WWI Mine-Mashers to Iraq

The armed services are spending billions and billions to figure out fancy new ways to stop improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. But the latest trick is an oldie -- dating back to World War I -- and couldn't be less high tech.

The contraptions are called mine rollers -- sets of wheels mounted in front of a vehicle, basically. When they roll over a mine or a pressure-activated IED, the wheels trigger the bomb. Because the vehicle is some distance behind the rollers, much of the bomb blast wave does not reach the vehicle, dramatically reducing the damage. And the vehicle lives to see another day. The Marine Corps just bought 150 sets from General Dynamics, according to Defense Industry Daily.

This idea sounds glaringly obvious. So you might wonder why it took the military more than 3 years to put the rollers up. In fact, the idea of a mine roller originated in 1918, to help nascent tanks deal with the anti-tank mines of that era. Many of the earliest IEDs in Iraq were built with anti-tank mines. Why didn't anybody in the Army Engineer School, for instance, make the connection?

Chalk some of it up to military bureaucracy. When it comes to mine-clearance, combat engineers and explosive ordnance disposal techs sometimes have overlapping lines of responsibility. (Which helps fuel an often-bitter rivalry.) At times, who exactly is supposed to develop bomb- and mine-fighting gear has been a blurry question, as well. The Counter-IED Task Force is now supposed to be in charge. But we'll see.

There are several legitimate concerns with the mine rollers that I am not going to mention here. However, my answer to these concerns are: If the insurgents do that, it would make their IEDs more detectable. Moreover, the standoff will interfere with aiming.

A friend and I were working on a similar concept, a Humvee roller attachment. However, we could not find a machinist to build our prototype. Now that I am deployed, we could not continue our commercial venture. One feature of our design was that it was telescoping, meaning that we can vary the distance of the rollers to the vehicle. We can change the distance to respond to changes in IED tactics. Maybe General Dynamics will incorporate the feature into their next run of mine rollers, too.

-- Jimmy Wu

Vintage Looks at Future Wars

Oooh oooh. Just when I thought I had hit the retro-futuro motherlode, along comes Tales of Future Past.

The site has a ton of vintage looks at tomorrow, including classic magazine stories of inflatoplanes, hovering Oldsmobiles, and kitchen computers.

But the stuff that'll get Defense Techies riled up is in the Future War section. Land battleships, anyone? (Note the farmhouse, about to be crushed.) Jumping jack artillery tower? Gyro destroyer? (Think Ferris Wheel, with guns, and you've got the right idea.)

"Predictions about the future seem to have a paradoxical quality about them. On the one hand, you see all sorts of articles and images showing a prosperous, peaceful people enjoying complex and interesting lives with all sorts of wonderful gadgets. On the other hand, you find gleeful descriptions of the most incredible means of wielding death that an adolescent mind can conjure," David Zondy, the site's founder, notes. "Come to think of it, that ended up being not very far from the truth. The late 20th century saw the West, and many parts of the rest of the world, enjoying incredible levels of prosperity with some of the most wonderful technological toys ever made, yet at the same time the entire world had a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over its head."

UPDATE 10:25 AM: Modern Mechanix just posted the full text of a 1934 story, "Is Aerial Warfare Doomed?"

(Big ups: Chris)

"Yesterday's Tomorrow, Today"

I have a new favorite blog. Modern Mechanix combs through old science magazines to pick out some of the goofier retro visions of the future. (There are some seriously awesome ads, too.)

Behold the baby-sized gas mask, the real-life hair helmet, and the magic house that makes its own weather.

The site (motto: "Yesterday's tomorrow, today") is good for more than just a laugh, though. It also serves as a reminder to those of us writing about technology that the gear you fall in love with today could be the stuff you ridicule tomorrow.

Big Bucks for Giant Blimp

I can't figure it out, honestly, what's behind this blimp fetish of mine. Maybe it's because I dig retro visions of the techno-future -- from pneumatic subways to mobile homes on the Moon; blimps somehow feed into that. Maybe it's the idea of being lighter than air that grabs me.

Either way, I'm not alone. There are a bunch of other people in the Defense Department who share my obsession. And they are handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new fleet of military airships.

The latest, Defense Industry Daily tells us: a $149 million contract to Lockheed, to build a massive High Altitude Airship that will look out for ballistic missile launches.

The blimp will hover above the jet stream at an altitude of 65,000 feet for months at a time and will also have the ability to detect low-flying missiles that may have slipped underneath ground-based radars. Once operational, it will be an important early-detection element of the broader U.S. missile defense architecture. It may also add as a weather surveyor and telecom relay.

