https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcmI6UnR4ggResidents of a southern Israeli town want a real-life laser cannon to protect them against Palestinian rocket attacks. And they're suing the national government, for failing to provide the ray gun defense.
From 1996 to 2005, the U.S. and Israeli governments worked together on the Tactical High Energy Laser project, considered by many to be the most successful energy weapon ever built. During tests at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the chemical-powered laser blasted 46 Katyusha rockets, artillery shells and mortars out of the sky. (Check out the video, to the right.) "All my career, I've been interested in fielding lasers," Jeff Sollee, a veteran Northrop Grumman laser scientist, told me a few years back. "THEL was as close as they come."
But generating the megawatts of laser power required for THEL – known in Israel as "Nautilus" – meant brewing up hundreds of gallons of toxic chemicals, like ethylene and nitrogen trifluoride. The weapons grew bulky; one proposed small-scale version was supposed to be kept in a mere eight cargo containers, each 40 feet long. A mobile THEL, on just a couple of trucks, proved to be too complex, and too expensive to contemplate. Worse, after a few shots, the lasers would have to be resupplied with a fresh batch of reactants. The logistics of hauling those toxins either through the air or across a battlefield made generals shiver. Israel eventually dropped out of the program. Then America did, too, turning its focus instead to solid-state, electric lasers.
Now, Northrop is pushing an upgraded THEL, under the name SkyGuard, which it says can fit into just three cargo containers. Newspapers have been howling for the government to put the laser defenses in place; the volume has only gone up since Hezbollah launched a series of rocket attacks against northern Israel in 2006, and since Hamas started firing longer-range rockets at southern Israel earlier this year. But the Israeli military has said that the sci-fi-esque system is still not ready for a real-world deployment.
So a group of citizens of Sderot, which has been hit by Hamas' rockets in recent weeks, is trying to force the government to set up the energy weapon defense – by taking prominent officials to court. They're suing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, among others, for not adequately protecting the people of the Negev desert town. "The failure to utilize the currently available and inexpensive 'Nautilus' systems is gross negligence on the government and IDF's part ... result[ing] in the murder and injuring of dozens of residents of Sderot. The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] has completely breached its duty to protect the Negev's civilians," reads a press release from the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, which filed the suit.
But Center director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner seems a little confused about some of the specifics of the laser system. She claims it "shot down Katyushas, Kassams and bombs with 100 percent success." Not quite. Yes, it did zap some 46 targets. But, overall, “its performance was not great,” Penrose C. Albright, a former Pentagon official who helped initiate the project, told The New York Times. “Under certain conditions you can make it work. But under salvo or cloudy conditions, you’ve got problems."
Darshan-Leitner also asserts that the old THEL is "just sitting there in New Mexico... There is a way to take it apart, bring it to Israel and rebuild it. A company
[you gotta figure it's Northrop – ed.] told me that it would take no longer than five or six months. It would cost around 50 million dollars to rebuild it, but there would be unlimited protection." The laser is, in fact, in storage in New Mexico. But that $50 million figure is about a third of what Northrop has said previously it would take to build a laser system. And, as Yiftah S. Shapir, a Tel Aviv University military analyst told The New York Times: "one guerrilla with a rocket launcher could fire 40 Katyushas in less than a minute, easily overwhelming most any defense."
Darshan-Leitner isn't just suing Israelis, however:
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