Non-Lethal Weapons: Sci-fi Meets
Pentagon Source: The Boston Globe November 20, 2000
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - Chris and Janet Morris raised some
eyebrows 10 years ago on their first visit to the Pentagon. Maybe it
was her knee-length hair, or his Quaker upbringing, or the 40 science
fiction novels that made up most of their resume.
Microcapsules to malodorants . . .
An arsenal of non-lethal weapons:
Microcapsules. Chemists at the University of New
Hampshire are inventing microcapsules that dissolve and activate in
response to heat, pressure, ultraviolet light, human sweat, or salt
water. At M2 Technologies in Hyannis Port, Janet Morris is hoping
these microcapsules will eventually be used to stop vessels by
expanding 100 times in size inside their cooling
systems.
Malodorants. Microcapsules can also be used to clear an
area by releasing the intense smell of rotting corpses of feces.
Government scientists determine how intense a smell has to be to make
people retch or vomit, Morris said.
Tiny robots. At a think tank at the University of Maine
this spring, a group of academics and military strategists looked at
exotic alternatives to blowing up a bridge, such as erecting huge
mirrors or holograms that would make the bridge invisible. Most
promising, said a researcher, was the "Robotic Battle Scenario": a
swarm of hundreds of tiny "hassler robots"
emitting chemical spray or lasers.
Foam. The Marine Corps is now using a non-lethal foam
made out of polyurethane and epoxy to disable metal equipment like
switches or small caliber weapons. Foam can be used as a barrier or,
in its adhesive form, to disable people.
Sound waves. Despairing at the cost of using trained
marine mammals to harass divers, researchers at the University of
Texas are testing alternate ways to drive off underwater terrorists or
protesters. One promising direction is sending sound waves that can
cause vertigo and disorientation.
Spider silk. Microbiologists at the Natick Army
Laboratory have spent eight years trying to learn how to produce and
spin spider thread to use in bulletproof vests, helmets, sutures, and
possibly entanglement nets. Spun at a heavier weight than spiders use,
the silk would twice as tough as Kevlar,
a lightweight bulletproof fabric.
And certainly they were peddling a risky idea - that the
challenge facing American soldiers in the future would be to avoid
killing people, and that the solution was to arm troops with
superadhesives, ignition-melting microwaves, sleep-inducing agents,
and bridge lubricants.
''There was occasionally a response, `Don't ever let
these people near me again,''' recalled Alan Dubban, the Air Force
lieutenant colonel charged with introducing the Morrises to a series
of generals and admirals.
The Morrises' concept is now widely known as
''non-lethal weaponry,'' and if there was any question about its
staying power, the answer seemed clear last week, when the University
of New Hampshire celebrated the second year of its
Non-Lethal Technology Innovation Center. The assembled crowd included
envoys from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department, the
Surgeon General, the Marines, the FBI, and the Secret Service - a
group Janet Morris still refers to, with some affection, as
''short-haired.''
In the decade since that first Pentagon visit, the US
military's overseas entanglements have boosted interest in the
futuristic technologies that the Morrises were, for a long time,
nearly alone in envisioning.
Flanked by technocrats and contractors in this New
Hampshire conference room, they're not alone anymore. For the
Morrises - who still profess perplexity at how people could want to
kill each other - it's a strange crowd to have fallen in with.
''In a sense, it's a sort of evangelism,'' said Chris
Morris, 54, who says he was raised to be a priest. ''It's missionary
work. You go where the need is.''
The idea of controlling civilians without hurting them
has gone in and out of fashion in Washington. In the 1970s, Justice
Department officials considered calming antiwar protesters with
humorous ''confetti cannons,'' but the idea seemed to fade from view
in the 1980s.
The mid-'90s brought a new surge of interest, when
Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire first crossed paths with the
Morrises and went on to plant the seeds of the UNH program. Two years
ago, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was established in
Washington. But since then, federal funding for research into
non-lethal weapons has been frozen at $24 million -
a minuscule sliver of the $300 billion-a-year defense budget.
