IT SOUNDS like the screenplay for a tawdry horror flick 鈥� corpses shot with plastic bullets, people zapped with microwave beams and others knocked out with volatile narcotic gels. But this is not Hollywood fiction. This is the reality of non-lethal weapons research.
At first glance, developing weapons that incapacitate without killing seems a worthy goal. But a worrying number of devices may not be quite as non-lethal as potential victims might hope for.
Take the Taser stun gun, which incapacitates its victims with a 50,000-volt shock and is widely used in the US. The trouble with the Taser is that even after 10 years of use in the US, there are still serious concerns about its safety.
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Human rights organisation Amnesty International cites numerous cases in the US in which a 鈥渢ased鈥� person later died. The maker, Taser International of Scottsdale, Arizona, is facing 33 lawsuits for wrongful injury, death or the use of excessive force, though seven previous suits have been dismissed. The firm says other factors, such as drug use, led to the deaths, not the Taser itself (快猫短视频, 12 November, p 30).
The UK Home Office has carried out its own tests on the health effects of tasers and this month will consider a request from the Association of Chief Police Officers to allow wider use of the Taser in the UK. If this is granted, Paul Wiles, chief scientific adviser to the UK鈥檚 Home Office, admits he will 鈥渕aintain capacity to test Tasers鈥� if health issues arise.
But shouldn鈥檛 such a device be proved non-lethal before it is unleashed on the public, not afterwards? Producing convincing evidence that a weapon really is non-lethal is tricky. The difficulty was all too evident at Jane鈥檚 Less Lethal Weapons Conference held in Leeds, UK, in October. Manufacturers appear to have little hesitation in deploying new weapons before knowing the full gamut of likely health effects. The impression is that the non-lethal weapons industry is learning little from the furore surrounding the Taser.
When the damaging effects of a weapon become known, it often has to be redesigned. For example, a number of governments are now modifying the supposedly non-lethal plastic bullet, which is not supposed to penetrate the body. Separate studies in the US and Israel have found that a large proportion of people killed by plastic bullets die from injuries caused when the round penetrated their body. So researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, have been firing plastic bullets at cadavers to learn how to reduce their lethality.
They are not the first to go down this route. The UK government鈥檚 Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire has already redesigned the plastic bullets used in the UK. The new bullets have a crumple zone at the front, reducing the initial rate of transfer of kinetic energy into the target and lessening the chance of skull and bone fractures. But the point is that this redesign happened years after plastic bullets were deployed and only after being recommended by the Patten inquiry into improving policing in Northern Ireland.
鈥淩esearchers have been firing plastic bullets at cadavers to learn how to reduce their lethality鈥�
And since plastic bullets were introduced, little has changed in terms of the way much of the industry operates. Colin Burrows, who chaired the Leeds conference, summed up the situation: 鈥淚t鈥檚 just appalling that you can buy weapons that are not licensed and not manufactured to standards. You cannot even do that with a headache pill.鈥�
The conference was fascinating for the fact that unlike invitation-only arms conferences, it included a great many critics, including specialists in conflict resolution and doctors who have treated victims of non-lethal weapons, to the evident disgust of some of the industry鈥檚 hawks. After one session of particularly acerbic criticism, a senior official from the US Department of Defense took me aside and advised me to ignore these detractors: 鈥淭hese peace-studies people have no business at this conference. They accuse us of not having done our research. Of course we have. But it鈥檚 classified.鈥� In other words: 鈥淭rust us. We are the military.鈥�
That won鈥檛 wash. The next generation of non-lethal weapons are technically complex and their effects will be too. For instance, the US army is rolling out a non-lethal crowd-dispersing weapon called the Area Denial System, which produces pain by heating the skin with microwaves. But what effect will it have on those who are subjected to prolonged exposure? And plans to create paintball-style knockout pellets that deliver a volatile goo which sticks to skin came in for strong criticism. A dose strong enough to fell a young, fit man, say the critics, could likely kill an elderly person.
What is lacking with all these weapons is convincing evidence that they won鈥檛 kill. The health effects of new non-lethal weapons must undergo exhaustive, independent and peer-reviewed research before they are launched, not later amid a blizzard of death certificates and writs. It cannot be too much to ask that non-lethal weapons be demonstrably non-lethal.
鈥淧rocedures are just not in place to ensure these things work as advertised,鈥� says public policy specialist Brian Rappert of the University of Exeter in the UK. That has to end.
