Near-critical behavior of the free surface of an ideally conducting liquid in
an external electric field is considered. Based on an analysis of three-wave
processes using the method of integral estimations, sufficient criteria for
hard instability of a planar surface are formulated. It is shown that the
higher-order nonlinearities do not saturate the instability, for which reason
the growth of disturbances has an explosive character.Comment: 19 page