TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Arms Itself with Non-lethal Weapons

How do pain rays work? What is the Portal Denial System? How does the Taser shotgun shell work? Join Jonathan and Chris as they introduce you to a new world of excruciating -- but, theoretically -- non-lethal pain.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love
all things tech. It's time for another qualifier on that.

(00:24):
This is a classic episode that originally aired on July nine,
two twelve, and it is titled tex Stuff Arms Itself
with non Lethal Weapons. Chris and I sit down to
talk about the whole idea behind non lethal weapons, including
the somewhat flexible definition of what non lethal is. I

(00:47):
hope you guys enjoy and so we wanted to talk
today about weapons that are designed to stop a target
without killing that target, or at least that that's supposed
to be what they do. Well, yeah, some some of
the research I did also turned up other versions of

(01:07):
the uh phrase non lethal weapons, including less than lethal weapons,
which sounds to me like it is a a verbal
uh disclaimer, he's only mostly dead. Well, it's not supposed
to kill you. We actually had somebody, uh we've had
some people right in to ask us about a particular

(01:28):
one of the ones we're gonna talk about today, But um,
really there there's a whole series of different kinds of
things that the military and police departments around the world
are investigating to basically stop people without hurting them completely. Yeah. Yeah,
so and this is this is tough. I mean, how

(01:48):
do you how do you convince someone to stop acting
irrationally or dangerously without really hurting that person in turn?
And it's tricky, but there are a lot of different
approaches that we've tried to take. Yeah, and I was
I'm sorry. I was about to say though that there
are a lot of reasons why you would want to
do this other than you know, simply not wanting to

(02:08):
to kill someone. Um, you know, for for strategic reasons.
If you have, say, uh um and this scenario I've
seen written about a lot, uh, say an uprising where
you have say, hundreds of people uh protesting and maybe
the protest is getting out of hand. Well, the the
authorities who come to subdue the protesters or dispersed the protesters, Uh,

(02:32):
if they kill people, they are likely to escalate uh
these kinds of of riots or or disquiet. And uh,
you know it's uh, it's happened, you know, we can
I can remember stories going back centuries of something like
this happening. So if there's a way to to uh
get people to leave without really hurting anybody, that that's
an advantage for for everyone. Really. I mean, the protesters

(02:54):
don't get hurt as badly or or you know, even
if it just makes them feel uncomfortable and they leave
as a result of that, I mean, it seems like
it's a positive for everyone. Yeah. And and we've tried
a lot of different approaches with a lot of different
methodologies and a lot of different results, right, not all
of them have been successful. Here's one of the ones

(03:16):
I wanted to talk about first. That's just kind of
interesting to me. This is using sound as a weapon
due to now there are two different ways that sound
tends to be used as a weapon. One of them
is in something called a long range acoustic device or
l l r a D. These are focused beams of sound.

(03:38):
You just you crank up the decibel level to like
a hundred fifty deciples, which is about fifty deciples over
the pain threshold, and you direct it at the target.
And that means the target suddenly has this incredibly loud noise,
uh directed at them, and it's a painful experience to
hear it. In fact, you can suffer hearing loss if

(03:58):
you are subjected to that for two long uh. Some
of these devices have actually been used for communication purposes.
I read one report that said that there were navy
ships that used a form of l R A D
to send out signals to um two boats as they
pulled into a harbor. So let's say that a giant

(04:19):
navy vessel is sailing into a harbor that's got a
busy fishing uh industry, and not all the fishermen are
necessarily paying attention to the fact that there's an enormous
ship coming in and they need to get out of
the way. I read a report that said that there
was a way where you could use this as a
communications tool where you're not trying to overpower someone, You're

(04:42):
not trying to cripple them. You're just trying to get
their attention and say, hey, buddy, we're coming through. You
might want to move, and except you're saying it in
whatever the local languages, and that it totally freaks people
out because suddenly they can hear this voice coming from
really far away, as if it's on a radio or something.

(05:03):
But there's no radio. I mean, it's just using a
focused beam of sound to direct that sound at the
individual and then that gets a little you know, it's
a little unreal surreal, if you will. I would love
to have one of these just to mess with people like, hey,
hey you, I can see you, you know that kind

(05:23):
of stuff. But but but the the other use of
this is, like I said, crank it up and you
cripple someone because it's just so loud that it it's
the pain is um uh difficult to bear on the
on the Department of Defense non Lethal Weapons program pages
and they have I use these for for my research.

(05:45):
They have a set of current and uh proposed um
different kinds of non lethal weapons, and they use what
they call acoustic healing devices, which I think are probably
related to these uh and they have a picture of
one of those. But they say that they use them
to to uh give intelligible voice commands over very very

(06:05):
long distances. So I think they you know, from ship
to ship, UM, you know, where they're not actually trying
to cause pain, but they're using that level of U
extra heavy amplification to get a message across and they
consider it a weapon. But they're not talking about using
it in the exact same way. It's like a really
focused bullhorn. Yeah. Yeah. Another UM non lethal weapon that

(06:30):
I saw that uses sound as the impulse stunnerd gun. UM.
I don't know about this one. No, it's uh, it's
it's pretty neat. UM. Some of these, some of these
weapon quote unquote weapons, I guess they're technically weapons, UM,
have very interesting names. Uh. This one is would have
been used if you've ever watched the movie Thunderball UM,

