Russian invasion of Ukraine. He promised continued efforts at diplomacy, but also listed a range of policy responses the United States would likely pursue if Russia moved its amassed forces into Ukraine. “Right now,” Biden said on Tuesday, “Russia has more than 150,000 troops encircling Ukraine in Belarus and along Ukraine’s border.”

The conflict stems most immediately from unresolved tension between Russia and Ukraine after 2014 protests in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv drove out a government closely aligned with Russia. That same year, Russia seized the peninsula of Crimea and its naval bases, and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine declared the provinces they hold to be two separate breakaway republics. Since 2014, Ukraine has fought a war to reincorporate the separatist areas.

While the situation in Kyiv is reportedly calm, the buildup of forces has been long visible. The Washington Post reported in October that satellite imagery revealed a massing of forces, and those numbers have swelled in the intervening months to encompass forces normally stationed in all corners of Russia’s vast territory.

To better understand what a war between Russia and Ukraine might look like, it helps to understand the modern machines of Russia’s military. Here are three weapon systems, and how they could be used.

A trio of tanks: the T-72, T-80, T-90

Among the first signs of a buildup of Russian forces along the border with Ukraine was the presence of the 1st Guards Tank Army, a military formation that includes hundreds of tanks. The 1st Guards include T-72 and T-80 models, tanks that were first built and fielded by the Soviet Union and have undergone modernization since. The third main tank design in Russia’s inventory is the T-90, which is of more recent origin than the T-72 and the T-80, though its roots are slightly more complex than that. The T-90 is derived from the T-72, and modern variants of older tank models are also in production. Like any machine in service for decades, the tanks have been subject to post-manufacture improvements, so some models of the T-72 could feature more modern advanced systems than older models of T-90s. 

All three tank models share some important characters. They can travel at speeds between 37 mph (the T-72) and 45 mph (T-80) on roads, and cover unpaved terrain at about 27 mph. Each model uses the same gun, a 125mm smoothbore cannon, allowing shared ammunition between types. These tanks can also fire anti-tank guided missiles for better punch at a greater range than regular ammunition provides. Some of the tanks include advanced targeting sensors that allow for the identification of enemies 1.5 miles away, and in low light.

Some advanced targeting tools are also being developed for the T-14 Armata, a modern optionally-crewed tank that has not yet been produced in numbers sufficient for it to likely participate in an immediate war.

[Related: Russia is building a tank that can pick its own targets. What could go wrong?]

In any attack, the purpose of tank formations is to advance into hostile territory, over trenches and rough ground if need be, while destroying any defenders in the way. And since their inception, tanks have combined speed, firepower, and armor to get this done. While originally tank armor was merely just the metal used in the hulls, decades of experience and iteration on tank design have led to active protection measures. These are hull- and turret-mounted packs of explosives that are set off when hit by heavy enemy attacks, exploding outward and letting the counter-blast deaden the impact of the attacker’s weapon.

The T-90 features a special kind of protection called RELIKT, which detonates sheets of explosive material on impact that could neutralize an incoming projectile. RELIKT armor plates can be replaced in the field, meaning tanks protected with this armor can be put back into use after battle, instead of needing to return to a faraway base for repair. 

Spotter, shooter

Tanks alone do not win wars. Any modern military that plans to utilize them includes other assets, so that the tanks are supported by aircraft, artillery, infantry, and other vehicles. The Russian military is artillery-rich, with modern ammunition and sensors paired to machines dating back to the Soviet era.

One of those weapons is the BM-30 Smerch, which was spotted near the border of Ukraine as part of the initial October buildup of Russian forces. The Smerch is a multiple-launch rocket system, or in simpler terms, it’s a truck that carries 12 rocket tubes on its back. For firing, the Smerch pivots the launcher upwards, and it can fire all rockets in either one great big salvo over 38 seconds or it can place shots individually, allowing it to hit a spread of targets. 

[Related: Russia’s Marker robot is a testbed for its next-gen military tech]

The Smerch was designed with rockets that had a range of 43 miles, but recent upgrades have increased that range to 56 miles. Inside each rocket is either one large warhead, five anti-tank warheads with a guidance sensor, or 72 submunitions. These submunitions are themselves fragmentation explosives, turning one rocket into 72 smaller bombs that explode into nearly 400 pieces, a fractal of destruction. The governments of Syria and Azerbaijan have both used Smerch artillery in their wars. Like any weapon that scatters explosives, the possibility remains that after battle some unexploded ammunition will persist, posing a threat to civilians for years to come.

With certain ammunition, all 12 rockets fired from a Smerch can throw explosives over an area of about 60 hectares, or roughly 150 football fields. Finding the right areas to target, and then inspecting the aftermath, is a task relegated to drone operators, who can direct existing Russian scout drones like the Orlan-10 to survey the damage and find new targets.

Electronic warfare

Modern tanks, artillery, and drones are all sensor-rich systems. Impeding enemy sensors while protecting friendly sensors is the work of electronic warfare. One of the simplest manifestations of electronic warfare is through a jammer, mounted on a truck, that can be driven into position.

The Krasukha 2 and Krasukha 4 Electronic Warfare systems are indeed jammers on trucks. These jammers obstruct radar signals by sending powerful waves that block the signals that a system, like radar, relies upon to perceive the world. Jammers can also block regular communications over radio waves, and the Krasukha systems have even been reported to block drones from receiving GPS signals. 

Modern tools, like sensors that can detect incoming signals and then calibrate the right kind of jamming signal to send in response, have made electronic warfare tools more effective. With Krasuhka jammers in place, Russian forces can potentially prevent enemy radar from accurately perceiving the world, protecting friends from detection and making some targeting systems less effective.

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To destroy drones in flight, Israel plans to deploy airborne lasers. A new system, which will mount high-powered laser weapons on airplanes, is part of a broader technological effort to create defensive systems so comprehensive that they can mitigate a range of low-cost weapons launched against the country, without costing a fortune to use.

In a speech at a think tank in Tel Aviv on February 1, Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced plans to defend the country with a “laser wall.”

“This will allow us, in the medium- to long-term, to surround Israel with a laser wall that will defend us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats that will essentially take away the strongest card our enemies have against us,” Bennett said, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Bennett’s plans call for this system to be ready and in use by 2023. 

Last summer, Israeli defense giant Elbit released a video showing a laser system mounted on a small plane destroying a drone flying over a body of water. The plane was a modified Cessna Grand Caravan, a versatile commercial aircraft that is often used as a transport for small groups of people. As seen in the video, the laser is operated by an onboard crew of three.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup]

The operators found the drone, and then focused the laser on a small section of the drone’s hull. After a few seconds, the laser burned through the casing and inner workings of the drone, and the robot crashed apart above the sea. The premise, as outlined by Oren Sabag of Elbit Systems, is to destroy incoming threats before they reach population centers.

Israel’s government has publicly expressed concerns that drones, launched from groups inside Syria and reportedly supplied by Iran, will regularly be used like guided missiles against the country. The Houthis, one of several factions in Yemen’s ongoing civil war, have received foreign-built drones and deployed them against targets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Low-cost drones offer range and accuracy previously unavailable to insurgents and armed groups without access to airplanes, letting those groups claim retaliatory strikes on builds far from the direct fighting.

In this way, drones can be seen as filling a similar role to the Qasem rockets, a cheap and rudimentary weapon that became a mainstay of attacks against Israel in the 2000s. These rockets, which lack guidance systems, are the primary target of Israel’s defensive Iron Dome system, an extensive array of radars, sensors, and missile batteries used to intercept rockets in flight.

The Iron Dome is effective at reducing the total number of rockets that explode, though like any defensive weapon system it can be overwhelmed by numbers and fail to intercept every attack. It is also expensive, with the dollar cost of each fired interceptor orders of magnitude pricier than the intercepted rocket, to say nothing of the actual development of the system itself. 

In the demonstrations of the new system last summer, the laser weapon destroyed drones at a distance of 1 km, or 0.6 miles. The goal is for the system to ultimately have a range of 12 miles, using a 100-kilowatt laser to quickly burn through any drone, missile, or rocket it detects. Nations like the United States have similarly invested in laser systems mounted on ships to protect vessels at sea from attack.

Defending an entire nation from incoming drones, rockets, and missiles is a much steeper task than putting a defensive system on a single ship. While “laser wall” implies fixed and permanent defenses, this system would be made up of flights of aircraft equipped with lasers. The system is being promised on a cost analysis that holds each laser usage as cheaper than the drone, rocket, or missile that the laser destroys. That may be possible, but it’s also generally expensive to keep aircraft constantly patrolling. 

[Related: The US Navy is testing out drone-zapping laser weapons]

What systems like the laser interceptor will do, and what the Iron Dome presently allows, is a way to mitigate many of the kinds of attacks that could be made against the country. Weapons, while largely seen from acquisition to use as apolitical tools, exist in a specific context, and change how leaders and governments understand the risk of certain actions. 

Like any defensive weapon, the “laser wall” cannot alone alter the politics that made its development prudent, nor can it promise indefinite security. Offense and defense is a kind of dialogue, and over time attackers can engineer or plan attacks that bypass known defenses. And in a larger context, on the same day that Bennett announced the “laser wall,” international human rights organization Amnesty International published a report declaring that “Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.”

As a technology that can mitigate the risks of asymmetric attack, the “laser wall” appears to have a basis in sound engineering and practical testing. If deployment follows, it will likely add a deeper layer of interception in the face of future attacks, and in so doing, will likely save some lives of people who would otherwise die in rocket or drone launches.

Watch Elbit’s video of the interception below:

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Most cases of so-called Havana Syndrome were likely not caused by Russia or any other foreign power, CIA officials concluded in a report released on Thursday. The majority of cases and symptoms can be explained by environmental causes, stress, or previously undiagnosed medical conditions.

The agency is in the middle of a comprehensive study on the about 1,000 reported cases of Havana syndrome. Its interim findings rule out unnatural causes of the condition in most cases, but the CIA will continue its investigation and focus on the two dozen cases that are still unexplainable. 

“Some of our toughest cases remain unresolved,” a CIA official told NPR under the condition of anonymity. “We have so far not found evidence of state actor involvement in any incident.”

First reported in 2016 in Havana, Cuba, the eponymous syndrome produces symptoms including dizziness, headaches, painful ringing in the ears, and balance problems. When dozens of diplomats located in Cuba’s capital began reporting their affliction, medical doctors and scientists were baffled, unable to explain a syndrome that presented so differently in so many people. Reported cases have steadily grown over time, increasing especially over the past few years. 

Theories as diverse as UFOs to foreign bioweapons to microwave attacks have been circulated in the years since the first cases. Some outside experts have suggested the symptoms are psychosomatic reactions triggered by stress. Some victims have stated that they find these explanations offensive.

[Related: A CIA spyplane crashed outside Area 51 a half-century ago. This explorer found it.]

In a December 2020 study by the National Academies of Sciences, commissioned by the State Department, a committee reported that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases” of the mechanisms considered. 

The idea that Havana Syndrome is an attack on diplomats by one country—like Russia, China, or Cuba—has been a popular theory, but remains unsubstantiated. A CIA official told CBS that, for those still unexplained cases, the agency has “not ruled out the involvement of a foreign actor.” Back in November, The Washington Post reported that CIA Director William Burns delivered a confidential warning to Russian intelligence services that they will face “consequences” if they are behind the cases. Moscow has consistently denied any involvement.

The CIA’s recent report that the majority of cases can be explained by natural causes has left many victims dissatisfied, especially after living with years of symptoms. The group Advocacy for Victims of Havana Syndrome said in a statement that the CIA’s release of its findings was a breach of faith, and that the report “must not be the final word on the matter.”

Regardless of the cause, those affected by Havana Syndrome are living with a real condition. “This finding does not—it does not—call into question the fact that our officers are reporting real experiences and are suffering real symptoms,” a CIA official told CNN.

A law that would compensate victims of Havana Syndrome was signed by President Biden last year. The CIA is currently evaluating who would qualify for payment and how those payments will be issued.

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To protect against hypersonic missiles, Japan is turning to railguns. 

Last week Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asia reported that the Ministry of Defense is hoping the successful development of a fast and accurate railgun will not just destroy missiles in flight, but will be so effective that it can deter the launch of those missiles in the first place.

“The Japanese Defense Ministry will develop a means to intercept hostile missiles using magnetically powered projectiles,” reports Nikkei Asia, “as the nation scurries to respond to the hypersonic weapons being developed by China, North Korea and Russia.”

Railguns, long the stuff of science fiction, have been explored and tested by militaries like the United States and China since at least 2008.

Here’s how Popular Science described a railgun after a Navy test in 2015:

A railgun works by generating a strong electromagnetic current that flows from one rail, through a U-shaped back end of the projectile, and into another parallel rail. This generates three magnetic fields—a parallel one around each of the rails, and a perpendicular one around the projectile. Squeezed forward by the magnetic fields, the projectile accelerates rapidly along the rails and is then launched forward, breaking the circuit. The end result is a large metal slug that can go very far, very fast.

This makes a railgun distinct from explosively propelled artillery, in which the force of rapidly expanding gasses propel a shell out the barrel of a cannon. Explosive propulsion, from the massive ship-mounted cannons of World War II battleships to modern artillery, is a tried and true way to hit an object, building, and sometimes even vehicle at great distance. Missiles, which mostly use solid-fuel rocket propulsion to hurtle an explosive payload through the air, require a useful yet expendable body built for one-way flight. With missiles generally, and ballistic interceptors specifically, only a small part of the propelled mass is the useful payload. The bulk of the body is guidance, navigation, and flight control systems designed to bring the missile into contact with its target.

Railguns shift the work of acceleration from the launched projectile to the machine doing the launching. This allows the actual ammunition fired to be simple, deadly, and fast. When the US Navy started its railgun project, it stated the goal was for the weapon to fire at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound, and to reach distances as far as 100 miles away. This power comes at a cost, not in the projectile, but in the infrastructure of the weapon: Ships would need to be built to accommodate not just the new gun, but the expected 25 megawatts or more of electricity needed to power the gun alone. 

[Related: The Navy’s electromagnetic railgun is officially dead]

Last summer, the Navy paused its development of a railgun, after years of declining budgets for the project. This is, in part, because the specific program itself was seen by the Navy as a poor performer. The Navy has instead invested in an alternative projectile for existing shipboard guns: the Hyper Velocity Projectile, which it believes can deliver similar performance without requiring new hardware on the fleet. Thanks to its exceptionally aerodynamic design, the Hyper Velocity Projectile is promised as a fast, efficient, far-ranging alternative to existing shells fired by ship-board guns.

Japan’s railgun plans date back to at least 2015, when budget and planning documents showed an indigenous setup with a ship mounting the railgun. In 2016, Japan demonstrated a proof-of-concept railgun that launched a projectile at a speed of 4,470 mph. At the time, this research was seen as a counterpart to US efforts, promising a future in which the navies of both nations used railguns to intercept and attack threats at a distance.

While the United States turned away from railguns as an offensive weapon, Japan’s continued development may signal a more immediately successful deployment as a defensive tool. Nikkei reports that $56 million has been included in the 2022 defense budget for Japan to develop working railguns by the end of the decade.

[Related: How North Korea’s cruise missiles could surprise its enemies]

On land, railguns can plug into existing power grids, or have dedicated generators without the space and power constraints of operating from a ship. That would let railguns slot into existing missile defenses, between already deployed interceptors and new, longer-range missile interceptors. Railguns specifically offer a counter to newer hypersonic projectiles, which travel on trajectories that are hard for existing interceptors to anticipate and match. By traveling faster than the missiles it’s designed to intercept, a railgun slug could punch a hole through a missile, disabling or destroying it mid-flight.

The United States, China, and North Korea all tested hypersonic weapons last year. These weapons, which operated in ways quite distinct from one another, are nevertheless all designed to bypass existing defensive measures. Railguns, already in development, could offer a defense that plugs a perceived gap in missile defense effectiveness. If so, those defensive benefits would hardly be limited to just Japan. China, too, has developed railguns, and in 2018 deployed one on a warship.

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Sometimes, before a torpedo can travel underwater to sink a ship, it needs to fly through the air first. India, as part of the ongoing modernization of its military, recently tested a missile-delivered torpedo system. 

That recent test began with a countdown and a roar of ignition, and then the torpedo-containing missile hurtled into the sky. Billowing a trail of smoke, the missile turned from vertical to horizontal, its ultimate destination far more aquatic than celestial. The weapon being tested was India’s Supersonic Missile Assisted Release of Torpedo, or SMART, weapon, and a reminder of the complexity of modern naval warfare. 

The December 13 test, announced by India’s Ministry of Defense, took place on Wheeler Island, about 140 miles southwest of Kolkata. The missile was transported and then launched from the back of a special truck. This system takes a little time to set up, but it means that the launch site can be moved in anticipation of danger. Having the flexibility of changing locations can protect the launchers from being found and destroyed by enemy scouts before ever firing.

“This was a text book launch, where the entire trajectory was monitored by the electro optic telemetry system, various range radars, including the down range instrumentation and down range ships. The missile carried a torpedo, parachute delivery system and release mechanisms,” said the Ministry in a release. 

Torpedos are self-propelled explosives, typically launched below or just above the surface of the ocean. Once in the water, torpedoes navigate to their targets, and then detonate below the water line, letting the sea rush in to sink the struck ship. On the other hand, missiles travel through air (or, sometimes, space), before smashing their explosive payload into a target.

In its December test, India followed the example of other nations, using a missile to carry and then launch a torpedo.

Torpedoes date back to the middle of the 19th century, as a way for ships to strike other ships over distance. Popular Science first mentioned a military torpedo in January 1874, saying “the new Hertz torpedo gave the most surprising results, the torpedoes disposing of the objects attached with the utmost punctuality and in a strikingly summary manner.”

[Related: The Royal Navy’s jetpack demo is astonishing—and impractical]

Since then, torpedoes have been a defining weapon of naval warfare. Mounted on ships, small attack boats, and especially submarines, torpedoes expand the ways in which naval combat can take place. When dropped from planes, torpedoes can let carrier-based aircraft sink enemy ships from ranges far greater than that of a battleship-born cannon.

One of the first proposed uses of torpedoes was coastal defense, with the torpedoes launched either from emplacements directly on the water’s edge, or from floating platforms just off-shore.  With the SMART missile, India demonstrates a modern update of that same concept. By launching a torpedo inside a missile that itself came from a truck on land, India’s military can attack ships at greater range than by utilizing traditional coastal defenses, making attacks from the sea that much more dangerous for any foes.

The Defense Research and Development Organization, the part of India’s military that developed the SMART weapon, did not list a range for the weapon, writing only “During the mission, full range capability of the missile was successfully demonstrated. The system has been designed to enhance anti-submarine warfare capability far beyond the conventional range of the torpedo.”

