The military borrows a trick from Superman
Bookworm on Jan 25 2007 at 11:32 am | Filed under: Military
It’s with a great deal of embarrassment that I admit that I’m a huge fan of Lois and Clark : the New Adventures of Superman, something I discovered a decade ago during 3 a.m. reruns when I was up with my newborn. In these shows, the all-too-wonderful Superman understands and espouses the virtues of non-violence but is always willing to rough up the bad guys when nothing else works. One of his little tools in defeating the bad guys without actual violence is his heat ray vision. Thus, through the wonders of computer animation, we see Superman heat up a bad guy’s feet so he runs away, or heat a gun so the bad guy is compelled to drop it. It’s cheesy, but the fact is it may soon become real:
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.”
The prototype weapon - called Silent Guardian - 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.
It sounds like a good idea to me. Heck, if it’s good enough for Superman, why shouldn’t it be good enough for us?
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7 Responses to “The military borrows a trick from Superman”
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Silent Guardian my foot. Ask the poor schmuck who gets burnt and then screeeeeeeeeee . . . ams for relief.I think the diabolical Penquin(Republicans)would enjoy it but not Superman(Democrats).
That’s right, Book. Superman is a Democrat.
Very good against mobs and riots. Depends on the range and penetration really.
One of the fascinating things about the non-lethal weapons - you guys know who one of the driving forces behind them has been?
Sci-fi writer C.J. Cherryh - Caroline Cherryh in her other career is an imaginer and developer working for the Pentagon on giant glue-shooters for non-lethal crowd control, handcuffs you squeeze out of a tube (so one riot cop can carry fifty pairs of cuffs), and various rays to safely immobilize people. Don’t know if this one of hers, but she came up with the original idea of the Taser.
I read one of Cherryl’s books, but it was a fantasy one… not a sci fi one.
The Tazer is great. I wonder if you could use it to interrogate terroists. Zap.
The Left will still oppose it. They’ll call it a “torture weapon.” Anything which helps our troops in the field is evil to the Left, and their media toadies will repeat their most outrageous lies without hesitation.
Expect poor pitiful innocent civilians with horrible burns claiming to be the victims of the American torture weapon. Expect “humanitarian” organizations to condemn the use of torture weapons. Expect celebrities to organize campaigns against torture weapons.
Expect no outcry at all when terrorists burn their captives to death with gasoline and blowtorches.
Precisely, Trimegistus. I anticipate Amy Goodman doing a segment any day now on Democracy Now about the new Pentagon dissent-crushing torture weapons and their potential to shred the right of peaceful assembly.
Commenters are dead-on! The only heat the left wants to apply to cretins who want us DEAD is that from the campfire around which we’ll sit with them and sing “Kumbaya”.