Word: lasered
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...technology is still comparatively primitive and untested. Even the proponents admit that a battle station firing laser beams could not be deployed much before the end of the century. Besides, the Administration wants to spend only $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1985, an almost negligible sum in the $250 billion annual defense budget, and all the money would be for research and development. Nonetheless, warns a prominent West Coast physicist, "when these projects get up a head of steam, they're almost impossible to stop...
...subsumed under a new, unified U.S. Space Command for all four service branches. Last week, even as the NSC met at the White House, the Space Shuttle flight crew was 150 miles overhead carrying out exotic experiments, and just a day earlier the Air Force announced that its Airborne Laser Laboratory had used a beam to destroy a target missile flying low and slowly off the California coast. Finally, the Air Force's antisatellite missile, originally set for a test launch last August, remains ready to fly any time the political climate is right. The flight, which was postponed...
...basic mechanism of lasers is now familiar: they emit a concentrated stream of intense light powerful enough to melt metal. Experimental U.S. lasers have tracked and destroyed small missiles in flight; last May in California the Airborne Laser Lab was 5 for 5 firing at supersonic Sidewinders. But a device powerful and precise enough to be practical for nuclear defense cannot yet be built...
Says M.I.T. Engineering and Computer Professor Jack Ruina: "I would compare it to going right from the kite stage to the 747." Years further off is the X-ray laser, which would be "bomb pumped," or powered by an internal nuclear explosion. Still more problematic are particle-beam weapons, which would fire streams of atomic particles...
...bigger than GM, Mobil and Exxon combined. With nearly a million employees, it is the second largest employer in America, behind only the U.S. Government. Its annual spending of $17 billion equals about 4% of all U.S. capital investment. Its Bell Laboratories, incubator of the transistor, the laser and Direct Distance Dialing, is the world's foremost industrial research organization. Western Electric makes 80% of all the telephone equipment used in America, including most of AT&T's 827 million miles of copper wire...