IEEE Spectrum July, 2007 - 32

In 1981, Fair joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or DARPA, and organized a joint program with the Army,
whose goal was to develop a large-caliber EM gun system within
10 years. Interest in the technology was building, but the program was still relatively small by DOD standards. By 1983, Fair's
expected funding was slated to reach only $1.4 million.
Then, on the evening of 23 March 1983, President Ronald
Reagan announced a crash program to build defenses against
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Fair and his team were
all for Reagan's initiative-which the press had quickly and derisively dubbed "Star Wars"-but they were dubious about the
space-based laser weapons being touted. Fair believed using railguns to launch simple kinetic projectiles, which destroy targets
by the sheer force of their impact, would be much better suited
for knocking down missiles.
That summer, a study group reviewed the options for missile
defense, and in the fall, the Pentagon formed the Strategic Defense
Initiative Office (SDIO) to oversee the $1.6-billion-a-year program.
Fair was asked to manage its EML component. It was a tempting
offer: he would get to allocate $20 million a year to the projects of
his choice, but he also worried about working in such a politically
charged environment. He chose to stay at DARPA, and Roger X.
Lenard, a missile defense analyst and former fighter pilot with the
Air Force, became head of SDIO's EML program instead.
READy TO LAUNCH: Richard
Parkes [left] and Scott
Rashleigh at Australian
National University make lastminute tweaks to a railgun
that set the speed record for
such machines in 1977.

44 IEEE Spectrum | July 2007 | NA

Lenard, too, was a space enthusiast, and he immediately
funded an Air Force study of EM guns to launch missile defense
systems into orbit, each of them weighing possibly hundreds of
metric tons. But the heaviest projectiles that had been test-fired
up to then weighed only a few kilograms. Not surprisingly, this
challenge proved impossible, and so Lenard shifted the focus to
EM guns for hurling projectiles at incoming missiles.
This goal was reasonable, but as Fair and others later charged,
the work emphasized hardware demonstrations to the detriment
of test and analysis. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum last
spring, Lenard said he felt pressured to demonstrate something
dramatic because his program was constantly overshadowed by
SDIO efforts on directed-energy technologies such as lasers.
One project in particular threatened to steal Lenard's thunder: at
Lawrence Livermore, physicists Lowell Wood and Rod Hyde were
leading a program to build a nuclear-pumped X-ray laser. Upon
detection of a missile launch, the orbiting system would detonate
a nuclear warhead, harnessing the blast to simultaneously power
thousands of missile-destroying lasers. News stories at the time
quoted Wood as claiming that these lasers could focus so much
energy so tightly that just one shuttle launch could put enough of
them into orbit to take out the entire Soviet ICBM arsenal.
"The first liar always sets the rules of the game," is how Lenard
ruefully recalls Wood's boast. He stops short of explicitly calling
Wood a liar but does say Wood was "wrong on many implementations of technology." Lenard recalls one meeting where he pointed
out significant problems with Wood's analysis, but Wood refused
to concede any of his points. Wood's mentor, Edward Teller, was
there, and as Lenard recalls, Teller finally snapped, "Lowell, why
don't you shut up and listen to the man? You might learn something." (Wood and Hyde declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.)
In 1985, fabulous-sounding results materialized under Lenard's
program. Railgun teams at Westinghouse and Vought Corp. (now
Vought Aircraft Industries, in Dallas) each reported projectile velocities of 5.9 km/s, matching Marshall's 1977 record. Then a Lawrence
Livermore team set up a railgun in Ancho Canyon, N.M., complete
with an explosive flux generator, which operates much like a regular generator, except that the motive force
is an explosion instead of a drive shaft. The
machines generate very high current and
voltage simultaneously. The Ancho Canyon
railgun reportedly clocked in at 10 km/s-
fast enough to launch a projectile from one
continent to another or even into low-Earth
orbit. Later that year, Maynard Cowan at
Sandia National Laboratories claimed a coilgun velocity of 15 km/s.
But the numbers turned out to be
grossly exaggerated. When Marshall asked
Cowan how he had measured his projectile's speed, for instance, Cowan said the
result had been estimated by a computer.
"There's no substitute for measurement,"
Marshall recalls telling Cowan. The
Lawrence Livermore results, too, had been
calculated instead of measured directly.
Marshall, Fair, and others thus put little
stock in the claims.
Lenard contends that the tests' high
electromagnetic pulses made measurements impossible. Later, in 1986, they
figured out how to measure the velocity-

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AuSTrAlIAN NEwS AND INforMATIoN BurEAu

but existing superconductors are too brittle and can't withstand
large, rapid changes in their magnetic fields.
Even the projectiles are a subject of intense inquiry. They
leave the barrel at such high velocity that when they hit the air,
they tend to flatten, burn up, or shatter. That's why Marshall
and others used small, nonconducting pieces of plastic. But for
real-world uses, you'd like some way of guiding the projectile to
its final destination, tens or hundreds of kilometers away. To
send a satellite into space, for instance, you'd equip the payload
with some sort of second-stage rocket to insert it into the proper
orbit once the payload left the atmosphere. But the conventional
electronics of the 1970s couldn't survive the massive acceleration
that an electromagnetic gun produces.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2007