Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq

team99parody writes "An 'Active Denial System' weapon that 'fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds' is scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 according to CNET and the print version of New Scientist. It was recently tested on people playing the part of rioters at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico where they asked the subjects to remove glass and contact lenses to protect their eyes. Hopefully real rioters will get the same courtesy. Police and the Marines are working on portable versions. Sandia Labs also has a nice writeup on this system with pictures of smaller versions of the weapon."

Re:Make some money

[partipilo]

Technically microwaves consist of non-ionizing radiation, will not have cumulative effects, and in low doses are reasonably safe. I've defeated the safety interlocks on an old microwave and run it with the door open. The energy dissipates quite quickly with distance.

Re:Wouldn't this be foiled

[Pitr]

The tin foil would get quite hot, and probably cause worse burns, anthough it would probaly also prevent any side effects that would be caused later on. Then again, tin foil over an insulating layer could do the trick.

Of course, if it really only penetrates 1/64th of an inch of skin, I assume simply being constantly hosed down with water would prevent the weapon from being effective, as the water should absorb the microwaves before they get to the skin.

I believe there are also ways of reflecting microwaves, but I might be remembering something else, or just watching too much TV...

Re:Napalm is not used anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

To my knowlege, the Mk-77 has not been used inside the US. But apparently 500 of them were used by the marines in the last gulf war.

And, apparently, in the current war in Iraq [google.co.uk] too. US media may not have covered this story.

Re:Little Waves in an Ocean of Hate

[Anonymous Coward]

"I was thinking, who the hell in their right mind would volunteer to be test subjects for an "unproven" ray gun? "

Check out how other radiation experiment [doe.gov] "volunteers" were selected. It's lots of reading, but according to the US Department of Energy in their earlier radidation experiments you'll see that they picked retarded children; institutionalized children; kids of people on welfare or other government assistance; people in hospitals without informing them; government sponsored schools feeding radioactive "vitamins" to kids, etc. To quote one of their pages [doe.gov]

"This research involved the use of many subjects whose capacity to consent to be a volunteer was questionable at best, including children, the mentally retarded, and prisoners
...
It is difficult to reconcile these deliberations with the fact that many subjects of CMR-funded research were not true volunteers. Whether the CMR believed that the needs of a country at war justified the use of people who could not be true volunteers as research subjects is not known.

Re:Potentially lethal?

[Grym]

The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?

Probably not. Last year the police in the US managed to shoot one of their pepper-spray paintballs through an bystanding girl's eye, killing her [boston.com]. And that's a "non-lethal" weapon you can aim!

The thing in the article covers an entire area. Do you think the operator is going to check and make sure that nobody in the crowd is wearing glasses, jewelry, or contacts? That's impossible!

Even in theory, this isn't a non-lethal weapon at all... It's quite obvious that this is intended as a means of disarming (have we forgotten that guns/knives are metal?) and/or killing large groups of people immediately without collateral damage; just like a neutron bomb [wikipedia.org], only more controllable and cheaper.

-Grym

Re:Coming to America

[Anonymous Coward]

Marijuana was instrumental to the Shinto religion until approximately the time Japan surrendered to the United States, at which point the drug policies of the United States became the de facto drug policies of Japan.

So let's shelve the freedom-of-religion act because if anything is completely full of crap here it is that.

Re:Coming to America

[jericho4.0]

The Basque people, Hawaiian, Nicobar islanders, and other scattered groups are probably directly descended from the first folks to show up. None of these are nations any longer, of course.

Native americans were not the first people in the Americas, and the people they displaced weren't either.

I still think the "stolen land" critique is valid, as these were active policy and millitary moves by the US goverenment. Unfortunatly, that was then and this is now, and there's not much the US can do but build a memorial.

Re:This WILL cause lots of nice CANCER.

[Dahan]

GHz is not a measure of energy.

