Sci-Fi Ray Gun Debuts in Iraq

[Richard]

November 21, 2008, 11:40 am
By John Tierney

A Flash Gordon ray gun from the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. (Gary Settle for The New York Times)I tremble to type this, but here goes: The ray gun has finally become a reality.

At least that’s what the Economist reports. It says a “directed-energy weapon” named Zeus (presumably because of his fondness for hurling lightning bolts) has been deployed in the back of a Humvee in Iraq. It’s being tested by soldiers who are using its laser beam to detonate roadside bombs from a safe distance of 300 meters.

This is astonishing news, at least to those of us who have been following the ray gun’s history since it was popularized by H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds.” From the ray guns of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to the phasers and blasters of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” the weaponry of the future was conspicuously bullet-free. Among futurists purporting to be writing non-fiction, ray-gun technology always seemed to be just around the corner without ever arriving.

Yet now, if the Zeus prototype works in Iraq, a dozen more will introduced within a year, according to the Economist, and bigger versions of the ray gun are in development. There’s the Laser Area Defence System (LADS — for once, a good military acronym) for blowing up incoming shells and rockets with laser beams. Boeing is working on a similar weapon, and a consortium of companies is developing an airborne laser strong enough to disable missiles from several hundred kilometers away.

And there’s also been testing of a smaller, non-lethal weapon using a “a focused beam of millimeter waves to induce an intolerable heating sensation on an adversary’s skin,” as my colleague Tom Zeller Jr. reported in The Lede.

I asked my colleague Bill Broad, our high-tech weapons expert in the Times science department, for some perspective on ray guns and lasers. “We’ve been quietly using lasers for decades — for instance, atop Mt. Haleakala in Hawaii — to illuminate Russian satellites,” he told me. “And pilots have engaged in various laser-blinding incidents. But this battlefield use sounds quite different and cooler. The future approaches!”

If the ray gun works, it will have joined the self-driving car in the ranks of fulfilled sci-fi. And we’ve just seen reports of the “world’s first practical jetpack,” although its immediate practicality seems debatable, to judge from my colleague John Schwartz’s flight.

Can the the time machine be far behind? I welcome your predictions on the next sci-fi gizmo to become reality.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008...s-in-iraq/