(06:51):
the documentary documentary Thunderball UM, which has a very scintillating
underwater battle scene. UM. But if someone had had the
impulse stunder gun, that might have gone a different way
because basically this is uh used to stop people who
are diving or swimming um underwater. It uses a sound

(07:12):
wave that travels underwater that affects the way a person
here's and will induce nausea. Oh so it's something you
want to feel when you're underwater. No. No, And I
mean if you had, you know, divers who are attempting
some kind of underwater subterfuge, I wanted to say subterfuge

(07:34):
partially underwater. UM, you know it would it would you
think about that, if you were feeling suddenly like you
were about to be ill, very violently ill underwater, I
imagine it would be very hard to continue on with
your actions. You would have to break it off and
and for the surface, you know, dive for the surface,

(07:55):
what swim to the surface. There we go. Um, but yeah,
that's a pretty neat application of sound too well. And
and another one I saw, which did not have a name,
or at least not a name that I could find,
is a product that was developed by some Japanese engineers. Uh.
It was a gun that has a microphone, a directional microphone,

(08:17):
and directional speakers. And the what the gun does is
you pointed at someone who's being loud and obnoxious, their
voice goes into the microphone. It gets projected back from
by the speakers at about a point to second delay,
So the person talking starts to hear themselves speaking but
point two seconds behind what they're currently saying, which is

(08:39):
incredibly distracting. It's very difficult to continue a train of
thought when you're hearing yourself at a slight delay. If
you've ever talked on the phone or on any sort
of radio device where you got that little bit of
an echo or on on Skype, for example, anything like
that where you start talking and you start hearing yourself
just an instant after you're talking. It can be very disorienting.

(09:01):
It can be very disorienting. Yeah, you start talking, then
you're thinking, wait, I just said that. No no, I
just said that. No no, no, I just said that,
And then you can't make sense of anything anymore. So
this particular quote unquote weapon was a sort of a
I was designed to try and take care of people
who are rude. Yeah, it's not meant to be like

(09:23):
something to disperse a crowd or whatever. But there were
a lot of of notes I saw on the article. Yeah,
that was popular a few a few months ago. I
remember seeing seeing that a lot. So it's not it's
not something that the police are using necessarily. It's more
like a I'm trying to eat my dinner in a
restaurant and you're having a cell phone conversation at the

(09:44):
table next to me and you're really annoying. Or I'm
at the movie theater and I just want to watch
this documentary darnett Um. Yeah, the notes I saw said,
what if you use this for someone who's doing some
public speaking. But I would imagine that even with directional speakers,
it's not so focused that only the person who is

(10:04):
speaking can hear it. You know, it's not like you're
beaming the words directly back into the person's ears. Everyone
can hear it. So it's not like you could get
away with doing something like that. Everyone would know who
had done that, and you would, uh, you would very
quickly get your come up. And I would imagine depending
upon the circumstances of where you used it. Why, um,

(10:26):
like I just want to aim at that valedictorian, think
she's so big? Um. Yeah. I was also thinking that
that's interesting that we bring that up in an election
year here in the United States where people are giving
a lot of speeches. We'll see. That was the thing
that was That was what a lot of the notes, uh,
we're you know, That's what they pertained to, was the

(10:47):
idea of some sort of person who's running for an
elected office and then disrupting their speech so that they
seem like they're an idiot and then gives their opponent
an advantage. But the truth is is that particular weapon
or that particular product, whatever you want to call it,
would not be so subtle as to allow someone to
get away with that. I have another This is not

(11:13):
another D O D product. UM actually looks sort of
like a series of of flat disks that are a
quartered together. Doesn't look very offensive if you will weapon.
But it's called the Enhanced Underwater Loudhailer. I told you
they had some strange names. Basically, this is another underwater

(11:33):
device that can be used up to uh forty deep
in water. UM, and it can it can transmit sound
up to four sevens away. Basically they can give It's
sort of like the one that they use above the
surface of the water. But um, it allows you to
uh send on you know. I actually the one I

(11:54):
was just talking about a few moments ago, where the
the device that you could use to send signals for
a very long time, uh, make your commands heard for
a very long distance. They show a picture of a
Navy ship. I think you could probably use that in
other applications. UM, but yeah, they can also they can
also issue commands with this underwater allowed haailer or impair
uh um people's hearing underwater for up to two hours.

(12:20):
It will operate so uh pretty neat. It's sort of
it's sort of like the In some of the other
research I did, I was looking at things like culture
ups and devices that you would use to stop vehicles,
and I wasn't really going to focus on that, but
it sort of seems like that, Like you could drop
this underwater. It's battery operated and they can use it
to give commands and and affect divers hearing underwater. So

(12:41):
pretty neat. Yeah, I'm ready to move on to a
new category unless you have another sound. One no other
sound on this is this is moving to the category
of air. Okay, using air as a weapon, Oh, sort
of like the air Zuka. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly what
it is. So air Zuka. So you're talking about a
device toy. Yeah, it's a toy. It's a device that
creates a vortex ring. Now vortex ring is kind of

(13:05):
imagined sort of like a tornado, except it's in a
donut shape and it will it's air that will rotate
in this donut shape and it actually will maintain that
integrity for a pretty good distance. And the air Zuoka
is just a it's a toy that does this. You
pull back a uh a sort of a well, it's
a diaphragm really and you let go and it pushes
air out through a nozzle and that creates the spinning

