Ancient Mirrors of Archimedes to burn ships attacking
Syracuse. According to a legend,
Archimedes created a mirror with an adjustable focal length (or more likely, a series of mirrors focused on a common point) to focus sunlight on ships of the
Roman fleet as they invaded
Syracuse, setting them on fire. Historians point out that the earliest accounts of the battle did not mention a "burning mirror", but merely stated that Archimedes's ingenuity combined with a way to hurl fire were relevant to the victory. Some attempts to replicate this feat have had some success; in particular, an experiment by students at
MIT showed that a mirror-based weapon was at least possible, if not necessarily practical. The hosts of
MythBusters tackled the Mirrors of Archimedes three times (in
episodes 19, 57 and 172) and were never able to make the target ship catch fire, declaring the myth busted three separate times.
20th Century Robert Watson-Watt In 1935, the British
Air Ministry asked
Robert Watson-Watt of the
Radio Research Station (UK) whether a "
death ray" was possible. He and colleague
Arnold Wilkins quickly concluded that it was not feasible, but as a consequence suggested using radio for the detection of aircraft and this started the development of
radar in Britain.
The fictional "engine-stopping ray" Stories in the 1930s and World War II gave rise to the idea of an "engine-stopping ray". They seemed to have arisen from the testing of the television transmitter in
Feldberg, Germany. Because electrical noise from car engines would interfere with field strength measurements, sentries would stop all traffic in the vicinity for the twenty minutes or so needed for a test. Reversing the order of events in retelling the story created a "tale" where tourists car engine stopped first and then were approached by a German soldier who told them that they had to wait. The soldier returned a short time later to say that the engine would now work and the tourists drove off. Such stories were circulating in Britain around 1938 and during the war British Intelligence relaunched the myth as a "British engine-stopping ray," trying to spoof the Germans into researching what the British had supposedly invented in an attempt to tie up German scientific resources.
German World War II experimental weapons During the early 1940s
Axis engineers developed a sonic cannon that could cause fatal vibrations in its target body. A
methane gas combustion chamber leading to two
parabolic dishes pulse-detonated at roughly 44
Hz. This sound, magnified by the dish reflectors, caused
vertigo and
nausea at by vibrating the
middle ear bones and shaking the
cochlear fluid within the
inner ear. At distances of , the
sound waves could act on organ tissues and fluids by repeatedly compressing and releasing compressive resistant organs such as the
kidneys,
spleen, and
liver. (It had little detectable effect on malleable organs such as the
heart,
stomach and
intestines.)
Lung tissue was affected at only the closest ranges as
atmospheric air is highly compressible and only the blood rich
alveoli resist compression. In practice, the
weapon was highly vulnerable to enemy fire.
Rifle,
bazooka and
mortar rounds easily deformed the parabolic reflectors, rendering the wave amplification ineffective. In the later phases of
World War II,
Nazi Germany increasingly put its hopes on research into technologically revolutionary secret weapons, the
Wunderwaffe. Among the directed-energy weapons the Nazis investigated were
X-ray beam weapons developed under Heinz Schmellenmeier, Richard Gans and Fritz Houtermans. They built an electron accelerator called Rheotron to generate hard X-ray
synchrotron beams for the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM). Invented by
Max Steenbeck at
Siemens-Schuckert in the 1930s, these were later called
Betatrons by the Americans. The intent was to pre-ionize ignition in aircraft engines and hence serve as anti-aircraft DEW and bring planes down into the reach of the flak. The Rheotron was captured by the Americans in Burggrub on April 14, 1945. Another approach was Ernst Schiebolds 'Röntgenkanone' developed from 1943 in Großostheim near
Aschaffenburg. Richert Seifert & Co from Hamburg delivered parts.
Reported use in Sino-Soviet conflicts The
Central Intelligence Agency informed
Secretary Henry Kissinger that it had twelve reports of Soviet forces using laser weapons against Chinese forces during the
1969 Sino-Soviet border clashes, though
William Colby doubted that they had actually been employed.
