Abstract
Artist Jim Sanborn has built a replica of a Manhattan Project laboratory, complete with relics from Los Alamos. The installation is on display at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., through January.
But is it art?
Two blocks from the White House, in a nondescript, dimly lit room of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, there is an atomic lab. Not a real atomic lab, but the next best thing–an art installation that experts say contains the most accurate representations ever made of the innards of the first atomic explosive, the Trinity device.
The installation, titled Critical Assembly, is the brainchild of Jim Sanborn, a well-known Washington, D.C.-based artist who has a knack for choosing arcane but compelling subjects. An earlier work, Kryptos, which sits in the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is a massive, S-shaped sheet of copper with a series of letters punched into it that form an as-yet-unbroken secret code.
With the Critical Assembly exhibit, which opened on November 1 and will run through January, Sanborn continues to exploit the suggestive power of secrets–in this case, by painstakingly reconstructing, with a touch of artistic flourish, the experiments and laboratory environment of the Manhattan Project, the government's top-secret effort to build the atomic bomb. The result is a chilling exhibit that forces us to experience both the terror and beauty of the bomb project.
Lining the walls of Sanborn's exhibit at the entrance are a series of large, cobalt-blue prints of radium dials, all set at just before 5:30 a.m. and bearing the date, July 16, 1945–the date and time the Trinity device was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Sanborn, who found the dials while traipsing through flea markets in and around Alamogordo with a Geiger counter, calls the prints “the real Doomsday Clocks.”
Entering the installation, there are the scratchy, clicking sounds of Geiger counters, flashing lights and fluctuating meters on closet-sized panels and oscilloscopes, and several lab tables loaded with graphite and paraffin blocks that serve as nests for bomb pits and criticality experiments. It is a dazzling sight.
A closer look reveals the artist's elaborate attention to detail. Everything down to the stools–whose mushroom-cloud appearance was favored by the scientists–has a distinct purpose.
Says Sanborn, “I really wanted to give a true sense. I mean, if somebody walked into that installation and had just had gallium injected for some procedure, it would then kick off all the Geiger counters in that room.”
Many of the items are actual relics of the original Los Alamos lab that Sanborn tracked down in the basements of former lab employees or on the shelves of souvenir collectors. The radiation detectors are being set off by real sources–tiny radium dials hidden in the bowels of the instruments. And the thick, black cables that meander along the floor of the “lab” are plugged into vintage hand-held detectors scattered about the room.
What is not real, of course, is the uranium, plutonium, beryllium, and polonium displayed as part of the experiments and bomb cores. But Sanborn offers something nearly as provocative–bomb replicas that accurately portray, to the best of anyone's knowledge, the shape and size of the Trinity device, the same implosion-type device as the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The bomb pits, which are partly disassembled to reveal the plutonium core and the various layers of uranium and aluminum surrounding it, were carefully machined by artisans. And Sanborn had a jeweler create the brass “urchin”–the polonium-beryllium neutron source at the very center of the bomb–which is comfortably nestled in a thick shell of plutonium.
The devices are seductively beautiful, but that is one of Sanborn's messages: “Very often scientists can be seduced by the power they are working with,” he told ABC News.
The exhibit illustrates this seductive power in a tactile way.
“None of the original labs at Los Alamos remain,” said Robert S. Norris, a senior researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man. “This is the closest we are going to get to what it was really like.”
Norris adds that the exhibit underscores that the bomb was a “human endeavor. It was man-made and can be man-unmade. But another lesson could be drawn from this, something we are witnessing a bit now, which is that it is not that difficult to make atomic bombs, and if you have the intentions or incentives to do so it can be done.”
Just as fascinating as the exhibit is the story behind one of Sanborn's key sources of information–the research of amateur historian John Coster-Mullen, identified by the Washington Post's art critic as a “Milwaukee truck driver who's a Manhattan Project junkie.” He is both those things, but he's also a former photographer with a keen eye for assessing old photos and an insatiable appetite for minutiae.
Without any technical training, Coster-Mullen came up with what is now widely recognized as the best estimates ever made about the size of the Fat Man urchin, plutonium pit, uranium tamper, and aluminum pusher shell–the main components of the “gadget” before it was wrapped in high explosives and inserted in the bomb. It is these measurements, which are described in Coster-Mullen's self-published 2002 book Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man, that Sanborn used to craft his pieces. (Atom Bombs is available at childrenofthemanhattanproject.org.)
