Set PHASRs On Stun

brianber writes to tell us NewScientist is reporting that the US Government has unveiled a new weapon in their non-lethal arsenal. The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHASR) laser rifle has many potential applications such as temporarily blinding a suspect who drives through a roadblock. So far, however, the DoD has declined to comment on the specific details of how it works.

Comments

Can't blind on purpose

[ReformedExCon]

Geneva conventions bar the use of maiming weapons, and one that would blind the enemy combatant is right out.

Re:Can't blind on purpose

[yamum]

Isn't the Geneva Convention only for war? Use within a country would bypass this rule, no?

Re:Can't blind on purpose

[Hard_Rock_2]

From TFA " But the device will require close scrutiny to ensure compliance with a United Nations protocol on blinding laser weapons." "Laser weapons capable of blinding enemies have been developed in the past but were banned under a 1995 UN convention called the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. The wording of this protocol, however, does not prohibit lasers that temporarily dazzle a foe."

Re:Can't blind on purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

Geneva conventions bar the use of maiming weapons, and one that would blind the enemy combatant is right out.

Since when has the US ever obeyed the Geneva convention?

Re:Can't blind on purpose

[baptiste]

A 1995 UN Convention bans the sale of devices which have as one of their purposes, the intent to blind people. See http://www.un.org/millennium/law/xxvi-18-19.htm So the whole war vs peace thing isn't really relevant. However, that convention seems easy to get around - if blinding someone is a SIDE effect - it seems like it would be allowed:

Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.

I just happened to be finishing up an excellent, if a little dated, book on Laser Weapons called 'Laser Weapons - The Dawn of a New Military Age' Its out of print, but if you can find it, I highly recommend it. Co-authored by a military Major General and a Biomedical Engineering professor specializing in eye injuries, etc.

One thing that is NOT in TFA, is this key fact about Low Energy Laser weapons:

It is not possible to only flash blind a person with a laser for a sufficient time in broad daylight without simultaneously causing permanent changes to his eyes. Temproary flash blinding by a laser is only possible when eyes are more or less adapted to darkness.

The key point here is that a laser weapon like this will only be 'safe' on the targets at night. During the day it won't work.

If you really want to poke around and see whats out there, both experimental and deployed, try some of these searches (and since most stuff related to laser weapons is still highly classified, take what you read with a grain of salt):

• HELEX
• LDS - Laser Dazzle Sight
• C-CLAW/RoadRunner
• StingRay
• Cameo Bluejay
• Coronet Prince
• DAZER
• COBRA

These are programs primarily from the late 1980's and 1990's, but it gives you an idea what they were looking at back then and some may still be in R&D today. Systems like Stingray and LDS were deployed at some point or came very close to it.

One thing most people don't realize is that High Energy Laser weapons (HEL) like proposed for SDI, etc, are VERY difficult to deploy and run into serious problems with atmospheric distortion and interference (lookup Laser Thermal Blooming on Google - its a neat effect) But Low Energy Laser (LEL) weapons can easily blind soldiers, destroy optics, and destory sensitive sensors on vehicles, aircraft, and missles, and aren't as severely impacted by the environment like HEL weapons are. Plus they are CHEAP to build and the technology is widely available - thus the weapons aren't limited to the G-8. If you think terrorists haven't considered using LELs you're kidding yourself. They may not have the dramatic effect - but imagine the psychological impact on a society (think DC Sniper) if numerous people started going blind just walking down the street. Why do you think the FAA freaked out so badly when people pointed handheld laser pointers at landing aircraft. I have a Class IIIa laser on my desk I bought for $50 - how hard would it

Re:Can't blind on purpose

[Kadin2048]

That's fairly consistent with a civilian course I took on the use of lethal force in self-defense. In short, people who have actually analyzed self-defense shooting incidents have shown that you're better off killing the other person than wounding them, in terms of the legal aftermath.

It's not hard to believe though, since a dead criminal is just another statistic, while a live one is a "victim" that some scumbag lawyer can put up in front of a jury and use to wring a settlement out of you, especially if you hit them in the spine and caused any sort of permanent damage.

From a public relations standpoint, it's usually better to create bodies than it is to create cripples. The exception to this might be if creating a body also involves creating a marytr.

Re:Can't blind on purpose

[onepoint]

>>how hard would it be for a terrorist to get a Class IIIb or Class IV laser capable of causing eye or skin damage

Here you go, took me about 1 minute to find it, just requires some basic paperwork and you could have it on your desk in about 1 month or less. Yep it's class - IV

http://amazing1.com/burning-lasers.htm

Onepoint

Re:Nice acronym

[cryptoz]

That's not an acronym. It's a backronym.

Re:Blinding the driver

[daraf]

Sure. Situation 1: Driver runs initial checkpoint. Checkpoint team attempts to fill car with bullets before car closes to effective suicide blast range. Situation 2: Driver runs initial checkpoint. Checkpoint team blinds driver. Driver is unable to navigate serpentine blast barriers and crashes. The (notional) probability of somebody dying in situation 2 is less than in situation 1.

Re:How is that a problem for America?

[Wyatt Earp]

Now, as for the dig against the DoD, as a Military Historian whose been doing alot of research on the US military and the conflict with Iraq, I would like to point out that no nation on Earth has spent and spends as much time, lives and money to insure that conflicts are carried out as "legally" as they can be.

For example, during the March Up to Baghdad in 2003, JAG groups were embeded in the main force and follow-on forces and anything taken, down to the knock-off Pepsi in one of the factories owned by Uday, were paid for or people who owned it were paid for things taken or damaged.

It's not perfect and 100% "clean", but its not really accurate to critize the DoD, a War is a War and it is violent and unfair, but the US and other NATO militaries try much harder than anyone ever has to mitigate the impact on civilians and non-combatants.

Re:ah, who cares about geneva conventions.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Have you seen this?
We're napalming civilians, now.

Not to sound condescending to the younger slashdotters amoung us, but this isn't in fact, as recent a development as you might think. There was this thing way back when called The Vietnam War, where US forces used napalm quite copiously on civilians.

History inevitably repeats.

HE vs WP

[Kadin2048]

WP is generally used as an anti-armor round, although it's markedly less effective than it was in the past. It's not anti-personnel, although there are situations where it could be used against mixed forces and seem as though it was being used that way.

Before tanks were hermetically sealed like they are today, you could pretty reliably disable one by dumping some burning stuff on it (napalm, white phosphorous, burning gasoline) if you could get it to fall down into the gap between the turret and the chassis. The turret essentially sits in a hole in the top of the chassis...get something through that gap and it's in the crew compartment. This is why if you're in a tank, you don't want to let yourself get swarmed by rioters with Molotov cocktails; even though it might not seem like they'd be much of a risk to a tank, a few well placed ones can really make life uncomfortable for the crew inside.

As a result, you don't send out armor units without infantry support, because they'll get overrun by foot soldiers and destroyed (a la 'Saving Private Ryan'). An advancing armor unit will almost always be mixed in with regular leg infantry, as force protection.

As a counter to this, if you're an artilleryman and trying to stop an advancing column of tanks with infantry support, you'd use a combination of both air-bursting high explosive (to disable the soldiers) and white phosphorous (to disable the tanks). The command for this is "HE and WP, timed and quick" -- high explosive air bursting (timed fuse) and white phosphorous with a contact-detonating fuse (quick fuse).

Nowadays, I'm not sure that white phosphorous is really used as a weapon per se, I think it's mostly used for the psychological effect, and for illumination. Plus obviously the tactics of huge land armies maneuvering around each other is relatively outdated today.