THE street protests in Ferguson, Missouri have been met with a range of so-called non-lethal weaponry, including sonic blasters, rubber balls, stun grenades and tear gas. There has been much debate about whether the authorities' response was disproportionate. But what is abundantly clear is that when the police decide to disperse protesters, there is no one device that is both safe and effective.


From the perspective of the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), crowd control is an engineering challenge. Non-lethal weaponry must deliver enough energy—the kinetic energy of a blunt projectile, the acoustic energy of a sonic blaster or the light energy of a "laser dazzler"—to produce an effect, but not so much as to cause harm. (That this military directorate's output will find its way onto America's streets is almost inevitable; it gets far more money than its civilian counterpart, and the Pentagon's leftovers have a fairly direct route into the hands of local police.)


The JNLWD's principal scripture is Directive 3000.3, a 1996 document titled Policy for Non-Lethal Weapons. The directive arose in the wake of America's withdrawal in 1995 from Somalia, where it had become clear that soldiers had few technological options when wishing to, as the directive put it, "incapacitate personnel and materiel while minimising fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment". The directorate’s annual Broad Agency Announcement tends to highlight the shortcomings of existing weapons and ideas, and this year's announcement is no exception. Several of its 14 "technology focus areas" are proposals that have looked good on paper for years, but have not got much further.


One of them, the Active Denial System, has been the JNLWD’s darling since it was unveiled in 2001. Also known as the pain beam, it heats skin painfully—but supposedly harmlessly—with microwaves. In thousands of tests, no one has been able to withstand the beam's effects for more than a few seconds. Yet the system has struggled to achieve wide adoption; the current version is a complex and voluminous beast the size of a shipping container, weighing eight tons. What the JNLWD would like is a far smaller contraption to accomplish the same goal, replacing the enormous, super-cooled "gyrotron" with solid-state electronics, perhaps, or compact lasers. But that is a tall order technologically, let alone politically.


Flash-bang stun grenades have limited effectiveness, leave “excessive smoke that obscures team member vision” and “ignite undesirable secondary fires”. Instead, non-pyrotechnic alternatives such as LED strobes and electronic noisemakers are on the wish list. The trouble is that explosives deliver, as it were, much more bang for the buck, along with a blast effect that makes targets pause and check themselves for injury.


The now-familiar Taser fires darts on long wires, which stick to the target and convey a series of disabling electrical pulses. Taser’s XREP effort packed the electro-shock circuitry into a projectile that could be fired from a shotgun, without wires. Although police forces were put off by the XREP's cost, the JNLWD is still pursuing the idea, aiming for lighter, smaller, softer projectiles that do the same job for one or multiple targets.


Some of the announcement's categories suggest little more than wishful thinking. The “Push-Back” section describes a device weighing no more than 45 kilograms that can establish and maintain a safe zone with a radius of 50 metres (such as would be required for, say, a rescue mission of a downed aircraft). This notional gizmo would "completely subdue" anyone within a further 50-metre radius, and hold others back at a distance of 400 metres. It is hard to see how any technology on the horizon could meet such a challenge.


The JNLWD’s approach may look like techno-optimism ignoring reality on the ground. Non-lethal technology can be and has been abused; rubber bullets can, at close range, kill just as effectively as the metal kind. But the ethos behind the effort to build better non-lethal weapons is sound. These are no longer baton charges and cavalry using the flats of their swords: research suggests unequivocally that the use of non-lethal weapons such as pepper spray and Tasers reduces the odds of injury both to suspects and to law-enforcement officers compared with the use of physical force. They can be misused, but the deployment of non-lethal weapons is always preferable to the use of the lethal kind.



Thou shalt  = you shall

non-lethal weapons 비살상무기

grenades   슈류탄

projectile 발사체

not so much as 정도는 아니다

directorate (특정활동을 책임지는 정부)부서, 이사회

scripture  성경, 경전

Directive  지시, 명령

in the wake of somthing ~에 뒤이어

incapacitate  무력화하다

materiel  군수물자

contraption 기계

strobes 섬광등(디스코장의 현란한 점멸 조명등)

put off by something. ~때문에 정 떨어지다.

radius  반지름, 반경

on the horizon  곧 일어날

 baton charges 경찰봉 공격

cavalry  기갑부대

odds of  ~의 가능성

flats of something 평평한 부분