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发帖数: 33885 | 1 Norinco = 中国兵器工业集团有限公司
China, however, has a history as an early leader in creating man-portable
laser dazzlers, used to blind personnel and knockout sensitive
electrooptical sensors. In 1995, the Norinco firm unveiled the ZM-87
Portable Laser Disturber at arms expos in the Phillipinnes and the United
Arab Emirates. The fifteen-milliwatt neodymium laser, capable of discharging
five pulses a second, was explicitly designed to inflict permanent eye
damage on enemy personnel with ranges of two to three miles, or temporary
blindness as far as six. Weighing seventy-seven pounds on its tripod-mount
and connected by a thick cable to a power unit, the ZM-87 resembled the crew
-served blasters used by stormtroopers in the film The Empire Strikes Back.
The entry of the ZM-87 on the international arms market prompted concern
however, and the same year an amendment to the 1980 Geneva Convention on
Certain Conventional Weapons was made that effectively outlawed it. The
Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, to which China and the United States are
signatories, explicitly forbids the use of laser weapons designed to
permanently blind a human being.
The Protocol did not come into effect until 1998, however. Norinco produced
twenty-two ZM-87s, several of which were apparently sold abroad. On April 4,
1997, a Canadian military CH-124 helicopter began photographing the Russian
merchant ship Kapitan Man, which was believed to be a spy ship due to
abnormal antennas and a prior record of espionage activities. While hovering
just six miles off Port Angeles, Washington both the Canadian pilot and a U
.S. Navy intelligence officer onboard experienced temporary blindness and
severe eye pain believed to have resulted from a ZM-87 laser. Though both
crewmen apparently suffered lasting impairments from the episode, the
presence of a laser onboard the Kapitan was never positively confirmed.
Later in 2003, two Apache helicopters training near the demilitarized zone
separating North and South Korea were illuminated by a laser thought by
intelligence officials to be a ZM-87 purchased by North Korea. | w*****8
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