(13:28):
vortex of air that then can go across the room
and hit someone in the face and they feel like
someone just you know, blew a huge breath of air
right in their face for for no apparent reason. So, yeah,
you walk in the door of a room, someone across
the room has gone whoop, and then you go, hey,
what was that? Well, and there's and I mean it
doesn't move that fast either, So it's kind of funny

(13:50):
because you actually can see, you know, there's there are
a few seconds between when someone might fire one and
someone else might feel it, and so you're just waiting
in waitings that didn't work. Oh yeah, there's the guy.
They're flinching. Now, yep, it worked. Well, you can actually
kick that up a notch and weaponize it. And if

(14:10):
you use pressurized gas and you accelerate the gas to
supersonic velocity as it exits the nozzle. Once it comes
out of that nozzle, it becomes a high spin vortex
ring that can travel a good long distance and be
strong enough to knock over someone. Oh around a hundred
eighty pounds, so they it's like getting shoved in the

(14:33):
chest by a really strong person. It's just it's just
that it's air. Now, you could also, if you were
so inclined, add in um malodorance. I you know, there
were so many jokes that I was thinking about making,
and I'm you're just not helping you. Well, the malodorance
would be designed the maloderant, of course, of something that

(14:55):
smells bad. But a malodorant could be designed to induce nausea, uh,
or for to make your eyes water. So then you're
getting shoved by a very stinky person essentially. But when
I say stinky person, I'm talking about smells. They're so
bad that you might feel like wretching. It's it's not

(15:15):
like it's not just you know, oh that's like rotten eggs. No,
it's way way worse. And uh you could even put
in other stuff too, if you really wanted to, like
some something that would affect you even more um acutely
than a malodorant. But anyway, that's the general idea is
just using air to knock back a person. Now, in

(15:37):
this case, you're talking about a weapon designed to really
knocked back individuals, right, you're not talking about like if
there's a group of people, uh, walking up, shooting each
one with a vortex of air is gonna take a
while because you have to let that pressure build back
up again and you have to then release the gas
so that it goes out. And of course, again that's

(15:59):
a projectile that does and move as fast as say
a bullet or even sound or anything like that. So
it starts to slow down almost immediately as it moves out,
well really immediately as soon as it objects from the nozzle.
So even though it's moving at supersonic speeds within the nozzle,
once it gets out, it starts to slow down. Um.
So it's not it's not something that you could use

(16:20):
on a mass of people. But if you're talking about
aiming at a specific person to knock them down, perhaps
it's a individual who has shown himself to be a
danger or herself to be a danger to others, than
it would be a useful tool without actually causing that
person direct harm. Now, granted, if the person falls down,

(16:43):
there's always the chance that person could suffer serious injury
in that fall, but the the impact of the air
itself should not necessarily cause injury. Um. Yeah, I don't
really have a lot of air based I can move
onto electricity. Well you know it. I do have one
that's uh that sort of reminds me of that sort

(17:07):
of out of that um that field. And there was
one that that I saw as a UM it would
be very effective against vehicles, but it also would make you, um,
well slip called polymer ice. Did you run across this
one at all? Oh, this is not now, this is
this is a this is a spray. But apparently what

(17:29):
it is is essentially uh, you know, a polymer is
as a chemical, and they would use it in places
where the military is looking into this as a possibility
apparently for especially for places that are particularly warm, like
the Middle East or um, you know, places closer to
the equator than say, I don't know, Greenland, um or

(17:51):
maybe Atlanta, Georgia on a summer's day exactly. But if
effectively creates sort of you would spray it on the
ground and it would effectively create a icy situation. So
this this plastic would make people slip and fall as
though they were on ice. Um. Now, if you're if
you're thinking Keystone Cops sort of thing. So you're chasing

(18:14):
somebody and they've set up a trap ahead of them
so that the polymer is on the ground now, so
they're starting to fall, and then of course the people
who are chasing them also begin to slip and fall,
so everybody is writhing around in the ground because they
can't get up. It's like a bunch of turtles on
their backs. Yeah. Um, they have been working on a

(18:34):
counter agent for this that they could use the shoes.
They could use it on the shoes and tires of
vehicle vehicles that are, you know, running after them. It's
still a really advanced version of my automatic banana peel tosser.
But yeah, the whole you know, making people fall down
thing where you were just talking about that a moment

(18:56):
ago with using the high powered air, I thought, oh,
slipping in falling down, that sounds like the if you
could use the two together, so you could really have
people on their backs. So this is the reason why
I really wanted to do this, uh, this topic, because
the more we talk about the more it sounds like
we're entering a world where Acme products from Warner Brothers
cartoons are a reality. Well, people still like talking about

(19:20):
that that effort that the US military made to weaponize bats.
Well there's also the whole weaponized dolphins thing. Yes, yes,
and then those those things are actually well we're actually real.
So hey, yeah, there's some some of these are really
cool and some of them are sillier than not. You
take advantages anyway you can get them, and not everything
pans out, all right, So let's move on to electricity.

