DARPA once developed a plan (Project SEESAW) to use a particle beam to blast incoming Soviet warheads out of space
Posted by
decline (aka Decline)
Jul 1 '21, 11:54
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The beam required more electricity than existed on Earth, so they came up with a novel power-generating solution: drain the Great Lakes in 15 minutes
After using nuclear weapons to dig 100s of tunnels crisscrossing the US to make the particle beam "laser" feasible, the next step was digging (natch, with nuclear weapons...see Project Plowshares) a Europe-sized cavern deep under the Great Lakes
Enormous turbine generators would then be built centrally under each Great Lake. Then (wait for it!) nuclear warheads would be clustered at "drain" points above the turbines. When radar indicated an attack, the warheads would detonate
This would blow massive holes in the lake floor and 6 quadrillion gallons of water would flow through the turbines quickly and generate the power necessary for the particle beam, which would then shoot down the Soviet weapons. Supposedly
Anyway it took like 7 years before this was declared infeasible and research halted because DARPA's attention had to shift to Vietnam counterinsurgency stuff that is...now being used as a basis for some domestic policing strategies targeting protesters, good times.
https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/seesaw.pdf
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