There are a number of challenges associated with an effort of this nature.

Solar cells and an advanced fuel cells that can deliver up to 500 kW must be developed to power the craft. An aerodynamic design and a control system must be developed to help keep the airship steady amid the high winds at that altitude, without consuming excessive power. Another important factor is determining how the airship would react to changing temperatures as the sun rises and sets every day, heating and cooling the helium. Then there's the major challenge of finding materials for the airship's skin that are capable of withstanding the extreme ultraviolet radiation at such high altitudes for extended periods without becoming brittle.

But this HAA is actually a little less ambitious than earlier designs. Before, the airship was supposed to be King Kong big, at 25 times the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Now, it's merely huge, at two-and-a-half Goodyears in length. Plans to power the airship with lasers seem to have also fallen by the wayside, for now.

If everything goes well, a prototype HAA should be ready to fly in 2010. I can't wait.

UPDATE 5:23PM: Via the Wonk, here's a presentation on "Advanced Concepts in Missile Defense." The HAA is in there, as well as a program for one interceptor with "multiple kill vehicles."

Retro-nukes

Dr. Arms Control Wonk here. Noah's running around today, so I've hijacked the blog for moment.

Retro fashions don't usually appeal to nuclear weapons designers, save for the odd Members Only jacket you spot on some poor refugee from the 1980s

So you might be surprised to find that uranium -- which fell out of favor with US nuclear weaponeers in the 1950s -- may be the hip Fall fashion in certain New Mexican locales.

Over at my blog, I've started a discussion about a story John Fleck broke in the subscription only Albuquerque Journal.

Bob Peurifoy, a retired Sandia executive, favors dumping plutonium weapons in favor of low-tech uranium designs. Actually, Peurifoy prefers the current US arsenal, but Congress says the weapons labs should relax Cold War design requirements to build new warheads that are more reliable and require less toxic industrial processes.

In that case, Peurifoy says, you can't do better than Uranium 235, which isn't nearly as expensive, toxic or fickle as plutonium.

Although a simpe uranium device (above, right) would produce a relatively small yield -- on the order of tens of kilotons -- dropping one on Kim Jong Il's Pleasure Palace would still ruin his day.

(Special Retro Bonus: Click here for a retro shot of former Sandia, and perhaps future Los Alamos, Director C. Paul Robinson).

Bat Bombs Away!

Now I know why they call 'em the Greatest Generation. What other group would have the moxie to turn bats into trained bomb-droppers?

The idea behind World War II's Project X-Ray "was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area," says Murdoc Online. "The bats would be in a sort of hibernation, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a parachute) they would warm up and awaken."

At the appropriate altitude, the bomb would open and over one thousand bats, each carrying a tiny time-delay napalm incendiary device, would flutter away and roost in various nooks and crannies, many of them in extremely flammable wooden Japanese buildings.

The napalm devices would go off more or less simultaneously, and thousands of little fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the ability of the Japanese firefighters to contain them would quickly be overwhelmed...

Seems to me, as outrageous as it sounds, that it could have worked... In fact, one afternoon while demonstrating the napalm devices, several bats woke too early in the lab, flew off, and ended up burning down the brand-new but uninhabited Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico. Really.

Of course, this is the era of warrior-thinkers that came up will all sorts of so-crazy-it-might -just-work schemes -- items like paper bombs, plague-filled subs, and aircraft carriers made of ice.

The October 1990 edition of Air Force magazine has a hilariously detailed rundown of the whole bat bomb episode. And Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman covers all sorts of WWII-era military research follies in his book Laboratory Warriors: How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II.

THERE'S MORE: "Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it," snarks Joel.

WWII PLAGUE SUB FOUND

St. Patrick's Day was just supposed to be another day of routine training for undersea researchers at the University of Hawaii. But then, they found something extraordinary 870 meters down, off of Barbers Point, Oahu: a mammoth, World War II-era Japanese sub, meant for biological combat.

The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled...

An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.

When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the mission reportedly was changed to bomb the Panama Canal. Both submarines were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor and were deliberately sunk later, partly because Russian scientists were demanding access to them.