According to Norris, who got to know Coster-Mullen while attending the reunions of the 509th Composite Crew–the flight crew on the Enola Gay and Bock's Car missions who were responsible for final assembly of the bombs–the author has become a member of the “bomb mafia.”
A mock bomb pit in a nest of paraffin blocks.
The details Coster-Mullen provides are a “unique contribution,” Norris says. “It was all out there for someone to find and he did it. He spent his own money. I kid him about it, saying, ‘There you are out on the interstate running me off the road.’”
When I called Coster-Mullen to inquire about his research, he began by briefly describing his childhood chemistry sets, his physics teacher in high school, and his early dream of someday becoming a physicist. And then he lit into his story, starting with his assessment of the famous photo showing Herb Lehr and Raemer Schreiber lugging a wooden box containing the physics package of the Trinity device to a car parked outside MacDonald Ranch. “I asked myself, so what can I get from this photograph? I studied sun angles, I looked at it in terms of where that box was relative to the position of the car and the car door. I took the photograph to an antique car dealer, and we sat down and went through all the old books and determined that it was a 1942 Plymouth. I then went and tracked down a 1942 Plymouth and took down measurements–the height of the door because that was the closest thing in the physical plane to that box. What I was trying to do was to determine the physical size of that box, because that would tell the largest measurements that that component could be.”
With this as his base, Coster-Mullen rummaged through declassified files, interviewed members of the 509th and former Los Alamos employees, studied all the available literature, and made countless calculations to come up with his final measurements for the Trinity device, which proceeding outwards from the center are: the initiator (or urchin), about one inch in diameter; the plutonium pit, 3.62 inches; the uranium tamper, nine inches; the thickness of the boron-plastic shell, about three-sixteenths of an inch; and the aluminum pusher shell, 18 inches. (Some of Sanborn's measurements are based on Coster-Mullen's preliminary calculations, which differ slightly from those in his book.)
With the opening of Critical Assembly, Coster-Mullen's (as well as Sanborn's) work seems to be getting attention from the government. According to Sanborn, a few days after the opening, several official-looking men–“I think they were DOE [Energy Department] guys”–showed up at the exhibit and pored over every inch of it, taking down property numbers of the Los Alamos equipment, getting down on their hands and knees to inspect the displays, and jotting down notes with their pencils. “I figured this would happen at some point,” he says. “It is the least you could expect.”
Michael Flynn is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
Nukes without borders
The Bush administration expresses a great deal of concern about nuclear proliferation and is quick to accuse others–certain “rogue states” in particular–of moving fissile material across international borders. (If Iraq's nuclear materials can't be found in Iraq, they must have been moved to Syria–or maybe to Iran, eh?)
But the administration simultaneously appears to believe that whatever the rules of international nuclear controls, it is under no obligation to follow them when it comes to its own impulses about shipping or selling American weapon materials around the world.
For example, late last summer, the United States decided to ship 300 pounds of plutonium powder to France. Critics claim this supply is big enough, should it go astray, to build 50 or more nuclear weapons (Associated Press, October 10, 2003). Members of both Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace France were incensed when they learned of the plan.
The U.S. government is planning to ship 300 pounds of plutonium powder to a fuel-fabricating plant at Cadarache, France.
Of course, this particular movement of U.S. weapon plutonium is not meant to spread bomb materials about; in fact, the shipment is part of a labyrinthine effort to fulfill a U.S.-Russian agreement to reduce their mammoth supplies of what they term “excess plutonium.” The material will be shipped to a French plant where it will be transformed into mixed-oxide or “MOX” fuel for nuclear power plants, and then shipped back to the United States. (MOX consists of about 5 to 8 percent plutonium, mixed with uranium.) Once the fuel is “burned” in a reactor, the fissile material becomes more difficult to retrieve for use in weapons.
As laudable as the goal of eliminating some portion of weapon-usable plutonium may be, the U.S. government probably expected some criticism for making an arrangement to have its first-ever MOX fuel fabricated in France, which involves a transatlantic crossing of dangerous materials and the inevitable transfer of authority over the materials to a foreign contractor.
