From George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”
Strange, alarming, morbidly intriguing — any or all of those would serve to describe the newly announced “Zombie Gun” that Russian president Vladimir Putinplans to use “for achieving political and strategic goals” (his words, as quoted from the UK Mail Online).
The concept is not new. For some time now military technologists have been working on weapons to incapacitate the enemy by attacking the central nervous system or damaging internal organs. Extremely high doses of microwaves could stop someone’s heart from beating or disintegrate his eyeballs, for example. Actually introducing such weapons to the combat zone–or perhaps against dissidents–well, that might be new (I stress, might). Lower dose microwave weapons have already been used in Russia for crowd control, and some claim they’ve also tried them out in other venues.
Quoting from the Mail Online:
Plans to introduce the super-weapons were announced quietly last week by Russian defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov, fulfilling a little-noticed election campaign pledge by president-elect Putin. Mr Serdyukov said: ‘The development of weaponry based on new physics principles – direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, and so on – is part of the state arms procurement programme for 2011-2020.’
The more insidious design–just one among the list proposed by Seryukov–is a weapon that could theoretically render someone pliable or even drive them insane by directly attacking the brain. This is the weapon most appropriately described as a “zombie gun” for obvious reasons. If the weapon can short-circuit the executive function capacity of the brain, then it’s plausible that the target would become silly putty, or possibly revert to a primal state and eat someone else’s brain (too early to tell).
I don’t doubt these claims by Putin and company, nor do I doubt that similar weapons have already been used on a trial basis (it’s important to beta test). And considering that last year a gentleman on our shores made an eye-ball burning 1KW microwave gun out of a microwave oven, well, I’m sure it won’t be long before Mattel has one ginned up for the kids.