True, but the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. E = hf, where h is Planck's constant. That's why hard ultraviolet light (~1 PHz or 1,000,000GHz) has enough energy to knock electrons out of orbit and cause mutations in DNA, while 95 GHz microwaves do not have enough energy to do so, no matter how many photons you crank out.

Re:Coming to America

[Seumas]

How about when police officers attend pre-assembly rallies and discussions under cover and try to promote violence from within and then attend the actual rallies under cover and start spraying people randomly with pepper spray just to stir them up and cause a disturbance so you can claim that they are violent and not peaceful?

And yes, this does happen. It has been videotaped.

Re:they've used this in Miami

[Khyber]

You are right, it was indeed the weapon you describe.

It's been known for quite some time now that using waves of sound can do all kinds of things to the human body. Using stereo-separated soundwaves of differing frequencies, you can create a harmonic that your brain respods to. This has been shown to make people sick, or make them feel better and give relief from a headache. It's also shown to be possible to make people hallucinate, put them to sleep, pep them up, and more. Our skulls and brains respond rather well to nice resonating frequencies. Kudos for you bringing this up. Makes me wish I could post and mod at the same time.

Re:Health implications

[Anonymous Coward]

The round gets vaporised by braking during target impact and thus it gets to atmosphere, then into foodchain (or directly into your lungs if you are nearby). To smaller degree, if DU is not enclosed in full metal jacket, same happens to weapons crew.

Re:Health implications

[carldot67]

It's hard to say.

All cells have a fundamental shock response to heating as well as to UV and other stimuli. They produce various repair enzymes that wander around doing useful stuff like refolding damaged proteins and relinking damaged DNA.

The problem is they sometimes get it wrong leading to mutations or regulation imbalances. Heating also changes the shape of proteins. Go higher than 42C for many animal proteins and they cease to work properly, in some cases permanently until they are replaced (there is a natural turnover).

Now since proteins are involved in genetic switchgear and regulation I can easily see the possibility of one delicate subsystem going out of whack: growth factors, receptors, messengers, polymerase initiation factors, repressors etc. If one or more of these go wrong you _can_ have unregulated cell growth. aka Cancer.

This would be particularly true for children or individuals with a pre-existing disposition.

Numbers are hard for me to take a stab at without data and mammalian heat-shock isnt my field (although my degree in molecular biology is a good start).

However, and as most people would suspect, unnatural stimuli given often enough to a large enough sample will eventually throw up something bad in individual cases at a rate higher than a control group. Its a statistical certainty.

What "how often", "eventually" and "large enough" and "something bad" mean in relation to the weapon are anyone's guess. And I think thats a problem. You can find all this out for Aspirin, so why not the weapon?

On balance, if you get tagged by this thing once due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time then the chances are it's not going to harm you long term. That said, I would really, really steer clear of it. It sounds like a nightmare.

Speaking from a social viewpoint, I personally think its a dangerous escalation. If the authorities start firing this at people then it can surely only be a matter of time until they start firing back.

Re:"non" lethal?

[PeterBrett]

Yes, that's correct. The basic premise is as follows:

If you kill an enemy soldier, you've eliminated and enemy soldier from the field.

If you incapacitate an enemy soldier without killing him, you've eliminated three enemy soldiers from the field.

That's one of the reasons NATO use high-velocity, highly penetrating 5.56 mm ammunition. It's one of the least lethal types of rifle ammunition in existence. The problem was that the 7.62 mm bullets used in e.g. the British SLR were just too deadly.

Re:Coming to America

[will_die]

The FEC did let loose any "trail balloon" about delaying the elections.
An office of the Justice department was ordered to do a paper on that and what would be required to delay the popular vote by a week or two at the most. It came down to that congress would have to approve the delay,the constitution does not place a date it is a federal law done by Congress and the President. Then a whole bunch of state laws would have to be changed, such as Florida's state law that says the vote has to be in place by a certain date in December.
Overall a smart idea to have it research, but from the research it was quickly determined that it was impractical to do anything about, and just hope and pray that some attack did not prevent a large number of people from participating in the election.

