"SET PHASERS TO COOK THEIR ASS"

CAPTAIN "GW" KIRK

The US military has recently unveiled a new "ray gun" that is supposed to be something new and wonderful in "active denial systems" and "non-lethal crowd control". The item is one of a trio of boondoggle projects that the US military has been throwing taxpayer dollars at in the past decade. One is a "bacterial squirt" capable of turning jet fuel into useless jelly. Another is the much mocked "gay spray" that supposedly turns enemy soldiers into homosexuals. Hopefully inducing them to stop and bugger each other before they overrun the position held by "dem true blue Gawd feerin Christian boys frahm Kansas". One fears for the boys from the USA if they are just too damn cute for their own good. Only female soldiers could save GW's butt then.

But getting back to the real world, this latest development, apparently $40 million dollars over the course of a decade in development, has been hauled out by the US Army public relations departments for demonstrations lately. Even though, like any good bureaucratic project, it was slated to be deployed in Iraq in 2005 and now will (hopefully, maybe, possibly, if enough congressmen are impressed) be ready to roll in 2010.

This directed energy weapon apparently sends a focused beam of what they call "millimeter waves" towards advancing enemies, crowds, taxpayers, those who don't vote Republican,etc which purportedly causes a "burning sensation" that will cause them to flee without any enduring injury by heating the first 1/64th of an inch of skin to about 50 degrees.

Molly really has to call a time out here. The military have gone to many lengths to give this part of the electromagnetic spectrum a new name in hopes that it won't be connected in the public mind with "microwaves" and all that that implies. "Milliwave" is hardly a widely used term to describe those parts of the EMS that lie on the border between infrared and microwave. Actually I've never heard the term before. The part of the EMS that these sort of waves lie in is usually referred to as the EHF(extremely high frequency) band of the microwave part of the spectrum. The purported "superficial" penetration of this sort of radiation is because, even though it has higher frequency and therefore more energy than photons in the usual microwave range (the average microwave oven operates at a wavelength of about 12 cm), the shorter wavelength means that it will interact with matter at a lesser depth.

Further on this "time out", one of the major contractors on this project, Raytheon, built the first microwave oven way back in 1947. Whatayoudo when almost all your competitors can build a better devise at a lower price ? In a lot of cases the solution to this problem is "get a government contract" where price, quality and deadlines mean little if anything. Other contractors involved in this development include CPI (Communications and Power Industries) of Palo Alto CA and Veridan Engineering of san Antonio TX.

But back to the main story. This devise was demonstrated to the media at the US Air Force's Moody base in the state of Georgia early in 2007, and predictably elicited the usual oohs and ahhs from the mass media. Few if any bothered to investigate the military's claims for the "safety" of the weapon even though a lot of information is available on the internet. The military, for instance, claims that it would take up to 250 seconds (a little over 4 minutes) of exposure to cause actual burns to the target. Physicist Juergen Altmann of Germany's Dortmund University, on the other hand says that the "safety range" is more like 3 1/2 seconds and that further exposure of as little as 3 to 5 seconds will produce second and third degree burns. This would probably be fatal in the majority of cases as the area of the body exposed to a beam with a diameter of 3 meters is about 50% ie everything facing the beam. Pretty well anyone with 2nd or 3rd degree burns to 20% !!!! of the body is a candidate for the ICU. Twenty is less than 50.

The difference between Dr. Juegen's statement and the military statement comes from a very simple omitted fact in the case of the military. They assume that the beam cooks the skin to 50 degrees and that it stays at 50 degrees. Dr. Jurgen points out that the longer the exposure the greater the heat. Try it in your own microwave. The wavelength of the radiation there is always the same. Uh duh. Two minutes cooking is hotter than one minute.

Jane's Defense Weekly is of the opinion that this weapon will be of limited military use ie being only a "one hit wonder" to disperse crowds that might contain gunmen. They say also that it will likely be of limited civilian law enforcement use, though the ways of the world might suggest otherwise. Look for this toy to show up on US shipments to every dictator in the world who is "on the right side according to Halliburton and Falwell".

Many others have noted other possible side effects of this weapon that the military has been careful to avoid in its press releases. For one thing its purpose of "dispersal" is rather a hit and miss affair. Unlike a hot stove element there is no useful direction to flee from a weapon of this sort. Suddenly the half of one's body pointed towards the weapon seems like it is burning. It's the same no matter which direction you run until you manage to outrun the beam's range (or until you are properly cooked if they don't turn it off fast enough). Lotsa good stampedes with lots of deaths which would, of course, be blamed on the crowd itself. also the heat flux delivered by this weapon is much higher than that known to cause corneal damage in experimental animals.

The weapon would, of course, be next door to useless in the face of a real military enemy approaching with a dispersed formation and able to call fire in on the greatly exposed units transmitting such a beam. It is, however, of great use in attacks on unarmed civilians, and that will be its real utility should it ever really get off the ground. Like all too much of military technology this devise points towards a truism that many have expressed over the years. The real and permanent enemies of any country are not the temporary foreign countries called "enemies". The real purpose of a military is to shield the rulers of a country from their own people and not from the foreigner.

MOLLY NOTE:

A lot of the information for this blog was taken from the Global Security.org website, a place that nobody in their right mind could accuse of "left-wing bias". This website is basically "technocratic" in that it will report the pros and cons of various military technologies without engaging in ideological polemic as too many sources, both left and right(including this one), do. The overall tone is, of course, that the American Empire is a great and wonderful thing, but these people engage in very little wishful thinking in their reports and often give more than one side of an item. Well worth looking at.