The Pentagon has unveiled a new non-lethal ray gun for use against rioters which disables victims by making them feel as if their clothes are about to catch fire.
The weapon fires beams of concentrated but harmless heat from a large dish antenna mounted on a Humvee jeep and is effective at up to 500 yards. At 130F, the invisible microwave beam feels like a blast of sudden, midday desert heat and can cause armed targets to drop their weapons and begin to peel off their clothes.
The system uses millimetre waves capable of penetrating the outer layers of human skin just enough to cause discomfort without inflicting damage.
By comparison, a kitchen microwave oven emits radiation which can penetrate several centimetres of human flesh, inflict burns and destroy cells. Christened the Active Denial System, the weapon is not due to enter service until at least 2010.
The US military and a number of law enforcement organisations foresee its deployment for riot control, covering roadblocks, and even defending the perimeters of army bases.
Colonel Kirk Hynes, the US Marine Corps director of the non-lethal weapons' programme, said the ADS represented a huge step forward technologically.
Raytheon, the US corporation which developed the prototype, has named it Silent Guardian, with one eye on the commercial possibilities of using it to protect private property by linking it to movement sensors. The weapon was shown off for the first time at Moody air force base in Georgia.
Major Sarah Fullwood, a Marines spokeswoman, described the sensation of being subjected to the beam as being "like a blast from a hot oven, too painful to bear without heading for cover, except there are no burns or after-effects".
The Pentagon admitted yesterday that experiments on the system had been going on for almost 12 years and that 10,000 volunteers had been exposed to its non-lethal firepower. The official line is that it could be adapted for crowd control, riot dispersal, checkpoint and port protection and even as a battlefield weapon in circumstances where insurgents and unarmed civilians were too closely mixed to employ bullets or shells.
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