The information on that paper is easy to find and was publicly available at the time it was made a big thing in the press. So are you just using it as a non-issue to spew your hate speech or did you not care about the issue enough to do anything besides read about it at some kookie conspiracy web site?

Re:Coming to America

[phreaki]

Shotguns are not invisible, cannot be fired 24/7 and kill.

Re:Coming to America

[MyLongNickName]

So "boo hoo" these people were arrested and released, right? Now, every job they apply to, they will have to tell their employer-to-be they were arrested

No. They don't. Your potential employer only has the right to know if you have been convicted of a crime. And most states limit that to a period of years.

Try again.

Re:The answer is: TINFOIL!

[Pxtl]

Those are dull metals. Highly reflective metals (like aluminum foil) would do better.

Re: Coming to America

[kalel666]

I know this is one of those things that "everybody knows", that the US armed Saddam in the 80's, but the facts speak otherwise. Yes, we supplied Iraq with monies and arms, but we were far behind those paragons of International virtue like:

USSR 17503 50.78%
France 5221 15.15%
China 5192 15.06%
Czechoslovakia 1540 4.47%
Poland 1626 4.72%
Brazil 724 2.10%
Egypt 568 1.65%
Romania 524 1.52%
Denmark 226 0.66%
Libya 200 0.58%
USA 200 0.58%

But don't take my word for it. Refer to the report from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) here: http://projects.sipri.se/armstrade/Trnd_Ind_IRQ_Im ps_73-02.pdf [sipri.se]

If you're going to blame the US for something, go ahead, but a least blame us for something legitimate.

Military Grade DU is not (just) depleted

[Savage650]

[on so-called "Depleted Uranium"] It means that the level of uranium 235 (compared to U234/U236) is reduced to below the levels found in nature. ....

It is not the Uranium content that makes DU ammunitions "hot", but the assorted contaminants. Remember where the military gets the stuff? They cant afford to use "lab-grade" stuff (made from freshly-mined ore), so they buy at the other end of the nuclear fuel processing chain:

Military-grade DU is actually nuclear waste, mamely the "everything else" part that is left over after you have extracted the few elements/isotopes that can be profitably recycled. Sure, it is "mostly" Uranium (enough so give it the desired pyhsical properties: high density, internal structure, hardness). But on the radiological level the contaminants are very significant (e.g. lots of short-lived (=hot) decay products)

Re:Coming to America

[bleckywelcky]

Actually, I think all riots would be classified as protests, but not all protests would be classified as riots.

Protest != Riot
Riot = Protest

Re:Coming to America

[Wile_E_Peyote]

The reason is that assembling to call the government to task for the wrongs they've done is instantly reclasified as rioting and pillaging.

Obviously you've forgotten the 60's. There were a great number of peacful protests that did not lead to the police bashing peoples skulls, therefore your assertion is false. It happens (Kent state), but it isn't the rule.

Boston tea party. A bunch of guys rioted and pillaged to decry the wrongs of the government.

The Boston Tea Party wasn't exactly a riot, all accounts I have read say it was remarkably peaceful.

Rodney King verdict riots. A bunch of people rioted and pillaged to decry the wrongs of the government.

This was a bad reaction and I wouldn't blame the police for using riot control tactics here.

How about the WTO protests in Seattle that were broken up with rubber bullets and tear gas? Were they causing property damage? Were they pillaging?

The answer to both questions is yes.

And then of course there's all the pillaging that was going on in Tiananmen square.

A serious abuse of power by the Chinese government and not comparable.

Whenever you have a government force putting down "riots", you better take some time to figure out why so many people are so god damned upset. Calling them a bunch of pillagers is moste definately missing the point.

Just because a bunch of people get together, doesn't mean they are there for good reason. Ever hear of Lynch Mobs? Soccer riots? Woodstock II?

