Israel Acquiring Banned American Laser That “Melts Eyeballs” of Enemies
by Tim Kennedy
July 1996, pgs. 36, 112
Two years ago, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other human rights advocacy groups mounted a public relations effort to persuade the United States and other countries to ban the military use of laser beams to blind enemy troops.
Of specific concern to these groups were “laser countermeasure” weapons intended to defeat battlefield surveillance: binoculars, gunners’ sights and more sophisticated electro-optics such as infrared sensors. When the operator of a laser countermeasure system locates a surveillance device, he trains a powerful beam of laser light on the targetand, thus, into the eyes of anyone looking through it.
An expert on the effects of antipersonnel lasers told the Washington Report that such an intense beam of laser light can “melt the eyeballs of a soldier before he has a chance to blink.”
Yielding to pressure, last September U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry banned the fielding of lasers designed to cause permanent blindness. However, it now appears that Perry and President Bill Clinton intend to give an anti-personnel laser to Israel in exactly the same category they have banned for American military use. And neither the Pentagon nor the White House intends to prohibit Israel from using this devastating weapon to destroy the eyesight of its enemies.
Arms merchants long have argued that there has never been an instance in recorded history when a class of weaponrysuch as antipersonnel lasershas been eliminated by a treaty. These same people often cite the example of a 12th Century pope who, faced with a major advance in weapons technology, declared the crossbow “a hateful weapon to God.” and banned its use.
“Attempts to ban a weapons technology by agreement or treaty do not work, have never worked, and will never work,” writes Forecast International, a market analysis firm that investigates and reports trends in the international defense industry.
The publication was referring to the “Nautilus” program, the American laser research effort, one of whose products the United States now seems ready to ban for American use but to share with Israel.
According to a press release issued by the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command (USASSDC), the “Nautilus” program’s lead agency, the research is intended to evaluate the “effectiveness of lasers for potential use as a tactical air defense system against short-range rockets in a variety of missions.”
The laser used for the Nautilus program was designed and developed in the 1970s by the Cleveland-based defense firm of TRW, Inc. The laser’s current name is the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL). Over the years, however, the laser hasdepending on the application for which it was being testedbeen referred to by a variety of code-names.
Built at TRW’s test facility in San Juan Capistrano, California, and later re-installed by TRW in 1983 at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Nautilus program’s megawatt-class, continuous wave, deuterium fluoride laser was originally used by the Army’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Office to test the feasibility of using “directed energy” to knock out incoming ballistic missiles and other airborne targets.
Over the years, the TRW laser at the White Sands High Energy Laser System Test Facility also was used by Army scientists to develop a number of antipersonnel lasers, notably the Mid-range Infrared Advanced Antipersonnel Disabling (MIAAD) system.
Although few details are publicly available about MIAAD, it is one of numerous laser weapons systems developed in recent years that pose a blindness hazard to troops. A source at the Pentagon has told the Washington Report that the MIAAD antipersonnel laser is similar to the British-built “DEC Laser Dazzle Sight.” Forecast International describes the DEC as a “high energy laser intended to disable electro-optical surveillance by overloading its sensors…A further function is to blind enemy personnel, including pilots of attacking aircraft and tank crews.” The laser is effective against targets up to 12 miles away.
A Split-Second Blast
Weapons researchers learned the capacity of laser light to cause blindness discovering that a split-second blast of high-intensity laser light permanently blinds laboratory animals by burning out the optic nerves, thermally bleaching the retina, rupturing the blood vessels inside and around their eyes, and physically blocking the transmission of light within the structure of the eye.
“Simply put: total, permanent blindness,” says a staff eye specialist at the Walter Reed army hospital in Washington, DC who served as a medical consultant for several antipersonnel laser testing programs. “The laser light literally melts the eyeball.”
Last year’s official Pentagon ban on antipersonnel lasers put an end to the MIAAD program, as well as a man-portable version of MIAAD called the Laser Countermeasure System (LCS)a 40-pound, shoulder-fired “gun” that shoots a beam of light powerful enough to burn out human retinas from up to 3,000 feet away.
The People’s Republic of China makes a cheap knock-off of the LCS called the “ZM-87,” a 77-pound device that resembles a machine gun. It can blind soldiers up to two miles away, and disable soldiers seven miles away.
U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Nancy Burt, a Pentagon spokesperson, made a three-month-long effort to arrange a Washington Report interview with the Defense Department’s desk officer for Israel in order to gain a better understanding of the U.S.-Israeli “Nautilus” partnership. However, Burt was unable to convince the Israel desk officer to cooperate, even if the interview was “off-the-record.”
When the writer contacted the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command to learn if USASSDC intended to prohibit Israel from using the banned U.S.-developed laser against troops, a spokesman, John Cunningham, stated that the decision to share the laser technology with Israel was not made by his command. “We have no oversight of U.S.-Israel projects. We are taking our orders from the Secretary of Defense [Perry] and President Clinton.”
Cunningham urged the Washington Report to contact the Pentagon or the White House for answers to “policy questions.” However, Cunningham added, “the “Nautilus” laser was never intended as an antipersonnel-type laser.”
“To say this laser was not ‘intended’ for use against troops is an exercise in doublespeak,” says a retired Army colonel who once worked on the LCS program. “It’s like saying an M16 rifle is not a deer rifle because it was only ‘intended’ to be a military combat rifle.”
The Washington Report’s inquiry to the National Security Council, the White House’s office on foreign affairs matters, elicited a response from the NSC spokesman, David Johnson, that was similar to Cunningham’s: “The Nautilus system is an anti-missile system and it was never intended to be an antipersonnel weapon,” said Johnson.
When the Washington Report described to Johnson the Army colonel’s comment about the M16 rifle. Johnson said. “That’s sort of like saying: ‘This is a tank. You can use it to hunt deer if you want, but it’s a damned expensive way to do it.’”
Unfortunately, expense to the the U.S. taxpayer has never been a consideration at the political level in sharing the results of U.S. weapons development programs with Israel. Nautilus is being offered to Israel in the form of a multimillion-dollar “research grant.” The funding for Nautilus research is part of a $2 billion military grants package Clinton offered last May to Shimon Peres during the then-Israeli prime minister’s pre-election visit to Washington.
Experts estimate that each year the United States gives Israel at least $5 billion in military aid, economic assistance, and loan guarantees. However, the fact that part of this enormous sum will be used to arm Israeli soldiers with weapons banned, on humanitarian grounds, from use by American soldiers adds a new dimension to this extrordinary saga of unrestricted transfer of America’s resources to its unpredictable and, U.S. Middle East specialists say, uncontrollable Israeli ally. |
