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Rural Montana, 1998. Heavily armed religious fanatics have holed up inside a fortified compound and are threatening to blow themselves up if the FBI attempts to disarm them. But government agents wheel out a device that looks like a giant speaker and position it facing the building. They flip a switch, and a low rumbling issues forth. A few minutes later, the fanatics stumble out of the building one at a time. They are clearly dizzy and disoriented, and some are vomiting. Agents handcuff them.
The same year, somewhere in the Middle East. An angry mob is throwing stones and homemade firebombs at a squad of U.S. peacekeepers. Hiding behind their jeep, the soldiers connect an exotic-looking stainless steel gun to a canister the size of an oxygen tank. Soon a stream of brown foam shoots from the gun into the crowd. Within seconds, the mob is mired in mounds of supersticky goo, unable to move. The riot is over.
Sometime this fall -- perhaps as soon as this month -- a secret task force will submit a list of recommendations to the undersecretary of defense in charge of acquisition. If, as expected recommendations are approved, the Pentagon will then establish its first coordinated effort to develop radically new types of weapons: nonlethal ones.
These controversial proposed devises -- which are expected to play a burgeoning role in future battles [see "Digital Warrior," Sept.] -- would use a variety of technologies to temporarily incapacitate enemy soldiers or criminals or to disable their vehicles and equipment. For example, giant "infrasound" speakers might use super-low-frequency beams of sound to disorient terrorist holed up in a building; or during peacekeeping missions, anti-combustion chemicals could be sprayed onto military vehicles to disable their engines. Within the United States, police might shoot tiny homing devices from custom-made guns at fleeing vehicles, eliminating the need for hazardous high-speed chases.
Concepts for such technologies have been bandied a for decades in military research circles -- until recently, with little reaction from top brass. But that's changing. Last year -- about the time events in the Somalia peacekeeping operation were reaching a climax -- the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent Washington government advisory group, briefed Defense Undersecretary John Deutch on the potential...