The Pentagon's Quest for Non-Lethal
Arms is Amazing. But is it Smart? Tucked away in the corner of a drab industrial park in
Huntington Beach, Calif., is a windowless, nondescript building.
Inside, under extremely tight security, engineers and scientists are
working on devices whose ordinary appearance masks the oddity of their
function. One is cone shaped, about the size of a fire hydrant.
Another is a 3-foot-long metal tube, mounted on a tripod, with some
black boxes at the operator's end. These are the newest weapons of
war.
For hundreds of years, sci-fi writers have imagined
weapons that might use energy waves or pulses to knock out, knock
down, or otherwise disable enemies--without necessarily killing them.
And for a good 40 years the U.S. military has quietly been pursuing
weapons of this sort. Much of this work is still secret, and it has
yet to produce a usable "nonlethal" weapon. But now that the cold war
has ended and the United States is engaged in more humanitarian and
peacekeeping missions, the search for weapons that could incapacitate
people without inflicting lethal injuries has intensified. Police,
too, are keenly interested. Scores of new contracts have been let, and
scientists, aided by government research on the "bioeffects" of beamed
energy, are searching the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums for
wavelengths that can affect human behavior. Recent advancements in
miniaturized electronics, power generation, and beam aiming may
finally have put such pulse and beam weapons on the cusp of
practicality, some experts say.
Weapons already exist that use lasers, which can
temporarily or permanently blind enemy soldiers. So-called acoustic or
sonic weapons, like the ones in the aforementioned lab, can vibrate
the insides of humans to stun them, nauseate them, or even "liquefy
their bowels and reduce them to quivering
diarrheic messes," according to a Pentagon briefing. Prototypes of
such weapons were recently considered for tryout when U.S. troops
intervened in Somalia. Other, stranger effects also have been
explored, such as using electromagnetic waves to put human targets to
sleep or to heat them up, on the microwave-oven principle. Scientists
are also trying to make a sonic cannon that throws a shock wave with
enough force to knock down a man.
While this and similar weapons may seem far-fetched,
scientists say they are natural successors to projects already
underway--beams that disable the electronic systems of aircraft,
computers, or missiles, for instance. "Once
you are into these antimateriel weapons, it is a short jump to
antipersonnel weapons," says Louis Slesin, editor of the trade journal
Microwave News. That's because the human body is essentially an
electrochemical system, and devices that disrupt the electrical
impulses of the nervous system can affect behavior and body functions.
But these programs--particularly those involving antipersonnel
research--are so well guarded that details are scarce. "People [in the
military] go silent on
this issue," says Slesin, "more than any other issue. People just do
not want to talk about this."
Projects underway. To learn what the Pentagon has been
doing, U.S. News talked to more than 70 experts and scoured biomedical
and engineering journals, contracts, budgets, and research proposals.
The effort to develop exotic weapons is surprising in its range.
Scores of projects are underway, most with funding of several hundred
thousand dollars each. One Air Force lab plans to spend more than $100
million by 2003 to research the "bioeffects" of such weaponry.
The benefits of bloodless battles for soldiers and law
enforcement are obvious. But the search for new weapons--cloaked as
they are in secrecy--faces hurdles. One is the acute skepticism of
many conventional-weapons experts. "It is interesting technology but
it won't end bloodshed and wars," says Harvey Sapolsky, director of
the Security Studies Program at MIT. Says Charles Bernard, a former
Navy weapons-research director: "I have yet to see one of these ray
gun things that actually works." And if they do work, other problems
arise: Some so-called nonlethal weapons could end up killing rather
than just disabling
victims if used at the wrong range. Others may easily be thwarted by
shielding.
Sterner warnings come from ethicists. Years ago the
world drafted conventions and treaties to attempt to set rules for the
use of bullets and bombs in war. But no treaties govern the use of
unconventional weapons. And no one knows what will happen to people
exposed to them over the long term.
Moreover, medical researchers worry that their work on
such things as the use of electromagnetic waves to stimulate hearing
in the deaf or to halt seizures in epileptics might be used to develop
weaponry. In fact, the military routinely has approached the National
Institutes of Health for research information. "DARPA [Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency]
has come to us every few years to see if there are ways to
incapacitate the central nervous system remotely," Dr. F. Terry
Hambrecht, head of the Neural Prosthesis Program at NIH, told U.S.
News. "But nothing has ever come of it," he said. "That is too science
fiction and far-fetched." Still, the Pentagon plans to conduct human
testing with lasers and acoustics in the future, says Charles Swett,
an assistant for Special Operations and
Low-Intensity Conflict. Swett insists that the testing will be
constrained and highly ethical. It may not be far off. The U.S. Air
Force expects to have microwave weapons by the year 2015 and other
nonlethal weaponry sooner. "When that does happen," warns Steven Metz,
professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Army War College,
"I think there will be a public uproar. We need an open debate on them
now."
