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Oct. 8, 2006 - Art Bell
02:39:11
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Doug Beason - Energy Weapons and North Korea Nuclear Test
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From the other side of the world, Southeast Asia, the very, very worried side of the world.
Well, that's not fair.
We're all worried.
Manila in the Philippines.
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever it may be, wherever you are.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM, the largest program of its size in the world.
And largest program of its size, largest program of its type in the world, I think would be
a fair way to put it.
And I think we're all at this hour very, very concerned about what has just apparently occurred
in North Korea.
Let me tell you what I know.
And I simply logged on to my usual Associated Press location and was just blown away.
There wasn't very much information there.
It simply said North Korea says nuclear test successful.
North Korea said Monday it's performed its first ever nuclear weapons test.
The country's official Korean central news agency said the test was performed successfully.
There was no radioactive leakage from the site.
The nuclear test is a history-changing event that, according to them, brought happiness to our military and
people.
I'm not sure about the military.
What do we know since then?
All right.
It seems as though South Korea measured something in the magnitude of about 3.5.
So there has been a geologic event in an area called Hwardy or something like that in North Korea.
It's apparently the area similar to the area where they did the missile tests as well.
Now the USGS in Florida recorded the initial geologic event as a 4.2 magnitude initial reading, so there's quite a bit of difference between 3.5 and 4.2 as you know on that scale.
Based I think on the 3.5, American Intel sources said if indeed that was a nuclear test, and by the way US Intel is not confirming that it was a nuclear test yet, although I think everybody believes that it was.
Based on the 3.5 US Intel said they didn't get 400 kilotons that they wanted, 400 plus kilotons they actually wanted.
But that was based on the 3.5 and again USGS in Florida is saying it was 4.2.
The South Korean stock market is at this hour plunging.
The prospects are many.
We have many things to talk about.
Whether or not they'll, for example, be an arms race.
Japan has a great deal of raw nuclear material stored and could begin making a bomb and have one in weeks or, you know, a couple of short months if they want one.
And can you blame them?
They probably do.
This is monstrous news.
I don't know whether it meets Ed Dame's prediction or not, but it sure comes pretty damn close if it doesn't do it.
Japan has called it a grave threat, as you can imagine.
The UN Security Council is going to meet.
I got an email from somebody here who said President Bush has always been a man of his word, always.
He said the U.S.
would not allow North Korea to have a nuclear weapon.
He will not.
Look for him to show a fast and painful reaction to North Korea.
He does what he says.
He doesn't flinch.
Not my words, that of an emailer.
Robert, I have no idea from where Robert emails.
Now, I've made only a very slight change in tonight's program.
In the second hour, in the next hour, we're going to have Dr. Doug Beeson here, who is, listen to this, is the Associate Laboratory Director for Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass destruction.
Now, you don't get a better guest than that coming up in the second hour.
Coming up in the first hour, I'm going to steal A guest that Ian Punnett had on last night, his name is Kenneth Sewell.
He spent eight years in the submarine service with classified duties in nuclear engineering technology.
Five of those years were aboard the USS Parsh, the most decorated ship in the history of the United States Navy and America's top espionage submarine.
According to his best-selling book, Blind Man's Bluff, the Parsh reportedly tapped the undersea communication lines of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and retrieved lost Soviet weaponry from the ocean floor.
Since leaving the Navy, Mr. Sewell has worked in the defense industry, holding both Department of Defense and Department of Energy security clearances.
In researching this book, Mr. Sewell Had access to recently declassified intelligence files in the US and Soviet military archives that were opened after 1991, 91 rather, after among other sources.
So, we have two guests that are entirely relevant and probably capable of commenting extensively on what has apparently just occurred in North Korea.
I think that when the dust Nuclear dust settles.
We're going to find out that indeed they have tested a nuclear weapon, something that everybody has feared for a very long time.
I think we all understand how absolutely out of its mind the regime in North Korea is.
So in a moment, we'll tap the knowledge of Kenneth Sewell.