"It is not the first World War II-era 'monster' that the HURL [Hawaii Undersea Research Lab] scientists have found," notes the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. "Last year, off Pearl Harbor, they located the wreck of the gigantic seaplane Marshall Mars, one of the largest aircraft built and used as a transport plane by the U.S. Navy. Two years earlier in the same area, the HURL crew also found the wreckage of a Japanese midget sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941." (via Boing Boing)

"RATS, BUGS, BOYS" REDUX

It's been nearly two weeks since Defense Tech highlighted a series of rather silly Pentagon schemes to fluster enemy soldiers by harassing them with rats, stinging bees, and men in heat. And, since then, the international press has been having a big ol' belly laugh with the so-called "gay sex bomb."

One man isn't smiling, however. That would be Edward Hammond, the bioweapons researcher at the Sunshine Project who, uh, turned me on to the proposed "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals." He says that Pentagon spokesmen fibbed when they claimed that the ideas in the document were "rejected out of hand."

* In 2000, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) prepared a promotional CD-ROM on its work. This CD-ROM, which was distributed to other US military and government agencies in an effort to spur further development of "non-lethal" weapons, contained the "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals" document. If the proposal had been rejected out of hand and not taken seriously, it would not have been placed in JNLWD's publication.

* Similarly, in 2001, JNLWD commissioned a study of "non-lethal" weapons by the National Academies of Science (NAS). JNLWD provided information on proposed weapons systems for assessment by an NAS scientific panel. Among the proposals that JNLWD submitted to the NAS for consideration by the nation's pre-eminent scientific advisory organization was "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals".

Thus, the Pentagon's statements (as quoted in news reports) are inaccurate and should be corrected.

BROADWAY'S SECRET TRAIN

There are a zillion reasons why New York is the City with a big "C," and everyone else lives in the land of the lowercase. But right up there at the top of the list is our sprawling subway, the central nervous system of this town. And it turns 100 today.

Like every grand project, there are lots of stories behind its building. But my favorite has to be the one about the secret train which ran under Broadway.

Back in the 1860's, New York had become beyond overcrowded, quadrupling its population in just 40 years. Something had to be done to ease the city's traffic woes. But Boss Tweed, the City's unchallenged ruler at the time, had his hand in the trolley business, and wouldn't let alternatives flower.

So Alfred Beach – the editor and co-owner of Scientific American – decided to build a subway in secret. He had a license to build a mail delivery system under Broadway using pneumatics, or compressed-air. But Beach expanded those tubes many times over, so they could carry people in air-powered trains.

The idea was to make an underground railway so grand, that even Tweed could not resist the public pressure for it. And the scheme almost worked. Unveiled in 1870, Beach's subway was, by all accounts, a smooth, quiet ride. And it was ornate – chandeliers adorned the ceiling of the demonstration terminal. In the middle sat a grand piano.

The press went ga-ga over Beach's railway. 400,000 people paid a quarter to make the one-block trip in the first year the train was open. New York's Senate and Assembly passed bills authorizing Beach to build a Manhattan-long pneumatic subway.

But Tweed, as usual, had the last laugh. Governor John Hoffman, his puppet, vetoed the subway bill. Beach's dream died that day in Albany. It'd take another thirty years before New York would start digging.

WORLD WAR II'S PAPER BOMB ATTACK

It's one of World War II's oddest, and least-known stories: In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese sent a fleet of hydrogen-filled, paper balloons across the jet stream to strike North America. And it worked.

Out of the 9,000 handmade incendiaries sent, 1,000 eventually landed here. And not just along the West Coast , but as far east as suburban Detroit.

Slate (via /.) reviews the tale, gives a warning or two about censorship, and provides a few links.

THERE'S MORE: "In my research for Terrors And Marvels: How Science
And Technology Changed The Character And Outcome Of World War II, I came across an original photo, in the FDR Library at Hyde Park, of one of the paper balloon bombs, tethered on a base in Montana," Defense Tech dad Tom Shachtman writes.

The photo was there because it had crossed the president's desk, and it had clearly alarmed him and his aides. (It is reproduced in the book.) In general the balloons did very little harm, though, no more than isolated lightning strikes might have done, and their landing sites were less predictable than lightning strikes.

The Canadian government did ready a plane full of peat moss that they could impregnate with bubonic plague, for retaliation on Japan in case one of the paper balloon bombs did contain biological, disease-causing agents. In withholding information on the balloons from the public until American and Canadian scientists could determine the make-up of the payloads, the censorship served its basic purposes: to prevent panic in the general public, and also to prevent trigger-happy people in the military from sending peat-bombs in return.

