Word: lasered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like so many other triumphs of science, the laser has become a double-edged sword. Capable of producing an enormously powerful, very narrow beam of light, it has been used to perform delicate surgery on the retina of the eye, puncture tiny holes in material as hard as diamonds, produce three-dimensional pictures called holograms, and even measure the distance from earth to the moon (with an error of only a few inches). But the laser can also be used for less peaceful purposes. It provides, for example, the guiding light for the Air Force's extremely accurate "smart...
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...
...generation of lasers shows so much military promise that the Pentagon will spend some $90 million this fiscal year on "electro-optical warfare," nearly double the figure of two years ago. The Russians, also interested in laser weaponry, are thought to be spending even more, and may well be ahead of the U.S. research effort. Only a few months ago, Soviet scientists announced that they had generated a pulsed laser beam of 300 billion watts...
...project and early this summer finally completed some complex calculations on possible means of controlling thermonuclear fusion-the same awesome process that fires the sun and other stars. The goal of LoDato's work was hardly new; like many scientists in laboratories round the world, he proposed using laser beams to reach the enormous temperatures (as high as several hundred million degrees) needed to sustain fusion reactions. Nonetheless, LoDato felt that his contribution was sufficiently original to justify his request for an $80,000 grant from the AEC to pay for computer analysis of his complex equations...