Can new arms cut casualties?

The international Chemical Weapons Convention allows police forces, but not military units, to use such weapons. But military use in situations more akin to law enforcement is a gray area under international law, US officials say, and tear gas was used against hostile Serb crowds in Bosnia. Marine Corps units in the Gulf area reportedly have tear gas and pepper spray in their arsenal.

"The question is whether we stick to the ban and kill people, or use them as a method to save lives," says Army Col. John Alexander (USA, ret.), former head of nonlethal defense programs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This is essentially the argument made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in recent congressional testimony.

Other experts strongly disagree. "The Chemical Weapons Convention ... explicitly prohibits the use of riot-control agents in warfare," says Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York who chairs the Federation of American Scientists' working group on biological and chemical weapons.

"The US has a history of using nonlethal weapons to increase the lethality of other weapons," says Dr. Rosenberg. "Tear gas was extensively used in Vietnam to flush out hidden troops to they could be shot."

Even if that doesn't happen in Iraq, one of the many unknowns that Secretary Rumsfeld frequently harps on is the length, ferocity, and possibility of collateral damage (including civilian casualties) in the urban ground war - even if so-called nonlethal weapons are a key element.

"I don't think we have anything that will make the urban fight radically easier," says military analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Whether nonlethal military hardware amounts to "weapons of mass protection," as some boosters assert, or a potentially dangerous step into a new and murky world of warfighting remains to be seen.

"I suspect future scholars will see the concept of nonlethal warfare as closely tied to the digitization of combat," says Dr. Thompson. "As military forces become more and more dependent upon electronic sensors, computers, communications and navigation devices for battlefield success, the possibility of victory through denial of access to the electromagnetic spectrum is increasingly appealing."

Since much of the technology here is widely available, it's also possible that the US itself might have to counter communications jamming, computer viruses, and microwave pulses at some point.

"This may be a more humane and discriminate way of waging war," Thompson adds. "But it also creates new vulnerabilities that US planners have barely begun to consider.

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