The military’s new “Active Denial System”
Where “Active Denial System” is a nice way of saying “long-distance microwave oven.”
Some people were actually crazy enough to volunteer to stand in front of the US military’s new Active Denial System (ADS) microwave. The ADS is part of the Petagon’s new “less-lethal” weapons program — I wonder if “less-lethal” is like saying “a little pregnant?” — anyway, the weapon fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters, intruders, obstreperous children, bags of unpopped popcorn, whatever. This beam is supposed to cause pain but no injury. The weapon was tested in 2003 and 2004, but little was heard about the tests afterwards, until Edward Hammond requested the documents about the tests under the Freedom of Information Act.
Several tests were conducted, two to measure pain tolerance levels and one to determine its efficacy in driving away simulated rioters or intruders. The weapon created pain within two seconds of its activation, and the pain levels become intolerable within five seconds. The idea is that the pain will force the rioters or what have you to disperse, which seems like a good idea. After all, I don’t know many rioters interested in suntanning while they’re rioting, no matter how convenient it might seem.
There are some big problems with such a system, however. The main one is what happens if someone is unable to get out of the path of the beam. Would the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure? Living in downtown Boston, near Fenway Park, I “attended” the Red Sox riots last year after the Sox beat the Yankees, and then again when they won the World Series. (No, I wasn’t a rioter; I was a spectator.) Anyway, in a situation like that, I was lucky to be able to move at all. In some cases, it took me a good five minutes just to move 100 feet. Now, if the police had turned on their lovely ADS guns in an attempt to move the crowd, there would have been injuries: tramplings from people trying to avoid the beam, and burns on people unable to do so. Now the military is considering using a vehicle-mounted ADS in Iraq and other places as a means, again, of crowd control. This strikes me as a really bad idea.
During the experiments, the volunteers threw up their arms when they were hit with the beam, and were given a 15 second “cooling off” period before they were targeted again. In one test, a volunteer ended up with burns because the beam was accidentally used on the wrong power setting. Oopsie.
Hmm. I wonder if I could explode a potato at 200 yards?
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