Alexander Khrolenko (RIA Novosti) – The Listva, a remotely operated mine clearance vehicle capable of detecting and blowing up mines up to 100 meters away, is one such weapon.
An armored vehicle equipped with a UHF emitter moves in front of a mobile missile system. It detects radio-controlled landmines planted along and away from the road using ground-penetrating radar and then uses ultra-high-frequency rays to neutralize them.
This is a novel technique, which had never been used before.
In the next two years Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces will receive over 150 Listva robotic mine clearing vehicles.
Future Weapons
The unique radio-electronic weapons based on new physical principles, which were successfully tested in Russia last fall use mobile electromagnetic emitters to disable missile warheads and onboard aircraft electronics many miles away.
The electromagnetic bombs developed by Russia can be more effective than nuclear weapons because they are able to neutralize entire armies with just one short electromagnetic impulse.
Moreover, unlike already exiting electronic jammers, they can completely take out or seriously damage even off-line weapons like tanks, grounded planes and missiles in silos.
Earlier, media reports said that Russia’s defense industry had come up with the Alabuga, a new electro-magnetic missile, which uses a powerful UHF emitter to disable all enemy electronics within a radius of 3.5 kilometers (2.3 miles), turning it into “a heap of scrap metal.”
Russia plans to install such weapons on its sixth-generation fighter drones because powerful UHF radiation can kill pilots.
Radio-electronic weapons are able to jam a tank’s loading mechanism, blow up artillery shells inside a turret and destroy enemy soldiers hiding inside a bunker or taking cover up to 100 meters underground.
Foreign Designs
The US, Israel and China are equally busy developing their own types of electromagnetic weapons. During Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991, the Americans used a relatively primitive electronic bomb by fitting the warheads of their Tomahawk cruise missiles with carbon fiber.
The Pentagon used more advanced electromagnetic weapons during NATO’s 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia. In the first two week alone, the US Air Force dropped over 400 super-heavy JDAM gliding bombs packed with graphite and metallic fibers and particles knocking out the country’s entire air defense control system.
Since electromagnetic weapons are capable of pushing a nation back centuries, countries are now developing ever ever-new means of defending themselves again these fearsome weapons.
