News From the New Millennium

Here's a sentence you wouldn't have seen in news stories back in the Twentieth Century:  "A cruise ship fended off pirates with sonic blasters."  But it actually happened off the coast of Somalia.  See the news story here. 

The sonic  blaster is more properly known as a Long Range Acoustic Device, and was developed by the U.S. Navy as a nonlethal means of defending its ships against terrorist attacks.  Nonlethal weapons have been an important area of Pentagon research programs for more than a decade, ever since it became obvious that terrorists and other "asymmetrical warfare" opponents are perfectly willing to use innocent civilians as human cover.  Nonlethal weapons deprive them of one of their most effective weapons:  ugly images on the news. 

Still, it certainly would be the high point of any cruise ship captain's career to be able to give the order, "Pirates off the starboard side!  Run out the sonic blasters!"