Laser ethics:
What happened with U.S. forces in Somalia foreshadows
the impending ethical dilemmas. In early 1995, some U.S. marines were
supplied with so-called dazzling lasers. The idea was to inflict as
little harm as possible if Somalis turned hostile. But the marines'
commander then decided that the lasers should be "de-tuned" to prevent
the chance of their blinding
citizens. With their intensity thus diminished, they could be used
only for designating or illuminating targets.
On March 1, 1995, commandos of U.S. Navy SEAL Team 5
were positioned at the south end of Mogadishu airport. At 7 a.m., a
technician from the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory, developer of the
lasers, used one to illuminate a Somali man armed with a
rocket-propelled grenade. A SEAL sniper shot and killed the Somali.
There was no question the Somali was aiming at the SEALs. But the
decision not to use the laser to dazzle or
temporarily blind the man irks some of the nonlethal-team members. "We
were not allowed to disable these guys because that was considered
inhumane," said one. "Putting a bullet in their head is somehow more
humane?"
Despite such arguments, the International Red Cross and
Human Rights Watch have since led a fight against antipersonnel
lasers. In the fall of 1995, the United States signed a treaty that
prohibits the development of lasers designed "to cause permanent
blindness." Still, laser weapons are known to
have been developed by the Russians, and proliferation is a big
concern. Also, the treaty does not forbid dazzling or "glare" lasers,
whose effects are temporary. U.S. military labs are continuing work in
this area, and commercial contractor are marketing such lasers to
police.
Acoustic pain:
The next debate may well focus on acoustic or sonic
weapons. Benign sonic effects are certainly familiar, ranging from the
sonic boom from an airplane to the ultrasound instrument that "sees" a
baby in the uterus. The military is looking for something less
benign--an acoustic weapon with frequencies tunable all the way up to
lethal. Indeed, Huntington Beach-based Scientific Applications &
Research Associates Inc. (SARA) has
built a device that will make internal organs resonate: The effects
can run from discomfort to damage or death. If used to protect an
area, its beams would make intruders increasingly uncomfortable the
closer they get. "We have built several prototypes," says Parviz
Parhami, SARA's CEO. Such acoustic fences, he says, could be deployed
today. He estimates that five
to 10 years will be needed to develop acoustic rifles and other more
exotic weapons, but adds, "I have heard people as optimistic as one to
two years." The military also envisions acoustic fields being used to
control riots or to clear paths for convoys.
SARA's acoustic devices have already been tested at the
Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, near the company's Huntington Beach
office. And they were considered for Somalia. "We asked for
acoustics," says one nonlethal weapons expert who was there. But the
Department of Defense said, "No," since they were still untested. The
Pentagon feared they could have caused
permanent injury to pregnant women, the old, or the sick. Parhami sees
acoustics "as just one more tool" for the military and law
enforcement. "Like any tool, I suppose this can be abused," he says.
"But like any tool, it can be used in a humane and ethical way."
Toward the end of World War II, the Germans were
reported to have made a different type of acoustic device. It looked
like a large cannon and sent out a sonic boomlike shock wave that in
theory could have felled a B-17 bomber. In the mid-1940s, the U.S.
Navy created a program called Project Squid to study the German vortex
technology. The results are unknown. But Guy Obolensky, an American
inventor, says he replicated the Nazi device in his laboratory in
1949. Against hard objects the effect was astounding, he says: It
could snap a board like a twig. Against soft targets like people, it
had a different effect. "I felt like I had been hit by a thick rubber
blanket," says Obolensky, who once stood in its path. The idea seemed
to
founder for years until recently, when the military was intrigued by
its nonlethal possibilities. The Army and Navy now have vortex
projects underway. The SARA lab has tested its prototype devie at Camp
Pendleton, one source says.
Electromagnetic heat:
The Soviets were known to have potent blinding lasers.
They were also feared to have developed acoustic and radio-wave
weapons. The 1987 issue of Soviet Military Power, a cold war Pentagon
publication, warned that the Soviets might be close to "a prototype
short-range tactical RF [radio frequency] weapon." The Washington Post
reported that year that the Soviets
had used such weapons to kill goats at 1 kilometer's range. The
Pentagon, it turns out, has been pursuing similar devices since the
1960s.
Typical of some of the more exotic proposals are those
from Clay Easterly. Last December, Easterly--who works at the Health
Sciences Research Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory--briefed
the Marine Corps on work he had conducted for the National Institute
of Justice, which does research on crime control. One of the projects
he suggested was an electromagnetic gun that would "induce
epilepticlike seizures." Another was a "thermal gun [that] would have
the operational effect of heating the body to 105 to 107" degrees
Fahrenheit. Such effects would bring on discomfort, fevers, or even
death.
But, unlike the work on blinding lasers and acoustic
weapons, progress here has been slow. The biggest problem is power.
