JUST FOR FUN: SANDIA’S DR. STRANGELOVE MACHINE & ...

Every now and then I just have to cut loose and connect the dots wildly with no regard for evidence and content, much less coherent argument. And this is one of those cases, fostered by an article I read last week at phys.org that really ignited my imagination, and those imaginings I am sharing here, so that those of you who think I'm a bit on the fringe will have no further doubts!

Recently I read an article about how some of China's generals are planning a nuclear first strike against the U.S.A. Well, such military madness planning, rest assured, goes on in the general staffs of all the world's militaries, and China's generals should not be expected to be any less insane than anyone else's. There are US nuclear warfare plans against virtually every nation on earth, going back to the first SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) of the 1950s, a gloriously apocalyptic spasm of thermonuclear rubble-bouncing designed to take out the Soviet Union and Red China in one fell swoop.

Well, consider this interesting article from phys.org on Sandia's nuclear pulse generating machine, a monster known, intriguingly enough, as "Saturn" (hmmm....Cosmic War themes anyone?):

Two radiation generators mark major milestones

Now, first of all, I find the idea of building enormous machines to emit bursts of X-rays and gamma rays to mimic a nuclear blast immensely...well...exciting(insert Dr. Strangelove voice here). The purpose, according to the line being put out in the article, is to test electronics hardening measures to protect American installations' electrical systems from going down to the EMP of a nuclear burst. Well, fine. That's certainly plausible. But let's note what we have here, we have machines capable of directing such a pulse, able to be refired, and all this without that nasty thermonuclear fireball to gum up the works. Neat, huh?

Now what's really interesting is that when you read all those internet articles about all those insane Chinese generals plotting nuclear war against the USA (of course, our generals plotting to do the same thing against China's generals aren't insane), you'll discover that one of their first strikes will be the detonation of nuclear weapons in space to take out our communications via EMP...then Sandia and phys.org release this article as if to say "Oh Ja (Dr. Strangelove voice again), Ve haff been schtudyink ziss for many decades, und haff zese really cool machines vith vitch to schtudy zese thinks, ja?"

Now let's crawl way out on the limb. As Sandia and phys.org are telling us, these cool "little" EMP x-ray and gamma ray machines have been around for a while in one form or another. Now I began to think, being a sort of Dr. Strangelove sort, what if you could miniaturize all this technology, build a GRASER (that's a gamma ray laser folks), utilizing the Mossbauer effect and so on, then via a bunch of fancy phase conjugate mirrors, make it a phase conjugate GRASER, and put it all up in space where those insane and evil Chinese generals are planning to carry out the first strike in their coordinated plan of insanity? Well, a phase-conjugate space based GRASER (Texas drawl here) would give them Chi-comms something to think about!

...then I remembered, I was playing out a bizarre scenario of one of actor Steven Seagal's more interesting movies (in an output of uninteresting movies), Under Siege II. In the movie, Eric Bogosian plays (admirably well) a crazed scientific and engineering genius who develops a space-based GRASER (called in the movie, aptly enough, GRAZER I, as if to say to the audience, "Pay attention now..."), who in turn steals the satellite from its would-be American controllers through a back door in the satellite's computer program, initiating his very own private secret space program, and ...well...fires the thing at a - you guessed it - Chinese military target, destroying it in a massive earthquake. At this point, the American generals, while alarmed, are all remarking that they at least have plausible deniability in causing the quake. After all, Mother Nature is the perfect plausible deniability...except, oh yea, for that ball of lightning over the Chinese facility that appeared in the movie shortly before the facility was destroyed. The generals and admirals are relieved, until Bogosian informs them that the next target is the nuclear reactor under the Pentagon unless they pay up a billion dollars.

Well.... all this leads me to suspect that those guys at Sandia may have made these machines a little smaller than the pictures we're being shown... and the timing is, well, eerily like Seagal's movie. It would, to recall the inimitable words of Dr Strangelove, "a very simple matter to construct such a machine by even the smallest nuclear power if it had de vill..."  Uhm...yea... in any case, China was sending messages, and the USA was sending messages back.