Even more criticism should be expected when the shipment actually occurs later this year, because the fabricating plant at Cadarache, where the MOX fuel is to be made, was closed, supposedly permanently, at the end of July 2003 because of safety concerns. The French environmentalist organization WISE-Paris suggests that Cadarache will now be reopened for the sole purpose of fabricating fuel from U.S. plutonium.
Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that there was no immediate public announcement on August 12, 2003, of the award of the contract for fuel fabrication to the French firm Cogema (Nuclear Fuel, September 1, 2003). But even though the news was delayed, it was, embarrassingly, still published before the plan had received the necessary agreement of the French government to allow the plutonium to be imported.
Energy Department officials apparently believe they must get their first MOX fuel assemblies made in France because the MOX-fabrication plant they plan to build at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has been delayed. Duke Cogema Stone & Webster, the consortium constructing that plant, has not satisfactorily answered safety and environmental questions; as a result, the plant's licensing and construction have fallen some three years behind schedule.
With no prospect of MOX from the Savannah River plant, testing MOX as initially planned at either one or both of the reactors at Duke Energy's Catawba nuclear facility in South Carolina, or in one of the two units at Duke's McGuire plant in Huntersville, North Carolina, would be delayed. On the other hand, whichever of these nuclear stations is chosen, its reactors will have to be modified and relicensed to burn MOX, which also has not yet happened (Rock Hill Herald, August 8, 2003).
In Brief
At the same time that David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, reported his results to Congress in October, the administration was asking for $600 million more for his team, which had already spent $300 million in an unsuccessful search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2003/10/100803.html). A spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pointed out to Agence France Press that the total, $900 million, is about four times the entire annual budget for the IAEA's worldwide inspection efforts.
Televangelist Pat Robertson took some flak after he said in early October 2003 that the State Department should be taken out by a nuclear weapon. It was the second time Robertson had called for the annihilation of State on his television program, the 700 Club; last June he proposed a strike on State using “a very small nuke.”
Writing in the American Mineralogist, David Bish, an Indiana University scientist, has concluded that zeolite, the same mineral used to control the ammonia smell in kitty litter, could be used to trap radioactive materials, keeping them from escaping from nuclear waste sites like Yucca Mountain. Luckily, layers below the Yucca disposal site are reported to be “rich in zeolites” (Reno Gazette-Journal, November 11, 2003).
Last fall the Detroit Metro News reported that trucks from Toronto, Canada, carrying medical wastes destined for a landfill in Wayne County, Michigan, were setting off newly installed radiation detectors at the Blue Water Bridge, which connects Sarnia, Ontario, to Port Huron, Michigan (September 8, 2003). About 200 trash trucks a day enter Michigan from Ontario, and two to three shipments a week are being sent back to Canada. Before the new detectors were installed, inspectors had been detecting radioactive waste in the Canadian trash using hand-held detectors. (Waste haulers argue that their right to import Canadian waste is protected by the North American Free Trade Agreement.)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory apparently lost 12 master keys that unlock thousands of doors and gates at the high-security weapons facility (Tri-Valley Herald, November 7, 2003). According to the Energy Department's Office of Inspector General, the losses were not reported for more than a month after they were first discovered in April 2003, and the lab made little effort to evaluate the risk posed by the missing keys, some of which had disappeared three or more years ago. Replacing and upgrading the lab's locks is expected to cost some $1.7 million.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation believes that if it can induce Entergy Corporation to close down at least one of the Indian Point nuclear power plants for at least 42 days a year, it will substantially reduce the predicted deaths of large numbers of fish. But an Entergy spokesman insists that the losses of aquatic life, said to be caused in part by the plant's lack of suitable cooling towers, are really the ordinary loss of fish eggs through natural causes (New York Times, November 13, 2003). Said spokesman Jim Steets: “I've never seen slaughtered fish outside the Indian Point plants–never.”
The Agriculture Department's campaign in favor of irradiated ground beef is not enjoying the success the department had hoped for. In spring 2003, the department decided that if supermarkets wouldn't buy, perhaps those who prepare school lunches would. But as Marian Burros reported in the New York Times last October 8, a recent survey of 56 school districts found no takers. Most respondents said they did not need irradiated meat because contamination was not a problem, or that the extra cost (13 to 20 cents a pound) was prohibitive. Others said they would not purchase the product because of the controversy over the safety of zapping foodstuffs and parents' concern that their children would be used as guinea pigs.