India is not the only nation with this type of tech. The Vertical Launch Anti-Submarine Rocket, a missile-borne torpedo fielded by the US Navy, boasts a range of more than 10 miles. The MK 54 Mod 0 Lightweight Torpedo, when not launched inside a missile, has a stated range of about 6 miles, so the missile adds at least 4 miles to that range. (By one estimate, the missile-delivered version can travel 7 miles further.)

It is likely that, when it comes to India’s SMART weapon, delivering the torpedo by missile allows a similar degree of range extension.

[Related: The Royal Navy’s robotic sub will be a test bench under the sea]

What’s more, weapons like this are harder to detect than delivering the same torpedo by plane or boat, both of which have larger and more persistent radar signatures than missiles that fall into the sea after releasing a torpedo into the water. To ensure that the torpedo splashes down gently, before propelling itself forward, it is released from the missile with a parachute. If it works like the US-made version, the Indian missile will launch, release its booster, and then separate the casing around the torpedo. At that point, the torpedo will parachute nose-first into the water, before detaching the parachute at the surface, and then seeking out the target vessel under water.

Once in the water, torpedoes employ guidance systems that direct them to their targets, be they surface ships or submarines hiding deeper below the waves. In the case of the US-made Vertical Launch Rocket, this weapon can be fired from coastal defense installations as well as mounted on ships, giving fleets already at sea the ability to reach out and fight enemies at great range.

Anti-ship and anti-submarine weapons like this demonstrate an investment in a growing range of weapons that increase the risks of naval warfare for enemies. While India, like its neighbors China and Pakistan, is a country with a nuclear arsenal, being able to respond to potential threats with a range of weapons gives military and political leaders more options in any conflict. 

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Plutonium pits, the potent hearts of modern nuclear weapons, degrade over time. As these cores decay, so too does the certainty that they will work as designed when detonated. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the organization that grew out of the Manhattan Project to design and equip the nuclear arsenal of the Cold War, is advancing towards its goal of manufacturing 30 new plutonium pits to go inside nuclear bomb cores by 2026.

The project is both a specific manufacturing challenge, and an opening for the United States to newly consider how many warheads it needs on hand to achieve its stated strategic objectives.

Inside a nuclear warhead, a plutonium pit is crucial to setting off the sequence of reactions that make a thermonuclear explosion. Inside the pit is a gas, like deuterium/tritium, and around the pit is chemical explosive. When the chemical explosive detonates, it compacts the plutonium around the gas until the core is dense enough to trigger a fission reaction. What makes a warhead thermonuclear, as opposed to just atomic, is that this is combined in the same warhead with a uranium core, which creates a fusion explosion.

”The pits we’re making now are part of that proving out of the processes, the development of techniques that we’ll use starting in 2023 for war reserve pit production,” lab director Thom Mason said in a December 1 forum.

So far, Los Alamos has reportedly produced six prototype pits, as part of the process of relearning and fine-tuning plutonium core production. This is hard work, and it was once done at an industrial scale.

“Fabricating a pit requires a number of operations: melting down an old pit, casting the metal, machining, and finishing the formed piece,” writes Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist who worked at Los Alamos labs when its pit production facility was set up in the late 1970s. “There may be other operations as well, particularly if impurities are to be removed from the metal. Each operation requires at least one glovebox with equipment. A glovebox has a window and gloves to reach into a working space that is separate from the room atmosphere. The toxicity of plutonium requires it be contained.”

For most of the duration of nuclear warhead production, plutonium pits were made at the Rocky Flats Plant in Golden, Colorado. The facility, which ran from 1952 until it was closed down in 1989, is now a superfund site.

[Related: Battling Over Aging Nuclear Warheads]

At present, the United States has about 5,600 nuclear warheads, of which roughly 1,750 are deployed either on intercontinental missiles or at bomber bases. This stockpile constitutes just under half the estimated total number of nuclear warheads on this planet. (Russia, which has about 6,500 warheads, is the other massive arsenal. Combined, the arsenals from all other nuclear armed countries constitute only about 9 percent of the total global inventory.)

These 5,600 warheads are a sharp step down from the US’s peak of over 31,000 warheads in the late 1960s, and it’s a massive step down from even the 21,000 warheads the US had going into the 1990s. The size and timing of the warhead creation is important: nuclear warheads aren’t just an old technology at this point, they are an old technology that was last mass-produced at any real scale in the 1980s, with much of the industry knowledge dating back further.

When plutonium pits were last regularly produced at scale, the United States still conducted live nuclear tests of warheads. The United States conducted its last live nuclear test in September 1992 (and agreed to stop testing above ground in 1963). Since then, much of the modeling of nuclear blasts, and exploration around warhead modernization or redesign, has taken place in simulated environments. As part of its overall push to modernize the nuclear arsenal, the Trump administration considered restarting live nuclear tests.

While strategy and doctrine place an extremely high threshold on the use of nuclear weapons, to the point that sole launch authority in the United States rests with the president, the weapons are intended to work when used. Plutonium suffers radioactive decay, a natural process but nevertheless one that can inhibit a nuclear warhead from fulfilling its specific obligation, which is to blow up when it’s supposed to, with tremendous force.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, tasked with managing the US nuclear stockpile, highlights “factors including plutonium aging, safety and security advancements, global risk, and weapons modernization” as reasons to replace the plutonium pits in existing weapons.”

[Related: The US military’s first experiment with portable nuclear reactors was short and tragic]

It is not yet known what kinds of additional safety or design features are being explored for these new warheads, if any. Given how much of the process happens in layers of official secrecy, any changes to warhead design are likely to remain under wraps, with only pit production figures provided.

“We’ve held off on making new pits pretty much as long as we can,” said Mason, as reported by The Santa Fe New Mexican. “If we delay further, the annual production rate required will go up, and we’ll need an even larger capability. It’s important to start now so we can now produce at that kind of right level and not have to overbuild.”

If Los Alamos can successfully revamp pit production, a process it knew decades ago but had failed to deliver on between 2013 and 2021, then it’s possible that this same knowledge could be extended to a future production facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The Department of Energy has set a goal of annually producing 80 new pits a year by 2035, enough to fully replace the plutonium in every existing US warhead by 2105. (Replacing just the deployed warheads could happen by 2055 if 80 pits a year can be made.)

While the labs work on relearning high-stakes industrial techniques for terrifying weapons, it is estimated that most of the existing warheads will remain fully functional for at least 100 years after first manufacture. Given an arsenal of hundreds of deployed warheads, the stakes of failure to modernize are that, in the event of the worst war humanity has ever known, some warheads might fail to detonate, letting millions live. 

Watch Thom Mason’s Dec. 1 meeting, below:

Correction on Dec. 17: This article has been updated to clarify that Russia has about 6,500 nuclear weapons, not 650.

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Michelle L.D. Hanlon is a professor of Air and Space Law, University of Mississippi; Greg Autry is a clinical professor of Space Leadership, Policy and Business, Arizona State University. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

On November 15, 2021, Russia destroyed one of its own old satellites using a missile launched from the surface of the Earth, creating a massive debris cloud that threatens many space assets, including astronauts onboard the International Space Station. This happened only two weeks after the United Nations General Assembly First Committee formally recognized the vital role that space and space assets play in international efforts to better the human experience—and the risks military activities in space pose to those goals.

The U.N. First Committee deals with disarmament, global challenges and threats to peace that affect the international community. On November 1, it approved a resolution that creates an open-ended working group. The goals of the group are to assess current and future threats to space operations, determine when behavior may be considered irresponsible, “make recommendations on possible norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors,” and “contribute to the negotiation of legally binding instruments”—including a treaty to prevent “an arms race in space.”

We are two space policy experts with specialties in space law and the business of commercial space. We are also the president and vice president at the National Space Society, a nonprofit space advocacy group. It is refreshing to see the U.N. acknowledge the harsh reality that peace in space remains uncomfortably tenuous. This timely resolution has been approved as activities in space become ever more important and—as shown by the Russian test—tensions continue to rise.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty

Outer space is far from a lawless vacuum.

Activities in space are governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is currently ratified by 111 nations. The treaty was negotiated in the shadow of the Cold War when only two nations—the Soviet Union and the US—had spacefaring capabilities.

While the Outer Space Treaty offers broad principles to guide the activities of nations, it does not offer detailed “rules of the road.” Essentially, the treaty assures freedom of exploration and use of space to all humankind. There are just two caveats to this, and multiple gaps immediately present themselves.

The first caveat states that the Moon and other celestial bodies must be used exclusively for peaceful purposes. It omits the rest of space in this blanket prohibition. The only guidance offered in this respect is found in the treaty’s preamble, which recognizes a “common interest” in the “progress of the exploration and use of space for peaceful purposes.” The second caveat says that those conducting activities in space must do so with “due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty.”

A major problem arises from the fact that the treaty does not offer clear definitions for either “peaceful purposes” or “due regard.”

While the Outer Space Treaty does specifically prohibit placing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction anywhere in space, it does not prohibit the use of conventional weapons in space or the use of ground-based weapons against assets in space. Finally, it is also unclear if some weapons—like China’s new nuclear capable partial-orbit hypersonic missile—should fall under the treaty’s ban.

The vague military limitations built into the treaty leave more than enough room for interpretation to result in conflict.

Space is militarized, conflict is possible

Space has been used for military purposes since Germany’s first V2 rocket launch in 1942.

Many early satellites, GPS technology, a Soviet Space Station and even NASA’s space shuttle were all either explicitly developed for or have been used for military purposes.

With increasing commercialization, the lines between military and civilian uses of space are less blurry. Most people are able to identify terrestrial benefits of satellites like weather forecasts, climate monitoring and internet connectivity but are unaware that they also increase agricultural yields and monitor human rights violations. The rush to develop a new space economy based on activities in and around Earth and the Moon suggests that humanity’s economic dependence on space will only increase.

However, satellites that provide terrestrial benefits could or already do serve military functions as well. We are forced to conclude that the lines between military and civilian uses remain sufficiently indistinct to make a potential conflict more likely than not. Growing commercial operations will also provide opportunities for disputes over operational zones to provoke governmental military responses.

Military testing

While there has not yet been any direct military conflict in space, there has been an escalation of efforts by nations to prove their military prowess in and around space. Russia’s test is only the most recent example. In 2007, China tested an anti-satellite weapon and created an enormous debris cloud that is still causing problems. The International Space Station had to dodge a piece from that Chinese test as recently as Nov. 10, 2021.

Similar demonstrations by the US and India were far less destructive in terms of creating debris, but they were no more welcomed by the international community.

The new U.N. resolution is important because it sets in motion the development of new norms, rules and principles of responsible behavior. Properly executed, this could go a long way toward providing the guardrails needed to prevent conflict in space.

From guidelines to enforcement

The U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space has been addressing space activities since 1959.

However, the remit of the 95-member committee is to promote international cooperation and study legal problems arising from the exploration of outer space. It lacks any ability to enforce the principles and guidelines set forth in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty or even to compel actors into negotiations.

The U.N. resolution from November 2021 requires the newly created working group to meet two times a year in both 2022 and 2023. While this pace of activity is glacial compared with the speed of commercial space development, it is a major step in global space policy.

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On September 9, Israel defense company Elbit announced the ARCAS, or Assault Rifle Combat Application System. The device is a combination of a gunsight, operating system, and an augmented reality display. If it proves useful in combat, it heralds a future in which soldiers not only aim rifles, but where the rifles tell soldiers information about who they are aiming at.

ARCAS is an after-market add-on to existing rifles, converting the familiar weapon of infantry into the central node in an array of sensor-rich technologies. Elbit is marketing it for both Special Operations forces, who are accustomed to training with specialized gear, and regular infantry, who need weapons to be dead simple.

The laundry list of features that ARCAS adds to a rifle include features that help a soldier shoot more accurately, like passive range measurement and automatic ballistic correction. With the right sensors, ARCAS can detect where hostile gunfire is coming from, and let the wearer know of any movement seen on its video cameras. By allowing the soldier to aim through a camera connected to a heads-up display, the rifle can be fired from the hip and around corners, two kinds of shooting difficult to pull off with a traditional down-the-barrel sight.

Other features of ARCAS seem more like replacements for the radios and tablets carried into battle. These include a way to “interface with tactical Command and Control,” which is a fancy way of saying “talk to the officer in charge,” and “navigation assistance,” or a map with routes shown on a heads-up display.

An additional set of features resemble what players can expect in a video game, and indeed, that’s by design. One such tool is “friend and foe identification,” the former of which is easy to identify if the friendly soldiers’ uniforms’ are set up for detection, the latter of which is tricky without some known characteristic of the foe broadcast in a way sensors can receive. The ARCAS can also track ammunition remaining, inform the soldier if there’s a blockage in the gun, and can help someone using the gun precisely calibrate their sight without needing to test with live fire.

[Related: The Army is giving its gun sights a seriously high-tech upgrade]

That is a tremendous amount of promise to fit into a physical form that is, mostly, a forward grip with a computer and a camera inside, attached to a rail-mounted sight, powered by a battery and all designed to fit on existing firearms.

The camera can pick up heat as well as visual light. Some versions of ARCAS can be connected to other rifles equipped with ARCAS, allowing information to be shared over Wifi and Bluetooth. The system can also connect to other weapons and sensors over a mesh network, allowing soldiers to communicate with each other through their rifles without needing additional communications support. It is also, as designed, capable of running other software applications built for the system, making it a platform in the Silicon Valley sense of the term. 

The most important task for an ARCAS-enabled rifle remains the oldest job of a rifle: correctly identifying a human target, and punching a hole through them. Elbit lists the system as detecting human targets at 1,900 feet, recognition of a human target at 820 feet, and identification of a human target at 390 feet. 

“The difference between Detection, Recognition and Identification is the amount of data that can be collected from the target, mainly the size of the target in regard to the sensor,” says Dana Tal-Noyman, international corporate communications manager for Elbit, via email. “Detection is the ability to distinguish the target from the environment – detect there is something in the scene. Recognition is the ability to discern the type of target observed – is it a person or a car? Identification is the ability to understand specific details about the target – armed/unarmed, type of car etc.”

The M4 carbine is a rifle used by many militaries, including Israel’s, and Elbit’s display of ARCAS systems appears to be mounted on M4s. The M4 has an effective range of 1,640 feet. Lots of combat, especially in the urban areas of the occupied territories where Israel’s soldiers often fight, can take place at much closer ranges, ranges where the difference between detection, recognition, and identification are meaningful. In open plains or at range, the ARCAS promises to let soldiers know of threats before they can shoot them. In closer quarters, the system offers the potential for an AI-assisted assessment of the human’s identity.

[Related: These augmented-reality goggles let soldiers see through vehicle walls]

A video produced by Elbit for the release of the weapon envisions a training scenario for the ARCAS. In a laboratory, a soldier clad all in black goes forth into a digital landscape, a sort of retro-futuristic setting. With a press of a button in the forward gun grip, the soldier sees an illuminated path through the terrain to his objective. This map and route are visible to others. Upon reaching rifle range of the objective, enemies are illuminated in bright red against the soft turquoise glow of the heads-up display. The rifle adjusts automatically, finding the center mass.

The camera zooms back, showing the video’s protagonist joined by seven other soldiers all connected by invisible lines of communication. In moments, with a live display of remaining bullets in the rifle, the soldier shoots four enemies, and arrives in the center of the simulation unscathed.

It is a compelling vision of future warfare—one in which sufficiently advanced rifles allow infantry to automatically outclass enemies, the way sufficiently advanced jets and tanks allowed the same to happen decades prior.

Promotional material, like the Elbit video, do not make room for all the ways in which these new advances could disappoint. Any system that allows remote identification of friendly forces could be turned, instead, to reveal them as targets to a sufficiently prepared and capable foe. Sensors are always susceptible to spoofing, or being fed false information. This is to say nothing of the capacity for simple underperformance—of a rifle that misreads the number of bullets left, or of one that misidentifies a civilian as an enemy.

Watch the video, below:

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In two tests over the weekend, North Korea fired cruise missiles into the sky. The missiles traveled for 126 minutes, covering a distance of 932 miles. It was a moment that caught the United States by surprise, a demonstration of a likely nuclear-capable weapon, and also the kind of technological development that many observers saw coming for decades.

The flight time, as well as footage of the truck-mounted launchers believed to fire the missiles, come from official North Korean releases. The missiles’ flight times were later confirmed by US and South Korean sensors. 

Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea, had announced that the missile was in development at a party conference earlier this year. The weapon was described as “strategic,” a word often used by countries to imply, without explicitly stating, that the weapon is designed to carry a nuclear warhead.

North Korea has built cruise missiles before, but none with the range of the weapons in their weekend test. North Korea has already built missiles that can carry a payload, nuclear or otherwise, hundreds of miles. This includes at least one model of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that can reach most of the United States, and many other missiles with ranges that can hit nearby countries, like South Korea, Japan, and US forces based in Guam  instead.

What is remarkable about cruise missiles is how much harder their specific flight patterns are to detect, track, and defend against in time. 

Ballistic missiles, like those in the arsenals of the United States, Russia, and China, are incredibly fast weapons. The Minuteman ICBM, used by the United States, has a top speed of 17,500 mph. To reach their targets, these missiles fly upwards, arc into space, and then pivot down. It is a process that produces a great deal of visual evidence, even as it happens quickly.

In fact, today—three days after testing the cruise missiles—North Korea conducted a pair of ballistic missile tests. Also today, South Korea became the first nation without a nuclear weapon of its own to test its own submarine-launched ballistic missile.

[Related: The US Navy launched a missile from a ghost ship. Wait, what?]

But cruise missiles are different. For one, they don’t travel up into space, like an ICBM.

“Cruise missiles have some advantages over ballistic missiles — they can fly low to the terrain to evade radar detection, maneuver around defenses and employ a number of guidance strategies to achieve high accuracy,” says Jeffrey Lewis, professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “Cruise missiles make a lot of sense for the DPRK because it plans to preempt US forces in South Korea and Japan if it believes the US is about to invade.”

Because ballistic missile launches can be seen, firing a ballistic missile creates a tense moment in which presidents or other leaders have to make hard choices about whether or not they trust the sensor readings, and if so, decide if they should respond in kind before the nuclear weapon hits. It’s a grim calculus, one that military planners and theorists have spent decades gaming out.

Cruise missiles, instead, take much longer to reach their destination, but they can arrive entirely by surprise. (And, importantly, cruise missiles lack the overall range of ICBMs; North Korea’s Hwasong-15 ICBM boasts a range of over 8000 miles.)  

“Cruise missiles are slower … but the radar might never see it if the cruise missile hugs the terrain all the way in,” says Lewis. 

For example, in 1987, 19-year-old amateur pilot Mathias Rust flew a rented Cessna from Helsinki to Moscow’s Red Square without being detected, a flight that led to the firing of several Soviet generals for failure to secure the capital against such an attack. He “scared the shit out of the Soviets. If he could fly all the way to Red Square, so could [a cruise missile],” Lewis adds.