I'm Mark Bell.
Just one more comment from me before we go to our guest.
I think it's reasonable to conclude, and that's all it is, is a conclusion, that A, yes, North Korea did just test a nuclear device.
B, that North Korea is not capable of delivering that device across oceans.
In other words, their missile test did not go well.
And even if they had, I don't think that, with the probable size of the device, That we have anything to fear in terms of some missile taking off from North Korea and hitting the West Coast of the United States or anything of that magnitude.
However, Everybody's got to now understand that if they wanted to, and you've got to remember they're crazy as loons up there, the North Koreans could probably reduce Seoul, South Korea to radioactive dust just about any time they wanted to now.
Let's bring in our guest.
Kenneth Sewell, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming on.
First of all, very, very, very, very short notice.
I understand you were on with Ian Punnett yesterday, so thanks for coming back.
My pleasure.
All right.
I don't know where I can tap your knowledge on all of this.
I guess you heard what I just had to say.
The U.S.
Intel is saying, well, maybe it wasn't 400 kilotons.
Maybe the North Koreans didn't get as much as they wanted.
They still can't even really confirm there was a test.
What's your feeling?
Do you think there has been a test?
Well, it's unfortunate, but this hasn't been unexpected.
They've been very close to testing.
I think they were waiting for the right moment.
Now, I did disagree with one thing you said.
Tomorrow morning, we're going to hear the government start their spin, telling us that they're years away from reducing the size and the throw weight of this nuclear weapon to where it gets to the point where it can threaten the closest neighbors of North Korea and the United States.
But we're overlooking another aspect of this.
In my book, Red Star Rogue, we told the story of how a Russian submarine was commandeered and almost destroyed Pearl Harbor back in
1968.
People are forgetting that the second largest submarine fleet
in Asia is in North Korea. They have over 48 submarines capable of making it to the United States coast.
That's right.
Even more capable of threatening Taiwan and South Korea and Japan and Indonesia.
Okay, and those submarines would be more than capable of carrying
whatever it is that they've come up with weight wise, right?
Absolutely.
It could be huge.
It could be heavy.
The sub can handle it, and they could strap it on the deck, drop it in a harbor.
They'd only have to be suicide bombers.
They have a delivery method, and none of our allies really has the capability, and I'm not quite sure that we're 100% safe protecting against these threats.
That does add a dimension.
I thought perhaps with the size of it, Kenneth, I was thinking of course just of missiles and they can't deliver it that way yet, I'm sure, but As you point out, they've got submarines, and all they'd have to do is get one close, and that's all you have to be with nuclear weapons is close, and that would be that.
Kenneth, let me put you in a tough spot.
You didn't just say, I don't want to answer this.
If you were the President of the United States right now, right now, and you were getting confirmation that North Korea had just done what they've apparently done, what would you do?
I would basically blockade the entire country.
Nothing would go in and out until they decided to open up for major inspections and stop their nuclear program.
It's time right now.
You have to stop short of an attack because Seoul is so close to the North Korean border.
Even the device they have now, we're looking at the possibility of open warfare and maybe How old are you, Kenneth?
Oh, I'm about 56.
56, okay, well you're old enough.
I was in the Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kenneth, and of course we blockaded Cuba, and there was that instant, more than one instant, where we thought we were at At World War 3.
And of course blockade work.
Now you're saying you would blockade North Korea.
Now the situation is a little bit different.
We don't have an island here so much as we did with Cuba 90 miles off the Florida coast.
Blockade North Korea would mean going eye to eye and tooth to tooth with the Chinese.
How much risk?
The Chinese are not happy about this either.
Neither are the Russians.
You remember back in the Korean War, the Chinese actually saved North Korea from total defeat.
And it wasn't no more than 16 or 17 years later that North Korea and China were fighting up along their northern border.
These people know that Kim is unstable.
They know he's unpredictable.
And they don't like the idea of him having a bomb because China feels they have a destiny in this sphere of influence in Asia.
