pain ray

Coming soon, from the folks who brought you the microwave -- Raytheon! After more than ten years in the making and at a cost of over 40 million dollars, 'Silent Guardian', or Active Denial System, (ADS, in it's formal mood), is almost ready for public release!

US military vehicle equipped with the Active Denial System (Photo: US Department of Defense) Crowd control always presents a problem for the military and police. How do you keep people away from a site without direct physical confrontation, when someone is almost sure to get hurt? Tear gas has variable effects and depends on wind; rubber bullets have killed. But what about a system that inflicts pain at a distance, without contact?

The Active Denial System, the Pentagon's "pain ray," is a millimeter wave nonlethal weapon that has been at the center of controversy since it was publicly revealed in 2001. This is the second part of an interview with the Air Force Research Laboratory's Diana Loree, the ADS project manager, who has been with the program since 1993. (Here's the first part.) In today's entry, we focus on "System 2," the latest version of the weapon, which could eventually be sent to Iraq.