SWINGING 60'S DRONE OVER IRAQ

Sure, the Pentagon's latest and greatest drones were there. But Gulf War II also saw the remergence of an unmanned plane that got its start nearly four decades ago, Defense Tech pal CW notes.

"Vietnam-era Firebee drones [flew] over Baghdad to drop radar-jamming chaff and, until they ran out of fuel, to circle the city as decoys to draw anti-aircraft fire away from coalition strike aircraft."

Jim Pinkerton described the drone last year in the Houston Chronicle:

Called the "Ryan Firebee" after its inventor, the drone is 23 feet long with a wingspan of 12 feet. A J-2 jet engine, the same type used in small trainers, powers the Firebee, giving it a range of more than 300 miles. According to the crew, the five drones are the only ones of their kind in the Air Force's inventory..... Each drone... was programmed to fly to Baghdad, on to Tikrit -- Saddam's hometown and his power base -- then back to Baghdad, making multiple passes over the Iraqi capital.

MOON BASE: RECURRING DREAM

Moon Base? Old news.

In his hotly anticipated announcement Wednesday, President Bush ordered NASA scientists to plan for a manned "foothold on the moon." They might look through their old filing cabinets to start. Because the U.S. government and its contractors have been planning lunar colonies since long before Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap for mankind in 1969.

Since word of Bush's space plan leaked last week, political rivals and some space-policy experts have assaulted it for being too expensive and grandiose.

But the 2004 plan sounds downright meek compared with a 1959 scheme to use nearly 150 rockets to outfit a military outpost on the moon. A 180-person lunar commune probably isn't in the works, as was proposed in 1972. And it's hard to imagine a replay of 1975's idea to build a 100-ton, magnetic-levitation train for tossing bags of freshly mined lunar soil into space, where it would be processed into industrial supplies.

My Wired News article has looks at some of history's kookiest moon plans.

THERE'S MORE: Ben Bova, Greg Bear and other science-fiction luminaries are fired up about the new space plan.

WORLD WAR II FOLLY: BRITS' ICEBERG SHIPS

As the Allies prepared to invade occupied Europe in 1942, a truly nutty idea swept through the British military hierarchy: build giant aircraft carriers made of ice.

The ships could be made cheaply, they figured. And, maybe, they could be constructed tough enough to withstand bullets and torpedoes.

With Churchill's blessing, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, began the task of developing "berg-ships" up to 4,000 feet long, 600 feet wide and 130 feet in depth.

His task seemed to get easier when, in early 1943, "two American professors discovered that a very tough material could be produced by adding a small amount of wood pulp to water before freezing. They called this material pykrete, in honour of (Mountbatten's scientific advisor) Geoffrey Pyke," Combinedrops.com says.

Lord Mountbatten had a block of pykrete prepared by a Canadian engineering company, and took this block to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. As it appeared that "Habbakuk" would run into supply and technical problems, not to mention the high costs ($100 million for the first ship), it was Mountbatten’s aim to get the Americans to take over the project. It is reported that he fired a revolver at the pykrete block during a coffee break, and the bullet bounced off and struck one of the senior officers who were present - thankfully without serious injury!

Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman wrote about this folly in Laboratory Warriors : How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II (out now in paperback). Take it away, Pop:

To my mind, the major interest of the story of this absurd enterprise is how far it went before the bubble was burst. This was a loony idea all along, and its premise was easily refuted by science and even easier by mathematics -- you just had to compute how much of the stuff would be needed to make a floating airfield, plug in a few figures about the output of wood from Canadian forests, and realize that it would take the entire country's forests to make one field.

But because the idea had powerful patrons, Churchill and Mountbatten, who were not scientists but politicians whose authority could direct the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars, millions of dollars were spent on it. It reminds us that Star Wars is not the only science-fiction fantasy to enchant the mind of a leader of the Western world.

(via Boing Boing)

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech buddy Wyatt Earp points us to great pictures and diagrams of the berg-ships here and to a longer essay on the subject here.

AND MORE: Another Defense Tech pal says Mountbatten's effort wasn't "really the folly that it seems."

The coast guard long ago gave up trying to destroy icebergs and they are simple fresh water bergs, not pykrete. Given the other advances dreamt up by the British that made carrier-based jet aviation practical (and safer) like the angled flight deck and steam catapults it's not necessarily something to be dismissed out of hand. RULCCs (REALLY Ultra Large Crude Carriers) made of ice just might turn out to be structurally stronger and more damage resistant than the current crop of aging ULCCs rusting their way along the seaways today. Toss in built-in obsolescence and easy recycling...