Unveiled over the weekend and dismissed as an April Fool’s Day joke, Russia’s announcement of a zombie-creating “superweapon” is all too real, insists Premier Vladimir Putin. The zombification ray is being developed by scientists as a more “politically acceptable” alternative to nuclear weapons, as well as a nifty new form of crowd control.
While we’ve probably got your attention by now, it is at this point we need to discuss the semantics of the matter, and what we mean by “zombie.” The gun is not, naturally, creating Romero-style zombies, which would be worse than useless as a form of crowd control. Instead, it is aiming for the ability to enthrall the living (along the lines of the Bela Lugosi-era Dracula). In short, it is not undead related, but a mind control ray.
Still, great fodder for a dystopian novel, but is it real? The details on how the weapon putatively works are light, but they are referred to as “directed energy” weapons, something the US has already begun rolling out. The leap from shining a hot (not necessarily visible spectrum) light on someone’s arm until they go “oww” to full-fledged mind control appears to be a long one indeed.
But not, necessarily, an unimagined one. The Air Force has been angling for mind control (or at least dumbening) weapons for years now. Russia has been working on it too, naturally.
The claim that they have (or are close to having) broken the barrier to full scale mind control by way of electromagnetic waves could well be a massive bluff. The story, however, has a mind of its own, and that will be even harder to control, and the term “zombie creating superweapon” alone is likely to make the story more pernicious than any movie zombie plague.
