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DARIA VAISMAN
Most international policy was, at that point, riot control. The US had
become a peripatetic interventionist, dabbling in United Nations
sanctions and adjudicating regional skirmishes as if they were
protests at a college rally. For an optimistic military administration,
non-lethals were the humanitarian antidote to atom bombs. By
1996, the US had invested nearly $37 million in research for
non-lethal weapons.
The ideology behind "non-lethal" weapons was not new. Police had
used chemical sprays and rubber bullets, to name just two, to quell
domestic riots in the US throughout the 1960s. A second-wave of
non-lethals were introduced in the Gulf War and then, later, in
Somalia in 1994: sticky foams to adhere a person to an object or
another person; caustics to dissolve tires and roadways; lasers to
disorient and temporarily blind; acoustic weapons that used
high-decibel noise to cause pain, or infrasound to cause unbearable
nausea. The US had already discovered, while dropping bombs over
Vietnam, that sudden, high-decibel noise would deafen people,
though this was not what non-lethal researchers had intended.
(The 1907 Hague Convention clearly prohibits the use of "arms,
projectiles, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary
suffering.") But it presented an interesting question: Was it
possible to project sound at a precise decibel level that caused pain
without permanent ear damage? Furthermore, there was anecdotal
evidence suggesting that at the right frequency, infrasound would
"liquefy [people's] bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic
masses."1
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Cabinet Magazine Online - The Acoustics of War http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/acousticsofwar.php
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Cabinet Magazine Online - The Acoustics of War http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/acousticsofwar.php
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its own conspiracy theories as well. Major Joseph Cook III has
suggested in his handbook, Nonlethal Weapons, that the Russians
have a gun that shoots 10-Hz acoustic bullets the size of baseballs
from hundreds of yards away. It has been claimed for years that
the Nazis developed a sonic cannon so powerful it could fell a B-17
bomber out of the sky. But these appear only as anecdotal stories.
Of the acoustic prototypes that actually exist, several have actually
proved viable. In his 1981 book Riot Control, Colonel Rex Applegate
showcased a blueprint for a curdler (which he aptly nicknames "the
people repeller"), which looks like a British police club and emits a
shrieking, pulsating sound equal to 120 decibels at 30 feet.
Swanson directed me to two weapons: a Compression Air Device
[CAD] and a Ring Vortex Cannon. The CAD generates energy at a
specific low frequency from a combustion engine at its base, and
directs the sound out of a long tube. The Ring Vortex Cannon,
which Swanson thinks is the most viable of the acoustic weapons, is
actually an acoustic and kinetic cannon that sends out an
infrasound donut-shaped shock wave combined with a toxic
chemical spray. The vortex ring travels at hundreds of miles per
hour, and hits its target with the force of a rubber blanket. br>
Ultrasound also has its adherents. For years, self-proclaimed
futurologists such as the husband-wife team Janet and Chris
Morris have been prophesying a different kind of ultrasound
weapon: acoustic voice plants that can make the target imagine to
be hearing voices inside his or her head. A powerpoint slide from a
talk Swanson had given in 1999 explained the technology in more
detail: Two high-frequency sound beams are mixed, producing a
"difference tone" that is audible with "laser-like directivity." (Audible
sound, in the 20 Hz to 20 KHz range, tends to dissipate in all
directions like infrasound.)
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Cabinet Magazine Online - The Acoustics of War http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/acousticsofwar.php
"Our ears are our primary sensor," Swanson tells me. "Sound can
cause anxiety and stress, but a loud sound won't put you on the
floor and keep you there. It won't make 100% or 70% [of people]
sick the way it will work for 1% or .01% of the population. Nausea is
not a repeatable effect for the general population, but deafness is.
If you make everybody deaf, your weapon doesn't work that well."
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©2003
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