While seeking nearly $1 million in tax breaks for a food irradiation facility, a Fort Worth businessman, David Corbin, lashed out at people who, he said, just “don't like” the irradiation industry (Star-Telegram.com, September 17, 2003). To blame, he said, were “anti-meat” organizations like Consumers Reports. (Consumers' August 2003 issue reported that some taste testers disliked irradiated ground beef because of its “singed hair” quality.)
Lie detectors have not panned out as gold-standard tests of truth telling. So Zuhair Bandar, project director of the “Silent Talker,” and his colleagues at Britain's University of Manchester are developing an automated system, using cameras and computer analysis, to zero in on mannerisms, from nervous tics to hand gestures to head-scratching and the like (The Futurist, September/October 2003). Bandar believes that small, involuntary, and unintended behavior may reveal character traits or illness, as well as identify attempts to deceive. Because the system will be computerized, Bandar says, it will be more usable than earlier studies of “kinesics,” which involved the use of time-consuming and subjective human analysis.
The United States is justly proud of its military prowess, but apparently a little defensive when anyone else shows a bit of talent. Defense Week's “Daily Update” on October 1, 2003, reported that the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was trying to downplay the fact that an Australian diesel-electric submarine had “sunk” an American submarine during recent training exercises, and said the Australians were making too much of the simulated hit. Adm. Walter Doran said that the outcome “certainly does not mean that the Collins-class submarine in a one-on-one situation is going to defeat our Los Angeles-class or our nuclear submarines.” Navy spokeswoman Lt. Ellissa Smith tried to soften the blow by saying that the training session had included “events” in which both the Australian Collins-class submarine and the U.S. nuclear submarine “were simulated as being hit by exercise torpedoes.”
There's been a lot of controversy about who won the 2000 presidential election in Florida, but last fall controversial fundamentalist and Pentagon bigwig Gen. Jerry Boykin explained George W. Bush's presidency to an audience of coreligionists: “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? … He's in the White House because God put him in there” (NBC Nightly News, October 15, 2003).
Meanwhile, Energy Department officials may be equally concerned about keeping tight controls on other countries' weapon-grade uranium, but in the energy bill that was carried over from last year, they have asked for and expect to be given congressional approval to traffic in U.S. “highly enriched,” or “weapon-grade” uranium if they wish. The bill contains a provision permitting the Energy Department to sell weapon-grade uranium to commercial customers, both in the United States and abroad. But it is not yet clear whether the decision to sell weapon uranium to foreign buyers also means a partial or complete reversal of the U.S. policy of the 1990s to supply only low-enriched uranium as fuel for foreign research reactors.
Both these moves come on the heels of a June General Accounting Office (GAO) report that criticized the Energy Department for its apparent indifference to the problem of the international trade in radiological materials that may be used in building so-called “dirty bombs”–radiological dispersal devices whose use would induce panic and economic disaster by spreading radiation in heavily populated areas.
According to the GAO, Energy had not worked well with others–it had been resisting efforts by the international community to establish tighter controls on “sealed radioactive sources”–an ideal source of dirty bomb materials (Nucleonics Week, June 19, 2003).
Keeping science alive
Lal Bihari knew he was alive. It just took him some time to prove it to the government of India, which had considered him dead since 1976.
He ran for public office. He tried to obtain a widow's pension for his wife. Bihari even allegedly kidnapped and threatened to murder the son of the uncle who conspired to have him declared dead and stole his property (Time, Asia edition, July 19, 1999).
C. W. Moeliker, with mallard, winner of the 2003 Ig Nobel prize in biology.
During his own struggle, Bihari discovered thousands of other citizens suffering the same fate and eventually founded the Association of Dead People. In 1994, the government relented and Bihari is now recognized as alive.
For his efforts to resurrect himself within his government's bureaucracy and bring recognition to others in the same grave predicament, Bihari was awarded the “peace prize” at the 2003 Ig Nobel prize ceremony.
Awarded annually by the Annals of Improbable Research as a spoof of the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are given to recognize humorous, whimsical, and usually dubious scientific achievements.