Cruise missiles follow similar trajectories and flight patterns, staying low and maneuvering in course, only they replace the idealistic pilot in Rust’s plane with an explosive payload.

[Related: No one wants another H-bomb test in the Pacific]

While cruise missiles as a concept date back as early as 1918, the 1970s and 1980s saw their development as cutting edge technology, some of which are still in service today with modifications. The United States includes both Air Launched Cruise Missiles, designed to be released from bombers, and ship- or land-launched cruise missiles like the Tomahawk, in its war planning, with both types of missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

The Soviet Union, then the United States’ foremost military competitor, also produced its own cruise missiles for the same purpose. Some of those were inherited by Soviet successor countries, and in 2005, Ukraine acknowledged that 12 of its cruise missiles had been transferred to Iran and China. 

“Twenty years ago, a Ukrainian entity transferred some Soviet Kh-55 cruise missiles to Iran and China,” says Lewis. “In the years since, both Iran and China have unveiled cruise missiles that look like derivatives of the Kh-55. It is no surprise that North Korea has followed suit.”

Cruise missile technology has circulated long enough that a host of nations have built similar weapons. What sets the new cruise missile apart is that it joins a growing North Korean arsenal. 

That arsenal contains a daunting array of types of missiles, with one big important caveat: “There are more missiles on that list than fissile material in North Korea,” says Scott LaFoy, Program Manager, National Security & Intelligence at Exiger Federal Solutions. In other words, North Korea has many kinds of missiles it can use, but current estimates suggest it could, at most, outfit just 45 weapons with nuclear warheads. That’s a fraction of the 350 warheads estimated to be in China’s inventory, and it’s hardly any relative to the several thousand held by the US and by Russia.

The new cruise missile does not change the fact that North Korea is one of nine nations with nuclear weapons. It changes how those warheads could be delivered, but it does not increase the amount of warheads the country can produce, which is already quite limited. But for military planners, policy makers, and those seeking to negotiate arms control treaties, the new cruise missile is worth serious consideration.

For everyone else, it matches the overall story of North Korean weapons development: a small country, decades later, builds technologies the United States already has on hand. 

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Space can only keep so many secrets. And, if everything had gone as planned for General John Hyten, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this week space would have contained one fewer secret, with the unveiling of a space weapon already in orbit. As reported by Breaking Defense, Hyten had hoped to use the 2021 Space Symposium conference to declassify a secret space weapon program.

The reveal, reportedly planned originally for last year’s Space Symposium until that was canceled for pandemic reasons, was delayed this time because of the abrupt end of coordinated fighting against the Taliban. 

The weapon was originally supposed to be declassified as the culmination of the Space Force’s launch: not only did the Pentagon have a new branch, but it had weapons in orbit, too. With the timing now delayed a second time, three big, ominous questions remain: Why would the military want an anti-satellite weapon, why put it in orbit, and what are the dangers of such a weapon?

Why an anti-satellite weapon?

The first human-made objects to pass the Kármán Line (100 km above the ground) and make it into space were military V-2 rockets. This start of human activity in space, and especially in orbit, began as a military enterprise. Inter-continental ballistic missiles, the descendants of those earlier V-2s, are designed to carry thermonuclear payloads into space before crashing back to Earth with catastrophic effect. 

Satellites are the other major military tool in space. Parked in orbit, satellites carry sensors and transmit information to human attendants on the ground. In 1960, the US put a satellite into orbit with a camera, which would eject film canisters full of sensitive information to Earth below. That same year, the US launched a satellite with a covert mission to track radar signals from the USSR. The USSR shortly followed suit. This satellite race stayed focused on surveillance, with both superpowers using objects in orbit to keep an eye on militaries below.

[Related: This cutting-edge drone is headed out to pasture at an Air Force museum]

For decades, this has remained a tenuous line: nations build and move weapons below, and put sensors in orbit to provide early warning of everything from ground invasion to nuclear launches.

This reliance on sensors in orbit carries with it vulnerability. A nation’s ability to perceive an attack in real time could be destroyed, if the satellite tracking those movements was also incapacitated or outright eliminated. Several nations have demonstrated an ability to destroy satellites with missiles fired from the ground. Other Earth-based tools, like anti-satellite jammers, count more broadly as weapons.

Why in orbit?

Putting an anti-satellite weapon in orbit is an old idea. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union even built a big cannon into a space station, and test-fired it in orbit. Also in the 1970s, the United States began research on a dedicated anti-satellite weapon. 

There’s a pretty good reason a military might want to hide a weapon in a satellite: it can already be in place when it needs to attack.

Some satellites generally like this already exist. China’s Shijan-17 is an inspector robot, which can move in orbit to repair and change the paths of other satellites. A future tool developed for debris removal, in the form of a robot tentacle arm, could also be used to lash out at and harm other satellites.

What are the dangers?

There is a real danger in placing weapons in orbit, especially if other nations know about them. At present, orbit serves every nation with satellites by allowing those satellites to observe the Earth below unencumbered. If every satellite was instead a potential weapon, it might lead nations to attack each other’s satellites, for fear of losing any assets already placed in space.

Violence in orbit risks a cascading series of harm. Broken satellites produce orbital debris, which can accelerate and punch through other satellites with a force much greater than that of a bullet. If debris from one destroyed satellite breaks another satellite, the risk to every other object in space goes up exponentially, as the debris cloud grows and further satellites crumble, ultimately rendering the once-useful part of space into a scorched orbit.

This has implications not just for space war. It also makes it harder for nations to understand and anticipate nuclear attacks. If nations decide that satellites are fair game for military attacks, it will likely benefit whoever attacks first, even as it risks nuclear miscalculation below. Revealing a weapon in orbit declares to every other nation not just that a country thinks satellites are fair targets, but that an offensive war against satellites could be winnable.

Whatever space weapon the United States has that Hyten is eager to reveal, teasing it without coming clean about the weapon is likely the worst of both worlds. If the weapon had remained secret, it would only change the strategic calculations of other countries that could discover its existence. If it was public, then it could possibly have a deterrent effect against other space weapons, as nations have a direct threat of retaliation to worry about. By having the weapon half-public and half-private, it is hard for nations to adjust their response based on reality, which is a recipe for error and potentially tragedy.

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

The Biden administration admitted on Tuesday that the Taliban had captured a significant amount of US military equipment originally supplied to Afghan security forces during the militants’ blitzkrieg on Kabul in recent weeks—and the US doesn’t know exactly how much American gear they’ve lost to terrorist hands.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone but certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said during a press conference. “​​Obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”

Indeed, photos published by newswires like the Associated Press and circulated on social media by eyewitnesses to the Taliban sweep of Kabul show militant fighters touting M4 and M16 rifles, M24 sniper rifle systems, and M2 .50 caliber machine guns. Other footage showed night vision goggles, radios, and magazine pouches apparently seized from Afghan outposts during the Taliban offensive, which also saw militants seize military vehicles like Humvees and MRAPs.

While Sullivan did not specify what a “fair amount” of defense materials entailed, he had previously blamed the members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) for laying down their arms before the Taliban onslaught, stating that the US’s $86 billion in funding over the last two decades “could not give them the will and ultimately they decided that they would not fight for Kabul.”

At the moment, there’s still a lot that senior US officials don’t know about American weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban. But based on past reporting from US government watchdogs, the militant group may have inherited a broad arsenal of American weapons from the hands of fleeing Afghan security forces. 

According to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report, the U.S. military transferred roughly 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons systems, and 208 aircraft to the ANDSF between fiscal years 2003 and 2016. And according to a recent Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction analysis, the last few years have seen the Defense Department send the ANDSF more than 7,000 machine guns, more than 4,700 Humvees, and more than 20,000 grenades. This is to say nothing of the communications, explosive ordnance disposal, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment transferred to the ANDSF over the course of two decades as detailed in the GAO report. According to the Intercept, the Taliban have even seized US military biometrics devices “that could aid in the identification of Afghans who assisted coalition forces.”

That American weapons are falling into the hands of the very militants they were intended to kill is nothing new. A 2016 Pentagon audit revealed that poor record-keeping and regulations had allowed nearly half of the 1.5 million weapons provided to Iraqi and Afghan security forces since 2002 to go missing, including nearly 978,000 M4 and M16s, while a 2014 SIGAR report found that some 43 percent of weapons provided to the ANDSF likely ended up in the hands of groups like the Taliban or ISIS. There is also plenty of ammo missing from former Afghan government stockpiles.

That said, not all of this captured gear will see combat again. Captured UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters the Taliban paraded on social media during the group’s march on Kabul, for example, are both unflyable and outright unsustainable due to a lack of training, spare parts, and logistics required to operate such advanced equipment, as Defense One astutely noted on Friday. 

Still, the overwhelming volume of American small arms and other weaponry captured from Afghan military outposts by the Taliban is still a major propaganda victory for the group, if anything. Indeed, the militant group has taken pains to parade captured US military gear—including rare weapons like the special operations forces FN-SCAR—in videos showcasing their capabilities. Several Taliban fighters had American-made weapons on display when they were pictured sitting in the presidential palace.

When pressed on the matter of US equipment falling into enemy hands on Friday, prior to Kabul’s fall, the Pentagon appeared unprepared to address the potential issues. “We are always worried about US equipment that could fall into an adversaries’ hands,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said at the time. “What actions we might take to prevent that or to forestall it, I just simply won’t speculate about today.”

But days later, when asked if US troops were taking action “to prevent equipment from falling into the hands of the Taliban by destroying it” during a Tuesday press conference, Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor of the Joint Staff provided a dismally simple response: “I don’t have the answer to that question.”

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Slowly but surely, the Army is inching towards fielding its first true combat-capable, high-powered laser weapon mounted on a Stryker infantry carrier vehicle.

The service announced on Tuesday that it had successfully completed its first-ever Directed Energy-Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) “combat shoot-off” between two unique laser systems at Fort Sill in Oklahoma earlier this summer.

The shoot-off saw the two 50-kilowatt laser weapons—developed in a competition between defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Raytheon—participate in “a series of vignettes designed to emulate realistic threats and combat scenarios,” according to the service.

Those “vignettes” included simulated UAS and rocket, artillery, and mortar (RAM) targets for the systems to engage.

The laser-equipped Strykers “faced a number of realistic scenarios designed to establish, for the first time in the Army, the desired characteristics for future DE M-SHORAD systems,” the service said in a statement.

While laser weapons, long a dream of military planners, have only recently become feasible as a real-life combat system, it’s unclear whether technological progress will allow the Army to keep its ambitious timetable for deploying its laser Strykers downrange. But as far as Army officials are concerned, the service’s laser Stryker prototypes are all but ready for the next big war.

“This is the first combat application of lasers for a maneuver element in the Army,” said Army hypersonics and directed energy chief Ltg. L. Neil Thurgood in a statement. “The technology we have today is ready. This is a gateway to the future.”

DE M-SHORAD program manager Col. G. Scott McLeod added this in a statement: “We are building and delivering a brand new capability. This is not a modification or an upgrade. It took just 24 months for the combined government and industry team to design, integrate, and have it ready to perform in an operational environment.”

The Pentagon once envisioned deploying laser-equipped Strykers downrange in Iraq and Syria to counter the “flying IEDs” and explosive-laden drones of terror groups like ISIS, but applications to the European theater became a major focus for military planners after U.S. Army Europe identified a major short-range air defense (SHORAD) gap in the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

While soldiers with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment have been rocking 5kw laser systems aboard Stryker vehicles downrange in Europe for the last several years, the 50 kW trial represents a major increase in both power (and, by association, lethality) over previous iterations of the system, one that might finally prove capable of effectively intercepting incoming drones and ordnance.

“Offering lethality against unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and rockets, artillery and mortars (RAM), laser weapons now increase Army air and missile defense capability while reducing total system lifecycle cost through reduced logistical demand,” the Army said in a statement.

According to the service, the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) plans on delivering a platoon of four laser-equipped Strykers to an actual combat unit by some time in fiscal year 2022.

Army officials had previously announced plans to stand up its first battalion of Stryker vehicles outfitted with high-powered laser weapons sometime this year with the goal of eventually standing up four battalions by 2021.

The DE-MSHORAD system isn’t the only laser weapon the Army is working on at the moment. As Task & Purpose previously reported, the service is also working to field a 300 kW Indirect Fires Protection Capability – High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL) truck-mounted laser by 2024.

While the 50 kW Stryker will deploy primarily to drones and incoming ordnance out of the sky, the 300 kW version IFPC-HEL system could potentially channel enough power to counter incoming cruise missiles. 

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This story originally featured on Field & Stream.

Let’s get something straight right away. Bullets do not really expand. For something to expand it has to become larger or more extensive. The front end of bullets do seem to get larger as they penetrate, but in truth they are only changing shape. In fact, most so-called expanding bullets lose mass as they deform; it’s kind of hard for a bullet to lose mass and become larger at the same time. What bullets do is deform during impact, just like an apple deforms when it’s thrown against the barn door.

For bullets to deform, they need to have an impact velocity that’s capable of initiating the process. This will vary from bullet to bullet but generally speaking, a mono-metal bullet needs to impact at around 1800 feet per second (fps), while some bonded bullets can start to deform on impact at around 1600 fps, and jacketed lead-core bullets can often start the process with impact velocities as low as 1400 fps. But we’re only talking about minimum deformation. For bullets to fully deform into the little mushroom looking clumps we so much adore, they’ll need to impact at about 2000 fps or faster.

To better illustrate this, let’s go back to the apple and the barn door. If you lightly toss the apple at the barn door, it will bounce off and may be slightly flattened on one side. Put a little force behind it, and it will splatter. If you throw a tomato at the barn door, you don’t have to throw it as hard as the apple in order to get it to splatter. It’s the same with bullets, the harder the bullet, the higher impact velocity needed in order to deform.

Deformation happens quickly with all bullets

In all but a few exceptions, bullet deformation starts immediately with impact. This is because the bullet’s best opportunity to deform is when velocity is highest. As the bullet meets resistance, it begins to slow, and the slower it goes the less force there is to make it change shape. Part of this slowing is a product of the bullet changing shape, as it becomes less aerodynamic. In other words, the more it deforms, the slower it goes, and almost immediately the velocity drops to a point where deformation is no longer possible.

This has been shown at the ballistic labs at Nosler and Barnes, where, for example, a 150-grain Barnes Triple Shock fired from a .308 Winchester impacted a block of 10 percent gelatin with a velocity of 2545 fps. After passing through 6 inches, the bullet’s velocity had dropped to around 1600 fps, which is well below a speed capable of causing further shape shifting. In fact, with mono-metal bullets the time between bullet entry and when the bullet stops deforming is less–though nearly unmeasurably less—than with conventional lead core bullets. This is because tough mono-metal bullets need more velocity to cause the deformation.

Fast-expanding bullets actually take slightly longer to deform

With conventionally jacketed lead-core bullets—which are thought to expand faster—once the bullet begins to deform, the soft lead-core and mangled jacket are exposed and continue to deform deeper into the animal. The bullet is losing velocity, but because these materials are softer (like the tomato), they continue to deform at slower speeds. In other words, it takes longer for a jacketed bullet to develop into its final deformed shape than it does a much tougher mono-metal or bonded bullet. 

Some believe that all-copper or gilding-metal bullets take longer to change shape because they’re tougher, and that jacketed bullets deform faster because they’re more fragile. In fact, the opposite is true. For all practical purposes, the difference is immeasurable. But the truth is: There’s no such thing as a fast-expanding bullet. It takes all bullets almost exactly the same amount of time to shape shift. For one bullet to take more time to deform, it would need to speed up during penetration. But bullets and ballistics don’t work that way.

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Between 1946 and 1958, the United States waged nuclear war on emptied islands in the Pacific. Bikini Atoll and the Enewetak Islands were evacuated first, their inhabitants moved from the blast. All in all, around 200 people were evacuated, but the plan was never that the islands be permanently abandoned. Now many of the displaced and their descendants want to move back to the islands, but leftover radiation is the greatest obstacle. When will it be it safe to move back to the site of 67 nuclear tests?

A team of researchers visited the islands to find out. Their new study, led by Emlyn Hughes from Columbia University’s Center for Nuclear Studies, updates estimates of the islands’ radiation levels. In August 2015, the team traveled more than 1,000 miles in two weeks, getting radiation readings on some of the islands in the Enewetak Atoll, Bikini Atoll, and Rongelap Atoll. These readings were then compared with radiation readings from Majuro Atoll in the southern Marshall Islands (a control island, for the purposes of the study) and with readings of Central Park in New York City.

Central Park and the Majuro Atoll experience 100 and 9 millirems of radiation per year, respectively. Enewetak had the lowest radiation levels, at 7.6 mrem/y, which makes sense, since the island has had extensive cleanup efforts. Rongelap has higher levels at 19.8 mrem/y, and Bikini Atoll has the most radiation of the islands studied, with a mean of 184 mrem/y. The authors note their estimates disagree with earlier estimates from the mid-1990s, which indicated a level of radiation close to what this study found in 2015, despite the fact that 20 years of decay happened between the studies.

From Hughes et al:

However, it’s not clear how much of that radiation would find its way into the bodies of the islands’ human inhabitants, or how much of it stems from nuclear tests. The authors continue:

As it is, Bikini Atoll is the site of a narrow apocalypse, a still-open wound from the Cold War. The study argues that the wound still festers, and encourages more study before people move back. Idyllic as the islands may look to the naked eye, the bombs blasted into the site decades ago extend their deadly reach into the present, vengeful ghosts of our atomic dawn.

Bikini Atoll

Update: A previous version of this story misstated the exposure levels of Central Park, and identified the wrong researcher as lead on the project. The story has since been corrected.

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

After more than 15 years and half a billion dollars in funding, the Navy’s dream of building an electromagnetic railgun capable of nailing targets up to 100 nautical miles away at velocities reaching Mach 7 has no hope of becoming a reality anytime soon.

The Navy announced on Friday that the service has “decided to pause” research and development of the much-hyped electromagnetic railgun (or EMRG) at the end of 2021 in light of “fiscal constraints, combat system integration challenges, and the prospective technology maturation of other weapon concepts,” according to a statement provided to Military.com.

“The decision to pause the EMRG program is consistent with department-wide reform initiatives to free up resources in support of other Navy priorities [and] to include improving offensive and defensive capabilities such as directed energy, hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare systems,” according to the Navy.

The death of the EMRG was all but certain as of early June, when the Navy’s fiscal year 2022 budget request revealed that the service had zeroed out two separate line items related to the superweapon’s research and development funding, as our colleagues at The War Zone reported at the time.

