We Have Constructed a "La-ser"

I've been waiting for this like you don't even know.

The U.S. military now has a functional ray gun. All that's left is for jetpacks to be produced and sold on the consumer market and I'll feel like we've finally made it to the 21st century.

The current prototype isn't deadly by any means, but the electromagnetic beam it fires makes the victim feel as if he were burning alive without really burning him. Much like how waterboarding makes someone feel as if he were drowning without really drowning him, so I can deduce at least one way in which this technology might be routinely used.

Once produced, the weapon can be mounted on armored ground vehicles, helicopters, ships, and airplanes. It apparently has potential for riot-dispersing, making it, they say, ideal for keeping order in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. But the technology won't be put into service until 2010, so that last part's not what you want to hear.

In the demonstration, the "rioters" were played by army servicemen who volunteered to be shot by a giant ray gun. This bothers me for two reasons:

1. The article did little to quell my suspicions that there are no side effects that'll emerge down the road from skin exposure to a giant ray gun. If I volunteered, my buddies would definitely be impressed by my story, but not by the possibility that I'm gestating an alien fetus.

(Okay, a bunch of them would still think that was pretty rad, too.)

2. In the military, you do what you're told, and that's the end of that. And they've got a weapon to sell, essentially. I can't help but cynically imagine Col. Mark Kymes or some other officer ordering the participants to add some theatrics upon being hit. You know, seize or something once you hit the dirt and this thing'll look like a real humdinger. Maybe it is a humdinger, but it doesn't have to be, is all I'm saying.

Traditionally speaking, we've got this thing backwards. Mankind tends to invent the lethal technology before it ever tones it down to develop the non-lethal version, like rubber bullets. Here it's unsettling because you can imagine this concept eventually being taken to sci-fi proportions of destruction. If you're going to one day invent a laser cannon that grinds open its mechanized maw and proceeds to atomically discombobulate vast swaths of people and objects in its path, I suppose the starting point is constructing a beam, like this one, that causes unruly discomfort.

That's assuming Marvin the Martian hasn't already beat us to the patent.