Northern Ireland "squawk box" field trials In 1973,
New Scientist magazine reported that a sonic weapon known as a "squawk box" underwent successful field trials in Northern Ireland, using soldiers as guinea pigs. The device combined two slightly different frequencies which when heard would be heard as the sum of the two frequencies (ultrasonic) and the difference between the two frequencies (infrasonic) e.g. two directional speakers emitting 16,000 Hz and 16,002 Hz frequencies would produce in the ear two frequencies of 32,002 Hz and 2 Hz. The article states: "The squawk box is highly directional which gives it its appeal. Its effective beam width is so small that it can be directed at individuals in a riot. Other members of a crowd are unaffected, except by panic when they see people fainting, being sick, or running from the scene with their hands over their ears. The virtual inaudibility of the equipment is said to produce a 'spooky' psychological effect." The UK's
Ministry of Defence denied the existence of such a device. It stated that it did have, however, an "ultra-loud public address system which [...] could be 'used for verbal communication over two miles, or put out a sustained or modulated sound blanket to make conversation, and thus crowd organisation, impossible.'"
East German "decomposition" methods described decomposition methods as 'an attack on the human soul'. He died of a rare form of
leukemia in 1999 which he believed was the result of
radiation poisoning. He, and others, suspected he had been targeted with directed X-rays during his imprisonment. In
East Germany in the 1960s, in an effort to avoid international condemnation for arresting and interrogating people for holding politically incorrect views or for performing actions deemed hostile by the state security service, the
Stasi, attempted alternative methods of repression which could paralyze people without imprisoning them. One such alternative method was called decomposition (transl.
Zersetzung). In the 1970s and 1980s it became the primary method of repressing domestic "hostile-negative" forces. Some of the victims of this method suffered from
cancer and claimed that they had also been targeted with directed
X-rays. In addition, when the East German state collapsed, powerful X-ray equipment was found in prisons without there being any apparent reason to justify its presence. In 1999, the modern German state was investigating the possibility that this X-ray equipment was being used as weaponry and that it was a deliberate policy of the Stasi to attempt to give prisoners radiation poisoning, and thereby cancer, through the use of directed X-rays. A notable example of a directed energy system which came out of the SDI program is the Neutral Particle Beam Accelerator developed by
Los Alamos National Laboratory. This system is officially described (on the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum website) as a low power neutral particle beam (NPB) accelerator, which was among several directed energy weapons examined by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization for potential use in missile defense. In July 1989, the accelerator was launched from
White Sands Missile Range as part of the Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) project, reaching an altitude of 200 kilometers (124 miles) and operating successfully in space before being recovered intact after reentry. The primary objectives of the test were to assess NPB propagation characteristics in space and gauge the effects on spacecraft components. Despite continued research into NPBs, no known weapon system utilizing this technology has been deployed.
Alleged tracking of Space Shuttle Challenger The
Soviet Union invested some effort in the development of
ruby and
carbon dioxide lasers as anti-ballistic missile systems, and later as a tracking and
anti-satellite system. There are reports that the
Terra-3 complex at
Sary Shagan was used on several occasions to temporarily "blind" US spy satellites in the IR range. It has been claimed that the USSR made use of the lasers at the Terra-3 site to target the Space Shuttle
Challenger in 1984. At the time, the Soviet Union was concerned that the shuttle was being used as a reconnaissance platform. On 10 October 1984 (
STS-41-G), the Terra-3 tracking laser was allegedly aimed at
Challenger as it passed over the facility. Early reports claimed that this was responsible for causing "malfunctions on the space shuttle and distress to the crew", and that the United States filed a diplomatic protest about the incident. After the end of the
Cold War, the Terra-3 facility was found to be a low-power laser testing site with limited satellite tracking capabilities, which is now abandoned and partially disassembled. ==Modern 21st-century use==