The concept of a death ray is generally portrayed as some form of directed energy weapon that projects energy at a person or object in order to destroy them.

Contents

1 Research and development 2 History 3 See also 4 External link

Research and development

A death ray weapon is under active research and development, but most examples of such weapons appear in science fiction. Several mythologies mention lightning as the weapon of gods like Zeus, Thor (the mjolnir) or Indra (the vajra). The difficulty in creating a death ray is that most weapons work not by transferring energy, but by matter causing physical damage at the point of impact. To reproduce this amount of damage requires large amounts of energy, and this is difficult to implement in a hand weapon. The goal is a death ray that would fire a particle beam or laser or radiation stream sufficiently powerful to kill humans.

History

After the astonishing technological advancement during World War I, many such schemes began to appear credible. Harry Grindell-Matthews tried to sell such a ray to the British Air Ministry after that war. He failed to appear to demonstrate his apparatus, however. It was apparently taken to France but has not resurfaced, leading to various conspiracy theory ideas about what might have happened to it, or who might have developed it later.

Radar is a by-product of this research.

Nikola Tesla was also working on a form of death ray at the time of his death. He offered the US War Department the secrets of his "teleforce" weapon on January 5 1943 but was assumed to be crazy. Tesla then offered his device to several European countries. Records which recently turned up in Russia showed that his proposed death ray was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated by high voltage produced by a huge Van de Graaff generator.

In the later phases of WWII, Nazi Germany put its hopes on research for technologically revolutionary secret weapons. Through the 1930s the atomic bomb and radiological weapon were proposed, and the related, more selective, surgical idea of a death ray was probably more appealing than wanton and horrific destruction by such means. This belief intensified in the 1940s after Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the undesirable physical and political fallout of such weapons of mass destruction.

Science fiction as far back as the 1920s had emphasized death rays as the weapons of choice. As the laser, invented in 1960, became industrial reality in the 1960s, the generic fictional death rays were often renamed lasers. By the late 1960s and 1970s however, the laser's limits as a weapon were evident, and less specific terms such as "phaser" (Star Trek) or "blaster" (Star Wars) were used.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan revived the idea as a matter for public funding with his Strategic Defense Initiative program, which was immediately nicknamed Star Wars, due to its objective to put weapons in space. Lasers could destroy ICBMs in flight. The program had limited success but there were numerous attempts to find practical death ray technologies. It is not clear whether this was part of a general plan to facilitate the collapse of the Soviet Union by misdirecting the Soviets into investing in research that had no practical outputs (this was a common Cold War strategy on both sides).

Enthusiasm for these ideas, and the arms race they implied, waned in the 1990s. By this point, science fiction was more interested in the very real potential of personal-scale biological warfare, chemical warfare, robots, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to kill selected individuals - without necessarily having to come directly into their sights to do so. The Project for the New American Century, for instance, noted that genetically-selective plagues might become a politically useful tool.

On a more limited scale, there is research on lasers as dazzling non-lethal weapons, and weapons of projected sound waves.

See also

• Surgical strike
• Science fiction weapon

External link

• Ventura, Timothy, "Tesla Death Ray Reconstruction (http://www.americanantigravity.com/graphics/tesla/Tesla-Death-Ray-Reconstruction.pdf)". 1994. (PDF)