(19:43):
So there's plenty of that. Yeah, you know, you have
your typical stun guns, which a basic stun gun is
a device that has a couple of electrode prongs that
when you when you activate it, electricity passes between the
two prongs. So if you were to put that in
contact with a human you could shock them and generally

(20:04):
it's a strong enough electric shock to make their muscles
seize up. It causes pain, and it also makes people
fall over if the if the shocks enough for their
muscles to seize up like that, they lose control of
their muscle um, their muscle movements and they fall over.
Um yeah, it's you can't you can't stop that, you know,

(20:29):
because our muscles do work on electrochemical signals. So if
you use electricity to override those signals, then suddenly they
just start contracting like crazy and you can't really do anything. Um.
As someone who has actually felt the sting of an
underpowered stunt gun, I can tell you it is not
a pleasant experience. It felt like it felt like a

(20:52):
really intense beasting because the one that was I was
gonna say, used on me, but really I used it
on myself. Uh, I was an idiot kid. I don't
want to know. It was not the first one to
do it either. I watched until several other people went
owl that that hurts. The next one's like, hey give
me that owl, Well, that does hurt, and next person, hey,

(21:13):
give me that al and then came round to me.
I'm like, all right, give me that. But the battery
had really run down, so it wasn't a very powerful
stun gun. And really the reaction we all had was
if you hit an attacker with that particular stun gun
because the battery been worn down so much, you really
would have just irritated them, because again, it wasn't enough
to make all your muscles contract. It made you made

(21:36):
made whatever muscle it was in contact with twitch like crazy,
and it stung, but it wasn't enough to really be
a deterrent well, a real stun gun with a fully
charged batteries serious business that can make you fall over
and it can be a while before you can get
back up again. And perhaps the most I would argue,
the most famous name in this sort of technology, although

(21:58):
it's not just stunt gun, is taser, and a typical
taser is a device that ejects a pair of electrodes,
fires them at a target. UH. The electrodes trail a
wire that connects back to the handheld device, and then
once it comes into contact with the target, electricity flows

(22:20):
through the wires into those electrodes and shocks the target
and again creates a shock strong enough to make all
those muscles contract and the person generally winces, says something
along the lines of al and falls over UM. And

(22:40):
the intention is to do this in a non lethal way. Now,
there have been deaths associated with the use of tasers.
In some cases it was because of the way the
target or the person will say person target is just
the generic term, but the person fell, and then the
fall was partially what killed the person. In some cases,

(23:02):
it might be that the person had a pacemaker or
some other medical device that got UH that malfunction due
to the electric shock. Sometimes it has to do with
drugs that are in the persons system. Anyway, even though
it's meant to be non lethal, not every single instance
is non lethal. So these are and that's pretty much

(23:23):
true of all those things we're talking about that have
these really serious consequences, is that they could potentially kill somebody.
Well that that basic taser you can fire that at
someone who's maybe twenty ft away. But Taser came up
with something pretty interesting that I saw, I think back

(23:44):
in two thousand nine at c S. Right, I believe
you're talking about an article you wrote on how Stuff
Works dot com. Yeah, the Taser shotgun. Yes, yeah, well
actually isn't the shotgun itself just the shotgun show. But
you do you do get you can't have a specific
shotgun that is designed to only fire these Taser shotgun shells,

(24:05):
so they won't fire a round of shot. But these
Taser shotgun shells, inside the the shell is a Taser device.
There are the little electronic probes that will stick into
whatever the target is. The back half of the shell
detaches and there are a bunch of there are a
couple of wires where it will attach to the probes.

(24:28):
The back half dangles down from the target and then
shoots electricity through those prongs. So that gives military or
police the ability of firing a taser at a much
greater range than they could if they were just using
a handheld device. Also, the shotgun shell has little fins
on it that stabilize its flight. So yeah, I've seen

(24:51):
my regular shotgun that has shot that dispersed, disperses as
soon as you fire. Yeah, this this is so that
it will give it a stable flight paths, so that
it'll it'll fly in the the straight direction of where
you're aiming the shotgun. Right, And if I remember the
article correctly, you wrote that there if if they try
to remove it, then they get shocked. Yeah, the the

(25:13):
wires that have the electricity running through them are not shielded,
so I need to remove this. Yeah, then you grab
it and then you get shocked again, and it does
send pulses of electricity through and I think it's like
twenty seconds of a pretty serious shock so that it'll
immobilize the person. Um. Yeah, And they were showing every

(25:37):
time I see taser at c s, they are they
tend to be showing off their technology by bringing in volunteers,
and I cannot imagine ever being a volunteer for that.
I took a pepper spray certification course. Did you actually
have to get hit by the pepper spray to be
actually certified? Yes? And everyone I elected not to. I

(25:58):
watched everyone else do it, and I was very glad
that I had not elected not to. Yeah, everyone I've seen,
I mean, I've known a lot of people who have
gone into the military, into or into the police force,
or even into uh to firefighter courses where part of
it is that they have to be exposed to this
stuff so that they understand what the consequences are and

(26:20):
they know what the effect is. Well, in every case
it has been a horror story to hear about their experiences. Well, yeah,
that's the uh, that's the thing. One of the reasons
that pepper spray is more effective than a lot of
chemical weapons, from what I understand, is that, um uh,
no matter what you might be uh taking, if you're

(26:41):
on some kind of drug that might otherwise, um, you know,
make you feel less pain. Uh, the pepper spray will
still make everything swell up involuntarily. UM, So you might
you might not notice the pain, but the swelling will
still impede you. Yeah, and that was one of the
reasons that that they have to do that. It was

(27:03):
because actually goes back to your shocking yourself story, is
to keep people from going, hey, Bill, look at that.
You know, uh, you don't want to do that on
on just just for kicks. It's not something that that's
serious business. But well, yeah, I have one other electricity one. Okay, cool,

(27:23):
and then I can actually add a couple of things
that are similar. Groovy. Chris and I will be back
to talk more about non lethal weapons in just a moment,
but first let's take a quick break. The last one
I wanted to talk about is still a taser one