Indeed, the Navy’s requests for railgun funding have declined significantly in recent years, with the service requesting just $9.5 million to develop advanced tech associated with the weapon system in fiscal year 2021, down from around $15 million requested in fiscal year 2020 and roughly $28 million in fiscal year 2019.

Despite a successful test of railgun for the public in 2017 at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, insiders previously told Task & Purpose that the Navy’s supergun was clearly headed for an R&D “valley of death” between testing and procurement, wherein promising technology remains stuck in the research phase due to lack of resources or some other developmental challenge.

In the case of the EMRG, those developmental challenges included the stalled development of a universal common mount, a component critical to actually demonstrating the tactical feasibility of the supergun on a Navy warship beyond the static 2017 test firing of the weapon at Dahlgren.

“Transitioning military technology efforts from the research and development phase to the procurement phase can sometimes be a challenge,” as a Congressional Research Service report on the Navy’s directed energy efforts puts it. “Some military technology efforts fail to make the transition.”

Both the technical and budget shortfalls, however, come during a period of waning interest in its potential application. As Task & Purpose previously reported, the Defense Department has in recent years shifted its attention to the so-called hypervelocity projectile (HVP), a super-dense shell that has seen cheaper and less technically complex applications to conventional powder artillery compared to usage as the primary ammunition for the EMRG.

“The Navy feels it can get away with using the HVP in a conventional gun system, and the service can use conventional guns for lower-end threats and always return to missiles for higher-end threats,” as one source told Task & Purpose. “The service will only complete the integration when the need for the greater capability for a broader range of threats is required.”

Less than a year after declaring the Navy “fully invested” in the service’s much-hyped electromagnetic railgun, in February 2019 Adm. John Richardson, then the Chief of Naval Operations, telegraphed buyer’s remorse over the weapon’s troubled development, declaring the project “the case study that would say, ‘This is how innovation maybe shouldn’t happen.’”

“We’ve learned a lot and the engineering of building something like that that can handle that much electromagnetic energy and not just explode is challenging,” Richardson told an audience at the Atlantic Council at the time. “So, we’re going to continue after this—we’re going to install this thing, we’re going to continue to develop it, test it … It’s too great a weapon system, so it’s going somewhere, hopefully.”

Unfortunately for Richardson and other Navy leaders, the only place that the service’s EMRG is headed is into deep storage. And while that doesn’t mean the research will never see the light of day again, it does mean that the US has officially lost the railgun wars: after all, one of China’s Type 072III-class landing ships was spotted roaming the high seas with its very own railgun turret as recently as December 2018.

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Guns kill people

In this week’s obvious news, laws that allow people to kill other people with guns have led to more people killing other people with guns. According to two new research papers, stricter firearm laws are associated with fewer firearm homicides, and the implementation of Florida’s stand-your-ground law was associated with increased firearm homicides.

These findings, released today by the JAMA Internal Medicine, may sound obvious. But since Congress has essentially withheld all funding for gun violence research for the last 20 years, large-scale studies of this sort have been few and far between. As The Atlantic reported, “In the mid-1990s, Congress declared that funding at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shouldn’t be used to advocate for gun control, and it effectively blocked funding for the study of gun violence at the agency.” Despite studies showing that gun violence is a threat to human health and safety, the CDC, a federally funded public health agency with a seven billion dollar annual budget, still withholds support from gun research. Perhaps these new findings will bolster the case for federal funding.

One paper released today, first-authored by Lois K. Lee of Harvard Medical School, examined five types of gun laws: “those that (1) curb gun trafficking, (2) strengthen background checks, (3) improve child safety, (4) ban military-style assault weapons, and (5) restrict firearms in public places and leniency in firearm carrying.” The researchers found strong evidence that laws strengthening background checks and purchase permits helped decrease gun homicide rates. Interestingly, the researchers did not find strong evidence that laws focusing on trafficking, child safety and assault weapons decreased firearm homicides. The evidence for the effects of laws regarding guns in public places was not conclusive either way. On the whole, though, they found that, “stronger gun policies were associated with decreased rates of firearm homicide, even after adjusting for demographic and sociologic factors.”

What can be done to decrease gun homicides?

Another paper released today, also in JAMA Internal Medicine, tracked the effects of Florida’s stand-your-ground law since its implementation in 2005. This law allows a person to use deadly force instead of retreating from what they believe to be a life-threatening encounter. To conduct this research, David K. Humphreys of University of Oxford and his colleagues examined gun death data for the years leading up to 2005 and the years after, then compared them to other states’ data for the same years. They found that gun homicides increased in the years following 2005, while prior to 2005 they had remained relatively stable. The comparison states (New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Virginia) which don’t have stand-your-ground laws, did not have similar increases, strengthening the evidence that this is a Florida trend associated with stand-your-ground laws, not part of a national trend.

Sherry Towers, who uses data to research societal phenomena at Arizona State University, notes that the researchers in this second study looked at all homicides, not differentiating between unjustified homicides (which are, of course, crimes) and justified (which are not considered crimes, under the stand-your-ground law). She points out that, according to FBI statistics, there were 238 justifiable homicides nationwide in 2006, but there were over 1,100 total homicides in Florida during the same year, “so obviously justifiable homicides really aren’t a big fraction of the total number of homicides.” Towers does agree with the finding that stand-your-ground had a significant impact on homicides in the years following its implementation, and added that the law seemed to have little impact on property crimes and robberies, the exact type of crimes the law is intended to deter. “It would take more study to determine the trends in justifiable homicides, before and after [stand-your-ground] in Florida, to see if the law had an effect on those,” she tells Popular Science.

Informed discussion of public health issues requires sound data, and this research is just one small step towards informing a national conversation. Debate over the Second Amendment has reached a fever pitch in the United States this year, and while this research does not recommend dismantling citizens’ rights, it does provide another point of discussion for the ongoing debate. And whatever our political affiliations, let’s hope we can still find some common ground in fact-based evidence. Towers, for one, is not optimistic that this research will help drive policy. “I doubt the results of the study will change the opinions of people on either side of the gun control fence,” she says. “Those who are in favor of [stand-your-ground] laws will likely not be persuaded by this study as to the public health impact.”

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Humans are not naturally equipped for fighting underwater. While advances in everything from scuba tanks to goggles to underwater vehicles made it possible for people to fight beneath the waves, it has still been hard to put actual weapons into the hands of the people doing the fighting. Underwater rifles, built specifically to launch a projectile through dense water, are one way to arm a submarine soldier, but they present a separate problem: underwater rifles are ineffective above the surface, and a person hoping to fight on land will need to carry a second gun.

To help solve this unique problem, Russia has developed specialized dual-use underwater and above-water rifles. The latest of these is the “dual-medium ADS assault rifle” created by High-Precision Weapons Company, part of Russian defense giant Rostec. With a magazine located behind the trigger and handle (the “bullpup”) configuration, the rifle is compact. Its barrel is fitted for 5.45x39mm bullets, the same kind commonly found in the AK-74 rifle and in use across the world today. In addition, the ADS can load a cartridge of special 5.45x39mm bullets designed to fire entirely underwater.

The latest iteration of the ADS rifle appeared at the International Maritime Defense Show in Saint Petersburg, Russia, held in late June. The design has been in the works for some time, with the ammunition formulated in 2005 and early production models reportedly undergoing field trials in 2009.

The new version is now under mass production, making it a somewhat curious weapon. Underwater gunfights are an especially rare kind of combat. Even if they are undertaken by special forces more than regular soldiers, it is still at heart a novel tool for a subset of missions. 

[Related:The Royal Navy’s robotic sub will be a test bench under the sea ]

What makes it somewhat less remarkable is that it comes from a long line of underwater rifles. Most famously, the Soviet Union’s APS underwater rifle was built to fire long steel darts, at a range of 100 feet at a depth of 16 feet underwater. (With underwater weapons, their range is strongly affected by depth, decreasing as they go deeper.) On land, the weapon was limited to a range of about 330 feet, with the big caveat that because the gun’s barrel was not rifled, it was not terribly accurate.

That underwater range, short even in shallow depths, highlights the kind of fighting a gun like this is good for. It’s a close-range tool designed to absolutely stop a person or animal near the diver. Swimming infiltrators, equipped with explosives that can attach to the hulls of ships, have functioned as saboteurs in wars for decades. “Frogmen,” commandos with scuba gear and flippers (hence the name), date back to World War II. 

[Related: Russia unveils amphibious assault rifle ]

A rifle that can stop a frogman underwater in a harbor, or fight off attackers on a dock, is a useful tool. It is also one that could be used against animals trained for military purposes, like sea lions, dolphins, and beluga whales. While reports of actual combat between trained dolphins and armed frogmen are hard to source, the US Navy did deploy trained dolphins for harbor security in the Vietnam War. Both the United States and the Soviet militaries trained animals for military porpoises—that is, purposes—throughout the Cold War. More recently, in 2019 a beluga whale believed to be trained by the Russian military was discovered off the coast of Norway. 

Rifles like the ADS go some way to making humans slightly more adept at surviving combat underwater. Like the existence of frogmen suggests, it’s a tool that brings humans one step closer to being masters of truly amphibious warfare. 

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North Korea tested a nuclear weapon late Tuesday for the third time ever, and this is where it happened. After the test, a slight tremor rolled through North Korea’s mountains, and the U.S. Geological Survey picked it up, along with its exact location. The Washington Post went ahead and used those coordinates to map it with Google’s new data on the country.

Some parts of this aren’t all that surprising. The location is where North Korea conducted its last two tests–one in 2006 and one in 2009–and its right next to a known nuclear test facility. What is surprising, and a little funny, is some of the user-generated data associated with the site. Without an official North Korean name to plug in to the maps, Google users in the country (like someone who wanted to bring attention to nuclear activity) are open to suggest their own, and sure enough, nearby is “Nuclear Test Rd.” The Post points out that the road eventually disappears, presumably going underground near the test facility.

Nuclear Test Facility

Nearby is what’s probably North Korea most infamous concentration camp, Hwasong Gulag, also known as Camp 16, which is one of the camps we got a view of when Google released its images of the country.

Scary? A little, maybe, but at least we’ve seen something similar before.

To see the zoomable map, click here.

Washington Post

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It’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I’m watching a robot poke a forest camouflage backpack with a stick. Here on the southern edge of Albuquerque, N.M., in an oven-hot tract of desert, a dozen assorted cops, military guys, and national researchers, along with three sweaty journalists, have gathered to play with robots.

Welcome to the Robot Rodeo, an annual competition that is both more and less absurd than it sounds. More absurd because for five days, grown men and women with important jobs (military technician, police officer) use obscenely expensive robots (the machine in the image above costs $100,000) to defuse fake threats (a bombing attempt against the fictional “MIB headquarters,” which may or may not be a nerdulent reference to Men In Black).

Less absurd are the stakes: law enforcement agencies and the military use robots to tackle dangerous situations that might otherwise result in human casualties. But robots are complicated technologies that need to be tested in all sorts of far-fetched scenarios. Defuse a “bomb” out here in the desert, and you’re that much better prepared to address a real bomb threat.

***

A bomb squad from Doña Ana County, N.M., received this fictional briefing: A car drove up to the MIB headquarters, where a passenger got out and threw a backpack over the fence. The car was found, but the passenger ran away. The driver, now in custody, has warned of a booby trap and larger bomb still in the car. The team has 90 minutes to respond to the threat.

The squad immediately sent their Remotec HD-1 after the package thrown over the fence. Like most of the robots at the rodeo, the HD-1 moves on tracks and has a strong gripping arm topped with a camera.

Because the “MIB headquarters” was actually just a large trailer, the robot faced a tricky problem: the bomb made it beneath the truck, and a low hanging metal crossbeam caught the Remotec’s camera every time its arm tried to move forward and grab the package. So the team got creative. Grabbing a nearby piece of wood, the robot began to poke against the backpack.

Poke it with a stick!

After trying a few different angles, and a second stick, the robot was able to push the suspicious package out from under the truck. Then it wheeled away from the headquarters, fake bomb dangling in its claw.

The challenge was only half-met. The booby-trapped car was still a threat, and to complicate matters, all its doors were locked. A second robot drove up, the Remotec Andros F6A, which is the larger, older sibling of the stick-manipulating HD-1. (Cool thing about the Andros F6A: it can climb stairs thanks to an extra, narrower set of tracks tucked in close to its body.) The second robot set about the hard and difficult task of opening a car door handle without hands. Or depth perception. The team had just 58 minutes left on the clock.

For 20 minutes, the robot moved back and forth, angling the claw higher and lower, poking the side of the car and scraping the door. The task seemed to require more finesse than the Andros F6A was capable of. (An earlier team attempting this challenge underestimated their robot’s strength, and had accidentally broken off a car door handle in the process.) Finally, after great effort, the claw latched against the door…

Latched onto the car door handle

…and with delicate effort, opened it!

Door opening success!

Mission mostly accomplished! With the suspicious package retrieved and the car door open, the Doña Ana County team no longer faced the novel problem of retrieving bombs from difficult places, and instead set about resolving the more routine task (for a bomb squad, anyway) of defusing the mock explosives.

* * *

Elsewhere at the Robot Rodeo, a separate mission was underway. Two suspicious packages, again in backpacks, were discovered in the narrow gap between a railing and a fence. The path was hardly wider than a sidewalk. The first bomb was found on the ground and quickly retrieved. The second, however, proved much more challenging. Dangling from the top of a fence, the package was difficult to reach and precarious to move.

Working together, a bomb squad from Farmington, N.M. and the 62nd Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company from Fort Carson, Colo., deployed a combination of military and civilian robots. Farmington sent out a Remotec F6A, and Fort Carson the Talon, a smaller, tracked robot that defused improvised explosive devices in Iraq and helped survey the Fukushima nuclear disaster site in Japan.

This challenge required a special rope-and-pulley operation that, while simple for humans, is incredibly complex for robots. The first part of the task required setting carabiners onto two rail-mounted hooks, so that the pulled rope would drag the package against the far side of the path. Here’s what a robot setting a carabiners looks like:

Talon and Remotec set a carabiner

One of the trickier parts of operating these robots is that they each can only look with one camera at a time. In the above image, the Talon is further back, providing larger context and extra visual input for the Remotec as it tries to hook the carabiner on the loop. (It’s like if people only had depth perception when someone else was standing next to them.)

Once the carabiner hooked onto the rail, the next difficult task was placing the proper hook on the backpack itself. Again with the Talon acting as a spotter, the Remotec extended its mechanical arm as high as it could. The package remained just out of reach, but the Remotec had one more trick up its gears. One set of the robot’s tracks scrunched up, lifting the machine an extra six inches off the ground. (Imagine a robot standing on tippy-toes.) That extra height allowed the robot’s arm to latch onto the backpack.

Remotec Hooks The Package

A pull on the rope, and the backpack slipped along the ground, out of the narrow corridor. Getting the package off the fence was only the penultimate step; next, the teams needed to find out what, exactly, was inside. The Talon carried the package into an Open Vision Live Video X-ray system set up under a tent, which, as you might guess, provided live X-ray video of the package’s contents.

TALON X-Rays the Suspicious Package

Inside was a cylinder, which the teams labeled a pipe bomb. Challenge complete! The judges, from Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs, asked a few follow-up questions about pipe bomb disposal, and then it was mission accomplished for the two bomb squads.

Next year, the teams and their robots will meet up for another rodeo in Los Alamos, N.M. (I’m crossing my fingers for bomb-disposal drones.) While the competition allows military personnel, police officers, and researchers to test the limits of bomb disposal robots, its greatest benefit lies in teaching the teams to come up with creative solutions in the heat of the moment. Even as the technology improves every year, the robots are still only as good as their human operators.

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The Pentagon is trying to speed up the deployment of an ultra-large bunker-busting bomb, which would constitute the largest non-nuclear bomb the U.S. has ever used. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, is a 30,000-pound bomb that would dive deeper than any previous bomb, and could be strapped to B-2 or B-52 bombers by July of 2010.

GBU-24

The MOP is 20 feet long and can penetrate bunkers up to 200 feet before exploding. At 15 tons, the MOP is a third heavier than the previous “mother of all bombs”, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, which was only 10.5 tons. The MOP also packs a whopping 5,300 lbs of explosives, which is 10 times the amount its predecessor bunker-buster, the BLU-109, carried. Basically, it’s massive.

The push for accelerated deployment is due to the increased perceived nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea. It’s believed that many of their nuclear programs could be in development underground, below levels of current bunker-busting bombs’ range. The Pentagon intends the rapid deployment to send a message that the United States is tweaking strategies to address new threats. And nothing is more American than advertising the sheer size and tonnage of the bombs hanging below our jets.

[via Reuters]

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Tall grass hid the advancing cadets from my perch in building 7. The tall grass hid nothing from the drone the defenders flew over their position, a Parrot AR 2.0, a common model used by civilian fliers. A minute later, after the drone pilot filmed the crawling cadets, instructors called in mock artillery fire. The cadets’ position was compromised, and while the rest of their platoon advanced to take the buildings, these 10 cadets instead spent an hour in the sun contemplating what they could have done about the drone.

The answer was standing right behind them. As the smoke grenades denoting artillery landed nearby, a supporting electronic warfare officer aimed a rifle-shaped antenna at the drone. The drone crashed to the ground instantly, its camera going fuzzy and then only showing the pilot a close-up of asphalt.

The rest of the battle was a success for all involved: the defending squad of cadets successfully retreated, that attacking platoon took and held the buildings, and the Army Cyber Institute gave the Army’s next generation of leaders a taste of the complexity that cheap commercial technology can bring to modern war.

I, a non-combatant, am here at this rural training site near the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, on this June Thursday at the invitation of the Army Cyber Institute.

Part of the Army’s larger cyber complex, the Institute is a sort of internal think-tank at West Point, trying to figure out what the cyber component of warfare looks like in practice. “Cyber” is a broad term, and it mostly brings to mind people sitting at desks slinging code across the internet.

“Cyber electromagnetic activities,” says the definition in an Army field manual on the same, “are activities leveraged to seize, retain, and exploit an advantage over adversaries and enemies in both cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, while simultaneously denying and degrading adversary and enemy use of the same and protecting the mission command system.”

What does that actually mean in practice? Sometimes, it means the people at desks on computers. But this day, it meant an antenna on an airsoft M-4 rifle stock, hooked up to a Raspberry Pi computer, spitting code over Wi-Fi at an unlocked toy quadcopter (the Parrot AR drone).

This specific cyber rifle only works with a specific type of drone, so don’t expect soldiers to go into battle with code rifles the next time they deploy. That’s almost beside the point. Most of the exercise traced a familiar point to soldiers for decades: spend a few hours marching to a village, and then dislodge the defenders holed-up there.

Military Operations Urban Terrain

This scenario is termed a MOUT, or “Military Operations Urban Terrain.” “Urban” is defined pretty loosely — the site had eight small buildings, one of them two-stories, and a couple of trucks. It was urban in the sense that it wasn’t an empty field.

