Thus the headline on the front cover of the Marine Corps Times of 5 March announcing the ‘Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System’ – a microwave beam device which, it is claimed, will heat up the skin of anyone exposed to it, creating ‘a burning sensation similar to a hot light bulb pressed against one’s flesh’. A Marine colonel said the device is intended to ‘influence motivational behaviour’.
The New York Times report of this on 2 March described this as a crowd-dispersal weapon and Colonel George Fenton of the Marine Corps, Director of the Department of Defense’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Program, said the system was ‘not designed to burn’. One wonders when it was the last time the Colonel tried to change a hot light-bulb with his fingers…….
This device – whether or not it ever gets deployed against, say, a crowd protesting about the New World Order – is terribly significant. For the first time the weapons development world, which has been researching microwave technology for its weapons potential for 20 years, has produced a piece of kit which has obvious application. (And how appropriate that the first thing produced is one to be deployed against the unarmed citizenry…..)
Maybe the media will now give more credence to the other electromagnetic horror stories which they have largely ignored thus far….. but don’t hold your breath.