And they don't want somebody like Kim getting out there and interfering with what they believe is their right.
You know, we're talking about, you know, way back in World War II, the Communists have always believed that the United States never had to stomach for casualties.
They saw it in Vietnam, they looked at what happened when the World Trade Centers were attacked and we lost over 3,000 people and the turmoil 3,000 people probably starve to death in North Korea every month, and that's nothing to these people.
And now they're looking at Iraq, and the fuss we're making over the casualties there, which, the loss of any life of any American serviceman, one is too much, but these people have no regard for life whatsoever.
Now, if they threaten Japan and Taiwan and South Korea, and even if they attack, if we have this threat that They could destroy one of our cities, a Seattle, a San Francisco, a Los Angeles.
Are we going to retaliate?
Are we going to risk millions of American cities for some other country?
And I can tell you right now, this is going to open the door for South Korea and Japan and Taiwan to develop their own weapons.
Because I don't believe they feel they can depend on us in our nuclear umbrella anymore.
Well, with respect to Japan, I guess my comment, and I made it yesterday before all this occurred, it would be, can you blame them?
Would you blame them?
And if you were Japanese right now, and you had just seen this occur right next to you, what would you do if you had nuclear stockpiles as they have?
Well, you know, they've always had Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the legacy there, but now it's totally different.
You have a madman several hundred miles away that is threatening their existence.
And Japan, you know, our power in the United States, in the free world, depends on free trade.
That's the one thing that the Soviet Union didn't have that led to their downfall, is the fact that their only trading partners were countries like Cuba and Romania and Hungary.
And which really was a one-way street and a drain on their economy.
It's a free trade.
It keeps us strong.
And yet, one of the things we've got to watch out for, if Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and the countries of Asia don't feel secure, they're going to become, to use a phrase that Henry Kissinger used to use, Finland-ized.
They're going to want to become more neutral.
And that takes them out of our camp as trading partners and allies.
Okay, Kenneth.
Well, whether it's a blockade or any other action that comes from the UN Security Council, the linchpin is going to be China.
Now, on the one hand, as you point out, China's probably not real happy that this occurred, but on the other hand, China is largely responsible for it occurring because they have used their veto in the Security Council to prevent any real action up to this point.
You're 100% correct on that, and they're probably rethinking their position right now.
China has a lot to lose with North Korea having the bomb, and I think we may start to see a change in their position.
Well, let's try this tack.
How crazy, how crazy is North Korea?
How crazy is Kim?
How crazy is that government, really?
Are they crazy enough now that they have the bomb To, for example, use it either on Seoul or perhaps Japan, or worse yet, get it, as you point out, in a submarine to the U.S.
and try and destroy one of our cities.
My God, if they did that, Kenneth, it would be suicidal for them because, of course, the United States would utterly destroy North Korea.
There would be no living things left in North Korea.
I don't think they would attack the United States first.
I think they would They're going to probably throw their weight around.
Let's say they did set off a bomb at Pusan and destroy a city in North Korea.
And then Kim tells the United States, we have a bomb near one of your cities.
If you attack us, we attack you.
What does the president do at that point?
We don't know.
Is he bluffing?
Does he really have one there?
Did it get through our SOSUS system?
Could it get through our SOSUS system?
Well, you'd be the right one to answer that.
If they had a nuclear weapon in a submarine and they tried to get it to the coast of the U.S., could they do it?
There's the possibility.
They've been doing some modifications to our SOSUS system to detect silent diesel-electric submarines.
And we have people that have been complaining about some of the Distress that's causing whales.
And there may be holes.
The communists have been probing our systems for decades.
We're not 100% sure.
We may not be 100% covered.
We don't know what they know or what they don't know.
The question comes right down to, are you willing to take the chance?
Are we as well covered in the extreme northern Pacific, Kenneth, as we should be?
I don't want you to give away anything that's classified.
Here's a story that's true.
In Seattle, there was a Foxtrot submarine on display.