The terrain was typical for this part of New York State: forest around the clearing, a couple gentle hills, and mountains all around the site. I lost cell phone signal unless I stood in one place in the two-story building. Captain Millman, an officer escorting West Point’s own media team to the event, joked that the army did a good job “implementing the terrain” for cyber operations. That is to say, it was a naturally denied environment. Most communications didn’t work, so the cadets and officers relied on the radios that did.

Going through this course were 24 cadet platoons, of 40 people each, meaning a total of 1,000 seniors and juniors were running this course. The course ran from May 19th through June 8th. I watched the exercise from the woods with the 13th platoon to go through. Matching West Point’s enrollment, it was roughly 80 percent male, though this was only clear afterwards when the cadets removed their helmets for debriefing.

My handler for the assault was Erick Waage, a Captain with the Army Cyber Institute. He held the cyber rifle, and earlier that morning the attack team picked him up as an “enabler.” Essentially, an enabler is any person with a unique skill not with the unit that is attached for the mission — it could be a local interpreter, a special guide, or in this case, someone with a unique weapon to offer. Here is the information the Army Cyber Institute gave the cadets on the drone (described, as they often are in military circles, as a micro-Unmanned Aerial System):

C2 is “command and control,” so this just means that the person in charge of the defense can use the drone to scout.

Added to the danger: this drone wasn’t just a scout, but in the scenario they had to treat it as a deadly weapon too, one packing an explosive punch. While bullets are of some use against drones in the real world, for this scenario they were deemed ineffective, so the attacking cadets had to use different means to shoot them down.

That meant the cyber rifle. Here’s how the cadet’s orders described it:

The CEMA enabler task is to neutralize ENY drones to allow PLTs freedom of movement. O/a 0600, CEMA TM conducts L/U with 1 st PLT and integrates into platoon’s scheme of maneuver in support of counter-UAS.

CEMA is “cyber-electromagnetic activity,” ENY is enemy, and PLT is platoon. At 6 a.m. in the morning, the cyber rifle team linked up with the platoon, and they marched for several hours to get into position. I, escorted politely to the mock battlefield, arrived a little before 10 a.m., and was sent into the woods to watch the attack.

The cadets choose to assign Captain Waage to the weapons squad, whose medium machine guns would provide covering fire as the squad advanced. A few minutes after my arrival we heard the drone, and Captain Waage knocked it out of the sky. Then I saw the machine gunners open packs ear plugs. All guns for the training used lasers and sensors in the cadet’s uniforms to signal hits, but they were still loaded with blanks, so the exercise got really loud, really quickly.

Parrot AR 2.0 On The Ground

After the initial flurry of action, it became clear that the defenders were in two buildings up the road, so I gingerly left my perch in the woods and watched the action from inside. I was here to see the drone, and with it out of the way, the attack proceeded as planned.

The Army Cyber Institute is one small part of the Army’s larger cyber apparatus. In Fort Meade, Maryland, there’s the 780th Military Intelligence Bridge, which focuses on defending networks at a much higher level. There’s also the Cyber Center of Excellence at Fort Gordon in Georgia, which focuses on growing institutional knowledge of cyber within the Army. This, again, is a broad range, from protecting information on secure networks from outside intrusion to just making sure that when troops in the field use their radios, they only say what’s necessary.

Captain Cliff McClung is an Electronics Warfare officer who used the cyber rifle for the platoon that came through in the afternoon. He explained that before approaching the buildings, he and the cadets plotted out areas of the map. and assigned each a single word code name. That way, when communicating with radios in the exercise, they could be brief. Radio signals are easier to find the longer they’re broadcast, and radio silence remains as important a form of protection in 2016 as it was in the past.

Capt. Matthew Hutchison, Piloting A Drone

After the first platoon went through, there was some time to process the lesson. Cadet Austin Neal, in charge of the exercise, had never fired the cyber rifle before, so Captain Matthew Hutchison, today’s drone pilot, got the drone in the air and Captain Waage showed Neal how to shoot it down.

In a moment the quadcopter buzzed to life, then hung low in the air above the cinder block-and-plywood buildings. Neal, positioned on a small hill about thirty feet away, pointed the cyber rifle’s antenna at the drone, and it fell to the ground with a clattering of plastic.

“All I had to do was press the red button and pull the trigger,” Neal reported afterwards.

The cyber rifle is an example of what an elegant solution to cheap drones might look like. Commercial drones with cameras have prices in the low hundred of dollars (the Parrot AR 2.0 costs south of $200 these days), with more elaborate ones available at a couple thousand.

Cadet Austin Neal With Cyber Rifle

Both Ukrainian forces and the Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk are using commercial drones, but the Russian-backed side is better equipped, and are developing drone doctrine: one quadcopter flies over a trench, where Ukrainian troops shoot at it, and then the second drone watches the muzzle blasts, training artillery on the target. It’s brutal and it’s relatively cheap.

If a future anti-drone weapon is as simple and subtle as the cyber rifle, soldiers will be more than capable of using it with just a moment’s training.

This lesson was clearest on the second run of the day. That platoon, the 14th to approach this course, put their weapon squad at the far end of the clearing, trusting the range of their guns and the concealment of the tall grass. Then they crawled forward into position, where the quadcopters spotted them overhead.

Captain Cliff McClung, the cyber-rifleman attached to the squad, decided to make this a teachable moment. He called the officer piloting the drones for the defenders, and in a moment the quadcopter was overhead, filming soldiers advancing on arms and knees. The instructors looked at the footage, called in the artillery, and the weapons team was out, their advance undone by the drone. McClung then knocked the drone out of the sky, and the lesson proceeded as planned.

As their peers advanced building by building amidst drifts of yellow smoke, ten future U.S. Army officers spent the next twenty minutes in the sun, contemplating the future of war.

Smoke On The Training Ground

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Apple’s latest software update for the iPhone and iPad features one of its subtlest but most symbolically significant design changes yet. iOS 10, which will be available for free download this fall, removes the revolver emoji and replaces it with a squirt gun.

The change is available now to developers who download iOS 10 beta 4, although I should note that software is not designed for the general public, but rather app creators looking to get their own software ready and working in time for the fall release of iOS 10.

But if you do install iOS 10 beta 4, the revolver is gone and a green squirt gun with an orange tip appears in its place. The squirt gun emoji change comes alongside “more than 100” other changes to Apple’s emoji, including more options for skin tones, more women in diverse professional roles, and more detailed characters. In one example, the “Running Man” emoji appears more 3D.

On its website, Apple says it wants to “ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere.” And with millions of people using emoji in their daily communications, even the smallest changes will have significant impacts on our conversations. Apple’s stances on emoji can’t help but have political ramifications, in other words.

In this case, the change to the squirt gun emoji comes nearly a year after a social media campaign called #DisarmTheiPhone was launched by advocacy group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, with the goal of pressuring Apple to drop support for the revolver emoji.

Screenshot of the ‘DisarmTheiPhone’ Twitter account

Previously, Apple was reported to have pressured the emoji masters of the universe —the Unicode consortium, an international standards body — to drop plans to add a rifle emoji to the set.

It seems Apple’s latest changes go a step further than that. We’ve reached out to the company for further explanation on why the revolver/squirt gun emoji swap in particular, and will update when we hear back.

[H/T: Nick Statt, The Verge]

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Launching a missile is easy. Hitting another missile with a missile is one of the hardest challenges of modern military engineering, and has been for decades. Today, the Pentagon successfully fired a ballistic missile interceptor at an ICBM-like target, destroying it in space.

It is an impressive achievement, one that comes after billions of dollars spent on the program. It is not a sign that the United States is in any position to deploy a missile defense system that can stop a real ICBM under realistic conditions. That goal is still likely years if not decades away.

What happened today?

The test was run by several groups within the Department of Defense, primarily the Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. Air Force 30th Space Wing. From a test site in the Marshall Islands, the military launched a dummy ICBM-like missile. Other military sensors picked up wth launch, including a special X-band radar likely mounted on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. These sensors passed along information to the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, which is the name for the whole missile defense unit. The GMD system took the tracking information and plotted a way to shoot a missile at the dummy target.

At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the Air Force launched a “ground based interceptor,” or a special missile designed to reach and stop ICBMs. In space, the interceptor used an “exo-atmospheric kill vehicle” to crash directly into the dummy target, destroying it. That exo-atmospheric kill vehicle is essentially a flying battering ram, released by the interceptor rocket to forcibly slam into the target, disabling it. The whole test cost $244 million.

“This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland,” said Navy Vice Admiral Jim Syring, director of the Missile Defense Agency, in a statement released by the Department of Defense, “and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat.”

Interceptor Launched

What is the origin of missile defense?

The first ballistic missiles were used in World War II, with conventional explosives. In the Cold War, nations quickly realized the potential of arming ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and then developed such weapons. The longest-range of these weapons are the appropriately named Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, and they presented military planners with a terrifying reality: a weapon that could be assembled and launched entirely within one country, and then travel a great distance quickly to destroy a base, town, or city in another country. Thousands of these weapons were built, and decades of elaborate strategic thinking was devoted to making sure nations (primarily the USSR and the United States) deployed weapons in such a way to not actually shoot at each other.

To get around this constant terror, sometimes literally referred to as a balance of terror, researchers started designing weapons that could shoot a missile out of the sky, disabling or detonating it in the least harmful way possible.

“Do we have an operational missile defense system?,” Popular Science asked asked in 1965, rhetorically answering, “Most Americans think so. They’re wrong.” The trick in this answer was that the Nike-X system, deployed and tested on the same Kwajalein Atoll from today’s test, was only operational for that atoll, and was not yet defending anywhere in the continental United States. The other catch is that the Zeus and Sprint missiles used in the Nike-X system were themselves nuclear weapons, designed to blow up in proximity to incoming ICBMs.

Using a nuclear weapon to stop a nuclear weapon was somewhat within a normal idea of war in the 1960s, but the idea has understandably since fallen out of favor. And such tests were banned as part of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Instead, modern missile defense attempts to use advanced sensors to detect a missile as soon as it’s a threat, and then direct conventional weapons to intercept and destroy the target.

ICBM-class target

How successful were previous missile defense tests?

In 2014, congress reviewed testing of an ex-atmospheric kill vehicle. While Congress ultimately funded further research, it asked that future tests include realistic conditions, which suggests major limitations to what was learned in previous tests.

Other missile defense systems, like the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense, or THAAD, radar and interceptors now deployed in South Korea and elsewhere, had promising early results when tested in the late ’90s, if one overlooks a failure to actually hit the target. The GMD system itself has 36 deployed interceptors, concentrated mostly in Alaska with a few at the Vandenberg base. While the system’s been in place since 2004, it has had at most a success in 3 out of 9 tests. And for all those tests, the intercepting missile had perfect information about the target: when it was launched, what it looked like, how fast it was going, and what trajectory it was traveling.

“GMD has yet to be tested against realistic decoys,” wrote David Willman in the Los Angeles Times, “which would challenge the system’s ability to discern between decoys and nuclear warheads.”

Because the GMD was rushed into deployment in 2004, the United States has spent over a decade with essentially missile defense prototypes in place, making the weapons on hand but not really adequately tested. That’s the worst of both worlds: a false sense of security, and a defense system whose further development may encourage more aggressive action than if the system didn’t exist at all.

What’s next?

Despite the best recommendations of game theorists, the United States has a missile defense in place, which is gradually getting better at doing the task it was assigned. Today’s test is a step in that direction, but it would be a mistake to assume that initial reports of a successful test mean the system is now as effective as it would need to be in the face of a real attack.

And a real attack will be far more complex than today’s test. As long as strategists have contemplated missile defense, there have been just as many planners and researchers figuring out how to evade missile defense. The answers are mostly known, and have been for decades: missiles that deploy decoys could fool interceptors, and unusual trajectories and launch sites could best interceptors trained on known flight patterns. And then there is the issue of volume: every interceptor that misses is potentially another city devastated, so the more missiles an attacker fires, the likelier it is some of those missiles will get through.

To counter that, interceptors have to not only be accurate every time, they have to become cheap enough to field en masse. Otherwise, instead of deterring an attack, missile defense may simply invite a larger nuclear salvo.

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When Iraq’s American-equipped army fled their posts in Mosul last June, they left that American equipment in the hands Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the attacking violent insurgent group. Since then, the U.S. Air Force destroyed some of the captured vehicles. Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wonders if there’s a better way to stop stolen equipment from working. He proposes “kill switches,” like those found in iPhones, as a means for keeping American arms, given to allies, from working in the hands of enemies.

Here’s the key idea from Zittrain’s article:

Through email, Popular Science spoke with Zittrain about how these proposed killswitches could work, and what they would mean for arming allies in the future.

Popular Science: Cell phone kill switches work in a world filled with cellphone towers and internet connections–things that are rare on battlefields. I know you mention satellites, but what kinds of infrastructure do you think a kill switch would require?

Jonathan Zittrain: Some [military] hardware already relies on communications with a home base perhaps thousands of miles away. For example, remotely piloted drones. The technology used to securely direct drones might be usable for other instruments of war. Essentially, the more sophisticated and communications-based, such as relying upon military-grade GPS, the less of an incremental change a kill switch would represent.

**PS: **What kinds of military gear do you see as likely kill switch candidates?

**JZ: **Medium and heavy weaponry, including tanks, anti-aircraft missiles, helicopters, and jets.

**PS: **What safeguards could prevent an armed non-state actor from “jailbreaking” their killswitch-enabled MANPADS [Man Portable Air Defense Systems], tanks, or rifles?

JZ: No safeguard is foolproof, and physical possession of the gear in question is often thought of as “game over” from a hacking perspective. But if we see the problem in terms of time and effort to break the lock, rather than “can it ever be broken,” there may be useful ways of integrating this technology, especially when balanced against the costs of misuse of the weapons should they be completely unsecured. (Right now we might depend on such things as batteries that naturally expire and are hard to replace, or other maintenance that an adversary won’t be in a position to do.)

Steven Bellovin at Columbia has done a lot of thinking about this problem for nuclear weapons, which need to be hardened against use should they fall into someone’s wrongful possession. He’s written up his thoughts here.

One could also imagine an expiration date requiring renewal with a code or signal, so that no adversary could hack the switch itself and render the weapon useless even if it hadn’t been stolen. At most the hacker could allow the weapon to continue operating past its due date.

Iraqi Army Patrolling Mosul, 2008

**PS: **Many small arms in current use are decades old if not older. Would you support retroactively adding kill switches to these before distribution, or are kill switches more for advanced equipment?

**JZ: **I see them as more useful for more advanced equipment. With the world awash in small arms, it seems harder to make a dent in that supply.

**PS: **With kill switch-equipped weapons, do you think the United States or others would be more likely to arm friendly non-state actors?

JZ: This is a distinct possibility, and could mean that kill switches would, as a second-order effect, lead to more arms being sold or given to parties. If the worst uses can be foreclosed — or we convince ourselves that they are — it changes the downside risk of providing the arms to begin with.

**PS: **Kill switches come with a major trust issue. While America might promise killswitchable weapons to an allied army so that an insurgent can’t use them, what assurance would the ally have that the kill switch wouldn’t leave them vulnerable?

JZ: That assurance may already be in question. Any secret kill switches already in use would presumably be used rarely in order not to eliminate that trust. Here, stated up front, a recipient knows the conditions by which the arms are transferred. The easy case is the recipient possessing the kill switch; the more difficult is the providing country having it; the most radical would be for the UN Security Council or some other group to have to come to consensus to trigger the switch.

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Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they’re spooky as hell.

Can turning animals into cyborgs ever end well? Should lasers really be strapped to planes? Is dispersing humans with the worst smell ever created a better alternative to doing it by burning their skin? You be the judge. Launch our gallery of the world’s spookiest weapons—some decades away and others already implemented—and marvel over what humans can create when they work apart.

The Atomic Bomb

Project X-Ray

MK-ULTRA

The Stargate Project

The CornerShot

Cetacean Intelligence Mission

The Gay Bomb

The Trophy Active Defense System

Metal Storm

Cyborg Moths

The Navy’s Railgun

The Puke Flashlight

Mobility Denial System

A Military-Grade Stink Bomb

The Scream

Active Denial System

The Rods from God

Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition

Airborne Laser

Calmatives

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On April 1, 2017, the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opened its Stallion gate to the public, like it does twice every year. For a few hours, visitors are free to wander the Trinity Test Site, where, on July 16, 1945, the United States tested the first atomic bomb in history, forever altering the destructive power available to humans. On the way in, the over 4,600 visitors were greeted by about two dozen protesters, whose signs bore a simple, stark message: The first victims of an atomic bomb are still living.

“I remember just like it happened yesterday,” said Darryl Gilmore, 89, then a student at the University of New Mexico, studying music and business courses. His brother had just returned from the war, and they needed to get him down to Fort Bliss in El Paso so he could process out. Gilmore borrowed the family car for the trip; he drove it back from Albuquerque to his parent’s home in Tularosa along Highway 380, which goes through Socorro and San Antonio and on to Carrizozo. It’s the same road people take to visit the Trinity site today. On that day in mid-July 1945, he stopped to check his tires, and then encountered a convoy of six army trucks.

“The lead driver, a sergeant, told me ‘put your windows up on your car, and drive out of here as fast as you can, there’s poison gas in the area,’” recalled Gilmore. “I found out much later that they were prepared to evacuate a bunch of ranch families in that neighborhood from miles around. I found out they didn’t evacuate anybody.”

“My folks had gotten up early that morning, before 5 o’clock, and they saw the flash from Tularosa, that explosion,” said Gilmore, “and of course in Albuquerque I didn’t notice it at all. The only thing that came out in the paper that afternoon was a statement that an ammunition dump in the remote corner of the range had exploded, and that’s all the information that was released at that time.”

Color photograph of the Trinity Test

Apart from the convoy, and the statement about the ammunition dump, Gilmore didn’t hear any official word about what had happened in the New Mexico desert that day until shortly after the news that the A-bomb was dropped on Japan, first on Hiroshima on August 6,1945, and then on Nagasaki on August 9.

The effects of the fallout on Gilmore became clear much sooner than that. By the time he and his family reached El Paso, his arms, neck, and face were red—as if he’d gotten a bad sunburn. “I didn’t know at the time what had happened to me,” said Gilmore. “My outer skin gradually fell off the next few days, I used lotions and stuff on it, [but they] didn’t seem to make much difference. A few years later, I began to have skin problems, and I’ve had treatments ever since.”

Gilmore is the survivor of multiple cancers. His prostate cancer responded to radiation treatment and hasn’t returned, but his skin cancers remain a persistent problem to this day. And his immediate family—his father, mother, and sister—who were living in Tularosa at the time of the Trinity test, all died from cancer.

