Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Phil Carter discusses a DoD memo that further supports to the possibility that we have already entered this parellel universe.

Well, the UFP also had phasers that could be set on "stun"; those are obviously preferable to the "pain beam". Sadly, in the real world it is very tricky to render someone reliably unconscious (not awake, or dead) from a distance, which means that our alternatives are things like rubber bullets and tear gas; this seems like an improvement over both of those.

What makes one weapon more, or less, evil than another? I'd rather be 'hit' by a directed energy beam then a bullet...but then, if they have weapons like this I think they will use them far more often.

The problem isn't with the government having these 'tools,' but with the use to which the tools are put.

I've long held the view that there ought to be an entire Star Trek *series* set in a parallel universe where the United Federation of Planets is evil.

Millimeter wave?

That's the very short microwave range.

The countermeasure is pretty low tech.

You upgrade from tinfoil hat to tinfoil suit.

I'm not joking.

Your agonizer please...

Matthew: the tinfoil suit solution is fine on the battlefield, less fine in the interrogation room.

The interesting thing -- and I checked, when I read it -- was that the word 'microwave' does not appear in the article at all.

One wonders why. Perhaps it's because we know that putting people into microwave ovens -- well, that would be wrong.

They don't use the term microwave because (as best as I can determine from Google) it's on the upper border line.

The article noted it would be useful for crowd control. Which, the article did not go on to say, might prove very important soon, for both foreign and domestic theaters of operation.

Brad,

What does this have to do with empire? Or evil? Is the U.S. becoming an evil empire becuase it is developing weapons that *DON'T* kill people? C'mon.

Ummm..crowd control. Ever play dodge ball?

Serpentine!

Ridiculous. How much did we spend on this "weapon"?

Flaffer

The CDR wrote: "I've long held the view that there ought to be an entire Star Trek *series* set in a parallel universe where the United Federation of Planets is evil."

There is: _Blake's 7_.

Almost certainly guaranteed to show up in the interrogation rooms before the battlefield...

Why is this likely to be used in interrogation? There are already no end of ways to cause people in your immediate control pain and discomfort. The whole advantage of this is that it works on people at a distance.

Jake McGuire wrote:

        Why is this likely to be used in interrogation?

Well, there are two things in the quotation that suggest its usefulness in "interrogation" (read: torture):

         ... but no one has withstood the pain it produces
        for more than three seconds.

sure it's no rectal probe with a broom handle, but it might have its appeal particularly when combined with:

        ... years of testing has produced no sign it will
        lead to health effects beyond perhaps causing
        skin to temporarily redden.(...)"

Think of it as a push-button "bag of oranges". No visible marks, lots of plausible deniability. Just make sure you ban camera phones and you are pretty much assured of avoiding another Abu Ghraib-type scandal.

Jake wrote:
        The whole advantage of this is that it works
        on people at a distance.

The whole advantage of this thing is that it causes intense pain with no permanent marks. The distance feature is just a "dual-use" benefit.

I wonder what the status is on anti-satelite warfare. It seems that it wouldn't be that hard to knock them out of the sky, or to just blow a bunch of debris into orbit which would destroy all of the satellites.

Funny, but they didn't put a quote in about how long people withstood having 120V AC run through their testicles or being forced to breathe carbon dioxide or anything else. I say again: there is no shortage of ways to inflict pain on someone in your control. Even ways that will not leave marks.

Look - there is a very obvious problem of how to deal with unruly and violent crowds that you nevertheless do not wish to kill. Vast numbers of people end up being killed - for lack of a better term - unneccesarily. The military has gone through a lot of work to produce a system that inflicts non-lethal pain on specific people at a great distance. The "at a distance" part has made their design much more difficult and expensive than it would otherwise be. The military is publicizing this, at least to some extent. None of this is consistent with the theory that this is intended for or going to be used primarly torturing prisoners.

Re: ASAT. Pretty well understood. Setting off a nuke in LEO is very bad news. Actually targetting a specific satellite (even with debris) is pretty difficult, but no more so than building a moderately complicated satellite - technologically advanced nations with their own space capability could certainly do it. A lot of the US missile defense work will provide ASAT capability "for free".

Jake,

Again, I think you misunderestimate the advantages of a device which requires little or no training to operate (you try to find someone who can apply electricity to testicles without causing burns!) and can cause pain from a psychologically safe distance. Add properly scientific language about how it only causes reddening of the skin and we could have the most humane Inquisition in history.

But I may be entirely wrong and you may be right, perhaps devices like this may be better suited to breaking up anti-war and anti-globalization protests. And there is the export market, lots of unruly crowds in Iraq, China and the Stans.

We will surely live in a paradise when we can suppress a crowd without killing a single person.

I'm *much* more worried about weapons like this being used to suppress protests than being used in interrogation. In an interrogation situation, I don't see that it offers anything more than a stun gun, for instance.

That the military -- "Destroying Property and Killing Humanity is Job One!" (TM) -- would waste its time on a weapon which merely inflicts pain is bad enough. But testing such a thing on "volunteers" who "STAND" in front of the thing? Idiocy! Isn't Gitmo full of caged enemies who can be strapped across the barrel of the new device?

Impeach the bastards who waste our money on frivolities like this!

"One wonders why. Perhaps it's because we know that putting people into microwave ovens -- well, that would be wrong."

Indeed, far more wrong than blowing large chunks out of them with a high-speed piece of lead.

Is this covered by the Second Amendment?

Qui habet aures audiendi audiat - He who has ears, let him understand how to listen

Nescio quid dicas - I don't know what you're talking about