Post by UniverseSeven on Mar 7, 2005 15:14:50 GMT -5
By Lester Haines
Scientists have reacted angrily to the revelation that the US military is funding development of a weapon intended to deliver an "excrutiating bout of pain" from over a mile away. The "Pulsed Energy Projectile" (PEP) device "fires a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid", the New Scientist explains. If you happen to be that something solid, then you get temporarily incapacitated without suffering permanent injury.
That's the theory, but pain reasearchers fear that the proposed riot control weapon could be used for torture, and further doubt a solid ethical basis for the research. Andrew Rice, a consultant in pain medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, said: "Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do not believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown."
What those physical effects might be is the subject of a University of Central Florida in Orlando study which aims to "optimise" the effect of PEPs as noted in a 2003 US Naval Studies Board review of non-lethal weapons. The review outlined how PEPs produced "pain and temporary paralysis" in animal tests, apparently as a result of "an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells".
continued at
www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story4.htm
Scientists have reacted angrily to the revelation that the US military is funding development of a weapon intended to deliver an "excrutiating bout of pain" from over a mile away. The "Pulsed Energy Projectile" (PEP) device "fires a laser pulse that generates a burst of expanding plasma when it hits something solid", the New Scientist explains. If you happen to be that something solid, then you get temporarily incapacitated without suffering permanent injury.
That's the theory, but pain reasearchers fear that the proposed riot control weapon could be used for torture, and further doubt a solid ethical basis for the research. Andrew Rice, a consultant in pain medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, said: "Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do not believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown."
What those physical effects might be is the subject of a University of Central Florida in Orlando study which aims to "optimise" the effect of PEPs as noted in a 2003 US Naval Studies Board review of non-lethal weapons. The review outlined how PEPs produced "pain and temporary paralysis" in animal tests, apparently as a result of "an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells".
continued at
www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story4.htm
