A declassified document recently released by the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center revealed development plans for a military “seizure weapon” inspired by a controversial episode of the popular Japanese children’s cartoon Pokemon. The episode was pulled from American programming in 1997 after symptoms of epilepsy were induced by rapidly flashing images in several hundred young Japanese viewers.
The Army reveals in the declassified document that application of electromagnetic pulses could force the neurons in the brain to simultaneously fire and disrupt voluntary muscle control.
“It is thought by using a method that would actually trigger nerve synapses directly with an electrical field, essentially 100 percent of individuals would be susceptible to seizure induction” from “up to hundreds of meters,” the document states.
The document cautioned that “the effectiveness of incapacitating a human nervous system with an electromagnetic pulse had not been tested” thus far but speculated that “50 to 100kV/m free field of very sharp pulses” would likely be “sufficient to trigger neurons or make them more susceptible to firing.” The document referenced the 1997 Pokemon incident on Japanese television as an example.
