<HTML>Revealed: police's new supergun will blast rioters off their feet
New generation of microwave and laser weapons set to transform crowd control techniques
The Independent, published: 9 October 2005
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news.independent.co.uk]
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British defence scientists are working on a new generation of weapons which includes microwaves, lasers and chemical guns that could be used to quell riots, The Independent on Sunday has found.
...Scientific Applications & Research Associates, a US firm that has made such a gun, said it could fire shock waves that hit people "with enough force to knock them off balance. [It] feels like having a bucket of cold water thrown on to your chest". The research involves putting high-powered lasers and micro- wave weapons on cruise missiles and planes to "kill" an enemy's own weapons, although these new arms could be banned under international treaties.
These weapons are part of a taxpayer-funded, fast-expanding, secret programme of research by military laboratories and private defence firms into so-called non-lethal weapons.
Modern technologies have also made it much easier to create new arms, and Britain has a joint programme to develop military non-lethal weapons with the US, which is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into research.
The high-powered microwave weapon is part of a British programme code-named Virus, run by a little-known department of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) called the Deep Target Attack directorate. The weapon fires a powerful pulse of microwaves to completely or temporarily knock out equipment such as computers, radar or guidance systems.
A report by Canada's defence research agency, released by the Sunshine Project, a US-based group that investigates military research, says the UK is "one of the main players" in the world in investigating weapons using high-powered micro-waves, along with the US, France and Russia.
This revelation surprised Neil Davison, head of a research programme into non-lethal weapons at Bradford University. He said the MoD had a track record of secrecy over its research programme.
"We know the British armed forces have an active programme to find new non-lethal weapons and the UK is working closely with the United States, but the details of that collaborative arrangement are not openly available," he said.
Many of these techniques could be highly controversial...
Mark Fulop, head of the bio-medical sciences department at the MoD's main defence research agency, confirmed that there is an extensive programme to find new non-lethal weapons...</HTML>
