Pokemon Shock

The Pokemon Plot: How One Cartoon Inspired the Army to Dream Up a Seizure Gun - WIRED

In 1998, a secret Army intelligence analysis suggested a new way to take out enemies: blast them with electromagnetic energy until their brains overload and they start to convulse. Amazingly, it was an idea inspired by a Pokemon episode.
Application of “electromagnetic pulses” could force neurons to all fire at once, causing a “disruption of voluntary muscle control,” reads a description of a proposed seizure weapon, contained in a declassified document from the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center. “It is thought by using a method that would actually trigger nerve synapses directly with an electrical field, essentially 100% of individuals would be susceptible to seizure induction.”

This wasn’t the only method the Center suggested for taking down combatants. Other exotic, less-lethal weapons included a handheld laser gun for close-range “antiterrorist special operations roles”; a “flood” of network traffic that could overload servers and “elicit a panic in the civilian population”; and radio frequencies that could manipulate someone’s body temperature and “mimic a fever.”

Danger Room acquired this secret study on nonlethal technologies thanks to a private citizen, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and now wishes to remain anonymous. By coincidence, Sharon Weinberger wrote a 2008 Danger Room report after independently acquiring a piece of the document – an addendum that described using a “Voice of God” weapon, powered by radio waves, to “implant” a suggestion in someone else’s mind. It wasn’t even close to the strangest suggestion made for exotic weaponry.