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Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxl!ihnp4!astrovax!mwe
From: mwe@astrovax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: Re: X-ray lasers
Message-ID: <166@astrovax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 7-Dec-83 15:08:57 EST
Article-I.D.: astrovax.166
Posted: Wed Dec  7 15:08:57 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Dec-83 07:43:28 EST
References: <13929@sri-arpa.UUCP>, <172@dual.UUCP>
Organization: Princeton Univ. Astrophysics
Lines: 19

The X-ray lasers currently under consideration are strictly one shot weapons.
You get one pencil of radiation for each copper bar you vaporize in the
explosion. Hopefully you could put more than one copper bar around each 
warhead, but they would all have to be locked on and tracking simultaneously.

The real problem with this approach is that Russian countermeasures will
almost certainly be much less expensive than the sattelites, and the arms
race is after all an economic struggle...

Two of the suggested couter-measures are first the obvious anti-sattelite
missile, to be fired minutes before your attack, or second a sort of
umbrella that deploys in front of each of your missiles as it leaves the
atmosphere. The MIT defense analysis group claims that there are as many
as twenty different workable counter-measures. They also claim that we don't
have the required tracking and pointing technology now to make the system
workable.
-- 
Web Ewell	Princeton Univ. Astrophysics
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