It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them… I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.” Since the first appearance of the “heat-ray” in H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds, ray guns have been a staple feature of science fiction: the classic sign of overwhelming technological superiority. But they are no longer fiction. Last month, Lt Col John Dorrian admitted that the US military’s brand-new Active Denial System (ADS) had been shipped to Afghanistan, the first time it has been present in an active theatre of war. According to the top brass, it is a “non-lethal, directed-energy, counter-personnel weapon”. Among the troops, however, its favoured description is rather shorter: “the pain ray”.
Compared with most military vehicles, the device looks relatively harmless – like one of the broadcasting trucks you see outside big sporting events: an anonymous-looking military transport with what appears to be a square satellite dish mounted on top. But it contains an extraordinary new weapon, capable of causing immense discomfort from half a mile away without – its makers claim – doing any lasting damage.
The ADS works by projecting a focused beam of 3.2mm wave electromagnetic radiation at a human target. This heats the water and fat molecules on the skin, causing their temperature to rise by up to 50C. Philip Sherwell, a Sunday Telegraph reporter who tried out the ADS in 2007, describes it as “unbearably uncomfortable, like opening a roasting hot oven door”. The immediate instinct is to escape the beam and seek cover – at which point the effect subsides.
In some quarters, the ADS has been hailed as the future of crowd control. Kelley Hughes, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), which oversaw its development, says that “the ADS provides our troops with our most advanced, non-lethal escalation-of-force option. It will support a full...
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Send it to the southern border...NOW!
ReplyDeleteLet's deploy this technology along our southern border. It looks like a great way to repel border jumper So!
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