Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [169]
The core of the E-bomb idea is something called a Flux Compression Generator (FCG), which the article in Popular Mechanics calls “an astoundingly simple weapon. It consists of an explosives-packed tube placed inside a slightly larger copper coil, as shown below. [The article even has a diagram!] The instant before the chemical explosive is detonated, the coil is energized by a bank of capacitors, creating a magnetic field. The explosive charge detonates from the rear forward. As the tube flares outward it touches the edge of the coil, thereby creating a moving short circuit. ‘The propagating short has the effect of compressing the magnetic field while reducing the inductance of the stator [coil],’ says Carlo Kopp [an Australian-based expert on high-tech warfare]. ‘The result is that FCGs will produce a ramping current pulse, which breaks before the final disintegration of the device. Published results suggest ramp times of tens of hundreds of microseconds and peak currents of tens of millions of amps.’ The pulse that emerges makes a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison.”
As good as all this may sound (oh, sorry, I forgot that technological progress is good; civilization is good; destroying the planet is good; computers and televisions and telephones and automobiles and fluorescent lights are all good, and certainly more important than a living and livable planet, more important than salmon, swordfish, grizzly bears, and tigers, which means the effects of E-bombs are so horrible that nobody but the U.S. military and its brave and glorious allies should ever have the capacity to set these off, and they should only be set off to support vital U.S. interests such as access to oil, which can be burned to keep the U.S. economy growing, to keep people consuming, to keep the world heating up from global warming, to keep tearing down the last vestiges of wild places from which the world may be able to recover if civilization comes down soon enough), it gets even better (or worse, if you identify more with civilization than your landbase): After an E-bomb is detonated, and destroys local electronics, the pulse piggybacks through the power and telecommunication infrastructure. This, according to the article, “means that terrorists [sic] would not have to drop their homemade E-bombs directly on the targets they wish to destroy. Heavily guarded sites, such as telephone switching centers and electronic funds-transfer exchanges, could be attacked through their electric and telecommunication connections.”
The article concludes on this hopeful note: “Knock out electric power, computers and telecommunication and you’ve destroyed the foundation of modern society. In the age of Third World-sponsored terrorism,305 the E-bomb is the great equalizer.”306
I go to the post office. Jim, my favorite clerk there, with whom I often chat as he processes the packages I’m mailing, comments on the heat. It’s eighty-five or eighty-six, he says, the second or third highest temperature on record here. I know, cry me a fricking river, but I live on the cool coast of northern California.
“It makes you think about global warming,” he says.
I nod, then reply, “Nineteen thousand people dead in Europe from the heat, and the damn newspapers don’t even mention global warming.” I don’t mention that this is more than six times the number killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Jim likes my politics, but polite discourse generally demands that we ignore many obvious things.
Now it’s his turn to nod. He says, “Did you see those pictures of glaciers melting in Europe?”
“The climate is changing, and those in power won’t do anything about it.”
“The culture has too much momentum,” he responds, “and those in charge have too much money and power for us to stop them.”
“That’s why my next book is about how to take down civilization.”
He looks at me for a moment. “You can write a book about it, but you can’t make it happen.”
“I can help push in the right direction at the right times, and I think that can make