(27:43):
is the Taser shock Wave. I don't know much about
this one. This was another one that I saw on
display the same time as a shotgun. Now. Shock Wave
is essentially it's a bank of tasers. Take six regular
taser guns to get they're in a twenty degree arc,
uh and put them on a tripod and then you

(28:07):
set it out in front of you and that way,
when the rampaging horde of zombies comes at you, you
can fire off if you wanted to. You can fire
off all six at the same time, hitting those those
people as they come at you. You can also stack them.
Are zombies affected by electricity? Well they there muscles would
have to be right. You would think there would be

(28:27):
a galvanic response. Yeah, clearly there's a galvanic response. I mean,
come on, Frankenstein alone, all right. Anyway, we'll have this
discussion offline. But you can stack these taser shock waves,
so you can have three or four of them stacked
on top of each other, which means now you've got
four or three or four times that, and so eighteen
or twenty four stun guns at your taser stun guns

(28:47):
at your disposal. This is terrifying to look at in person.
I mean, you look at this thing and you just
think of the You realize that this is for very
serious problems like an uprising or a riot or something
where there are there's a demonstrable danger to people in property,

(29:08):
Like I think about the riots that happened in London
and in the summer of Uh. This is the sort
of thing where you could imagine UH, something like this
deployed where it's you know, you wouldn't think of this
as a uh. The first option, But it's definitely one

(29:28):
of those things that you know, could be in an
arsenal for trying to do crowd control or prevent a
mob or a riot from attacking a particular target. Anyway,
it basically functions the same way as a taser stun gun.
It's just that you have, uh, put a whole bunch

(29:50):
of them together in series and uh actually I guess
technically they're all in parallel and you can stack them
and and so it's like instead of having to have
a whole bunch on hand where as soon as you
because as soon as you fire a taser, you can't
just immediately redeploy it. You know, First of all, you
have you would have to reel in the electrodes again,
You'd have to have a new uh cartridge of propellant

(30:14):
in order to shoot those electrodes out again. You would
also have to have a charged up battery to to
deliver the shock. So this is what gives you that
capacity without having to have a whole bunch in a
box behind you. Yeah, that would that would be another
advantage of having the taser shotgun shell, Yeah, because you

(30:34):
can reload very quickly and and yeah, that's absolutely terrifying.
Really anyway, what was your next category? Let me see
before I I was going to go onto one of
my favorite types of technology of all time, lasers. Okay,
well before before we do that, since we were talking
about the taser shotgun shell a moment ago um. The

(30:56):
Department of Defense also has weapons that it uses in shotguns, UM,
such as stingball shells. Um. Wow. Sting sting balls are
essentially I mean, they're shot, but they're rubber, so it's
almost like the bean bag guns too. Um. This is
why I think that some people use less than lethal

(31:18):
because I imagine that a rubber pellet, well judging by
the effects of hockey pucks on unprotected hockey players when
they get hit with them or even protected ones, you know,
and that's a frozen piece of rubber. So you know,
I'm thinking that if it were coming at you fast enough,
it could do significant damage. But they used they use
sting balls in another and several other types of weapons

(31:40):
like the there's a stingball grenade that launches the little
rubber pellets and a modular crowd control munition which is
about the size of a Claymore mine and send six
hundred six hundred rubber balls out at high speed quote
unquote to suppress targets. And I'm pretty sure if an
explosion of six hundred little rubber balls we're happening right

(32:03):
next to me, then I would probably be suppressed. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
here's the thing is that when we talk about things
like these, these devices that shoot out uh projectiles at
high speeds, clearly there's already an added danger there because
you've got something that's causing the stuff to fly out
at those those velocities right right, So you have some

(32:25):
sort of propellant or explosive that is giving these things
the kinetic energy they need to suppress crowds. Clearly, I
would imagine if you are right there next to whatever
it is when it goes off, you could suffer a
really severe injury, if not, if not death. Well, you
know they used the flash band grenades. Uh, they use,

(32:47):
you know, these explosive devices to propel these out, and
if you're standing right next to it, if the uh
the charge is loud enough, I'm sure it could damage
you're hearing. I mean thinking back to uh Keith Moon's
famous appearance with the who um on the Smothers Brothers show.
Where he put a uh, basically just an off the

(33:08):
shelf UM explosive inside his bass drum. And yeah, and
and Pete Townsend's hearing is was damaged permanently by that. Yeah.
Townsend had some some some interesting things to say about that,
although not immediately after the explosion because he couldn't hear anything. Yeah. Um,
so so that's certainly an issue. I've played paintball too,

(33:29):
Have you ever played? Um? One of the first things
that I know, and those use the paintball guns use
compressed carbon dioxide capsules UM to fire the paintballs out. Now,
actually they use UM similar things in law enforcement. In
the military, they have capstas and capsules basically pepper spray

(33:51):
in paintball form if you will, UM, and they have
guns that that fire those. But UM, you know, I
was the first, very first game I played. I'd never
played before. If you're wearing goggles, okay, so if you
have a stingball grenade and you are in a crowd
and you don't have goggles on, then your eyes are
obviously in danger. But this is one of those things
where you you put the goggles on and you you're

(34:13):
ready to go and everybody's set up on your teams,
and they blow the whistle to start the paintball game,
and the paintball you start to hear the sounds of
the paintballs behind you and your several hundred feet away
from the people who are firing them, and you're starting
to go, you know what, this is gonna hurt when
I get shot, And as it turns out, it does.
So I mean these these weapons, I mean talking about

