Pentagon unveils Heat-Ray Gun
Great new “crowd control” weapon! (BBC story below.) A Reuters
journalist volunteered to try it out and says it feels like a blast from a hot oven — “too painful to bear without diving for cover”! But Pentagon says it’s harmless. Gonna make “escalations of force” so much easier and more efficient. “Active Denial System” — great name. Gonna need these babies when the hurricanes start kicking up again. Keep people in line. Keep’m where they’re supposed to be. Pentagon says jump — how high? Where would we be without our great patriotic scientists and generals? Scientists and generals must be the wisest people on the planet. So glad they’re in charge. So proud to see american tax dollars hard at work.
US military unveils heat-ray gun
The US military has given the first public display of what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.
Called the Active Denial System, it projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling.
Military officials, who say the gun is harmless, believe it could be used as a non-lethal way of making enemies surrender their weapons.
Officials said there was wide-ranging military interest in the technology.
“This is a breakthrough technology that’s going to give our forces a capability they don’t now have,” defence official Theodore Barna told Reuters news agency.
“We expect the services to add it to their tool kit. And that could happen as early as 2010.”
‘Blast from an oven’
The prototype weapon was demonstrated at the Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.
A beam was fired from a large rectangular dish mounted on a Humvee vehicle.
The beam has a reach of up to 500 metres (550 yards), much further than existing non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets.
It can penetrate clothes, suddenly heating up the skin of anyone in its path to 50C.
But it penetrates the skin only to a tiny depth – enough to cause discomfort but no lasting harm, according to the military.
A Reuters journalist who volunteered to be shot with the beam described the sensation as similar to a blast from a very hot oven – too painful to bear without diving for cover.
Documents given out during the demonstration said more than 600 volunteers were exposed to the ray a total of more than 10,000 times since testing began over 12 years ago. They said there had been no injuries requiring medical attention during the five-year advanced development programme.
Crowd control
Military officials said the weapon was one of the key technologies of the future.
“Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in,” said Marine Col Kirk Hymes, director of the development programme.
The weapon could potentially be used for dispersing hostile crowds in conflict zones such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
It would mean that troops could take effective steps to move people along without resorting to measures such as rubber bullets – bridging the gap between “shouting and shooting”, Col Hymes said.
A similar non-lethal weapon, Silent Guardian, is being developed by US company Raytheon.