Through the years, the awards have honored scientists who chose to take up quirky questions about commonplace topics. Do all adolescents pick their noses? What is the surface area of an Indian elephant? Or there's this year's winner of the biology prize, C. W. Moeliker, who was the first to report a case of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks.
While at work in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam on June 5, 1995, Dutch researcher Moeliker heard a loud bang outside his window. Familiar with the pattern of birds slamming into the reflective windows of the building, Moeliker went to see whether the latest victim had damaged the glass. What he saw would ultimately gain him fame.
Next to the dead male mallard duck that had flown into the building, was another male duck, which, after picking at the duck corpse with his beak, mounted the dead mallard.
The duck continued his amorous behavior for 75 minutes, taking only two brief breaks, before walking away from the scene, quacking.
While both homosexuality and necrophilia had been observed in mallards before, Moeliker's case was the first observed case of necrophilia between male mallard ducks. Heeding the advice of colleagues, Moeliker published his observations in late 2001.
Actual Nobel laureates presented Moeliker and each of the prize winners with their awards as part of this year's ceremony, held in Harvard University's Sanders Theatre.
In addition to the presentation of the awards, the ceremony included several other events centered on this year's theme: nano.
Scholars gave “nano-lectures” under various time and length constraints and performers debuted a “nano-opera,” which told of the difficulties facing a woman and an atom in love.
Some of the other awards went to: the late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols (engineering) for establishing Murphy's law; Yukio Hirose (chemistry) for investigating why birds poop on some statues but not others; Karl Schwärzler (economics) for making it possible to rent the entire country of Liechtenstein for private events; and Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith (medicine) for presenting evidence that London taxi drivers have more developed brains than their fellow citizens.
When pigs fly
In October 2003, the U.S. State Department, in conjunction with the governments of Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, opened the Southeast Europe Mine Detection Dogs Center outside of Sarajevo. Thanks to their superior sense of smell, dogs have helped locate buried explosives and landmines for years. A trained dog can survey up to 1,500 square meters per day, compared to the maximum of 50 square meters a human can accomplish.
But canines may not be top dog much longer when it comes to landmine detection. In fact, detection dogs may someday have packs, herds, swarms, and fields of new mine-clearing colleagues. (And the more ways to detect mines, the better. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines estimates that there are as many as 20,000 deaths or injuries from landmines or unexploded ordnance each year; civilians constitute the majority of victims.)
In November 2003, African giant pouched rats were set to begin field-testing in Mozambique minefields as the newest enlistees in the effort to clear mines. Under a project run by the Belgian organization Apopo and funded in part by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD), the rats were trained for several years at Tanzania's Sokoine University of Agriculture to detect explosive vapors associated with buried mines.
Researchers are testing whether honeybees can be used effectively to detect buried landmines.
“Rats are good, clever to learn, small, like performing repeated tasks, and have a better sense of smell than dogs,” said Christophe Cox, the project's coordinator (Associated Press, September 13, 2003).
The giant rats–known best in the United States as a (now-banned) exotic pet and suspected source of the Midwest monkey-pox outbreak–can live to be eight years old, grow to 2.5 feet long (including tail), and weigh about three pounds. Their light weight is key; the animals won't accidentally trigger mines, as can happen with dogs or humans. When they do sniff out a vapor trail, the rats are trained to sit, scratch the ground, and wait for their reward of a bit of banana. They are cheap to care for and unlike their canine counterparts do not bond with their handlers, making them easier to use.
But when it comes to detecting explosives, pigs are the way to go, according to Geva Zin, a demining expert and former member of the Israeli army bomb squad who has trained the animals to detect dummy mines.
“Mines are silent killers and these little pigs could help to save many lives,” said Zin (London Sunday Telegraph, October 5, 2003). Although the pigs have proven adept at locating fakes, using pigs to detect mines in Israel is unlikely to happen any time soon; it's literally just not kosher. An even messier problem, according to the GICHD, is a pig's “natural instinct for digging,” (which means that if oinkers are deployed as mine-finders, pigs will certainly fly).
Even insects and plants are being considered as possible landmine detectors. University of Montana bee researchers, in conjunction with Sandia National Laboratories, trained bees to find specific odors associated with the faint vapor trails that emanate from buried landmines. Taught to respond to certain odors, the bees will swarm over anything emitting the right scent–including buried mines. But bees can be difficult to manage, and the problem of tracking their flight is still unsolved.
