It’s a simple question but I believe the ethical implications may be complicated. Why do nuclear weapons or any weapons of destruction have to cause such horrendous physical suffering? Why can’t a population be threatened with annihilation by three days of intense pleasure? Extreme ectasy followed by death. This is a serious question and I trust it will be accepted as such.
I suppose loading a nuke with massive explosive power is a tad easier than packing it with 10,000,000 parachuted boxes containing drugs, booze, and condoms.
Well, you said you wanted a serious answer.
Gives a whole new menaing to the ‘War on Drugs’.
My WAG is that the unpleasantness of the process of dying is a way of telling most creatures that survival is a better option, maybe without it the Darwinian effect would take over and such creatures would die out of sheer apathy.
We have apathy weapons of mass disillusionment and we in the UK are being subjected to them at this very moment, they call them election broadcasts.What it really interesting about them though is that whenever sprtlkezzxyambble1290rthvmmmblefumf…flarg yawn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
And, like, there would be way too many women left alive after 3 days of pleasurable bombs. I get it.
[1] The morale effects of weapons are at least as important as the actual damage caused. This is behind the old adage that you can do more damage by maiming one man (as his comrades will see him in terrible pain, and saving him will require a whole infrastructure of stretcher-bearers, medics and surgeons, as well as the impact on his loved ones) than by killing him (when his comrades and loved ones are more likely to be seeking revenge, and when his death is not a burden on the military support organisation).
[2] It’s not easy to develop a weapon that will stop tanks or destroy fortifications, but will let people die happily - pure explosive force remains very popular. Some weapons may be designed to cause extreme suffering, but most are simply designed to destroy a particular type of target. The method of destruction (the means) is not as important as whether it works (the ends). To develop a “nice” lethal weapon would be to make the means more important than the ends, which misses the point of lethal weapons.
[3] The cost of developing weapons would surely be prohibitive, for the reasons in [2] above. A manufacturer or government would want a good reason for investing heavily in “nice” lethal weapons. And why would they? The public see death as death; whether it’s at the hands of a flamethrower or a blissful drug-haze is neither here nor there (well, you see what I mean - people generally regard death in war as bad regardless of the means).
This reminds me of a book called Barefoot in the head by Brian Aldiss, where bombs loaded with hallucinogenic drugs were used to incapacitate the enemy; the war veterans were basically wandering around in a psychotic semi-reality.
Difficult read though.
Believe it or not, Gnome, most weapons of mass destruction are designed mostly to do property damage; killing people is a secondary effect. By destroying an enemies factories, transportation centers, and food production centers, your enemy finds it harder and harder to continue fighting, because he can no longer support his troops.
A pleasure bomb is more of a terroristic weapon. Let’s say you’ve invented a bomb that, when it goes off, leaves everyone within the detonation range stupidly happy (a Valium bomb). You’ve basically invented a friendly, clumsy neutron bomb–all the facilities are still standing, but you’ve got a bunch of idiots in the way instead of a bunch of radioactive bodies. There’s lots of disruption, but really nothing permanent. Not a very good weapon, IMHO. Sure would make a good movie, though…
Back in a military skills class I took back in college the subject of POW’s came up (now called epw’s for enemy prisoners or war). The U.S. standard opp. procedure was to take what steps are needed to detain them but treat them w/ respect. The thinking is if we do that the enemy is less likely to fight to the death and surrender easier.
I thought we should up the anti and promise them a 2 month vacation at club Med - they probally wouldn’t fire a shot.
In Larry Niven’s classic book “Ringworld”, there is an interesting weapon called a “tasp”. It was supposed to stimulate the victim’s pleasure center, rendering him/her/it helpless.
The interesting part of it was that the effect is so pleasurable that victims got addicted to it almost instantly, making them a slave to the tasper.
One tough-guy character (well, tough CAT character) gets hit with one by a wimpy character. The tough cat immediately agrees to go by the wimpy guy’s rules because he knows that if he got zapped with the tasp a few more times that he would become his willing slave.
Really, this is just a futuristic take on crack dealers getting their “customers” addicted. But it’s an interesting notion that it could have use as an actual weapon of sorts.
The CIA sees things my way. Everybody knows that. If you had to choose between these two scenarios how could the means (as opposed to the ends) not take precedence? A. Millions of little Homers writh around the cornfields of the midwest bleeding from every orifice as their skin and bones drip from their bodies B. Millions of litttle Homers get to live David Lee Roth’s life in 3 days. The thing is, Plan B probably makes 5 Star Enemy Generals feel like sluts. There are different relationship dynamics involved in killing someone with pleasure than pain. I’d like to say that I’m not claiming any innate pacifistic tendencies because I’m a female. I just got notification of a school renunion I’m supposed to attend next year. I have 10 months to develop psycho-kinetic powers or learn how to lock and load.
I acutually logged on today because it occured to me that we haven’t heard much about the neutron bomb lately. We’ve become so dependant on computers, I’m wondering why all the emphisis isn’t on the EMP aspect these days.
Given the patience of the military, I’m wondering if we’re not training scientist to ‘defect’, become ‘doctors’, legislate ‘vacinations’ and set all newborns bio-clocks to blow at say, 20 yrs old. Genoming will eventually add yet another weapon to the militarys arsenal someway.
