In late July, a Wisconsin prisoner who alleges he suffered permanent harm from a non-lethal "flash-bang" grenade received a $49,000 payout from the authorities. According to the Chicago Tribune, Raynard Jackson experienced ringing in his ears for months afterward, and now suffers from tinnitus after the grenade was thrown into his cell to subdue him. This type of "distraction device" or "stun grenade" can be a highly effective non-lethal weapon. But it can also present hazards which might be overcome with new technology. If the authorities could ever figure out how to field the things.
Some of the most serious incidents with flash-bangs have occurred when they have gone off by accident. Master Sergeant Dean Wagner was serving with a Special Operations unit in Baghdad in December 2004 when two flash-bangs suddenly detonated. He lost his right hand and sustained injuries to his right leg from the blast and the burns. Corporal Cooper Branan of the Marine Corps was injured when a flash-bang went off in his handas he was passing it to another Marine; he describes the damage:
In another well-documented incident, three FBI agents were waiting in a car during a hostage incident. In his vest, Agent Donald Bain was carrying a flash-bang grenade. It exploded without warning. "The car is on fire," Bain told CNN. "I was told later I was on fire. Smoke billowing in the car. It was obviously chaos."
Another of the agents, Thomas Scanzano, has suffered permanent damage. "I don't sleep. I have tremendous headaches. I have the doctors claim severe hearing loss, but for all practical purposes, I'm deaf in my left ear," he says.
As the CNN story recounts, stun grenades which had been rejected by the military were sold to the FBI instead.
All of these incidents highlight the big problem with flash-bangs. An explosion that is loud enough to stun and temporarily deafen someone a meter away is much louder at half a meter, because the intensity of the explosion reduces approximately with the square of the distance. Half the range means four times the shock. And at very close range – such as a grenade going off in your hand – the blast from even a very small amount of explosive will blow off a finger or worse.
The solution to this is a non-lethal fuel-air bomb known as the Improved Flash Bang Grenade, or IFBG, developed at Sandia. Instead of using a standard explosive, the IFBG ejects a plume of aluminum powder and ignites it. The resultant explosion is of much longer duration than from a "condensed" explosive (but still only milliseconds) and there is no single point with extremely high pressure. Even if you are inside the exploding cloud, the blast will not be as bad as holding a standard flash-bang.
The U.S. military's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate says that the IFBG's longer duration blast/flash will increase the incapacitating effects, and there is less chance of it causing a fire. This can be a real problem with existing flash-bangs. When the British SAS carried out an assault against terrorists at the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 their stun grenades ignited a curtain, starting a fire which gutted the building.
However, buying and fielding the new flash-bang has been a very long road. I wrote about the IFBG three years ago. Wired.com's Louise Knapp wrote about it four years before that. A solicitation, requesting 1,200 of the new grenades for testing, was issued in January this year and bidding was not closed until July 21st.
[Photo: Sandia]
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