Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon by Jeff Hecht

Author:Jeff Hecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633884618
Publisher: Prometheus Books

THE QUEST FOR NEW LASERS

At the end of 1988, Star Wars was developing several types of laser weapons, Richard L. Gullickson reported at the Lasers ’88 conference in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. MIRACL, now the center of a national laser weapon test range, was being used for ground-based tests with a beam director to test the lethality of high-energy lasers on various targets. TRW was testing Alpha at its facility in the hills east of San Juan Capistrano, California. Another variation on the hydrogen fluoride rocket-engine laser was being tested at half of the hydrogen fluoride wavelengths, but that project would fade away.78

A different approach was building giant mountaintop lasers that could focus their beams up to a relay in orbit. Free-electron lasers seemed to be the best option for a mountaintop laser. They had to be big because they were built around massive accelerators that produced relativistic electrons that amplified the light in the laser beam. As of late 1988, free-electron laser powers had only reached the watt level in the laboratory, but that didn't stop planners from envisioning that the planned Ground Based Free Electron Laser Technology Experiment (GBFEL-TIE) could generate a megawatt beam in the mid-1990s.79 A ground survey was seeking a site two miles wide and ten miles long (3.2 x 16.1 kilometers) on the White Sands Missile Range.80 At the time, some considered free-electron lasers to be the most promising approach, Gary R. Goldstein told a 1988 conference of the American Physical Society. But his analysis found “at best, future facilities will be many orders of magnitude away from the required gigawatt average output powers in the visible or near infrared region” needed for nuclear missile defense.81

Those mountaintop lasers would never be built. In May 1989, SDIO pushed plans for building them for missile defense out beyond the year 2000.82 Another budgetary whack came the following year, ending any plans for major construction projects.83

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