Nonlethal Weapons Gaining a
Beachhead Source: The San Francisco Gate November 23, 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.
And certainly they were peddling a risky idea -- that
the challenge facing U.S. 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 "nonlethal
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 U.S.
armed services' 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 anti-war protesters with
humorous "confetti cannons," but the idea seemed to fade from view in
the 1980s.
The mid-1990s brought a new surge of interest, when Sen.
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 nonlethal weapons
has been frozen at $24 million -- a minuscule sliver of the $300
billion-a-year defense budget.
And nonlethals 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 nonlethal 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 nonlethal 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 foresee 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 co-authored, 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 armed services must learn to check their
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 nonlethal 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 nonlethal
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 nonlethal 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
U.S. universities to establish nonlethal weapons programs in the past
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 nonlethal 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."
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page AA - 1
by Ellen Barry
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000
/11/23/MN111001.DTL