And non-lethals have remained political orphans. From
the left, human-rights groups have fiercely attacked the concept as
just another way of brutalizing the powerless. From the right comes a
different kind of derision.
''The mainline military begins with a profound
skepticism about non-lethal weapons, because they see their job as to
kill people or be prepared to kill people. Then there is the
contractor community, which has not really kindled to non-lethal
weapons because ... they don't have that kind of Stealth
Bomber profit margins,'' said Steven Aftergood, a military analyst
with the Federation of American Scientists. ''And then there are the
visionaries, who forsee a fundamental change in the way people
practice violence.''
The Morrises, whose education was in the fine arts, fall
into the last category.
In the years after college, Chris Morris pursued a
career as a rock musician and Janet wrote such books as ''I, the
Sun,'' ''Kings in Hell,'' and ''The High Couch of Silistra.'' ''The
Warrior's Edge,'' a book she coauthored, prescribed psychokinesis as a
strategy for success in business.
A distaste for the increasing violence in the fantasy
genre drove them into high-tech thrillers, and their research for
high-tech thrillers nudged them into defense contracting, Chris Morris
said. In the mid-1980s, in an adult-education class called ''How to Do
Business with the Intelligence
Community,'' they made an impression on their instructor, a former
deputy director of the CIA, who began taking them on rounds of the
Defense Department.
Among the two- and three-star generals they talked to,
some agreed with what they were preaching: that having lost its last
''peer enemy,'' the American military must learn to check its own
power or go the way of imperial powers before it. It was a lesson
driven home in Somalia, where troops found themselves spraying crowds
with gunfire in order to kill a few
snipers. And non-lethal weapons struck a chord among combatants,
particularly Marines, who said the world they learned about in boot
camp had become more complex.
''I was taught 20 years ago that the only thing you feel
is recoil,'' said David White, a Marine Corps expert in non-lethal
weapons who attended last week's symposium. ''But now you have urban
fighting. You go into an area like this one here. You've got women,
you've got children, you've got pregnant women. Now what do you feel?
With troops as educated as they are
today, will they hesitate?''
During the next few years, the Morrises' Hyannis Port
company, M-2 Technologies, became a go-to group for law enforcement.
In 1996, with the wounds of Waco and Ruby Ridge still smarting, the
FBI had more than 200 people stationed around the Montana ranch of the
Freemen, at a cost of $500,000 a day. Rick Warfard, the FBI's expert
in non-lethal weapons, was
struggling with a plan to coat the house in a thick layer of foam,
disorienting the armed men inside.
But the foam he found was too adhesive - ''if you put a
hand up to your face, you couldn't get it off,'' he said. In
frustration, he appealed to the Marines, who gave him the Morrises'
phone number.
In a whirlwind effort, they helped him find three
Canadian armored vehicles rigged to shoot out a high-velocity stream
of protein-based foam. They painted them sky-blue, Warfard's favorite
color. The Freemen surrendered before the foam could be used, but in
retrospect, Warfard gives the Morrises
credit for getting involved.
''Janet and Chris really opened themselves up. Even
though we could hear the squeals, they let us run with it,'' Warfard
said. ''Shoot, I don't even know if they ever got paid.''
But at the University of New Hampshire, one of three US
universities to establish non-lethal weapons programs in the last two
years, they started to look mainstream.
With an eye on conflicts in Kosovo and Israel, Defense
Department thinkers have widely accepted that the United States runs a
serious risk by appearing to be a global bully, say weapons analysts.
But some say that most non-lethal weapons have never
left the realm of science fiction. They haven't caught on, Aftergood
said, because ''they don't exist.''
Last week's event sought to counter that problem. At a
University of Maine think tank, the popular idea of using huge
holograms to render bridges invisible, said UNH chemist Yvon Durant,
was deemed ''totally unrealistic.'' More promising, he said, are the
microcapsules his lab is developing, which
can dissolve on command into a large mass of sticky gel or release an
intense smell of rotting corpses.
''I'm a lab scientist,'' said Durant. ''I try and
project what we can do in five or 10 years, not talk about science
fiction.''
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
by Ellen Barry
Globe Staff
Page B01