Star Wars coming soon

Press, 19 September 1980, Page 13

Star Wars coming soon

By

CHARLES NORTH,

“Observer,” London

Scientists at the British Ministry of Defence are for the first time having to take seriously the possibility that the United States and the Soviet Union will develop ‘‘Star War” weapons, able to shoot down an aircraft or ballistic missile with an energy beam travelling at the speed of light. A glimpse allowed by the United States Air Force at this month’s Farnborough air show of an experimental plane (above), flying with a laser-gun, revealed only a tiny comer of what is now an area of intense top-secret .activity in. America on what are officially known as directed energy weapons. Research into at least two possible death ray systems is being pressed ahead. One is the laser, an intensely focused and concentrated beam of light already well known to science.

The other is a stream of atomic particles—electrons, protons, neutral or charged atoms—which are not as exotic as they sound. They are used in the domestic TV set and the huge atom-smashing accelerators with which scientists investigate the interior of the atom. The idea that a crucial breakthrough is now very close in weapons that could make the missile as obsolete as the javelin is certainly no longer a joke in the Pentagon. No longer a joke either is the parallel suggestion that the Russians are involved in a vast programme on beam weapons of both type—and may be ahead of the West.'

Intelligence information in the United States now concludes that the Soviets are conducting a vast programme of research into offensive beam weapons and may be coming close to the point w’here they could destroy both United States satellites and missiles. Laser experiments have been carried out by Russian

cosmonauts aboard Soyuz spacecraft and their Salyut space station. A close watch by United States spy satellites on two key Russian sites, at Semipalatinsk, east of the Urals, and Saryshagan, in Kazakhstan, close to the Chinese border, is said to have produced convincing evidence that the Soviets have produced particle beams by harnessing the energy of both conventional explosions and small, contained nuclear explosions. An indication Of the new sensitivity in the United States on this crucial subject was also provided this month by a case in California when an optical company was accused of selling laser mirrors to the Soviet Union. While the technical possibilities of laser are not disputed in the West, the huge and complex hardware required to produce them has simply been considered unsuitable to be carried in an aircraft —let alone hoisted into space. It is now clear that the Americans have succeeded in packing the 10 tons or more of laser equipment needed into an aircraft—no high-speed fighter but a heavy Air Force KC 135, military cousin of the Boeing 707 airliner. The fact that it is flying at all “does have the smell of a breakthrough,” one British source admitted cautiously. The plane’s crucial tests, it is understood, are to come later this year over the New Mexico desert, when it will be tried out in interceptions of small target “drones” of die kind already destroyed in laser-firing from the ground, and against guided missiles launched from aircraft. I