Word: kirtland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Much of the Pentagon's laser weaponry research is conducted in great secrecy at Kirtland Air Force Base, outside of Albuquerque, at a desert site not far from Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. To some experts, the project (code-named "Eighth Card") is almost as important as the Manhattan Project three decades ago. It is not for security reasons alone that frequent warnings are issued to commercial and private planes to keep away from Kirtland; laser beams fired at the base's new weaponry range are known to have ignited wooden targets at a distance...
What may well be the most important goal of military researchers at Kirtland and elsewhere is to project a laser beam that could intercept and destroy a fast-moving intercontinental ballistic missile when it is most vulnerable-before the booster separates from the warhead. Long a subject of fanciful speculation, such long-range rays may soon become possible because of recent technological breakthroughs like high-energy gas dynamic lasers, which produce beams of laser light when their internal gases are rapidly heated, expanded and forced through tiny nozzles at supersonic speeds. Some new lasers have given off bursts of power...
...Kirtland A.F.B...
There are more laser-experiment sites than those listed by the FAA. Under the U.S. Air Force's so-called Eighth Card program, centered at Kirtland Air Force Base (N. Mex.), researchers are exploring the use of even stronger laser beams as military weaponry. The airspace over bases housing such experiments is automatically out of bounds to civilian craft. One goal of the program: the development of a laser that could destroy incoming enemy missiles. Traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), a laser beam could, in theory, intercept a 17,000-m.p.h. ICBM...