The Pentagon wants to buy your homemade bomb
SUMMARY
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants the bomb you've been tinkering with at home. DARPA's latest initiative is identifying emerging threats by mining everyday technologies. According to the agency's press release, this effort, called Improv, "asks the innovation community to identify commercial products and processes that could yield unanticipated threats." So DARPA wants that homemade bomb you've been building in your garage.
This means they want to see what you can make out of everyday household items so they can prepare a countermeasure. This kind of thinking is meant to tap into the natural resourcefulness and creativity of humans.
"DARPA's mission is to create strategic surprise, and the agency primarily does so by pursuing radically innovative and even seemingly impossible technologies," said program manager John Main, who will oversee the new effort. "Improv is being launched in recognition that strategic surprise can also come from more familiar technologies, adapted and applied in novel ways."
The agency is looking to see how everyday household materials can be used to threaten U.S. national security. It may sound odd to think of American wreaking havoc with common materials, but it isn't unheard of. In 1996, Timothy McVeigh purchased only enough ammonium nitrate to fertilize 4.25 acres of farmland at a rate of 160 pounds of nitrogen per acre, a formula commonly used to grow corn. This did not raise any eyebrows in Kansas. McVeigh later used the fertilizer to blow up Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing at least 168 people.
"U.S. national security was ensured in large part by a simple advantage: a near-monopoly on access to the most advanced technologies," DARPA said in a press release. "Increasingly, off-the-shelf equipment… features highly sophisticated components, which resourceful adversaries can modify or combine to create novel and unanticipated security threats."
To enter, interested parties must submit a plan for their prototype for the chance at a potential $40,000 in funding. Then, a smaller number of candidates will be chosen to build their device with $70,000 in potential funding. Finally, top candidates will enter the final phase, which includes a thorough analysis of the invention and a military demonstration.
The Department of Defense would like remind potential contributors that they should only build weapons within the bounds of their local, state, and federal laws.
Learn more about the DARPA project here.