Still dangerous

[uberjoe]

DU is not dangerous because because of the radioactivity, but because it's a toxic heavy metal. And when those rounds hit something at high velocity they burn, and put DU particles up into the air around the target. The problem comes from ground troops in the area who would advance on the target which has just been "softened up" by the DU cannon (or civilians in the area) would inhale the particles and get cancer down the road because they cannot exhale the particles.

Yes its depleted or most radioactivity, but it's still a burning heavy metal regardless.

Re:slashdot - predictable

[crabpeople]

"I don't see a SINGLE post suggesting sympathy for the people whose businesses, cars, property, and yes, even LIVES are threatened/damaged/ruined by the rioters."

Businesses, cars and property mean NOTHING if people are not allowed to "disturb the peace". How in the world you think damage to businesses and cars should ever be a reason to torture people with microwave death rays, is amazing to me. then i remembered you live in a perminant state of FEAR being an american. In that way I am able to slightly identify your responses. THey arent logical, or even make sense, but fear is hardly ever "logical".

"But then again, why should they get sympathy? They're working a job, running a local business, making a living, supporting a family...you know, all those things that the "anti-globalization protestors" (really fancy way of saying unemployed vandals) are supposedly "protecting"..."

if people dont think this persons "reality" isnt acurate, maybe they should re read that last paragraph again. Let me just say I had no idea people protesting the government dont deserve sympathy. its the same line of reasoning that says that suicide bombers are pussies or whatever, cowards, i believe is what they say.

whoes more of a coward? you hiding behind the police state, or someone willing to risk there LIFE to change the system?

"It's great we're in Iraq, we're accomplishing good things in the majority of the country where the psychotic terrorists aren't an everyday event."

you simply havent watched any footage from over there have you? my guess is you just watch the snippets on the news. blowing people up and torturing them is not "good things" in my book. are troops deploying food and water to the masses? can they keep the power on 24x7 for the big cities? are they assisting in the hospitals giving care to the injured? or are compasionate civilians doing that while the american army kills things. thats the entire fucking point of an army right? to kill? or do you have some illusion about how and why people are trained to go to war.

Re: Coming to America

[IgnoramusMaximus]

If you're implying the $200M from the US was used exclusively for chemical weapons and other WMD, then I'd love to see a source.

You gotta be kidding. I am not gonna waste a day looking for primary sources, I will point you instead to this [counterpunch.org] report, they cite their sources, go check them yourself. They mention figures totalling over $5 billion.

USSR sold weapons to Saddam as he was not part of the Warsaw Pact and USSR was in no position to give him stuff. As a matter of fact when Saddam fell, he was $8 billion or so in debt to USSR/Russia for all that junk.

Note that while the US money was earmarked for weapons, it was funnelled through various covers like the agriculture department. This is a standard practice with clandestine military aid, serving among other things to hide it from the taxpaying public.

Also from the article:

The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad continued its military offensive against Iran.

and

The US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application ...

Look, I'm not excusing the fact we provided this materiel to Iraq, only that we were hardly alone, and weren't nearly the worst offender.

The difference is that all the other participants were just trying to peddle their wares to Saddam (which still makes them covered in blood snakes) although of course they had their agendas. Particualry amusing is the fact that Saddam was falling out with the USSR over his war with Iran, which is what made him such a great buddy of the US. But unlike even the USSR (although they did sell him arms on credit - which ended up costing them dearly), the US was actively funding him during his attrocities, which is worse. Doubly so now, when the hypocrisy is of cosmic proportions, with all the "liberation" and search for WMDs crapola.

Re:Military Grade DU is not (just) depleted

[HardCase]

...on the radiological level the contaminants are very significant (e.g. lots of short-lived (=hot) decay products)

No, that's wrong. There radiological danger from DU is virtually zero. Its radioactivity is at the level of background radiation or less. Its problem is that it is a heavy metal. It's poisonous when ingested.

When I was in the Navy we joked around a lot about handling the ammunition for the 30mm CIWS gun until somebody finally brought out a geiger counter. Background radiation.

The last that I heard, CIWS doesn't use DU anymore. I heard something about tungsten rounds.

-h-