Peacetimes June 1994
Killing them softly: bizarre new weapons from the Pentagon's Black Budget
by Kathy Odgers

Our seemingly endless capacity for destruction has yet another euphemism to add to its vocabulary: the non-lethal weapon. These include an entire arsenal of weapons currently being developed in the U.S.A. at such laboratories as Sandia and Los Alamos under the strictest secrecy.
In a recent issue of The New Scientist, Vincent Kiernan cites the end of the Cold War as one of the major reasons for the interest in research into non-lethal weapons: since the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. "one of the military's growth areas has been peacekeeping." And it's hard to explain killing people in the interests of peacekeeping, as U.S. peacekeepers found when they shot into a crowd of demonstrators in Somalia, killing at least three. But "troops armed with non-lethal weapons could immobilize demonstrators without killing or injuring anyone, and perhaps even wade in and capture the ringleaders."
What exactly are non-lethal weapons? They are weapons designed to stun, disorient or immobilize enemy forces as opposed to killing them outright. But as one American journalist interviewed recently on Radio Peace put it, with more than a little sarcasm, they can be more accurately thought of as "pre-lethal" _ that is, designed to "soften up" the enemy before going in for the kill. Linda Rothstein, Managing Editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, went on to say that in this they are nothing new: the use of poison gas in World War I was not primarily intended to kill but rather to "confuse, disorient and weaken the enemy." Although not all students of warfare would agree with her choice of examples, the fact remains that the idea of non-lethal weapons has been around for over 2000 years: writing in the fourth century B.C., Chinese military strategist Sun-tzu observed that waging war need not require killing people.
What is new, however, is the application of modern technology to the development of non-lethal weapons. They range from the ludicrous to the truly diabolical: low frequency noise (or "infrasound") that can cause uncontrollable nausea and defecation; soporific drugs wafted towards enemy lines; highly caustic chemicals able to eat through metals; polymers that clog up jet intakes; electromagnetic energy that can disable enemy weapons; sticky foam that immobilizes all those it comes in contact with; nets fired from canisters to immobilize both people and vehicles; laser rifles and other beam weapons that can temporarily or permanently blind troops or interfere with optical sensors on enemy weapons.
Linda Rothstein attributes the recent surge of interest in non-lethal weapons in the U.S.A. to their perceived success in the Gulf War: "A lot of people felt that the Gulf War showed that precision targetting, the use of cruise missiles that disrupted the electricity supplies in Iraq were very successful and showed that non-lethal weapons could work effectively. It didn't matter that the effect of disrupting electricity, for instance, was enormous harm to the civilian population, it was still considered a non-lethal weapon."
Of course, with huge numbers of people dead in the aftermath of the Gulf War as a result of the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure by "non-lethal weapons," the semantic distinction between lethal and non-lethal weapons becomes patently absurd. If they are defined as weapons which don't kill their victims immediately but eventually, one could argue that nuclear weapons themselves are largely non-lethal, given that many of their victims die after immediate exposure as a result of being irradiated. Claiming that nuclear bombs can be classified as non-lethal is precisely the sort of pernicious nonsense advanced by no less a heavyweight in the scientific community than Edward Teller, pioneer of the U.S. nuclear weapons program and the brains behind "Star Wars."
At a conference on non-lethal weapons in November, Teller advocated the use of mini-nuclear bombs to destroy a country's infrastructure. In a great gesture of magnanimity, however, civilians would be warned of where the bombs would be targetted and could flee before they fell. "A plan of this kind," according to Teller, "could work out without a single casualty." Given what we know about exposure to radiation, Teller's opinions are willfully naive at best and criminally irresponsible at worst. As Linda Rothstein puts it, "Leaving a country irradiated, pock-marked and teeming with refugees may not strike most people as particularly non-lethal."
What emerges from the debate over non-lethal weapons is that any weapon used with enough accuracy or concentration can prove lethal. Laser weapons are a case in point: how could a blind pilot, even if his or her blindness is temporary, safely land a plane? And the Pentagon has expressed "a special interest," says Rothstein, in blinding enemy pilots.
An even more sinister aspect of this type of research, however, may lie in its civilian applications. As unruly Canucks fans and curious onlookers discovered in Vancouver recently, the non-lethal weapon of choice of the police, namely tear gas, is a highly effective and extremely unpleasant method of controlling civil disturbances. Currently in the U.S. there's a high-level power struggle going on between the Defense and Justice Departments for control of these weapons. With declining government budgets for weapons research and declining profits for arms manufacturers, the U.S. defence industry wants to sell non-lethal weapons to the police.
In a breathtaking leap of logic, the U.S. Defense Department and weapons makers are even claiming to be involved in defence conversion because they are producing products for the police and the maintenance of civil order rather than continuing to make weapons of war.