(34:34):
rubber balls and some of these other things that these projectiles,
even though they are designed to be non lethal, can
cause damage. Uh, you know if you if you get
hit with them in the right spot, I mean, you know,
it might be you might get one in the arm
from a thousand feet away. Go ow, Okay, so you
went out, But if you were standing right next to it,

(34:54):
it could cause a lot more damage. If you're near
it and you got it in the rib, you can
have a broken rib or at least a bruised rib. Well,
they cause wealth, those paintballs, I would imagine. So moving
on to lasers, one of the most basic forms of
using a laser as a non lethal weapon is you
don't you don't have a high powered laser use a

(35:15):
low powered laser to direct light at optics or sensors
or people's vision and you're just trying to blind them. Now,
these are called dazzlers or personal halting and stimulation response weapons.
Acronym is phaser. I know it's not mine. I didn't

(35:37):
make it up. Yeah. The Department of Defense has what
it calls the Green Laser Interdiction System. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah,
that's another way of putting it. Yeah, and they mount
those on rifles to h to dazzle their opponents. Well,
I mean, you think about it. There have been stories
in the media about people who are using off the
shelf laser pointers and pointing them at aircraft to be

(36:00):
funny to blind the pilots. Yeah. The in this case,
which these these lasers are are, they're low powered in
the sense that they're not they're not powered high enough
to do physical damage against something. They're not going to
do any sort of vaporization or ablation or anything like that.
But they will they will cut straight through things like

(36:20):
fog and um and they are very very bright, and
they're bright enough to actually blind you temporarily if you
were to look into it. And it also again is
used to to confuse sensors and optics, so that let's
say that you've got a coordinated attack on a target.
This way you can, um, you can minimize their defenses

(36:43):
as much as you can when you're attack is approaching. Um. Actually,
if you think about it, you um, well, they also
have a device called ocular interruption, which is sort of
a broader effect. Um. You know, they could use it
to uh to worn and suppress uh people who are

(37:03):
you know, the enemy or the the opponents of the military,
law enforcement trying to stop people. But it uh, it's
a it's rather than shining a pinpoint type laser directly
at somebody, it's more of a very very bright light
distributed um. And you think about you get some smoke
grenades and uh some some lasers and very bright lights,

(37:25):
and you either have a very effective way to confuse
people or a rock concert, a Pink Floyd concert. Well,
and looking at pictures of this, it's very it's very
reminiscent of the kinds of effects that you would see
at a at a rock concert. All in all, there's
just another brick in the wall. Okay, So moving on
with more laser stuff. How have you heard about laser

(37:48):
induced plasma channels. No, I haven't l i PC. All right,
so this is kind of an interesting idea. So you
know what a plasma is. It's an ionized gas. Plasm,
no plasma, all right, let's just come on really in,
big guy. So plasma is an ionized gas, which means
that it has free electrons flowing through this gas. It

(38:10):
means that the gas itself can conduct electricity. So imagine
that you use a laser to create a channel of plasma. So,
in other words, you've got this area of of atmosphere
and then you create a channel of plasma within a
pretty narrow channel, and then you fire electricity down that channel.
It'll go across that channel as if it were a wire,

(38:34):
so you could beam electricity in a way. Now, these
things require a lot of power and they don't have
a lot of distance to them. So instead of being
used as a weapon where you would direct it at
an approaching enemy, you use it as a way of
barricading a hallway or a corridor. So you create these

(38:55):
lasers that go up and down, say a wall, so
they're they're aligned horizontally like you could do them vertically too,
if you wanted to but horizontally across um a hallway.
You shoot this laser across the hallway, which creates this
thin channel of plasma that spans the hallway. Then you
shoot electricity along that channel, and now you've got these

(39:16):
zapping beams of electricity spanning the hallway, which act as
a pretty strong deterrent against anyone who has trying to
make unauthorized access to that corridor. I don't know, I've
seen all those spy movies. All you have to do is,
you know, do cartwheels and stuff over the lasers. Electricity
works a little differently than lasers do. But yeah, go
ahead and give that a shot. Um. Yeah, Actually that's reminiscent,

(39:41):
you know, jokes aside, that's reminiscent of the Plasma Cutter
podcast that we did sometime ago. Yeah, it's not not
entirely different. Now most of the effects and this is
intended again to be a non lethal a way of
of stopping people from accessing uh hallways and court ours. Uh,
it's it's not you know, it's not the most efficient

(40:05):
means of trying to keep people out because it does
require quite a bit of power to operate. Um. And
then I have the pulsed energy projectile or p e P.
Now this is one of the versions of the pain ray,
and in fact, we were specifically asked about the pain
right now, it's a shame about ray. This reminds me

(40:28):
of that time you tried to draw a hole in
your head. Uh. The actually was egne the But this,
this particular weapon is different from the other one we'll
talk about, which uses microwaves. We move onto that in
a little bit. This one uses a laser and again
creates plasma. We have a bit more to say about
non lethal weapons, but Chris and I will have to

(40:50):
do that after we take this quick break. So the
pulsed energy projectile what it does. It uses a deuterium
fluoride laser that emits a very high powered invisible laser.

