"Pain Ray, Please," Says Exotic Weaponeer
By Sharon Weinberger June 29, 2007 | 7:01:00 AMCategories: Bizarro, Lasers and Ray Guns, Less-lethal
This is part 2 of a dinner interview with John Alexander, the former Green Beret who's become one of the best-known advocates for exotic arms. Part 1 is here.
Danger Room: You've been pushing for nonlethal weapons for a long time. Do you think the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate is doing a good job?
John Alexander: They need to do more. They’ve got a new director [Col. Kirk Hymes], a good guy.
DR: What should the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate be doing more of?
JA: I think the issue they’ve got to think of is range, even for existing systems. One of the problems with things like pepper ball and those kinds of things is in order to increase range; you’ve got to increase launch velocity. When you do that, you increase the minimum safe distance, and increase the probability of lethality close in.
DR: Yet we haven’t even been able to deploy the Active Denial System -- the pain ray.
JA: Why haven’t we done that? The answer is not technology. The technology is mature enough. There was a request to deploy to the Green Zone for point defense. The answer was no. It was more along the lines, ‘We want to ensure all the testing is done, because it’s dramatically different from everything we’ve done before.’
DR: If you can’t deploy the Active Denial System to Iraq, what’s the point of having it?
JA: At some point, it will be deployed, whether in Iraq or someplace else. The press has not been favorable. ‘Human cookery’ and all this. How are you going to use it has been the most crucial issue all along.
DR: Do you think the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate will look at chemical-based nonlethal weapons?
JA: That’s too big for them. They cannot be seen as advocates. This is the type of thing I can say because I’m outside the system--they can’t.
DR: Where do you see chemicals fitting into nonlethal warfare?
JA: The Dubrovka Theater [siege] is a good example. [Editor's note: In 2002, Russian special forces pumped was it believed to be weaponized Fentanyl into a theater seized by Chechen terrorists. Press reports place the civilian death toll at 129; all 39 terrorists were also killed.]
DR: I know you think that is a success. I don’t, over 120 people died.
JA: Over 600 were saved.
DR: How many people would have lived had they not used it?
JA: Zero. No doubt about it. [The terrorists] came to die. This was not an arbitrary decision. What had happened is you had a known adversary. An adversary that has wiped out hospitals. They went in and killed everyone in the hospital. Hundreds of people. Their intent [at Dubrovka] was to die and to do it in the most spectacular manner possible. You know from a historical perspective, they would do it. They had started killing people. They didn’t use the [chemicals] until after some of the hostages had been shot. When hostages start dieing, all bets are off the table. There were a series of things they could have done better. You could have brought the number fatalities down an order of magnitude. Could you have saved everybody? I doubt it.
DR: Do you think there’s much of a movement to change the Chemical Weapons Treaty?
JA: This is an emotion versus fact issue. Chemical treaties are pretty much an emotional issue, based on technology that came out of World War I, trench warfare, and lots of casualties. There was a huge cry: ‘We're going to make this illegal, this is so awful we’re not going to do it.” Over time, that’s changed. In my view, we don’t know what to do, so we blame technology instead of blaming people.
DR: Okay, on a lighter note, what about the gay bomb? Fact or fiction?
JA: The problem here is the danger that you have when we do brainstorming sessions and then the information gets released. The confusion is over someone’s wild idea. Were going to put pheromones out there [allegedly causing soldiers to be attracted to each other], and in the Islamic culture in particular, everyone will be so appalled.
It may make good cocktail talk, but reality, give me a break.
