Air Force Plan: Hack Your Nervous System

This is the first of a two-​​part series on plasma and elec­tro­mag­netic weapons by David Hambling, author of Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth to Our High-​​Tech World.
The brain has always been a bat­tle­field. New weapons might be able to hack directly into your ner­vous sys­tem.
“Controlled Effects” (see image, right) is one of the Air Forces ambi­tious long-​​term chal­lenges. It starts with bet­ter and more accu­rate bombs, but moves on to dis­cuss devices that “make selected adver­saries think or act accord­ing to our needs… By study­ing and mod­el­ing the human brain and ner­vous sys­tem, the abil­ity to men­tally influ­ence or con­fuse per­son­nel is also pos­si­ble.“
The first stage is tech­nol­ogy to remotely cre­ate phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions. They give the exam­ple of the Active Denial System “peo­ple zap­per” which uses a high-​​frequency radi­a­tion sim­i­lar to microwaves as a non-​​lethal means of crowd con­trol.
Other weapons can affect the ner­vous sys­tem directly. The Pulsed Energy Projectile fires a short intense pulse of laser energy. This vapor­izes the outer layer of the tar­get, cre­at­ing a rapidly-​​expanding expand­ing ball of plasma. At dif­fer­ent power lev­els, those expand­ing plas­mas could deliver a harm­less warn­ing, stun the tar­get, or dis­able them — all with pin­point laser pre­ci­sion from a mile away.
Early reports on the effects of PEPs men­tioned tem­po­rary paral­y­sis, then thought to be related to ultra­sonic shock­waves. It later became appar­ent that the elec­tro­mag­netic pulse caused by the expand­ing plasma was trig­ger­ing nerve cells.
Details of this emerged in a heavily-​​censored doc­u­ment released to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project under the Freedom if Information Act. Called Sensory con­se­quence of elec­tro­mag­netic pulsed emit­ted by laser induced plas­mas, it described research on acti­vat­ing the nerve cells respon­si­ble for sens­ing unpleas­ant stim­uli: heat, dam­age, pres­sure, cold. By selec­tively stim­u­lat­ing a par­tic­u­lar noci­cep­tor, a finely tuned PEP might sen­sa­tions of say, being burned, frozen or dipped in acid — all with­out doing the slight­est actual harm.
The skin is the eas­i­est tar­get for such stim­u­la­tion. But, in prin­ci­ple, any sen­sory nerves could be trig­gered. The Controlled Effects doc­u­ment sug­gests it may be pos­si­ble to cre­ate syn­thetic imagesto con­fuse an indi­vid­ual’ s visual sense or, in a sim­i­lar man­ner, con­fuse his senses of sound, taste, touch, or smell.
In other words, it may be pos­si­ble to use elec­tro­mag­netic means to cre­ate over­whelm­ing ‘sound’ or ‘light’, or indeed ‘intol­er­a­ble smell’ which would exist only in the brain of the per­son per­ceiv­ing them.
There is another side as well. The sen­sory con­se­quences doc­u­ment also notes that the ner­vous sys­tem which con­trols mus­cles could be influ­enced to cause what they call Taser-​​like motor effects. The stun guns abil­ity to shock the mus­cles into mal­func­tion is rel­a­tively crude; we might now be look­ing at are much more tar­geted effects.
Tomorrow: Moscow moves in. Remote-​​controlled heart attacks, any­one?
– David Hambling

February 13th, 2006 | Bizarro, Lasers and Ray Guns | 1851486 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/02/13/air-force-plan-hack-your-nervous-system/Air+Force+Plan%3A+Hack+Your+Nervous+System2006-02-13+05%3A14%3A46 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.