G:asa (04/30/83)
The best article I've read to date on the defensive use of lasers
in space is the one by Kosta Tsipis that appeared in SCIENTIFIC
AMERICAN (December 1981, vol. 245, no. 6, pp. 51-57). The following
are quotations from that article.
"The potential of lasers as weapons has been assessed in a
series of workshops organized by the Program in Science and
Technology for International Security of the physics
department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Participants in the workshops have included some of my
colleagues and me from M.I.T. and investigators from other
universities, from industry and from the national weapons
laboratories. We have concluded that lasers have little or
no chance of succeeding as practical cost-effective
defensive weapons." (p. 52)
"On balance, then, laser weapons operating in the atmosphere
offer no clear advantage over existing weapons for close-
range defense. In addition they can be impeded by weather,
they cannot operate effectively beyond a range of a few
kilometers, they are easier to neutralize by countermeasures
than ordinary projectiles or supersonic missiles and they
require a much better tracking system. Under these
circumstances it is difficult to see how the development and
deployment of such fragile, complex and expensive weapons
would improve the military capability of a nation." (p. 57)
I would recommend this article to anyone interested in the
administration's recent defense proposals. I'd also be interested in
learning if there are any reasons why the conclusions reached by the
author cannot be accepted as the last word on the subject. (Reply to
this newsgroup, please.)
John Hevelin
ucbvax!g:asaandrew (05/02/83)
The fact that a scientific panel found lasers to be ineffective as weapons bears little relevance to the proposal to use particle beams as weapons.
geo (05/04/83)
In his origninal article (populi.561) John Hevelin quotes the December
1981 Sci Am article on DEW (directed energy weapons), by Kosta Tsipsis.
He praises the article, and asks if anyone knows any reason why this
should not be considered the last word on fry in the sky laser beams.
I also found this a very good article, and I would have considered it
the latest word until I read an article in fa.arms-d a couple of months
ago. The article described a new scheme someone had dreamed up.
The weapon consisted of a hydrogen bomb surrounded by rods that lased in
the X-ray frequencies. The rods were to be steerable, when many of them
were pointing at ICBMs the bomb was supposed to go off, pulsing the rods
and stimulating them to lase, thus zapping the missiles. (Remember ruby
lasers? They were pulsed lasers.) I forget what percentage of the
energy released by the explosion was supposed to be transmitted by the
lasers. I recall it was a fairly large fraction.
Tsipsis did not mention these devices.
Cordially, Geo Swan, Integrated Studies, University of Waterloo
(allegra|decvax) !watmath!watarts!geocrc (05/10/83)
It was once thought that aircraft would not be useful as weapons. Billy Mitchell had to demonstrate it. No one believed in rockets until Von Braun dropped some on London. Just a few years ago many people thought that there was no reason to go into space. Some still do. You can never prove something is impossible or useless. The best you can do is to prove that YOU can't make it do something useful. /Charles Colbert (Impervious to the commonsense of the stay-in-beds)