(41:11):
It's in the infrared spectrum that when it hits something,
it essentially starts to vaporize what it hits, just on
the very surface level. So if it hit you, it
would start to vaporize you, but not like disintegrating. It
would just be on the very surface, so like the
top level of skin or whatever. But then it creates

(41:33):
an exploding plasma. The electrons that the gas will give
off start to get even more energized as this laser pulses,
and that energy creates this exploding plasma and that in
turn will stun a target and it gives off this
electromagnetic radiation that activates your nerve cells, which can give

(41:55):
you the sense of pain. And that pain could be
in many different forms. It could be depending upon the
the pulse. It could be a stabbing pain, it could
feel like burning, it could feel like ice um. And
then there's also a lethal version of this technology called
the pulse impulsive kill laser, which has the best acronym

(42:20):
of all time pickle m p I k L so
deadly pickle. So when you fire, fire that you oppressed
the pickle switch. That's right, Yes, give him the pickle.
So this was developed by a company called Mission Research Corporation,
which is now part of Alliance Tech Systems. And there's

(42:40):
some downsides to this weapon. Uh. One of the biggest
is that it's huge. This is an enormous weapon that
requires essentially a vehicle to move it around, so it's
a mounted weapon at the time and right now, and
weighs around like five pounds, So it's not something that
could be deployed in a uh like for your average

(43:03):
infantry soldier. You know that there's just there's no way
of of miniaturizing it down at the moment, so it's effective. Uh,
and it is supposed to again supposed to be non lethal.
It essentially stuns the target and makes them hurt, but
it doesn't kill them or or specifically actually injure them.

(43:25):
It's just again activating their their nerve endings, so there's
no physical damage going on. It's just stimulating those nerve
endings to create pain, which in a way is like
absolutely terrifying, right, you know, it's there's no physical damage
being done, but still really scary. Uh. But not widely deployed,

(43:46):
right right. Yeah, the the they've been talking about these
weapons for quite some time, years and years at this point,
and uh, the the one that we really should talk
about has uh well its own set of drawbacks, but
it does use microwaves. Um and uh let's see where

(44:08):
where to begin. Well, I guess we can call it
the the There are two different versions of it that
I read about, the active denial system. Yeah, that's the
one I've read about MEDS. Well, there's also one called
the silent Guardian, which is kind of a little brother
to a d S. So a d S has a
range of around five and silent Guardian has a range

(44:28):
of around two. So, but they both work on the
same principle. They both use microwaves to create a pain
ray and it gives you the sensation of burning when
you're hit by it. You feel like you are are
like your skin is being subjected to incredibly high temperatures.

(44:51):
I watched a CBS report on this, and the reporter
actually withstood several blasts of this and explain what it like.
He said that it felt like scalding water was being
poured over his entire body, and he was wearing you know,
it was actually a cool day. He was wearing a
pretty heavy jacket. And he says that the microwaves just
penetrate straight through the clothing, so the clothing offered no

(45:13):
protection whatsoever. It didn't matter if his skin where was
exposed or not. Uh. He then held up a piece
of plywood to use as a shield, and he said
the problem was that using that still kept a lot
of his body unprotected, and um, just hitting his feet
and his hands was enough to make him dodge all
the way of the the the pain ray. Now he

(45:37):
used a mattress which helped a little bit. Beca said,
even then he could only get so far before it
got so painful that he couldn't stand it anymore. And uh,
and this is, you know, again, a pretty scary technology.
It uses a microwave around ninety giga hurts of frequency
and at that frequency. Uh, the the penetration of the

(45:58):
microwave is only about one sixty four of an inch,
so it's designed so it will not cook you from
the inside out. Yeah, microwave oven goes much deeper than that.
It can go several centimeters into whatever it is that
it is being exposed to it. Um and this, uh,
this device is is really um. I read that. Um.

(46:22):
They had the military had invited several people to uh,
the Marine Corps Basic Quantico, Virginia to experience this because
basically they've been trying to drum up support for this.
This device has been around for literally like fifteen twenty
years now. Um. And then again, this is one of
the devices that has been pursued very actively by the

(46:43):
military and an attempt to come up with something that
is less than lethal in a way to discourage people
and yes it does work. UM. The reason they're having
to drum up support for it UH is, for one thing,
it's known that it uses microwaves. UM. They deployed the
military deployed several of these UH pain raise to UM

(47:03):
the Middle East to use in theaters over there in
the last few years, and they never really used them
because they were afraid that people would start talking about
how the military we're using microwaves UH, and they you know, oh,
well you're going to cook us or you're going to
make a sterile. Yeah, you're going to irradiate us. You're publicity,

(47:25):
which is if you're trying to say, look, you know,
we don't want UH fighting to escalate. We just want
to break this argument up and stop this particular incident
right here. It's it's funny because a lot of this
is based on ignorance of how microwaves work, because microwaves
are a form of non ionizing radiation, right, But a

(47:47):
lot of people don't they understand that. They think of
it in terms of the microwave oven. We know that
that can be used to irradiate and cook. And people
think this this pain ray if it were left on
someone and they were unable to move. It would cause burns.
You know, people have been put in the hospital. Yeah,
you would, You could, you could suffer actual burns to

(48:09):
your skin. Now you're not going to have the if
you were sitting there long enough, those burns would start
to burn through you. But the you wouldn't immediately suffer
like deep burns. You would have skin burns, which aren't
that's no joy either. But it heats your skin up
to about degrees fahrenheit, which is about fifty four degrees celsius.