High-powered microwaves intended to heat someone standing 200 yards
away to 105 degrees Fahrenheit may kill someone standing 10 yards
away. On the other hand, electromagnetic fields weaken quickly with
distance from the source. And beams of such energy are difficult to
direct to their target. Mission Research Corp. of Albuquerque, N.M.,
has used a computer model to study the ability of microwaves to
stimulate the body's peripheral nervous system. "If sufficient
peripheral nerves fire, then the body shuts down to further stimulus,
producing the so-called stun effect," an abstract states. But, it
concludes, "the ranges at which this can be done are only a few
meters."
Nonetheless, government laboratories and private
contractors are pursuing numerous similar programs. A 1996 Air Force
Scientific Advisory Board report on future weapons, for instance,
includes a classified section on a radio frequency or "RF Gunship."
Other military documents confirm that radio-frequency antipersonnel
weapons programs are underway. And the Air Force's Armstrong
Laboratory at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas is heavily engaged in
such research. According to budget documents, the lab intends to spend
more than $110 million over the next six years "to exploit
less-than-lethal biological effects of electromagnetic radiation for
Air Force security, peacekeeping, and war-fighting operations."
Low-frequency sleep:
From 1980 to 1983, a man named Eldon Byrd ran the Marine
Corps Nonlethal Electromagnetic Weapons project. He conducted most of
his research at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in
Bethesda, Md. "We were looking at electrical activity in the brain and
how to influence it," he
says. Byrd, a specialist in medical engineering and bioeffects, funded
small research projects, including a paper on vortex weapons by
Obolensky. He conducted experiments on animals--and even on
himself--to see if brain waves would move into sync with waves
impinging on them from the outside. (He found that they would, but the
effect was short lived.)
By using very low frequency electromagnetic
radiation--the waves way below radio frequencies on the
electromagnetic spectrum--he found he could induce the brain to
release behavior-regulating chemicals. "We could put animals
into a stupor," he says, by hitting them with these frequencies. "We
got chick brains--in vitro--to dump 80 percent of the natural opioids
in their brains," Byrd says. He even ran a small project that used
magnetic fields to cause certain brain cells in rats to release
histamine. In humans, this would cause instant flulike symptoms and
produce nausea. "These fields were extremely weak. They were
undetectable," says Byrd. "The effects were nonlethal and reversible.
You could disable a person temporarily," Byrd
hypothesizes. "It [would have been] like a stun gun."
Byrd never tested any of his hardware in the field, and
his program, scheduled for four years, apparently was closed down
after two, he says. "The work was really outstanding," he grumbles.
"We would have had a weapon in one year." Byrd says he was told his
work would be unclassified, "unless it works." Because it worked, he
suspects that the program "went black."
Other scientists tell similar tales of research on electromagnetic
radiation turning top secret once successful results were achieved.
There are clues that such work is continuing. In 1995, the annual
meeting of four-star U.S. Air Force generals--called CORONA--reviewed
more than 1,000 potential projects. One was called "Put the Enemy to
Sleep/Keep the Enemy
>From Sleeping." It called for exploring "acoustics," "microwaves,"
and "brain-wave manipulation" to alter sleep patterns. It was one of
only three projects approved for initial investigation.
Direct contact:
As the military continues its search for nonlethal
weapons, one device that works on contact has already hit the streets.
It is called the "Pulse Wave Myotron." A sales video shows it in
action. A big, thuggish-looking "criminal" approaches a well-dressed
woman. As he tries to choke her, she touches him with a white device
about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He
falls to the floor in a fetal position, seemingly paralyzed but with
eyes open, and he does not recover for minutes.
"Contact with the Myotron," says the narrator, "feels
like millions of tiny needles are sent racing through the body. This
is a result of scrambling the signals from the motor cortex region of
the brain," he says. "It is horrible," says William Gunby, CEO of the
company that developed the Myotron. "It is no toy." The Myotron
overrides voluntary--but not
involuntary--muscle movements, so the victim's vital functions are
maintained. Sales are targeted at women, but law enforcement officers
and agencies--including the Arizona state police and bailiffs with the
New York Supreme Court--have purchased the device, Gunby says. A
special model built for law enforcement, called the Black Widow, is
being tested by the FBI, he says. "I hope they don't order a lot
soon," he adds. "The Russian
government just ordered 100,000 of them, and I need to replenish my
stock."
The U.S. military also has shown interest in the
Myotron. "About the time of the gulf war, I got calls from people in
the military," recalls Gunby. "They asked me about bonding the
Myotron's pulse wave to a laser beam so that everyone in the path of
the laser would collapse." While it could not be done, Gunby says, he
nonetheless was warned to keep quiet. "I was told that these calls
were totally confidential," he says, "and that they would completely
deny it if I ever mentioned it."
Some say such secrecy is necessary in new-weapons
development. But others think it is a mistake. "Because the programs
are secret, the sponsorship is low level, and the technology is
unconventional," says William Arkin of Human Rights Watch Arms
Project, "the military has not done any of the things to determine if
the money is being well spent or the programs are a good idea." It
should not be long before the evidence is in.
by Douglas Pasternak