DISARMAMENT: Blinding Laser Weapons Must Be Banned Now – Red Cross

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Senthil Ratnasabapathy

VIENNA, Sep 29 1995 (IPS) - During the 1991 Gulf War a U.S. soldier in the Kuwaiti desert was using a monocular rangefinder held to his left eye when he saw a flash from an Iraqi bunker. He was blinded instantaneously.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), say the U.S. soldier was one of the first known victims of a new and terrible weapon of war, the blinding laser weapon (BLW).

At present these weapons are not yet being mass-produced, but the ICRC and other non-governmental organisations warn that a number of countries — including Britain, China, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, Ukraine and the United States — are conducting research into blinding laser weapons.

Soldiers have a special fear of being blinded in combat, says a ICRC report by a military psychologist. The demoralising effect of such a weapon is well known; the mile-long lines of eyeless troops walking hand in hand back from the trenches where they were blinded by phosgene gas are part of the mythology of World War I.

In a report released here to coincide with an ongoing United Nations (U.N.) weapons convention meeting, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) says it has details of ten U.S. laser weapons projects, including five that exist in prototype form.

The U.S. military has already awarded contracts for 75 portable laser weapons systems. There are some reports that the U.S. military deployed such systems in the Gulf War in 1990-1991 and in later in Somalia, although they were never used.

One country that has decided to market its products publicly is China, which last year offered its 33 kilo ZM-87 laser for sale.

According to the documentation of the China North Industries Corporation, the gun’s manufacturers, this weapon causes injury to an eye at a distance of between two to three kilometers.

There have also been unsubstantiated reports that laser weapons were used during the ten-year-old Iran-Iraq war and, more recently, in the war in the former Yugoslavia.

NGOs gathered here for the U.N. disarmament meeting are now demanding that the U.N. conventional weapons convention be expanded with an additional protocol banning such weapons.

The Review Conference of the Convention on Prohibition or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or Having Indiscriminate Effects (CCW) began Sep. 25 and is to end Oct. 13.

“They should be banned before the disaster begins,” declared Cornelio Sommaruga, president of the ICRC. “Today there is still time do it, but tomorrow it may be too late.”

The Convention — in force since 1983 and ratified by just 50 countries — seeks to prevent the use of certain conventional weapons, such as mines, in ways that will cause unnecessary harm to civilians. The CCW has three protocols: one on non-detectable fragments, one on landmines and a third one regulating the use of incendiary weapons.

Lasers are generally divided into four classes, all of which have actual or potential military use. The lowest power lasers, referred to as class one, are intrinsically safe and are commonly used in supermarkets as barcode readers and in compact disc players.

Class two lasers, with an upper limit power of one milliwatt, are used as lecture pointers and are dangerous when a person looks directly at them for more than a quarter of a second.

However, says Human Rights Watch, an natural reflex forces anybody looking at such devices to blink and turn away in time to prevent damage.

Class three lasers are used to align building foundations and can be dangerous to the eyes, but are not dangerous when viewed as diffused reflections off walls.

Class four lasers, used as surgical lasers for example, are the most powerful, with the capability to burn skin and cloth and damage the eye.

Even their diffused reflections are dangerous. The power of class four lasers can be determined by the fact that the Chinese ZM-87 type can have a peak output of 15 megawatts — enough to light a small village.

According to the NGO Pax Christi International, technology has advanced to the point where low energy lasers powered by small battery packs strapped to soldiers backs, and effective up to one kilometre, can be produced.

Anti-personnel lasers can enter the eye directly and burn the retina. Thus, says the ICRC, a low-energy laser which would have no effect on other body tissue can totally destroy the central retina, thereby causing total and permanent blindness.

Lasers, however, can also be used in the humanitarian field, such as for detection, targetting and rangefinding. “Indeed, they have positive humanitarian implications in that they assist in pinpointing military targets,” says the HRW report.

The difference between the non-weapon and tactical weapon lasers is that the former uses a laser beam to aid other weapons — such as rangefinding or targeting — latter uses the beam as the a means of injury, the report said.

With the BLWs arousing global concern, countries that are still keen on further development of this technology are now resorting to secrecy, says Pax Christi.

Also, countries are attempting to evade the debate by renaming their existing systems with such seemingly innocuous names as anti- optic or anti-sensor devices.

“However, when used against an individual employing optical devices, such as binoculars or gunners’s sights,” says HRW, “the optics would intensify the laser beam and focus it on the most sensitive part of the eye, causing blindness.”

Further, some military officials are also playing around with the notion of employing lasers that cause temporary blinding — in military jargon ‘flash blinding’ or ‘dazzling’ — but the ICRC, which has done extensive research in the field, says it is a very risky venture.

Such a weapon would work only under ideal conditions in which the distance, angle of exposure and atmospheric pollution are exactly controlled to meet the weapon’s conditions. A battlefield, however, is a place unlikely to meet such conditions.

Another major reason why humanitarian organisations are concerned about the development of laser weapons is that mass production of such instruments will eventually lead to mass proliferation, with the consequence of the weapons reaching separatist, or even terrorist, groups.

According to the HRW, the Japanese Supreme Truth sect, notorious for its gas attacks on Tokyo railway stations this year, reportedly planned to attack a police building with a vehicle equipped with a laser device.

At present such blinding weapons can only be regulated through the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the use of weapons that cause unnecessary suffering. The current Vienna meeting has already drafted a proposal as a starter for a possible fourth protocol for the CCW.

If adopted, it will prohibit employing lasers to cause permanent blindness. The draft protocol, however, does not cover blinding as an “incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate employment” of laser beams in the battlefield.

Nor is there consensus on whether or not the production of such weapons should be banned and whether dazzling should also be included in the prohibition.

The conference may also decide to expand the scope of the CCW and its protocols, including the fourth on lasers, to include internal conflicts, says Ann Peters, a researcher at HRW.

According to NGO activists here, some three dozen countries support some kind of ban on laser weapons. A total ban, however, “is far from assured” said one delegate.

The United States, for instance, has come down from its original position of total opposition to a complete ban and now is prepared to ban certain types. “Their idea is to have their present programmes sanctioned,” one activist said.