So how about something a little more … grounded? Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada are looking into how plants can be genetically modified to alert people to the presence of buried explosives. The idea is to take a TNT-detecting gene from soil bacteria, insert it into a plant, and somehow create a kind of living caution sign that might change color when it absorbs chemicals used in landmines. Sound a little vague? The lead researcher would agree. “The truth is, we don't know exactly how it's going to work,” said Michael Deyholos (Charlottetown Guardian, October 14, 2003).
We love lasers!
The ability to use a beam of energy to blow a hole in something at a distance has long captured the imagination of science fiction writers. Phasers, blasters, photon torpedoes–they're commonplace in movies and on television. If the U.S. military has its way, lasers, also known as directed-energy weapons, could soon become a battlefield reality as well.
Compared to a projectile weapon, a laser beam has advantages. Unlike an artillery shell, a laser with enough power could disable a vehicle from far away without blowing it to pieces. Unlike a bullet, a laser beam is immune to the forces of gravity and drag. Unlike a missile, a laser can hit its target nearly instantaneously, and firing one doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per shot. Directed-energy weapons are also renewable; they don't have to be reloaded, only recharged.
The air force is currently testing a high-energy laser weapon linked to an F-16 flight simulator. Designed at Kirtland Air Force Base, the simulator is based on a smaller version of the Airborne Laser (ABL) system the Bush administration wants as part of its layered national missile defense system [See “Airborne Laser: Overweight and Oh-So-Late,” May/June 2003]. The ABL system is flown aboard a modified Boeing 747, and a 180,000-pound, six-module test system (the final ABL system will use 14 modules) is scheduled for initial tests in late 2004.
The air force laser weighs about 5,000 pounds and can fire on targets up to 10 miles away. Rudy Martinez, the simulation facility's project manager, said that air force test pilots want to see how they like the system and if they use the laser as often as conventional weapons. If the laser passes muster, air force researchers hope to make the weapons smaller and more powerful (Albuquerque Tribune, June 23, 2003).
A laser-powered plane (bottom of photo) circles researchers and its source of energy.
But it's not like Battlestar Galactica, explained Jonas Tyson, the project's assistant manager. Unlike in the movies, where a laser beam only has to make contact with its target and destroy it, in real life a laser has to hit its target, in one spot, for a second or two.
While the air force conducts its research and tests, the army has challenged scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a deadline and an “incentive.” Maj. Gen. John M. Urias, the army's chief acquisition officer for air and missile defense, told Livermore scientists that he'll “beat the bushes” for more than $150 million if they build the world's first mobile battle laser for test firing in 18 months (Oakland Tribune, October 27, 2003).
The general was inspired to make this offer by something he had witnessed three weeks earlier: the world's most powerful solid-state laser drill blasting through an inch of steel in two seconds. If the lab can shrink its tangle of wires, crystals, and diodes in half and make the laser beam output three times more powerful, the general is ready to throw it on a Humvee.
Livermore laser engineer Bob Yamamoto said the thick, clear crystals of man-made garnet, the heart of the laser, are already being grown. The army is interested specifically in the lab's solid state laser because it is electric and can run off a Humvee's diesel-hybrid engine. The air force device, on the other hand, is a bulky chemical-based laser, which requires fresh chemical supplies at a time when the army wants to cut reliance on supply lines.
Blasting holes in “stuff” isn't the only application for lasers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently testing a ground-based carbon dioxide laser to detect and locate sniper fire. It hopes to send the laser to Iraq in the next few months. The laser is designed to pick up and pinpoint the sound of sniper gunshots in much the same way that a radar detects moving objects.
Not to be outdone by the military sector, NASA also has a new crop of ideas for putting lasers to work. The civilian agency's latest laser breakthrough: the world's first flight of a laser-powered aircraft. Their test plane was small–weighing just 11 ounces with a five-foot wingspan–but it flew around a hangar powered solely by energy delivered from a ground-based laser. As long as it has a laser aimed at its underside solar panels, the plane has no need for onboard fuel or batteries and can stay aloft indefinitely–carrying scientific, communication, or reconnaissance equipment.
It may be a long time before we're beaming objects Star Trek-style through space, but future conflicts may be fought with as many glorified flashlights as bullets.