(48:31):
And uh, at that temperature, you're not it's it's it's
enough for it to be painful, so you want to
get out of the way. It's not supposed to be
so hot that it's going to immediately cause blisters to
form and that kind of thing. Um, but you know
that's it. Definitely, there are there's a perception that since
it uses microwaves, it is more even I want to

(48:54):
say more sinister, but really, when you're talking about inflicting pain,
that's pretty sinister already, or at least it can be.
Can that's what it can be perceived as. But it's
not as as it doesn't cause injury the way you
would immediately assume once you hear a microwave, right right, Um,
there's another problem with it too, what's up. It takes

(49:15):
a lot of energy and it takes a long time
to turn on, So you can't say there's a demon
demonstration that has gone out of hand. There are people
throwing stuff, there are people looting, and you want to
stop them. You don't drive up in the truck with
the pain rain mounted on it. Um the ones that
the pictures I've seen show a humvy well, a giant
it looks like a giant satellite dish sort of thing

(49:38):
on the top of the big antenna. The P E
P is essentially a very similar form factor. Yeah, and
you don't you don't, you know, drive up in the
pain rainmobile and flip the switch and cause everybody to
stop burning and looting. It takes a long time to
power up. I've seen hours listed as the time it
takes to power First, you have to have a comedian come,

(50:00):
I'll warm up the crowd. Hey, so that wants things
really get cooking. That's when you turn on the microwave.
I see you're all looting. Hey, I like to say
some shoes, you know. Whenever you're looting and there's just
nothing to pick up and throw through the window of
that department store. Doesn't that just make you crazy? Say

(50:22):
you got a size ten can key Stonora over there,
run they run tight? So so um, yeah, this is
that that's also a problem with it. It's not something
that it has to be in place and on um
and in the case of having it vehicle mounted, that
means you have to be running the engine to keep
the power on or you know, a lot of battery usage,

(50:43):
and that's uh in an arrow when fuel is a
lot more dear and cost um. That is a downside
that that's hard to ignore. So um, this very sophisticated
non lethal weapon may just end up shelved because it uh,
you know, it's just yeah, Now, did you have any

(51:04):
others you wanted to talk about, because I'm done, But
you said you had a few futuristic ones that you want.
There was one. I know, we're running a little along,
so I just wanted to mention the one. I actually
saw a thing and wired about this and in the
magazine a few years ago, which is when when you
mentioned this, I thought, oh, that would be fun. I
still can't find where I put that, But there was
one that I read about then that I just I

(51:24):
found a little bit on and they've still they've pursued it,
but it seems like it's still sort of fallen by
the wayside. And that would be the goog gun um
and uh. It's been called different things, but what it's
designed to do, it's sort of like the the polymer ice,
except it's designed to immobilize a target by shooting gooey

(51:45):
silly string like stuff at them, uh and wired. And
I remember it saying that it used some kind of
bone derivative to to use this, and it's supposed to
harden up when you get sprayed with it. I see,
So it's a foam that that then solidifies. Yeah, and
I think, um, I think now what they've been using
is more of a synthetic polymer type uh material. I've

(52:09):
I've seen pictures of it. Um. It looks almost like
the pink slime that people have been talking about about
meat processing lately. It's a sort of a gooey pink
uh tube like stuff. The problem is it doesn't harden
quickly enough to stop someone who's running, so you end

(52:29):
up gooey, but you don't end up hardening up like
a cartoon character after they've been coated in cement, which
is to say, you know, within about half of a second.
You know, every time somebody gets poured on concrete on
him in the cartoons, you know, and instantly hard you know,
it doesn't do that. Um, So that's kind of disappeared
from that um, from that usage. But I have seen

(52:54):
that people are using net guns, and they've been using
some kind of sticky material on the net so that
the net sticks to you. And that seems like it
might be promising, because if you shoot somebody with the net,
um then uh, you know, and it has that sticky
stuff and you can't think of it as like fly paper.
All of a sudden you're tangled up in this net.

(53:14):
You can't run anymore. Um. It seems like that would
be hard to load. You know, it would be more
effective against a very small number of people. If you're
dealing with a horde of zombies. I don't think you're
If you're by yourself, you're pretty much stuck. Yeah. Well,
I got five of them, but three hundred more are
coming at me. I think I'm in trouble close up
them all. Well, I found the I found the article
I think that you were talking about on Wired. It's

(53:36):
called Army reloads on Sticky Foam Weaponry. Yeah, that that
is one of the newer articles they This was one
of those. It was a feature on a series of
things and it had the pain ray. It was it
was literally like a series of a couple of paragraphs
each um in the print magazine. Yes, that is. That
is when I consulted now, and it's the picture of
the guy covered in foam. It looks like he's been

(53:57):
attacked by a bunch of octope. Yes string, it's probably
a few centimeters in diameter to spray. It's it's not
an attractive look. And that wraps up another classic episode
of tech stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed it and
learned something. We have more non lethal weapons that have

(54:19):
been introduced since this podcast was recorded. But I am
never ever going to forget the first time I ever
saw a taser shotgun. That was a heck of a
thing to see in person. Not I don't ever, ever
ever want to have the experience of being hit by one,
not at all. So let's just skip that part. But

(54:40):
if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
tech Stuff. You can write to me and let me know.
The email address is text stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or you can pop on over to our
website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. There you're gonna
find links to our presence on social media. You also
find archives of all the episodes we've ever recorded, including

(55:02):
these classics. And you'll find a link to our online store.
And I'll talk to you again really soon. Hext Stuff
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.