Report Calls for Development of Nonlethal Weapons
The U.S. military should place a higher priority on developing
and deploying so-called nonlethal weapons, the private National
Research Council (NRC) concluded in an unclassified November report
to the Pentagon. The council is part of the National Academy of
Sciences, which provides services to the government.
Types of nonlethal weapons vary widely but can include chemical
calmatives and malodorants intended to control or disperse crowds.
Other potential nonlethal weapons listed in the report include “high-power
microwave” to stop vehicles and vessels, “solid-state
lasers,” and “rapidly deployable marine barrier systems.”
The report recommended the armed forces increase research into several
types of nonlethal weapons, which it said could provide useful tools
to U.S. forces engaged in peacekeeping and urban conflicts, as well
as help the Navy protect ports and ships.
The report, which was delivered to the Navy’s Office of Naval
Research and the Department of Defense’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons
Directorate (JNLWD), raised concerns among some arms control analysts
that efforts to develop nonlethal weapons might violate the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC). The CWC does not prohibit “riot control
agents,” defined as chemicals that “can produce rapidly
in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which
disappear within a short time following termination of exposure,”
although it bans the use of such agents in warfare. The NRC report
mentions calmatives and malodorants as potential tools for the military
if “developed and applied in accordance with U.S. treaty obligations
in the Chemical Weapons Convention.”
Another concern is that the weapons might be lethal in some cases.
The JNLWD often describes such weapons as “less than lethal”
rather than nonlethal. Concerns over lethality grew in October when
Russian forces killed more than 100 people when they used an opiate-based
gas to overcome Chechen militants holding hundreds of hostages in
a Moscow theater. (See
ACT, November 2002.)
Despite recommending increased nonlethal weapons development, the
report notes some potential obstacles to further integrating nonlethal
weapons into military use, including a poor understanding of the
weapons’ “effects and effectiveness” and “perceived
treaty constraints.” The Army conducted research and development
of nonlethal weapons for “many years” until the early
1990s when the United States signed the CWC, according to the report.
“That program has not been started up again, in spite of legal
interpretations of the treaty indicating that it does not preclude
such work or the employment of such agents in specified and increasingly
important military situations, such as civilian crowd control in
peacekeeping or humanitarian relief operations,” the report
states.
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