Gilmore’s story is one of many collected by the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. The organization was founded in 2005 by residents Tina Cordova and the late Fred Tyler, with the express aim of compiling information about the impacts of the Trinity test on people in the area. Tularosa is a village in Southern New Mexico, about a three-hour drive south of Albuquerque or a 90-minute drive northeast from Las Cruces. The town sits next to the White Sands Missile Range, and, as the crow flies, is about 50 miles from the Trinity Site. The White Sands Range summary of the 2017 visit says the site was selected because of its remote location, though the page also notes that when locals asked about the explosion, the test “was covered up with the story of an explosion at an ammunition dump.”

“Trinity Site,” a pamphlet available for visitors to the location, notes that it was selected from one of eight possible locations in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado in part because the land was already under the control of the federal government as part of the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, established in 1942. (Later, the Army tested captured V-2 rockets at the range, and today it houses everything from missile testing to a DARPA-designed Air Force observatory.) “The secluded Jornada del Muerto was perfect as it provided isolation for secrecy and safety, but was still close to Los Alamos for easy commuting back and forth,” notes the pamphlet.

Cordova disputes that characterization. “We know from the census data that there were 40,000 people living in the four counties surrounding Trinity at the time of the test,” she said. “That’s not remote and uninhabited.”

There is no mention in the pamphlet or the official online history page of any civilians in the area. The history contains an evacuation order report, filed July 18, 1945, detailing “plans to evacuate civilians around the Trinity Site area if high concentrations of radioactive fallout drifted off the Alamogordo Bombing Range.” From that report:

Immediately after the shot, the wind drift was ascertained to be sure the Base Camp was not in danger. Monitors were immediately sent out in the direction of the cloud drift to check the approximate width and degree of contamination of the area under the cloud. A small headquarters was set-up at Bingham, near the center of the area in the most immediate danger. The monitors worked in a wide area from this base reporting in to Mr. Hoffman or Mr. Herschfelter. One re-enforced [sic] platoon, under Captain Huene, was held at Bingham; the rest of the detachment was held in reserve at Base Camp. Fortunately no evacuations had to be made.

Gilmore’s experience suggests otherwise.

To this day, he’s surprised that there was no attempt by the Army or police to block off the roads in the area downwind of the test. “They should have known better,” said Gilmore. “That radiation spread for hundreds of miles, a lot of people in Tularosa died from cancer, and people in Tularosa attribute practically all of it to the A-bomb.”

Gilmore was driving from San Antonio to Carrizozo on highway 380, at about 9am on July 16, just hours after the Trinity test. It’s the same road that visitors take to get to the Trinity site today, and only 17 miles from the test location. Representation of Gilmore’s experience, or that of any civilians in the area at the time, are missing from the experience of the site itself.

On arrival, visitors first see the large rusting remains of “Jumbo,” a massive metal container built to catch rare and precious plutonium if the “Gadget,” the first atomic bomb, failed to work as planned. (Ultimately, confidence in Gadget was great enough that the planners decided not to use Jumbo, instead placing it 800 yards away from the blast site.)

Tourists pose inside “Jumbo”

The quarter-mile path from Jumbo to ground zero is fenced in, as is the blast site itself. It’s a simple chain link, with three strands of barbed wire angling outwards from the top, and intermittent “Caution: Radioactive Materials” signs placed on the outer edges of the fence. There is a small obelisk at the site, the official Ground Zero Monument, where crowds of tourists gather for their picture in the shallow depression of the first atomic blast. Facing the inside of the fence are a handful of small signs, printed up with photography of the site and observations about life in the area. Then there are a series of stills of the blast, captured milliseconds apart, showing the formation of the mushroom cloud. Finally, there is a flatbed truck with the casing from a Fatman bomb, the same kind dropped on Nagasaki. Tourists posed with the casing, asking strangers to take their picture in front of the weapon.

“Trinity Site is explicit about the story they’re trying to tell,” said Martin Pfeiffer, an Anthropology graduate student at the University of New Mexico focused on the social impacts of America’s nuclear enterprise. “The narrative is one of a new epoch, the atomic age, in which American technological and cultural might won World War II and, by implication, won the Cold War too. The Trinity Site is overtly triumphalist in their presentation of events and erases the experiences of those removed from the land without fair compensation or who may have suffered radiation injury.”

When asked about an official history of the site, officials with White Sands Missile Range directed me to “Trinity: The History Of An Atomic Bomb National Historic Landmark” by Jim Eckles, who worked in the White Sands Missile Range Public Affairs Office from 1977 to 2007.

“Other than a few instances, public exposure to radiation in the hours and few days after the 1945 test has largely been glossed over by officials and historians,” Eckles writes, and then says that may have changed after the 2010 publication of a study on Trinity as a source of public radiation exposure. Still, the possibility of a greater harmful impact in the area than initially reported can be seen as early as 1945, when the chief medical officer of the Manhattan Project recommended that future tests occur in a larger area “preferably with a radius of at least 150 miles without population.”

Part of the danger wasn’t just the immediate impact on people exposed to radiation the day of the blast, but also how the scattered fallout affected the people in the area.

“We have to remember what life was like in 1945 in rural New Mexico,” says the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium’s Cordova, “There were no water systems, so water was collected in cisterns and holding tanks, and that may have been contaminated after the bomb. There were no grocery stores. People bought things in a mercantile, things like flour, sugar, and coffee, but they didn’t buy meat, vegetables, food, anything that was perishable. They had orchards, they had gardens. People raised everything that they consumed meat-wise: cows goats, sheep, chickens. They hunted, and all of this was damaged. People didn’t bathe as often back then, because water was scarce, so it got on your skin and they were absorbing radiation. It did get into the water supply, and then they would consume it. It got into the food supply, then they would consume it. They would inhale the dust.”

Trinity test, 15 seconds after detonation

The secrecy around the project took the Army to some unusual places after the test and before the nature of the bomb became public.

“One of Trinity’s more unusual financial appropriations, later on, was for the acquisition of several dozen head of cattle that had had their hair discolored by the explosion.” writes nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein. Indeed, we know that in December 1945, the Army purchased 75 head of cattle at market price from ranchers in the area, and proceeded to study the effects of radiation on those cows and their offspring. The area around Trinity, before it was fenced-off as a military gunnery range, was ranching country, with enough meager grass to support grazing herds. While the Army purchased some of the cattle affected by the blast, it’s highly likely that more cattle in the area at the time of the blast, or that grazed in the area after the blast, ended up consumed by locals. When cows consume radioisotopes of iodine that the blast deposited on grass, their digestive process accumulates isotopes from the whole grazed area; the cows can then pass the concentrated isotopes along through milk to humans.

This is echoed in testimony collected by Cordova on behalf of the Tularosa Downwinders. “We had this town hall meeting in Socorro when we had our report, and there were two sisters who came, and a brother, and they lived on a ranch that they said was 7-8 miles from Trinity, and said the government never paid them a visit, ever, and they said ‘our cows were wiped out; we ate them.'”

Historians of the Trinity test acknowledge that, after the blast, people in the area were largely left in the dark.

“No one did real medical and scientific follow-up with these ranchers,” writes Eckles. “For a couple years after the test, Los Alamos personnel discreetly inquired about the health of these folks without cluing them in on their concern.” This is a marked difference from how the United States treated the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In October 1945, the United States set up a joint commission to study the long-term impact of the bomb on the lives of the people in the area. That study continues to this day, under the Radiation Effect Research Foundation, tracking and monitoring the health of people exposed to the blast.

Tourists read about Fatman, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki

Those populations are the largest and best-studied cohort of atomic survivors, but some of their experience doesn’t directly apply to those downwind of the Trinity test. The Trinity test’s low blast and scattered fallout is different than the atmospheric bursts over the Japanese cities, the climate of high desert is vastly different from coastal cities, and there is the matter of diet. Milk and cattle are a major part of life in rural New Mexico, in a way that simply was not true of people living in Japan.

The Downwinder’s report highlights this dietary exposure as one of the major harms from the blast to people in the area. In 2010, the Center for Disease Control published a draft report, the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment, which looked at off-site health impacts from research done by the lab that designed and built the first atomic bombs. From the LAHDRA report:

All evaluations of public exposures from the Trinity blast that have been published to date have been incomplete in that they have not reflected the internal doses that were received by residents from intakes of airborne radioactivity and contaminated water and foods. Some unique characteristics of the Trinity event amplified the significance of those omissions. Because the Gadget was detonated so close to the ground, members of the public lived less than 20 mi downwind and were not relocated, terrain features and wind patterns caused “hot spots” of radioactive fallout, and lifestyles of local ranchers led to intakes of radioactivity via consumption of water, milk, and homegrown vegetables, it appears that internal radiation doses could have posed significant health risks for individuals exposed after the blast.

The recurring theme of studies about the impact of the Trinity test on people in the surrounding area is that there is a lack of thorough assessment of what actually happened—of what knowable, traceable harms from the bomb impacted people caught in its fallout. The National Cancer Institute plans to conduct one such study. Reached for this story, the NCI declined to comment, noting that the study is not yet in the field and therefore there are no results to report.

In lieu of a published federal study specifically on the health impact of the Trinity test, the Tularosa Downwinders themselves conducted a Health Impact Assessment with funding from the Santa Fe Community foundation. Some phrasings in the study misstate the science at hand. When the study says “We want to convey the fact that one millionth of a gram of plutonium inhaled or ingested into the body will cause cancer,” it states as certain fact that plutonium ingestion will cause cancer, rather than the more accurately describing plutonium ingestion as increasing the risk of developing cancer. To make the case for radiation exposure compensation, the Downwinder Consortium wants a study to happen soon, while the first generation is still around to testify to their experience of the blast. And they want to make sure that they’re consulted for the study, so that New Mexico’s victims of radiation exposure aren’t erased from history a second time.

There is already a program paying for people exposed to radiation risk from the tests in Nevada. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed in 1990 and amended in 2000, provides lump-sum compensation to uranium workers in 11 states, to “onsite participants in atmospheric nuclear tests”, and also to downwinders in three states: Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Senate Bill 197, sponsored by Senator Crapo of Idaho, would among other changes expand that coverage to include Trinity site downwinders. The bill is currently in the Judiciary committee with no hearing scheduled, though according to the office of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, that could always change.

Gadget, the bomb tested at Trinity

“The Trinity test site was part of our war effort, used to defend our country and keep the American people safe. The federal government therefore has a solemn duty to compensate those injured as a result,” says Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, one of the bill’s cosponsors. “I believe that the body of evidence shows a clear conclusion: people downwind of the Trinity test site were injured as a result of radioactive fallout, and downwind communities continue to suffer the consequences, both health and economic, of the Trinity testing. They should be compensated for their hardship.”

Compensation is a central goal of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

“I coined the phrase “unknowing, unwilling, and uncompensated,”” said Cordova, referring to the status of people impacted by the blast. “People who worked on the project were knowing, they knew what they were doing, they were willing to do it, and they were compensated at the time plus afterwards if they got sick. Those of us who gave no consent, never knew, were never willing, have never been taken care of.”

Compensation is just one part of the Downwinder’s request. “We want the government to come back and issue an apology to the people,” said Cordova. “That would go a long way in helping people to heal. There’s this trauma that’s been associated with this, that the government’s never going to come back and acknowledge it or take care of us.”

Gilmore is skeptical that an apology will ever happen. “I understand they made some settlements in Utah and Colorado, and Nevada, but nothing in the way that I know of in New Mexico, they just ignored New Mexico,” said Gilmore, “They’re just waiting for all us old people to die off so they don’t have to pay us any money for what happened to us.”

Part of the mission is to simply inform people that the downwinders exist. For five years, the Tularosa Downwinders have protested outside the road to the Stallion gate, a living addition to the story told through inanimate objects at Trinity itself.

“We decided, if people are going to go out there and celebrate the science,” said Cordova, “then we’re going to go out there, so that they know there were consequences too.”

Sign outside Trinity enclosure

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In November 1944, Japanese soldiers in a top-secret oceanside location loosed a set of balloons into the westerly winds. These globes, about 33 feet in diameter, contained a crude but ingenious device for releasing ballast that their inventors hoped would stay airborne for three to four days—long enough to reach the United States. There, an onboard timer would activate, causing the balloons to drop their payload: incendiary bombs.

Of the roughly 10,000 balloons—or “Fu-go”—launched, about 10 percent made it across the ocean. But the timer couldn’t control where the bombs dropped, so most fell in unpopulated areas. The strategy never amounted to much. Still, these balloons were the first successful intercontinental weapons.

Last year, a pair of foresters found a 70-year-old Fu-go, half-buried but intact, in the mountains of eastern British Columbia. That amazing discovery inspired me to build my own fire balloon—without the dangerous payload.

My design is much simpler than the historical one. Because my fire balloons lift off with hot air rather than helium, I need to use only lightweight materials. First I smear a dab of Sterno inside a small aluminum pie tin. Once lit, the fuel heats the air in a flimsy, plastic dry-cleaner bag, attached to the pie tin with thin wire. The volume of heated air gives the device enough buoyancy to rise hundreds of feet.

To prevent my DIY Fu-go from setting fires, I tether it with a spool of fine wire. On a cool, still night, it looks like a jellyfish floating toward the clouds.

WARNING: Play with fire, and you could get burned. So be careful, and keep your balloon under control!

Tether The DIY Fire Balloon

Build Your Own Fire Balloon

You can make a model Fu-go fire balloon from a dry-cleaner bag and an aluminum pie tin. Dry-cleaner bags work well because they are extremely light and the volume of heated air inside them provides enough buoyancy to make them rise to astounding heights. I chose magnet wire to hold the bag to the pie tin because it is light and won’t burn if exposed to flame. The final piece, jellied alcohol, burns hot and provides a sustained source of heat for the duration of the flight.

WARNING: This project literally puts fire in the air—so be careful near the flame and build at your own risk. Keep the balloon under control at all times: attempt only on still days or nights and fly only in areas free of flammable items and materials.

Stats

• Time: 10 minutes
• Cost: $6
• Difficulty: Easy

Tools + Materials

• Punch or needle
• 2-inch aluminum-foil mini pie pan
• Scissors
• Spool of 34-gauge magnet wire
• Dry-cleaner bag
• Jellied alcohol (such as Sterno)
• Lighter

Fire Balloon Diagram

Instructions

1. Poke four holes, one every 90 degrees, on the upper edge of the mini pie tin.
2. Cut 4-foot-long lengths of magnet wire.
3. Insert each piece of magnet wire though a hole in the pie tin and tie it off.
4. Insert the free ends of the wires through the plastic dry-cleaner bag, spaced at equal intervals all the way around the bottom edge, and tie them off.
5. Find the free end of the magnet wire remaining on the spool. Punch a hole in the center of the pie tin. Insert the wire into the hole and tie it off.
6. Place a dab of jellied alcohol, about the size of a pencil eraser, inside the aluminum tin.
7. Have an assistant hold the bag upright with the bottom of the bag open over the tin. Light the jellied alcohol. In few moments, the heated air will inflate the bag and then make it buoyant.
8. As the bag rises, pay out the magnet wire so the fire balloon can gain altitude. When the fuel is used up, the balloon will slowly descend for retrieval.
9. Fire balloons perform better on cool nights because they are more buoyant.
10. If your balloon will not rise, reduce its weight. You can do this by cutting away as much aluminum as possible from the pan, and by using the thinnest magnet wire you can find that won’t break in the breeze.

This article was originally published in the May/June 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Attack of the Fire Balloons.”

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The Romans invented the crossbow, but after this promising start, it disappeared from most Western armories. Nearly 700 years later, Europeans rediscovered the technology—and it became a game changer.

Unlike longbows, which required years of practice to use effectively, crossbows could be used immediately. A longbow’s power came from the bowman’s arm: He had to bend the heavy bow by hand, which could require him to apply more than a hundred pounds of force. With crossbows, an iron lever called a “goat’s foot” allowed a bowman to apply leverage, which made it much easier to pull back and cock the heavy bowstring. This made crossbows easy to use. Too easy, according to medieval European government and religious officials.

If ready-to-use weapons like this got into the hands of insurgents or heretics, well, that could shake the foundations of government and religion. This fear led to perhaps the first enactment of “gun control” laws: In 1139, Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull that outlawed the use of crossbows. They were, he said, “Hateful to God and unfit for Christians.” Fearing the crossbow’s destabilizing potential, the Christian countries of Europe obeyed Innocent’s proclamation.

However, English and Frankish armies soon embarked on the Crusades, fighting pitched battles against Turkish troops—who had no such ban. The Turkish defenders’ effective fusillades of crossbow bolts made the Crusaders reconsider the weapon. Eventually, England’s Richard the Lionhearted reintroduced the crossbow to rank-and-file Crusaders. (He might have come to regret that decision—Richard eventually died from a crossbow-inflicted wound while fighting in France.)

Once Europeans re-adopted crossbows, they didn’t look back. Because the weapons were expensive, infantrymen who owned these bows, particularly the highly regarded crossbows manufactured in Genoa, became valuable assets. Medieval leaders across Europe hired Genoese crossbowmen as mercenaries.

Naturally, this got me thinking about how to craft a weapon of my own. Designing and constructing a crossbow of military or sporting quality requires great skill, in addition to fairly sophisticated metal and woodworking tools. The results were impressive: Medieval Italian crossbows, weighing a very hefty 18 pounds, could shoot ¼-pound arrows capable of penetrating armor at a range of 100 yards.

However, my DIY crossbow didn’t need to pack that much firepower—or require that much work. I designed a model crossbow that you can make using basic tools. Sure, medieval engineers layered animal ligaments and wood fibers and laminated the layers together with glue made from river sturgeon. But for my materials, I stuck to plain wood and twine. This model crossbow won’t take down a Genoese mercenary, but it should defend your castle against all sorts of imaginary marauders.

How to build your own (model) crossbow

The crossbow isn’t hard to make, especially if you have access to power tools such as a jigsaw and power drill. Even if all you have are simple hand tools, you can get the job done.

WARNING: You’re building a device that shoots a projectile. Using it safely is the most important part of the project. Don’t aim at things you don’t want to shoot and wear safety glasses as appropriate.

Tools

• Jig saw or coping saw
• Electric drill
• Drill bits: ¾-spade bit; ½-inch, 5/16-inch, and 3/16-inch bits
• Wood chisel and mallet
• Sand paper

Materials

You have quite a bit of latitude in building this project—you can make the stock, bow, and trigger a bit longer or shorter, and the bow will still work. The dimensions below and in the instructions are the ones that worked well for me. However, feel free to experiment with the dimensions and perhaps get even better performance!

