14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have reacted very strongly in a negative way to the revelation that the US military is sponsoring the development of a weapon that can deliver an "excruciating bout of pain" from over a mile away. The "Pulsed Energy Projectile" (PEP) device "fires a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid ", the New Scientist explains.
If you happen to be that something solid, then you get temporarily incapacitated without suffering permanent injury.
At least, that is the explanation the military offered scientists wondering about the real effects of the weapon, worried that this device might be used for extreme persuasion techniques like torture. Andrew Rice, a consultant in pain medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, said: "Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do not believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown."
What those physical effects might be is the subject of a University of Central Florida in Orlando study which aims to "optimize" the effect of PEPs as noted in a 2003 US Naval Studies Board review of non-lethal weapons.
The review outlined how PEPs produced "pain and temporary paralysis" in animal tests, apparently as a result of "an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells".
This weapon has nothing in common with non-lethal, non-injury, immobilizing-only devices that the US military is designing and trying to "feed" to human rights advocates everywhere. Not that all these devices that claim not to induce any injury are ethical, think of the "sex gas bomb".