I get the ‘blow-up-the-infrastrcture’ theory Guy P proposes -it’s true- but it’s just the easiest way to ultimatly dispatch the population. Simplified, why invade,seek out every person and kill them individually when you can deprive them of food and water and let them die on their own? Oh, you won’t actually hear our military actually say that - they have much better propaganda…er, I mean reasons why we bomb the way we do. And we don’t actually WANT those countries but if you WERE invading a country you wanted, wouldn’t you want NOT to have to rebuild all the buildings? It’s the raison d’etre of neutron bombs.
At least with genoming you could program them to die happy. Flood the mind with endorphins and sweet dreams baby.
Neutron bombs, also called ER (Enhanced Radiation) weapons, have a sizeable blast radius. This is because neutron bombs are just regular fusion bombs jacketed in something that produces more neutrons than it’s bombarded with. The neutrons are not captured by another layer, as in cobalt bombs and other jacketed nuclear munitions. Therefore, the free neutrons can cause huge amounts of damage. The blast effects of a neutron bomb should not be overlooked, however, because they are not reduced by the jacketing. A neutron bomb and a more conventional (unjacketed) fission bomb of the same size would have the same blast radius.
I certainly am no expert. I was just remembering all the hype about detonating a neutron bomb a mile or so above a city that would disrupt power (even in cars), leave the buildings intact and not (instantly) kill the inhabitants. Some reports said that the population might not even realize it had happened. Perhaps I’m mistaken on the type of bomb or maybe it was just bad jounalism. Any E.M.P. bombs fit this description?
Possibly bad journalism, or else you already got hit by *Coldfire’s ** little weapon. But no, despite what * Popular Mechanics-style mags were saying around the early to mid-80’s, this is a mistaken appreaciation of the effects of EMP nuclear weapons. As Derleth said, EMP nukes are still fission weapons, and have very large blast radii. The Federation of American Scientists has a very good discussion of how a stratospheric-level EMP might cause disruptions over a large geographic area. Note that the radiation, thermal and blast effects in the area would be undimished. So if a 100kt weapon was detonated at 20km, there would definitely be thermal and blast effects at ground level.
Thanks for clearing up my ignorance!
“Neutron bombs” and EMP are two different things. As that FAS web page linked to above notes, a nuclear strike calculated to cause EMP effects across the continental United States might be detonated at an altitude as high as 400-500 kilometers. At that altitude, thermal and blast effects at ground level would be negligible to nonexistant. A “neutron bomb” would cause as much blast damage as a comparable “non-neutron” small tactical nuclear weapon, but would also cause deaths from radiation over a considerable area beyond the radius of destruction from blast and thermal effects.
As for the question in the OP: Exactly how would this “pleasure weapon” work? Does anyone have some mechanism in mind for how to remotely stimulate people’s pleasure centers or whatever it is? As it stands, asking why the military doesn’t use “pleasure weapons” instead of guns and bombs is like asking why the military uses big airplanes and container ships to transport troops and equipment instead of just “beaming” them to where they are needed.
Pain and pleasure are ultimately irrelevant. They are merely information in the mind. If a painful weapon and a pleasurable weapon kill you in three days, you die either way. What good will the pleasure do you? None. Even if we had “pleasure weapons”, they would not be inherently better than “pain weapons”. Just level the cities of your mortal enemies (not that we have any) as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
P.S. G. Nome: Drugs, booze, and condoms? What good are condoms if you’ll be dead in three days, anyway? (sorry, that’s unimportant, but it’s just been bugging me)
Maybe when it explodes, it would vaporize some extremely concentrated cocaine-substance or opiate or MDMA. I’m assuming that if the substance could be concentrated enough to have a significant effect when inhaled outdoors in the open air and hopefully powerful enough to induce overdoses. Kinda like poison gases, which have already been used in warfare, except pleasurable drug gases. Come to think of it, this might not be too feasible on a very large scale, like, say, a city. However, I imagine a methadone bomb launched into a foxhole could be quite effective, if only to incapacitate the soldiers long enough to just walk up and shoot them.
When general anesthetics were invented, some visionaries of the era predicted future “bloodless wars” in which the opposing armies would throw chloroform or ether at each other. That didn’t happen either, obviously.
And, like MEBuckner, I doubt the existence of any practical mechanism for a “pleasurable” weapon which would be as effective as the other kind. If it existed, it would get used if and only if it presented significant advantages in tactical or cost-effectiveness terms.
We’re basically talking about chemical warfare, and there are a number of technical and political (legal) issues with chemical warfare.
From Chemical Weapons - Introduction on the Federation of American Scientists website:
Note that last sentence: to be militarily effective, a chemical warfare agent should really be something which can be absorbed through the skin (like “nerve gas”), and not just something which must be inhaled; otherwise a simple gas mask can defeat it. Even nerve agents would probably be more effective as an anti-civilian terror weapon than as something to be used against well-trained and well-equipped troops. Chemical weapons could certainly hamper a modern military’s effectiveness, but you’ld likely still have to shoot or blow up a lot of the enemy’s troops, since they’d be wearing protective gear.
Finally, I don’t think you’d want to use anything cocaine-like. Crackheads are not noted for their docility or pacifism. A narcotic or knock-out drug might work. I’d guess that if there were something that could quickly incapacitate people by skin contact alone, and that either killed them pleasantly, or just knocked them unconscious for a few hours (or reduced them to giggling euphoria for a while), the world’s militaries would be interested–although the legal problems in Western countries might be insuperable even so.