• One 2-by-4 piece of wood, 17 inches long
• Two 3-inch-by-3-inch pieces of hardwood, ½-inch thick
• Two 5/16-inch-diameter hardwood dowels, 2 inches long
• Three 3/16-inch-diameter hardwood dowels, 2 inches long
• One half-round or full-round dowel, 3/8-inch-diameter, 30 inches long
• 40 inches of mason twine
• One or more 5/16-inch-diameter dowels, 3 inches long
• One or more rubber stoppers

Instructions

Step 1

With the above diagram as a guide, use the jigsaw to cut out the body of the crossbow from the two by four. Drill a ½-inch-diameter hole as shown: This is where the 30-inch-long dowel will fit, becoming the bow.

Step 2

Use the ¾-inch spade drill to fashion a 3½-inch-long slot in the crossbow body (see photo). Begin by drilling holes abutting one another. Then use the chisels to remove additional wood, shaping the holes into a slot. Sand the interior until it’s smooth.

Step 3

Following the diagram, use the jig saw to cut the trigger—or the tickler, as medieval crossbowmen called it—and roller from the two hardwood pieces. Use a 5/16-inch drill to cut a pivot hole in each piece.

Step 4

You will need to carefully align the trigger and the roller so that the roller can only move forward when the trigger is pressed. Use the diagram above to position the roller and trigger inside the slot in the crossbow’s body.

As indicated by the diagram, drill 5/16-inch and 3/16-inch holes in the crossbow body. Insert two 5/16-inch dowels to hold the trigger and roller in place, and two 3/16-inch dowels to act as stoppers.

Step 5

Drill two 3/16-inch holes in the bow (the 30-inch-long dowel), each about ½-inch from one end. Insert the bow into the ½-inch-diameter hole in the crossbow body, until it is centered halfway.

To fix the bow in place, take the remaining 3/16-inch-diameter dowel and sand one side flat (see photo above). Push it into the ½-inch-diameter hole until the sanded dowel holds the bow tightly in place.

Attach the mason twine to the bow, inserting its ends through the holes in the bow and tying it off securely.

Step 6

Make crossbow bolts out of 3-inch-long dowels: Cut a slot on one end for the string to rest, and place a rubber stopper on the other end. Place the blunt end of the bolt against the roller, draw back on the bow string, and place the string against the back end of the bolt.

Test out the tension and adjust the length of the twine accordingly: Too much tension can crack the bow, but too little will reduce the crossbow’s power. You should experiment to find the level of tautness that works best for you.

Finally, take careful aim and press the tickler to fire. As always—be careful, and don’t shoot anyone’s eye out.

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This past December marked the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, when nearly 400 Japanese aircraft attacked the American naval base. In the space of a few hours, the U.S. Pacific fleet was nearly destroyed. And after the assault, America invested heavily in improved anti-aircraft weapons.

Designing anti-aircraft, or ack-ack, guns was difficult. Because airplanes move so fast and have such extreme maneuverability, gunners must shoot at the target’s future position, making the aiming mechanisms quite complex. So America’s new guns were complicated and expensive—but boy, were they effective. The fast-firing autocannons could paint the sky with lead, firing more than 120 anti-aircraft shells per second. On one occasion in 1942, the guns aboard the U.S. battleship South Dakota shot down 32 enemy planes in a half hour.

Bofors on the cover

I designed a fast-firing weapon that conjures up ghosts of the Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns of World War II. Since it’s for home use, I powered it with gas instead of gunpowder and made it shoot mini-marshmallows instead of two-pound lead slugs. And of course, I call this marshmallow ack-ack a “mack-mack” gun.

Made from PVC pipe and fittings, a bicycle tire inflator, and easily obtainable cartridges of compressed carbon dioxide, the mack-mack is cheap, easy to make, and can be assembled in minutes. You may have seen marshmallow guns that use lung-power to shoot single mini-marshmallows, but this high-velocity weapon is far more impressive.

After assembling the PVC pipe and fittings, just as I would for a standard marshmallow gun, I drilled and tapped a single hole in the plastic and attached the bicycle inflator. The inflator releases a burst of compressed gas that’s much more powerful than a puff of breath. I also gave the gun another modification: an ammo tube that can hold seven mini-marshmallows at once.

When I pull the inflator’s trigger, all seven marshmallows fire in a single half-second, shooting out one after another in a glorious fusillade of soft, sugary firepower. Want to build your own mack-mack gun? Check out the instructions below.

Build your own mack-mack

Tools

• Tape measure
• Electric drill
• 7/16-inch bit
• ¼-inch pipe tap and handle *
• Adjustable wrench

* A ¼-inch pipe tap is different than a ¼-inch UNC tap

Materials

All parts are ½-inch diameter, schedule 40 PVC pipe or pipe fittings unless noted otherwise.

• 16-inch-long PVC pipe
• Three 4-inch long PVC pipes
• Two 2-inch long PVC pipes
• PVC coupling fitting
• Two PVC tee fittings
• Two PVC 45-degree elbow fittings
• Three PVC pipe caps
• CO₂-powered bicycle tire inflator with several spare 16 gram CO₂ cartridges *
• Air tank valve, ¼ NPT to Schrader ^†
• Mini-marshmallows

* Try finding these at a bike store or search online for “CO₂ bike pump” or “CO₂ bike tire inflator.”

^† These valves are available at hardware and home stores with reasonably large inventories. You can also find them online by Internet searching for “air tank valve” or “tru-flate valve.” Another alternative is to order from a large supply industrial company like McMaster-Carr.

Instructions

Mack-mack assembly diagram

1. Make a threaded hole in one of the pipe caps so you can attach the tire inflator: First, drill a hole in the center of one of the pipe caps. Now you’ll need to “tap” the hole, or cut screw threads into it. The plastic cuts easily, so you shouldn’t have much trouble with this.
2. Once the hole is tapped, insert the tank valve into the hole and tighten using the adjustable wrench.
3. Assemble the mack-mack as shown in the assembly diagram above. Press fit the pipe pieces into the sockets of the fittings, but do not use PVC cement or primer.
4. Screw the CO₂ bike tire inflator into the Schrader fitting side of the air tank valve.
5. Now the marshmallow shooter is ready to go! In the world of automatic weaponry, burst fire mode means you can fire a predetermined number of projectiles with a single pull of the trigger. Here’s how to use it.
6. Remove the cap from the upward-pointing 4-inch pipe.
7. Insert six or seven mini-marshmallows into the uncapped pipe, making sure they can fall freely into the main gun barrel. If the marshmallows are gooey and stick together, coat them with flour. Replace the cap.
8. Put on safety glasses and choose a target wisely. To shoot, pull the trigger on the bicycle tire inflator and release quickly. Go easy on the trigger—holding it for too long will quickly deplete your CO₂ supply and cause the cartridge to ice over. If that happens, you’ll need to wait until it thaws before you can fire again.
9. The mini-marshmallows will shoot out one after another. Expect to get about six to eight bursts per gas cartridge.

This project is from Ready the Cannons, a new book by Popular Science contributing editor William Gurstelle.

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For the first time in more than two decades, Congress has reached a deal to fund research into gun violence. Given the scope of the problem, the amount of money it appropriated—$25 million—isn’t very much, but researchers hope the historic agreement represents a new commitment to treating gun violence like what it is: a public health problem.

“Honestly, it was a complete shock,” says Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I did not think this was something that the Senate would agree to.”

The $25 million, which is part of a large spending bill, is divided evenly between the Center for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health. Although it’s not yet known how the money will be distributed to researchers, Rebecca Cunningham, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan, says it would be enough “to fund about eight or ten standard size NIH grants.” Those grants usually represent five years of work funded at about $500,000 per year.

From the perspective of public health, $25 million is surprisingly little. Research into motor vehicle crashes, the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, receives $88 million per year in federal funding, according to a recent paper by Cunningham. Cancer research received $355 million annually. Cancer is the third-leading cause of death in this age group. Gun violence is the second-leading cause of child and adolescent death in the United States, and it receives only about $12 million in federal research funding per year.

By contrast, the bill maintained funding for a border wall at $1.37 billion and allocated trillions of dollars to the Department of Defense.

The federal government almost entirely stopped funding gun violence research following 1996’s National Rifle Association-backed Dickey Amendment, which prevents federal funding to the CDC being used to advocate for gun control. Although it doesn’t explicitly prevent funding research into gun violence, it had a massive chilling effect. As a result, 20 years of data that could be shaping the national conversation around gun violence and informing legislation and public health interventions is simply missing.

Cunningham, Webster and others have been using small grants from the National Institute of Health and private foundations to chip away at the knowledge gap. But public health experts say much more needs to be done. Gun violence is a multifaceted problem, and studying it with the aim of decreasing its frequency means studying gun control laws, mass shootings, homicides, suicides, accidental deaths, and other demographic and health factors. It means doing everything from cross-country surveys to longitudinal studies that follow people over many years.

“They are all going to require their own fields of inquiry and their own solutions,” Cunningham says. “If the country is serious about this, it will require a substantial investment over decades.”

Whether the federal government is serious about funding gun violence research on a large scale remains to be seen. If, as Webster hopes, this $25 million represents the first of many injections of federal funding, “researchers will really respond to that,” he says. But a few individual influxes of cash won’t allow the field to advance; ambitious, long term projects need reliable financial support.

Regardless, gun violence researchers in the United States have a long road ahead. With such low funding levels in the last 20 years, academics have largely focused their work elsewhere. The field of firearm research will need to quickly build up its ranks and establish stronger institutional backing. Still, Cunningham says, while the funding itself isn’t substantial, “the signal shift is.”

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On June 30, President Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un on the hermit country’s soil—a first for a sitting American president. The moment also appeared to signal a resumption of high-level negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program.

North Korea is widely considered to have both nuclear warheads (the explosive head of a weapon) and missiles (which deliver the warheads) that can likely reach most corners of the continental U.S. Whether the country can put the two together into a viable nuclear weapon is a bit of an open question—they have yet to show definitely that their missiles can carry a nuclear payload—but it remains a serious international issue.

Using satellite imagery, photos, videos and other intelligence, experts have long tried to keep as close tabs as possible on North Korea’s often-secretive nuclear program. And, as talks over its fate seem poised to continue, here’s a primer on what to know about the country’s capabilities.

Short- to medium-range: meet the Nudong

Presumably, North Korea won’t be dropping nuclear bombs out of an aircraft. So, to know what North Korea is capable of, you need to know what their missiles can do.

The North Korean missile program is generally considered to have begun in the late 1970s or early 80s. At the time, the Soviet Union gave Egypt a stockpile of scud missiles, but not as many as Egypt wanted. So Egypt turned to North Korea to help them decode the technology and make their own scuds— giving both countries access to a supply of reliable missiles.

North Korea has since developed a series of successors that have a range of between 300 and 1,200 kilometers (186 – 746 miles). Also during the Soviet era, North Korea developed an even shorter-range missile known as the KN-02, which can fly about 120 kilometers (75 miles). It’s important to remember that North Korea hasn’t yet shown that any of its weapons can carry a nuclear payload, a fact that is particularly relevant to the KN-02, since its small size requires miniaturized warheads that North Korea may not have the capability to produce.

Once they had scud missiles, North Korea made them bigger and fatter until they arrived at a creation called the “Nodong” — one of its most commonly launched missiles, which can travel up to 1,300 kilometers (808 miles).

More recently, North Korea added a submarine-launched missile to its array. Called the KN-11, it has a Korean name that translates to “Polaris”, which is not-so-coincidentally what the Americans calls its equivalent. One hitch is that North Korea is only known to have one, largely experimental, submarine (and possibly another one underdevelopment).

The country also has what is thought to be a land-based version, the KN-15, though, again, they have never launched a missile and a warhead together.

North Korea’s latest launch came in April. President Trump dismissed it, saying “we don’t consider that a missile test.” Semantics aside, experts believe the country set off a new short-range missile, called the KN-23. Demonstrated only once before, it’s designed for short, low trajectories, can also fly medium-range arcs, and is similar to the Russian Iskander missile, which has a range of between 50 and 450 kilometers (31 and 280 miles)

“This puts US allies like South Korea and Japan in a very difficult position,” Matt Korda, a research associate specializing in North Korea with the Federation of American Scientists, writes via email. “Shorter-range missiles are specifically designed to target those countries.”

The intermediate range: the Musudan and Hwasong-12

North Korea’s early approach to missile development was relatively systematic. “They find something that works, stretch it as far as they can and then stack it,” explains David Schmerler, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Building on the Nodong, North Korea arrived at the Musudan, which has a range of around 3,200 kilometers (1,988 miles). But that program, which began in the early 2000s, has been shaky at best. It’s only been successfully tested once, says Schmerler.

North Korea’s missile testing accelerated around 2014 and peaked in 2017, a period in which they debuted an array of new technology. During this era, the Musudan’s function was largely replaced with the Hwasong-12 (that translates to “Mars” in Korean). The aim, says Korda, “appears to be intended to attack U.S. staging areas like Guam.”

Perhaps more importantly, the Hwasong-12 was the country’s first indigenously engineered missile — a major step for the North Korea’s nuclear program, and one that helped lead to even longer-range weapons.

The big ones: the Hwasong-14 and 15

North Korea’s nuclear ambitions have always included being able to reach the continental U.S.

Starting in the early 2000s, the Western media speculated that the “Unha” (“galaxy”) series of space launch vehicles could be a round-about way of achieving that goal. But many experts thought that was more hype than function.

“The Unha was more like the boogeyman missile,” says Schmerler. “I never looked at the Unha as a really reliable weapons system.”

In a sense, the Unha was a stop-gap measure until Kim Jong-Un could develop a land based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). That happened in 2017 with the Hwasong-14, which has a range of more than 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles). This was quickly followed up by the more powerful Hwasong-15.

“The HS-14 could likely target the west coast of the US (including Los Angeles and possibly Denver),” says Korda, “while the HS-15 could potentially target the entirety of the continental United States.”

While no one is sure exactly how many ICBMs North Korea has, seven appeared in a military parade in Pyongyang in early 2018. There are, however, a few caveats to their effectiveness.

One important consideration is how many launch vehicles (called Transport Erector Launchers, or TELs) North Korea has. In 2011, China sold at least six “logging” trucks to the country, in a half-hearted attempt to disguise the transfer of TELs. The latest ICMBs, however, require bigger TELs, so North Korea may have repurposed or cannibalized some of their original Chinese equipment for that task. That makes it difficult to know exactly how many operational TELs are left, which the country must have in order to launch an ICBM.

Another major unknown is whether North Korea’s ICMBs can survive re-entry into the atmosphere during a strike; an ability that’s not yet been proven. But, Korda says, “just because the North Koreans have yet to publicly demonstrate re-entry, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the ICBMs wouldn’t work as designed.”

Schmerler has a similar take, noting that the U.S. would be taking a big risk by assuming it’s not possible.

“In general, most people are on board with the idea that [North Korea] could hit most of the continental US,” he says. “Are you going to hedge on [them] not being able to make re-entry?”

Still, there’s much we don’t know about the opaque program. For example, the exact number of nuclear weapons North Korea has is also unclear (estimates put the arsenal between about 20 and 60 warheads).

Where they’re located is an unknown as well. “The missiles and launchers are largely hidden in the vast network of underground tunnels and caves that flow throughout North Korea,” says Korda. ”It’s basically impossible to tell where North Korean missiles are at any given time.”

Schmerler estimates that there are about 20 or so nodes around the country where missiles are concentrated. “When they get the order to go launch,” he said, “they just disperse.”

If North Korea can indeed marry its warheads to its missiles, it could create a bomb 15 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Once fired, a North Korean ICBM could reach Alaska in as little as 29 minutes.

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Could Lyme disease in the U.S. be the result of an accidental release from a secret bioweapons experiment? Could the military have specifically engineered the Lyme disease bacterium to be more insidious and destructive—and then let it somehow escape the lab and spread into nature?

Is this why 300,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with this potentially debilitating disease?

It’s an old conspiracy theory currently enjoying a resurgence with lots of sensational headlinesand tweets. Congress has even ordered that the Pentagon must reveal whether it weaponized ticks.

And it’s not true.

Ticks can indeed carry infectious agents that could be used as biological weapons. Military research has long focused on ticks. Sites around Long Island Sound, near the military’s Plum Island research lab, were some of the first places where the American Lyme disease epidemic was identified.

But there was no release of the Lyme disease agent or any other disease vector onto American soil, accidental or otherwise, by the military.

I started working on Lyme disease in 1985. As part of my doctoral thesis, I investigated whether museum specimens of ticks and mice contained evidence of infection with the bacterial agent of Lyme disease prior to the first known American human cases in the mid 1970s.

Working with microbiologist David Persing, we found that ticks from the South Fork of Long Island collected in 1945 were infected. Subsequent studies found that mice from Cape Cod, collected in 1896, were infected.

So decades before Lyme was identified—and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it—the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild. That alone is proof that the conspiracy theory is wrong. But there are plenty of other lines of evidence that show why Lyme disease did not require a human hand to change something Mother Nature had nurtured.

Lyme is an unlikely bioweapon

I teach a graduate course in biodefense. Biowarfare, the use of biological agents to cause harm, was once an interest of the U.S. military and that of many other countries.

One of the most important characteristics of a biowarfare agent is its ability to quickly disable target soldiers. The bacteria that cause Lyme disease are not in this category.

Many of the agents that biowarfare research has focused on are transmitted by ticks, mosquitoes, or other arthropods: plague, tularemia, Q fever, Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, Eastern equine encephalitis or Russian spring summer encephalitis. In all of them, the early disease is very debilitating, and the fatality rate can be great; 30% of Eastern equine encephalitis victims die. Epidemic typhus killed 3 million people during World War I.

Lyme disease does make some people very sick, but many have just a flu-like illness that their immune system fends off. Untreated cases may subsequently develop arthritis or neurological issues. The disease is rarely lethal. Lyme has a weeklong incubation period—too slow for an effective bioweapon.

And, even though European physicians had described cases of Lyme disease in the first half of the 20th century, the cause had not been identified. There was no way the military could have manipulated it because they did not know what “it” was. None of us knew—until 1981, when the late Willy Burgdorfer, a medical entomologist, made his serendipitous discovery.

Burgdorfer’s discovery of the Lyme bacterium

Burgdorfer had done his graduate studies in Switzerland in the late 1940s, investigating the biology of tick-borne relapsing fever, a bacterial disease that can spread from animals to people. During the course of that work, he developed new methods to detect infection in ticks and to infect ticks with specific doses of a pathogen. Those methods are still used today by people like me.

Eventually, Burgdorfer moved to the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, an outpost of the U.S. Public Health Service and National Institutes of Health – at the time, the world center for tick research.

Burgdorfer’s unique expertise was studying how microbial agents were adapted to the internal tissues of their tick hosts, using experimental infections and microscopy. Until Lyme disease came along, his reputation was as the world’s expert on the life cycle of Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF).

It was RMSF that led Burgdorfer to the cause of Lyme disease. He had been working to better understand RMSF on Long Island in New York. Why were dog ticks, the acknowledged vector, uninfected even in areas where people were getting sick? He knew that a new tick, the deer tick, had recently become common on Long Island and been incriminated as a disease vector.

