Strange, alarming, morbidly intriguing - any or all of those would serve to describe the newly announced Zombie Gun" that Russian president Vladimir Putin plans to use "for achieving political and strategic goals" (his words, as quoted from the UK Mail Online). The concept is not new. For some time now military technologists have been working on weapons to incapacitate the enemy by attacking the central nervous system or damaging internal organs. Extremely high doses of microwaves could stop someone's heart from beating or disintegrate his eyeballs, for example. Actually introducing such weapons to the combat zone – or perhaps against dissidents – might be new. Lower dose microwave weapons have already been used in Russia for crowd control, and some claim they've also tried them out in other venues. Quoting from the Mail Online: "Plans to introduce the super-weapons were announced quietly last week by Russian defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov. Mr Serdyukov said: 'The development of weaponry based on new physics principles – direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, and so on – is part of the state arms procurement programme for 2011-2020.'" [One weapon] could theoretically render someone pliable or even drive them insane by directly attacking the brain. This is the weapon most appropriately described as a "zombie gun." Similar weapons have already been used on a trial basis.