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Now, you've actually experienced the Active Denial System.
Beason: Yes, I did. It was back in 2001, and it was when they had first approved Active Denial for human testing. It was one of the most amazing experiments that I have had the privilege to participate in. At the time they were just exposing people's backsides to the millimeter waves, because in very strict human protocol testing, you just want to take it one step at a time. At the time I had to jump out of the way of the beam within an extremely short amount of time and, even though I was scheduled for two more tests, I was kind of reluctant to go back and do that again because I still had the memory of what it felt like, even though I didn't show any signs of being exposed to it.
Now, before I underwent the testing, I did a lot of research, because I didn't want to do the testing without knowing what was happening. I did discover that because the beam was at the millimeter part of the electromagnetic spectrum that it wasn't energetic enough to cause any type of carcinogenic effects--that is, carcinogenic effects occur with exposure to UV radiation, because the UV radiation is energetic enough to ionize some of the cells that make up the human body, but millimeter waves are too low in energy to do this--in fact it's much, much lower than sunlight or even infrared radiation, and also the amount of time that it takes to produce the Active Denial effect is much, much less than any time that it would take to cause any physiological effects.
So, in effect this works, to use science fiction terminologies, as a force field?
Beason: In fact, the joke was "phasers on stun"--you don't really stun people with this, but you can use a sweeping motion if you want to push people away as if you had a virtual force field there.
How much energy does this kind of system draw?
Beason: Active Denial has actually been put on a Humvee. I can't really say what the power levels are because that's classified, but you can actually drive around the Active Denial unit on this Humvee and have enough energy, so to speak, for missions that last a very long time--long enough to be of military significance. It's what we call a tactical system, that is, it's short-range, and remember I said an inherent advantage of directed energy is that it's really defensive because you cannot spread the Active Denial system over a large area, over a large crowd--it has to go from person to person to create this effect. You could sweep it back and forth, but you can't do it over a very large area--you can't imagine doing this over a city block or a city or anything like that.
Your book also talks about high-power microwaves--so that's different from the millimeter wave.
Beason: The difference here is that high-power microwaves are a type of directed energy that doesn't affect people but rather affects electronics. The difference is that if you look at the maturity with lasers, millimeter waves and microwaves, microwaves are the least mature type of technology. Lasers are ready to go to the battlefield any day now, Active Denial could go to the battlefield any day, but microwave research, it's going to take one or two decades until we get to the technical maturity to be able to put it on the battlefield.
Any other goodies coming out of the labs?
What kind of budget are we talking about for these systems like ABL?
Beason: ABL has been $300 (million) to $500 million a year over the past decade, and high-power microwaves is about an order of magnitude below that, about $30 million or so. The difference there is that the Airborne Laser is a weapons system, and that's right on the order that you would expect a major strategic weapons system to be funded at, but high-power microwaves are still in the laboratory.
See more CNET content tagged:
laser, diode, energy, microwave, weapon
A fascinating set of systems -- The evolution of Science, Science
Fiction and Imagination now coming to fruition.
DJO
Beam weapons are not your choice as the victim, they are the choice of the attacker. And they are a good choice for a number of reasons. You won't ever have a world without weapons... and when you need one, you want to have the best.
It is not the job of a microwave to subdue or eliminate threats. Thus, the microwave is designed to be safe.
Also - this is not just a tool they're going to turn loose on crowds of people. This would be something you turn loose when you're sitting in a humvee or tank somewhere with people chanting death threats and throwing rocks at you.
"Beam" type energy weapons have been on the radar for a long time. There are various reasons why they aren't being used to the same extent as traditional firearms, but once their capabilities can honestly exceed those of traditional means, then the change will only take a matter of time.
I wrote about beam weapons last year:
http://www.inaniloquent.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=8b31029f-76d0-4b26-b276-945efb836da8
If they don't have it already ;)
If they don't have it already ;)
Further, all the laws of physics, energy, thermal dynamics and inverse projection laws are fixed in this man's universe.
Interesting read, but still in the realms if science fiction!, such is life!
Further, all the laws of physics, energy, thermal dynamics and inverse projection laws are fixed in this man's universe.
Interesting read, but still in the realms if science fiction!, such is life!
The real test....can it pop a house's worth of popcorn?
The line about "Airborne Laser" already having flown without the actual laser is a crock, Why even mention that? No one cares that a 747 was capable of flight. That's like decades ago when there was supposed to be an experiment to test the feasibility of a nuclear powered aircraft. All they ended up doing was loading a small reactor (not hooked up to anything or providing any power) into a plane and flying around. Whoopee.
We found back in the 60's that transmitting high powered laser pulses over 100 megawatts in peak power and in excess of 50 joules would result in breaking down the air. The leading edge would heat the air changing the index of refraction for the following energy and the pulse would actually shorten in length with the tail trying to catch up with the leading edge.
The energy density would get so high that the air would break down and absorb the rest of the pulse.
The answer of course was to increase the beam diameter but I still wonder what effect this laser will experience in the atmosphere.
I realize that there are atmospheric windows in the IR and that the density is much lower at high altitude but it still sounds like a challenge.
Larry Eccleston
- by RobX1 September 27, 2009 10:05 PM PDT
- They used to test microwaves on dogs in Russia in the early 60's.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(22 Comments)I suppose now testing on humans is assumed to be safe because its a safer means of crowd control
The amount of pain they can inflict by burning the upper part through microwave or heat energy of the skin they produced these vehicles over seas on our enemies for control now they are safe enough to be used on everyone. Safe depends I guess on whether one is victim or the person using the microwave on the crowd
So lets say some portions of the bodies like intestine and interior brain regions just spat out when the military used it on who ever considered was hostile.It cannot be a mass weapon of destruction because only our enemies possess those.
Besides whats a little free tan for crowd control now a days. Off course one could argue not everyone has the same level of resistance like a child versus teenager compared to an adult or elder since not everyone has a different level of sensitivity so what could be considered lethal for one person may not be for another. Crowd control or testing Guinea pigs is my question under the security banner.