So Burgdorfer asked his colleague Jorge Benach at Stony Brook University for some deer ticks to test for the presence of RMSF bacteria. Benach happened to have some from nearby Shelter Island that he sent along.

In testing the “blood” of the deer ticks, Burgdorfer did not find RMSF bacteria. But he did find spiral-shaped bacteria called spirochetes. The spirochetes were very similar to what he had studied as a graduate student: the cause of relapsing fever. If spirochetes caused relapsing fever, perhaps other spirochetes were responsible for the mysterious new Lyme arthritis for which a cause was not known.

This ah-ha moment led to the landmark 1982 paper in Science with a question for a title: “Lyme disease – a tick-borne spirochetosis?“

Conspiracy theory can’t account for the facts

Some have overanalyzed the fact that Lyme disease spirochetes were first found in ticks from New York’s Shelter Island, right next to Plum Island, an isolated facility used as a military research lab until 1954.

But it was just a coincidence that Benach’s Shelter Island ticks were the ones in which Burgdorfer made his serendipitous finding. By 1984, once researchers knew what to look for, Lyme disease spirochetes were found in ticks from coastal Connecticut, New Jersey, and even California.

But let’s pretend the military started working immediately on the newly found agent of Lyme disease in 1981. That’s long after Fort Terry on Plum Island was repurposed in 1954 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study exotic animal diseases. It’s also after President Richard Nixon outlawed biowarfare research in 1969. If the bacteria was manipulated, it had to have been done after 1981—so the conspiracy theory’s timeline just doesn’t work.

The real nail in the coffin for the idea that Lyme disease in the U.S. was somehow accidentally released from military bioweapons research is the fact that the first American case of Lyme disease turns out not to have been from Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the early 1970s. In 1969, a physician identified a case in Spooner, Wisconsin, in a patient who had never traveled out of that area. And Lyme disease was found infecting people in 1978 in northern California.

How could an accidental release take place over three distant locations? It couldn’t.

Population genetics research on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent of Lyme disease, suggest that the northeastern, Midwestern and Californian bacteria are separated by geographical barriers that prevent these populations from mixing. Had there been a lab strain, particularly one engineered to be more transmissible, that escaped within the last 50 years, there would be greater genetic similarity between these three geographic populations. There is no evidence for a recent single source—such as a release from a lab—for Lyme disease spirochetes.

The real reasons for the epidemic becoming so burdensome include reforestation, suburbanization and a failure to manage deer herds.

Conspiracy thinkers make much of the military’s interest in tick-borne infections and how it influenced top researchers. Until Lyme disease came along, the number of tick laboratories in the world could be counted on both hands. As an acknowledged expert on ticks and the infections they transmit, it’s surely possible that Willy Burgdorfer received funding from the military, undertook studies for them, or was consulted by them. They were one of the few sources of research funds for tick projects in the period from 1950 to 1980. The overarching goal of such applied work would have been understanding the tick-related risks American soldiers faced while deployed, and how to protect them.

That Burgdorfer alluded to biowarfare or biodefense programs in interviews toward the end of his life should not be construed as an admission of participation in top-secret work. I met Burgdorfer several times and was struck by his wry sense of humor. It’s my guess that his hints that there was a bigger story to what he did for the military was a prankster’s way to toy with the interviewer.

As someone who has worked for more than three decades to understand the epidemiology and ecology of Lyme disease in order to reduce the risk of Americans getting infected, I am appalled that this conspiracy theory is taken so seriously that Congress is now involved. The idea that Lyme disease is due to bioweapons research gone wrong is easily disproven. Our legislators could better spend their time fighting for efforts to prevent disease instead of investigating a far-fetched story that’s based on misinterpretation and innuendo.

Sam Telford is a Professor of Infectious Disease and Global Health, Tufts University. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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The heavyweight torpedoes launched by submarines are secret, unseen, mysterious. Their universe: the dark silence of deep oceans. Their purpose: to destroy enemy subs and surface warships. Their use: only once every 80 years or so.

The weapon is more likely to sit in its launching tube for 30 or 35 years—that’s the average life-span of a heavyweight torpedo—and then be dismantled, than it is to be shot at an enemy. That makes the delivery of a brand new, designed-from-scratch, heavyweight torpedo notable. And in this case, its makers boast that it is “the most advanced torpedo on the market.”

The F21, designed and manufactured by France’s Naval Group, has been years in the making. The Naval Group finally delivered the first six of 93 to the French Navy in late November 2019. An unspecified number were then delivered in early January 2020 to the Brazilian Navy, which is replacing its Mark 48 torpedoes with the F21.

Torpedoes, which are basically underwater missiles, are classified as either heavyweight or lightweight. Heavyweights, delivered generally by submarines—but sometimes by surface warships—are designed to sink or cripple enemy submarines and warships. They carry an explosive charge of about 660 pounds and travel at high speed towards the target either by themselves or guided by a wire that trails behind and attaches it to the submarine. Lightweight torpedoes, deployed by aircraft close to their target, cannot be wire-guided, carry only about 90 pounds of explosives, and are just used against submarines.

Examples of torpedo use are few and far between. The British submarine Conqueror torpedoed the Argentine warship General Belgrano on May 2, 1982, during the Falklands War; it sank, killing 323 of the 1,095 people aboard. They used the Mark VIII torpedo, which has been in service since 1927! And on March 26, 2010, the South Korean Navy’s ROKS Cheonan was hit by a torpedo that some investigations concluded was fired by a North Korean midget submarine. Forty-six of the 104 people aboard were killed.

“A torpedo is not as beautiful as a submarine,” remarks Alain Guillou, senior executive vice president in charge of development at Naval Group. “But the level of complexity to develop these weapons is extremely high, which explains, even if it does not excuse, the difficulties we have encountered in recent years to finalize its development.” The F21 was originally scheduled to be operational in 2016, eight years after development work on it began.

Three things make this torpedo special: its safety, range, and intelligence.

When it comes to safety, the battery “really makes the difference,” Patrice Pyra, sales director at the Naval Group’s underwater systems business unit, or BU ASM, tells Popular Science. The first requirement is that the torpedo does not accidentally explode, as happened aboard the Russian submarine Kursk on August 12, 2000, killing all 118 aboard. So one of the design requirements was that the F21 be extremely safe—with zero risk of an accidental launch or explosion.

Saft, which designs and manufactures advanced technology batteries for industry, specifically developed a silver oxide-aluminum electric battery that can only be activated by sea-water (which should be absent in the submarine, of course) so the torpedo is totally inert while inside. At the same time this battery provides twice as much energy and power as a conventional silver zinc battery, and is still the same mass and volume as its predecessor, so that the torpedo can fit into legacy launch tubes on the French Navy’s nuclear-powered Rubis-, Barracuda– and Le Terrible-class submarines.

The US, UK, Sweden and Russia use thermal batteries as the energy source for their torpedoes. These batteries “have an advantage in terms of power,” according to Jean-Martin Hepp, BU ASM marketing manager—but need an internal heat source to work and generate heat during operation, making their use “much more risky.” The torpedo becomes more detectable to an enemy using infrared sensors. They are also noisier. “The difference in noise is like the one between a petrol-powered car engine and an electric car engine,” explains Hepp.

A piston pushes the nearly 20-foot-long, 21-inch-diameter, 1.2-ton torpedo out of its launcher tube. An auxiliary battery takes the torpedo beyond a security zone around the submarine. A valve in the torpedo then opens, allowing seawater to reach the main battery and activate it. This provides power to the two propellers, which project the torpedo through the water at a speed of 50 knots to reach a target that can be up to 31 miles away.

The F21 travels double the distance any other torpedo can travel, in depths ranging from 50 to 1,640 feet. It can be discreetly guided all the way from the submarine via a fiber-optic wire (allowing for communication between the weapon and sub), many miles of which are unwound from inside the torpedo while the rest is unwound from the submarine. But the torpedo can also use its in-built acoustic homing device to detect and pursue its target by itself. In this mode and in shallow waters other sounds can confuse the torpedo—so the noises are treated digitally with the same type of processing as is used in modern sonars. “We did a lot of work on this acoustic part,” Hepp explains.

Once it has reached its target, the torpedo uses an all-electric fuse based on “slapper” detonation technology, also used by some missiles. The way it works is that a very high-speed solid flyer disc interacts with a high-density pellet of pressed explosive and the slap from this flyer disc detonates the explosive pellet. Naval Group considered this system to be more stable and safer than the conventional electro-mechanical detonation systems, found in most torpedoes.

The warhead contains an explosive known as PBX B2211. The “PBX” part means that the explosive is bound using 5-10 percent of a synthetic rubber so that it absorbs shock and is very unlikely to detonate accidentally, a crucial part of keeping it safe.

As for intelligence: the F21 carries a sonar, which are its eyes and ears. The data gathered is then processed by the tracking management system. “This is where we find the really disruptive technology,” Hepp says. When wire-guided, it allows an operator to see and hear what the F21 is seeing and hearing. But it also allows the F21 to analyze the tactical situation by itself. It can distinguish between a decoy and a real vessel, it can recognize a civilian or friendly ship among a fleet of enemies, and it can avoid all known counter-measures. “When your weapon is operating 30 miles away you have to have confidence in its capabilities,” Hepp remarks.

In comparison, the US Navy is still using the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo designed in the late 1960s. It’s been in service since 1972. A new version, the Mark 48 Mod 4 or ADCAP, was last delivered in 1996—almost a quarter of a century ago. “Since then, the Navy has provided discrete improvements to the torpedo’s guidance and control and propulsion systems,” according to the US Navy’s Fact File.

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In 2015, more than 1,100 young people died by suicide or by accident because of a gun. New research suggests that almost one-third of those deaths could be prevented by simply locking up guns in the home.

“The take-home message from the findings of the study is that even a relatively modest increase in the practice of safe storage by parents could result in substantial reductions in firearm suicides and unintentional fatalities among youth,” says Michael Monuteaux, a Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics and epidemiologist who is the first author of the new study.

Their findings also suggest that both doctors and public health authorities need to do a better job of conveying that safe gun storage means safer kids, he says.

To do the study, the Harvard team used CDC gun death data from 2015, one of the few sources of information on gun violence available from the United States government. The CDC is limited in its ability to collect data on gun violence by the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which states that no government funding for injury prevention can be used to “advocate for gun control.” This broadly framed statement has had a chilling effect on all federal firearms research ever since it came into force.

They compared that data with a model that estimated how many deaths would have occurred if a single variable was different—if parents followed basic gun storage safety procedures. “We took the number that was actually observed in [2015], and then we estimated the number that would have occurred if more parents had stored guns safely, and then compared them,” says Monuteaux.

To make that estimate, the researchers designed a model based on the only existing American case study to specifically look at the effect gun storage has on young people, which is from 2005. Using that study’s conclusions on how effective gun storage can be, they estimated how many fewer injuries and deaths by suicide or accident in youths would have occurred in 2015, had more parents followed safe gun storage procedures.

They ran the simulation more than a thousand times in order to get a sense of the range of protectiveness that would be offered by different levels of buy-in from parents, finding that between six and 32 percent of accidental deaths and deaths by gun suicide could be prevented if more houses stored their guns locked.

To break that down differently, if at least 20 percent of homes that store guns unlocked started storing their guns locked, between 72 and 135 youth deaths could be prevented. Additionally, between 235 and 323 shootings of young people in total could be avoided.

But “it’s not actually that common, even for people living in houses with children, to keep guns secured,” says Elinore Kaufman, a fellow in critical care and trauma surgery at Penn who was not involved with the study but has written extensively on gun violence. Studies suggest that only three in ten gun-owning households follow safe gun storage procedures.

This study demonstrates that a simple step—encouraging people to store guns safely—could have a big impact in the number of young lives lost to gun violence, Kaufman says.

It’s also the kind of thing researchers can get behind. “All of the different policies that are out there, most of them, we don’t know whether they’re going to work,” she says. “We are in serious need of better evidence to help not only researchers, but also policymakers find solutions that will actually work.”

Some of the research questions that would demonstrate what actually works can be studied in the real world, she says, but on something like this, a computer model can help demonstrate what kinds of public health interventions might actually make a difference. On an issue as divisive as any kind of gun control in America, it also points to a simple step that few could take issue with. “This is the kind of intervention that most Americans support,” Kaufman says.

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Every year, a handful of the wet weather events in the tropics swell into hurricanes. These monster storms crash into coastlines and can inflict billions of dollars of damage, earning their reputation as some of nature’s scariest disasters. They have the potential to kill thousands and wreak ongoing environmental and economic chaos. So why not try to hit them before they hit us?

Since the dawn of nuclear explosives, citizens and scientists alike have speculated that the government might be able to repurpose weapons of war as weapons of weather. Most recently, President Donald Trump asked why we couldn’t just nuke hurricanes out of the sky. Meteorologists are wincing at the reappearance of this all-too-familiar myth.

“It doesn’t make sense at all,” says Falko Judt, a meteorologist who specializes in hurricanes at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“It is a spectacularly bad idea,” says Gary Lackmann, a meteorologist and professor at North Carolina State University’s department of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences.

Okay, so the concept inspires the meteorological equivalent of a massive eye-roll. But why is the idea of nuking a hurricane such a dud—and what explains the myth’s longevity?

First, a refresher on hurricanes, AKA tropical cyclones. They’re among the most powerful storms on the planet, and with good reason: They harness the heat of Earth’s oceans and turn it into whirling tempests. Hurricanes are fueled by warm ocean water (at least 80°F throughout) and usually develop over tropical seas. They take place when a weather disturbance, like a thunderstorm, literally spirals out of control. The storm’s winds pull warm air toward it. As it interacts with warm sea water, the water evaporates and starts to rise. Clouds form above, and more air rushes into the low-pressure zone created below. Soon, the swirling mass gains momentum and begins to move, dragging water along with it and growing larger and larger until it hits land. It’s the weather equivalent of a steam engine that converts water into mechanical work.

The results can be terrifying. The low-pressure systems whip up winds and shove water toward the shore, where torrential rains and gales of wind crash into beaches, landscapes and people. Severe flooding, property damage, and loss of life follow.

We know hurricanes need warm ocean temperatures to get going. But how can you get them to slow down? That’s hard, Judt explains. To really stop a hurricane from forming, he says, you’d need to cool down the ocean, suck the humidity from the air, or blow strong winds against the grain of the storm. And the jury is still out on what really causes smaller storms to turn into hurricanes. Some smaller disturbances can peter out, but others get out of control quickly. The factors that tip the balance either way aren’t entirely clear. “We’re not really sure yet,” he says. “About 90 percent of precursor disturbances do not become hurricanes.”

Storm modeling has become more and more advanced over the years, and the dynamics occurring inside storms are being demystified by data-gathering daredevils who fly planes directly into their centers. But there’s still a way to go, says Judt, and many questions about storm dynamics and formation remain unanswered. Without knowing exactly what factors lead to runaway growth, it’s difficult to know exactly what methods might stunt a would-be hurricane’s development.

But Judt’s list of potential hurricane busters doesn’t include nukes, because nuclear weapons are puny compared to nature’s wrath. If you nuked a hurricane, he explains, the resulting shockwave would do nothing to disrupt the storm. “A nuclear weapon is very powerful, but it’s not nearly as powerful as the hurricane itself,” he says.

That’s an understatement. The massive energy inside a hurricane is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes, he says. During its brief lifespan, a single hurricane generates wind energy equivalent to half of the energy consumed by the entire population of Earth in one year. The energy it releases in the form of clouds and rain is the equivalent of 200 times world’s energy-generating capacity. It would simply take too many nuclear bombs to defang a storm, says Judt—and more than likely, the cyclone would just turn from a spiraling menace to a nuclear spiraling menace.

That hasn’t kept scientists from giving it serious consideration. During Project Plowshare, a program designed to test peaceful uses for nuclear explosives beginning in the 1950s, the U.S. detonated 35 warheads in the hope they could help with everything from mining to, yes, weather control.

Jack Reed, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, ran with the concept of halting a hurricane with a nuclear weapon in 1959. At the time, it was still unclear just how powerful a punch these storms could pack, and Reed was convinced that nuke-shooting submarines could reduce wind speed enough to kill the circulation that pushes storms ashore.

But though he called for a test of the concept, writes historian Vince Houghton, “Not a single person with any kind of authority was willing to even entertain the idea of nuking hurricanes. Later in life, Jack Reed bitterly chalked this up to his idea being ‘politically incorrect.'”

The incorrectness of the idea isn’t just a function of public mistrust of nuclear weapons. “Spreading around a bunch of radioactive contamination for no real reason doesn’t seem like a good idea to me,” says Edward Waller, a professor at the Ontario Tech Energy Systems and Nuclear Science Research Center who studies nuclear emergency preparedness and response.

Though it’s unclear just how much material a nuclear hurricane could spread, says Waller, it’s not something anyone should be prepared to risk. In the nuclear world, he explains, there’s a concept called “ALARA,” or “as low as reasonably achievable,” that calls for people to use as little radiation as possible in the name of protecting as many people as possible.

“There are justifications for using radiation all the time,” he says. “But if a task or if a process can be done without using radiation, you don’t [use radiation].” And if the laws of physics make it extremely unlikely that a nuclear warhead will circumvent a deadly storm, you don’t shoot one into the sky. Since the idea strikes storm experts as preposterous, there has been little ink spilled on how exactly a nuke-icane would play out as it hit land. But it’s easy to envision the potential outcomes. “Can you imagine radioactive rain from a nuclear hurricane?” asks Lackmann.

People who lived in Europe in 1986 don’t have to. That’s when the Chernobyl disaster belched a cloud of radioactive contamination that dispersed across virtually the entire continent. Areas that experienced rainfall during the disaster saw higher deposits of radioactive contamination, and people as far as Asia and North America were dosed with fallout, too. However, the health effects were mostly endured by those who were close to the reactor when it melted down.

Depending on where a hypothetical hurricane attack took place, some of the contamination might not hit land. But even if the rainfallout didn’t bring severe harm, says Waller, it could hurt people anyway. “It would be putting undue stress on the population,” he says. Large-scale evacuations could put lives at risk through accidents or leave vulnerable populations uncared for—and the sheer stress of worrying about the unknown effects of hurricane nukes could cause additional health problems.

People who live through hurricanes are already at risk for depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and those who are evacuated during natural disasters experience emotional and mental impacts, even when their homes don’t end up getting destroyed. After the hasty evacuation of people from the area near the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011, for example, more than 1,000 people died, and displaced locals experienced a range of health problems due to the disruption.

Bottom line: The suggestion that scientists turn weather into war is past its expiration date. But thanks to the scary possibilities presented by the world’s ever-more-modern nuclear arsenal, it’s doubtful the cry to nuke clouds will die down any time soon.

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