Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq

team99parody writes "An 'Active Denial System' weapon that 'fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds' is scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 according to CNET and the print version of New Scientist. It was recently tested on people playing the part of rioters at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico where they asked the subjects to remove glass and contact lenses to protect their eyes. Hopefully real rioters will get the same courtesy. Police and the Marines are working on portable versions. Sandia Labs also has a nice writeup on this system with pictures of smaller versions of the weapon."

Comments

Re:Potentially lethal?

[Grym]

The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?

Probably not. Last year the police in the US managed to shoot one of their pepper-spray paintballs through an bystanding girl's eye, killing her. And that's a "non-lethal" weapon you can aim!

The thing in the article covers an entire area. Do you think the operator is going to check and make sure that nobody in the crowd is wearing glasses, jewelry, or contacts? That's impossible!

Even in theory, this isn't a non-lethal weapon at all... It's quite obvious that this is intended as a means of disarming (have we forgotten that guns/knives are metal?) and/or killing large groups of people immediately without collateral damage; just like a neutron bomb, only more controllable and cheaper.

-Grym

Re:This WILL cause lots of nice CANCER.

[Dahan]

GHz is not a measure of energy.

True, but the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. E = hf, where h is Planck's constant. That's why hard ultraviolet light (~1 PHz or 1,000,000GHz) has enough energy to knock electrons out of orbit and cause mutations in DNA, while 95 GHz microwaves do not have enough energy to do so, no matter how many photons you crank out.

Re:they've used this in Miami

[Khyber]

You are right, it was indeed the weapon you describe.

It's been known for quite some time now that using waves of sound can do all kinds of things to the human body. Using stereo-separated soundwaves of differing frequencies, you can create a harmonic that your brain respods to. This has been shown to make people sick, or make them feel better and give relief from a headache. It's also shown to be possible to make people hallucinate, put them to sleep, pep them up, and more. Our skulls and brains respond rather well to nice resonating frequencies. Kudos for you bringing this up. Makes me wish I could post and mod at the same time.

Re:Health implications

[carldot67]

It's hard to say.

All cells have a fundamental shock response to heating as well as to UV and other stimuli. They produce various repair enzymes that wander around doing useful stuff like refolding damaged proteins and relinking damaged DNA.

The problem is they sometimes get it wrong leading to mutations or regulation imbalances. Heating also changes the shape of proteins. Go higher than 42C for many animal proteins and they cease to work properly, in some cases permanently until they are replaced (there is a natural turnover).

Now since proteins are involved in genetic switchgear and regulation I can easily see the possibility of one delicate subsystem going out of whack: growth factors, receptors, messengers, polymerase initiation factors, repressors etc. If one or more of these go wrong you _can_ have unregulated cell growth. aka Cancer.

This would be particularly true for children or individuals with a pre-existing disposition.

Numbers are hard for me to take a stab at without data and mammalian heat-shock isnt my field (although my degree in molecular biology is a good start).

However, and as most people would suspect, unnatural stimuli given often enough to a large enough sample will eventually throw up something bad in individual cases at a rate higher than a control group. Its a statistical certainty.

What "how often", "eventually" and "large enough" and "something bad" mean in relation to the weapon are anyone's guess. And I think thats a problem. You can find all this out for Aspirin, so why not the weapon?

On balance, if you get tagged by this thing once due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time then the chances are it's not going to harm you long term. That said, I would really, really steer clear of it. It sounds like a nightmare.

Speaking from a social viewpoint, I personally think its a dangerous escalation. If the authorities start firing this at people then it can surely only be a matter of time until they start firing back.

Re: Coming to America

[kalel666]

I know this is one of those things that "everybody knows", that the US armed Saddam in the 80's, but the facts speak otherwise. Yes, we supplied Iraq with monies and arms, but we were far behind those paragons of International virtue like:

USSR 17503 50.78%
France 5221 15.15%
China 5192 15.06%
Czechoslovakia 1540 4.47%
Poland 1626 4.72%
Brazil 724 2.10%
Egypt 568 1.65%
Romania 524 1.52%
Denmark 226 0.66%
Libya 200 0.58%
USA 200 0.58%

But don't take my word for it. Refer to the report from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) here: http://projects.sipri.se/armstrade/Trnd_Ind_IRQ_Im ps_73-02.pdf

If you're going to blame the US for something, go ahead, but a least blame us for something legitimate.