How Real Is The Threat Of Laser Weapons

Space War ^ | 2/23/2010 | Ilya Kramnik

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

On February 12, 2010, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) used the Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB) mounted on a Boeing B-747 jumbo jet to shoot down a liquid-propellant and a solid-propellant target missile. The ALTB project is one of the MDA's most ambitious and long-term programs. Washington launched its initial research in this sphere in the 1970s. At that time, an NKC-135-ALL aircraft, a modified version of the KC-135 Stratotanker, was built and used as an airborne laboratory.

United Technologies built a 10-ton, 04-0.5-MWt CO2 laser system for the program. The NKC-135-ALL was involved in a series of tests in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Although the tests proved that a laser weapon was feasible, it had a range of just a few kilometers and therefore lacked any military prospects.

In 1985, a laser weapon used in ground tests heated up the stationary fuel tank of a Titan-1 intercontinental ballistic missile simulating a Soviet ICBM a thousand meters away causing it to explode.

Such tests, as well as the NKC-135-ALL program, were conducted under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program. However it was impossible to develop a feasible missile defense system based on airborne laser weapons because most of the technical problems remained unsolved.

The Soviet Union also implemented an airborne laser weapon program and built a Beriev A-60 aircraft, an upgraded version of the Il-76 transport aircraft. Although Moscow virtually mothballed the program after the break-up of the U.S.S.R. in late 1991, the media reported last year that it had been resumed.

[MrEdd]

What about the Battlefield Laser Scanner that was mothballed in 1984?

If there were to be a second american civil war it is approximately 100 percent certain some faction or other would build and deploy similar wea[ons.

[JRios1968]

"Do I need to say it..."

[mamelukesabre]

Little by little. They will get there.

[Myrddin]

Many years ago Steve Ciarcia (Circuit Cellar Ink) created a couple pretty decent laser rifles. Not sufficient to do damage, but quite capable of accurate aim with a range necessitating an optical scope. It was a very early version of laser tag. He became disillusioned pretty quickly as a realized how little fun he was having laying in dirty, wet leaves to avoid being "shot". The long range and total silence left him clueless with respect to whether he was about to be nailed. The original article can probably be located in an archive of Byte magazine from the early 1980s.

[grundle]

The ability to shoot down a liquid-propellant and a solid-propellant target missile is insignificant compared to the power of the Force.