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Pain Laser Finds New Special Forces Role

The laser weapon designed to produce maximum pain has been abandoned by the Pentagon. Or maybe it’s around, playing a whole new role as a drone killer. The Pulsed Energy Projectile (PEP) is an infra-red laser that fires a very short burst of energy at the target, causing a miniature explosion and an electromagnetic pulse […]

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The laser weapon designed to produce maximum pain has been abandoned by the Pentagon. Or maybe it's around, playing a whole new role as a drone killer.

The Pulsed Energy Projectile (PEP) is an infra-red laser that fires a very short burst of energy at the target, causing a miniature explosion and an electromagnetic pulse so intense it can overwhelm the nervous system. It was developed as a variable lethal/non-lethal weapon, with the idea that it could stop someone in their tracks, either by inducing extreme pain or Taser-like paralysis. More, shall we say, *extreme *effects would come at higher power levels.

I first wrote about the PEP for *New Scientist *in 2002, when it was being developed by Mission Systems, which has since become a division of Alliant TechSystems. (PEP has its own web page there.) I hadn't heard anything on it recently and contacted the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program for an update, and was told:

"For the past 5 years, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program has been supporting PEP bioeffects work to better understand the PEP mechanism of effect. The research finally concluded that the PEP laser could not reproduce the required waveform characteristic of a non-lethal weapon. The initiative was terminated with respect to this specific laser and laser waveform parameters. However, the JNLWP will leverage the work accomplished in the PEP project for other potential initiatives."

So, it seems the PEP is dead. It always seemed a bit clunky, because it was based on a large chemical laser and seemed likely to be overtaken by smaller, solid-state electric lasers like the Plasma Acoustic Shield System.

On checking with ATK, I was told that the program no longer existed. "I don’t know if the technology that was developed for that particular program was migrated into another program within ATK or not," said a spokesman "If so, I haven’t been able to find it."

However, a scan of current budget documents shows that while the non-lethal people are not still developing the Pulsed Energy Projectile, someone else is.

Special Forces Command's R&D budget for Financial Year 2009 records $974,000 against Pulsed Energy Projectile, with the note:

"This initiative was a Congressional add. Investigate application of laser in a counter-materiel role against UAV’s [Unmanned
Air Vehicles]."

The idea of using the pulsed laser to knock down drones harks back to the weapon's 1990's incarnation as the Pulsed Impulsive Kill Laser
(PIKL), when it was suggested that it could be used for "Disrobing reactive armor" and "anti-UAV," as well as zapping people.

(Actually PIKL seems to have been separate from PEP, but I haven't seen anything about it since 2000, so it's either been canceled or has disappeared into the world of Black programs).

But if the Pulsed Energy Projectile has now become a drone killer, does this mean that researchers have given up on the controversial application of trying to induce as much pain as possible from a laser pulse?

Nope. The nerves that conduct pain impulses are known as nociceptors. Brian Cooper, who was responsible for the original study on using the PEP to cause pain, delivered a paper at an Ultrashort Pulse Laser Workshop this month called, "Frequency Dependent Interaction of Ultrashort Fields with Nociceptor Membranes and Proteins." Translated to plain English:
They're still figuring out how they can use laser-generated plasma pulses to cause pain. (The presentation after his was titled, "Effects of
Ultra-Short Laser Pulses on Commercial Sensors.")

So the PEP project itself may be put to work shooting down small drones.
That may be an extremely useful capability, when they start appearing in large numbers, and we don’t have enough missiles. But it's quite likely that smaller, solid-state lasers are still being tuned and tweaked to produce intense pain and other non-lethal effects in human beings.

The PEP is dead … long live the new PEP.

[Image: ATK]

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