Word: lasered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...S.D.I. proves technologically feasible, serious questions would arise as to whether it would really strengthen deterrence, and at what cost. Estimates of the money required start at $60 billion for a rudimentary system that would rely on interceptor rockets. Calculations of the cost of a fully developed laser- or particle-beam system run all the way from $100 billion to a staggering $1 trillion. Such a broad range means that all the figures are fairly wild guesses. Indeed, Cory Coll, leader of an S.D.I. research group at the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, predicts it will...
...projectiles are easiest to find: the intense heat of a missile's rocket thrusters, concedes the anti-S.D.I. Union of Concerned Scientists, makes it stand out "like a firefly in a darkened room." That is also when a missile defense is most efficient: a single hit, by a laser beam, for instance, can destroy ten warheads at once. In post-boost and mid-course phases, the separated warheads are vastly more difficult to find and distinguish from decoys. On re-entry, the decoys burn up, and only the warheads continue to plunge through the atmosphere. But if there...
...LASERS. They are devices that generate high-powered, concentrated beams of light, almost perfectly parallel and of a single wavelength. The light from a lamp, in contrast, is a fuzzy discharge wiggling at different wavelengths and scattering in every direction. Laser beams travel at the speed of light (not surprising: they are light, though not always visible) and can be focused over thousands of miles of space to burn a hole in the skin of a Soviet missile, destroying its guidance mechanism and deactivating its warheads...
...Chemical lasers, utilizing the reaction of gases such as hydrogen and fluorine, are the most powerful lasers now in use. But a missile-killing laser beam might have to be 10 million times as powerful as the one that the Air Force is now using in antisatellite weapons tests. Also, because its long wavelength somewhat spreads out its focus, a chemical laser beam might have to be held on precisely the same spot on a missile's skin for as long as seven seconds; during that time the missile might rise 20 miles. Because a ground- based laser could...
...Excimer lasers, which use a different kind of chemical reaction, produce beams of short wavelengths that could destroy a missile by focusing on it for only a second or so. But the generating apparatus is so bulky that it could not be lifted into orbit; the laser stations would have to be placed on mountaintops to put them above the densest layers of the atmosphere. Even the thin upper layers would cause the beams to shimmer, however, owing to the same phenomenon that makes the light from stars appear to twinkle. The excimer laser beams would have to be bounced...