THE world looked on in horror when Russian special forces stormed a Moscow theatre to try and free more than 800 people held hostage for three days in October. About 130 of them were killed by a “calmative gas” pumped into the theatre to prevent terrorists blowing up the building.
The incident brought into sharp focus the role that so-called nonlethal weapons will play in future conflicts, and the very real risks they pose. The Russian gas is thought to have been a derivative of fentanyl, a powerful opiate-based anaesthetic. It killed 1 in 6 of the people it was intended to save – hardly a “non-lethal” weapon.
Some hostages were probably exposed to a fatal dose. But others might have been saved if the antidote naloxone had been given immediately after the attack. A few hostages choked on their own vomit, which would have been easily preventable by basic medical care.
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But the death toll might have been much higher if the gas had not been used. In purely military terms, the raid was quietly hailed as an unexpected success. Russian special forces killed 50 terrorists without losing a single man. “It was a textbook operation,” said one military expert afterwards.
So to military eyes, the Moscow siege shows just how useful a calmative gas could be for controlling crowds or hostage situations. They will want to keep looking for the perfect knockout gas, a highly contentious goal. Most civilian experts agree that finding a gas that will disable a fit and highly motivated terrorist without killing an exhausted elderly civilian nearby may never be possible.
“Non-lethal” weapons don’t have to kill to cause concern. This year, New Scientist reported on some of the more exotic experimental weapons. The Veiling Glare Laser, for example, built by the USJoint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate in Virginia, is intended to temporarily blind its targets by zapping them with ultraviolet light that is supposed to make eye lenses fluoresce.
Even more sci-fi is the Pulsed Energy Projectile, a laser that would vaporise whatever it hits. If that happens to be clothes – or skin – the resulting ball of hot plasma would knock people off their feet. Both these devices could leave victims blind for life, which might make them illegal under a 1995 amendment to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
Therein lies the difficulty. The goal of controlling armies, rioting crowds or terrorists without killing people – especially innnocent bystanders – is clearly worthwhile. But ambiguities as to whether such weapons are legal under treaties banning chemical and biological weapons, plus the military’s desire to keep its options under wraps, means most research is kept secret. Russia still won’t say exactly what the gas was.
Possibly the biggest offender – or the worst at hiding its plans – is the US, which has gone to enormous lengths to keep its research secret. No one will talk about the Pulsed Energy Projectile, for example, though there is no doubt the project exists. Without proper scrutiny of these programmes, civilian deaths from non-lethal weapons appear more likely, not less.