On Monday night, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate told guys like David Hambling and me that we were welcome to come check out its microwave-ish pain ray — provided we could make it to the middle of Georgia on 36 hours’ notice. It wasn’t exactly the most serious offer, for fellows in London and in L.A. And it’s one of several reasons why I decided not to blog about the demonstration, when word about it hit the wires yesterday.
But New Scientist did pick up on one interesting tidbit: Theodore Barna, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for advanced systems and concepts told Reuters that “We expect the services to add it to their tool kit. And that could happen as early as 2010.” (Here’s a promo vid for the system.)
Three years from now, hunh? Well, we’ll see. For years and years, there have been promises that the pain ray (or “Active Denial System” if you prefer) was just about to be rolled out to the field. Thirteen months ago, for example, the 18th Military Police Brigade requested ADS “to help ‘suppress’ insurgent attacks and quell prison uprisings.” The head of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force said, after nearly 10,000 trial shots, the system was good to go. $30 million was allocated to outfitting three fighting vehicles with pain rays.
But the military still can’t shake fears about ADS, as Hambling so ably noted last month. As Hambling put it, “the big problem is not with the technology, which seems to work fine. The problem is getting people to accept it. Everyone is still worried the millimeter-wave beam is going to give them cancer, melt their eyeballs or make them sterile.“
Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne didn’t help matters much when he suggested the pain ray should be zapping crowds here in the U.S. before it blasted any Iraqis.
Will Americans really be any more comfortable with that, a few years from now?
Pain Ray: Keep Waiting
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m not from the US so I say test on all the Americians you want :P
I officially volunteer to be an emergency DT correspondent next time you’re invited to a demonstration here in Georgia.
Isn’t this “pain ray” actually a heat ray? That is, it seems to produce pain not by neural induction or some such, but by straightforwardly heating up a very thin layer of epidermis.
What happens if it’s kept trained on someone for more than the recommended length of time? Does it produce blisters or worse? If not, why not?
This is amazing stuff. There was an article about it in Navy Times.
I was zapped by this thing at a convention last year, and I can tell you it works.
As for the Wynne comment, this may sound cliche, but I was at the roundtable where he made those comments and I’m not going to say any names here, but a certain AP reporter took what he said and wrapped it around a pole of out of context. Unfortunately, this happens more often than I’d like to think it does.
V
Im still wondering what 10 minutes of full exposure to the pain ray will do to a human. If just a few seconds is enough to let most rioters disperse, what will 10 minutes do to somebody who cant run away because of him (for instance) being ducktaped to a pole?
And if it heats the upper layer of your skin like they say, then what does it do to eyeballs? Call me skicko, but i’d also like to note the skin on the males scrotum is very thin.
Im really not sure on this pain ray thing.. it can be very usefull, yes, but the potential for human suffering and a total publicity disaster is enormous. And dont say that wont happen: Abu-Grahib and some other cases show that in such big organisation as the military there’ll allways be some idiot who doesnt follow the rules.
Ratheon is already selling these devices – Google Raytheon Silent Guardian to get their product descriptions and other reviews.
These weapons threaten our freedom in the present as well as the future.
Target at ElectronicElephants dot com
Don
I AM from the US, so I say test it on all the foreigners (Iraqis first) that we want.
This is a dual purpose weapon. Critical flluid cells and organs can be made the target to neutralize a person in civilian or military.
Great device, lets hope the military can shake these fears regarding ADS and get controlling those rowdy crowds with ease….