From Mark Blacklock

Some info which may be of interest on microwave weapons - if the US military are using them in the field they've come a long way fairly quickly. At InfoWarCOn 2003 (September time) I sat in a small, windowless room with about five others and listened to Glaen Shwaery of the University of New Hampshire's Non-Lethal Technology Innovation Center give a talk about the latest developments in non-lethals and problems they were encountering in developing and testing them.
<!--more-->
With regards the microwave devices (or directed energy devices), as I remember (and my notes confirm) the problem was "scaleability". I seem to remember him saying "there's a fine line between making someone's skin itch and cooking their brain".

There's no mention of these concerns in this, otherwise <a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/v-mads.htm" target="new">thorough, run-down</a>.

This mentions immediate discomfort to those in the beam but Shwaery outlined a different problem: that it takes a while to get the skin cells to the painful temperature of 130 degrees (my notes say 54, I'm so centigrade it hurts) - and once you've started cooking someone, you can't just shut down the process by switching off your device - the body keeps cooking, then overcompensates, making you freezing cold, before reheating again enormously. It is this process that kills people and this process that can't be controlled. I recall a graph with a couple of parabola, the second reaching higher than the first and breaking through the danger/death line.

In short, less than two years ago they couldn't make them work without killing people. At the same talk, there were murmurings about how hard it was to test these things without human subjects but the global security site says they have been using human test subjects in the US.

Now while yer man Will Thomas isn't the most trustworthy source, seems to me that the opportunity for proper field-testing of ADS (ie, this one goes up to eleven) on human subjects would be welcomed, regardless of whether or not it's finetuned. Suppose the clever thing to do would be to look in Iraqi hospitals for people whose brains have been boiled.