At 09:54 AM 8/12/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

(And I'm not ignorant of such technologies, having attended several of the Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conferences. I also played around with this as a minor plot element in a novel I was working on several years ago, namely, a character killed in Los Alamos when the Electronic Engine Control circuitry of his BMW was zapped while on a mountain road. This, by the way, is a "side effect" of widely deploying such EM cannon technologies--people using them on twisty mountain roads. I can think of some places near Big Sur and around Devil's Slide where such a gizmo would produce real interesting effects!)

Why would you need an "EM Cannon" for this? Just string a 1-car-sized loop of wire on the surface of a road, and off in the bushes hide a battery, DC-to-Hi voltage DC converter and 20kv+ capacitor, and a vacuum switch or some other switch arrangement. When the car in question traverses the loop, short the switch and the car will be blasted with 20,000 volt-turns of induction. Sure, most of it will pass harmlessly through the car's steel, but even iron has a limited "mu" which means that every electrical device in the car will be subjected to a certain amount of induced EMF, probably enough to at least reset a few microprocessors and possibly even destroy them. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com