They called it the Cobra.
I think it was down by Pier 22.
When they brought that submarine over, and they were refurbishing it, they found logbooks in the sub in Russian, and they had them translated.
And they came to find out that that submarine had actually been in the Puget Sound.
Oh my God.
So I guess the answer is somewhere along that line, the answer is no.
There you go.
And that was a Foxtrot class submarine.
We're not talking about one of their modern nukes.
We're talking about a technology that came from World War II.
Foxtrot was almost a copy of the German super-sub, the Type 21, with modifications.
So, you know, as I said, if they could do it with World War II technology, are we really safe?
I guess the answer to that is no.
How modern are these submarines that the North Koreans... What is the most modern sub the North Koreans now possess?
They have Romeos, about 22 or 24 Romeo class, which is about the same technology as the Foxtrots with a little more limited range.
However, on a one-way mission or with being refueled, they can make it to the U.S. coast.
They also have some whiskey class, which are slightly older.
And then they have about another 22 or 24, what they call coastal submarines with a crew of about 23
or 24 that can threaten the countries throughout Asia.
Now you have to keep in mind, even though these subs are old,
they've been constantly upgraded.
You know, we're talking about a country who has just developed a nuclear bomb now.
The technology to build a nuclear bomb is not secret.
You can find it in the textbooks at any college.
And you have a man who has thrown the resources of his country into developing these missiles and developing this weapon.
And he's starved his people in the process.
And so right there, that's not the act of a sane man.
No, it's not the act of a sane man.
And I suppose really what we should be talking about is how insane Kim is.
In other words, there is insanity, and causing trouble, and destabilizing the region, and worrying the hell out of your neighbors, and even testing a bomb, as they have done.
And then there is suicidal insanity.
Which really means, of course, as you point out, for example, a one-way mission in a submarine with a nuclear device on board to take out a U.S.
city.
That would be suicidal madness, in my opinion.
And are they that crazy?
I don't think he's that crazy.
I think he is crazy enough to throw his weight around.
I think he's crazy enough to threaten neighbors in the United States And I also think that one of the problems we have with a lot of our enemies out there is they have a tendency to underestimate the United States.
We're very quick to react.
The people, Taliban in Afghanistan, I remember reading a report where one of the leaders said our breath was taken away at how fast the United States was there and the attack and how forceful it was.
These people are always underestimating us.
Actually, just as afraid of this man miscalculating.
Hold tight.
We're here at the bottom of the hour.
North Korea has apparently just detonated a nuclear weapon.
I'm Art Bell.
Southeast Asia.
Asia in the news right now.
North Korea apparently has detonated a nuclear device.
Here's what we know.
It probably occurred at about 0136 Greenwich Mean Time.
The intended magnitude was about 400 kilotons.
Staying in the magnitude category, originally reported as about a 3.5 magnitude seismic event by the South Koreans, but USGS in Florida is reporting 4.2 initial magnitude.
It will settle that out eventually.
You know, USGS locations will compare notes and they'll find depth and do a whole lot of research, which you can be damn sure US Intel is doing right now.
US Intel cannot confirm But all indications are that indeed a nuclear device was detonated.
North Korea having a nuclear weapon, of course, is an incredible, just an absolutely awful development.
We all knew that it might happen.
Well, apparently it has happened.
My guest, rather, is Kenneth Sewell.
He'll comment further about all of this in a moment.
Japan, as you might imagine, calling it a grave threat.
Kenneth Sewell is my guest.
Kenneth has an awful lot of experience on board a U.S.
nuclear submarine.
Kenneth, welcome back.
You said that if you were president you would immediately begin to blockade North Korea.
Now, a couple of things about that.
One, North Korea, as you pointed out, is virtually starving to death now.
Probably more than 3,000 people a month starve to death in North Korea on a regular basis.
This country is desperate.
A blockade of North Korea, cutting off virtually the only, with or without the permission of China, and one would imagine it could only occur with the permission of China, but I mean cutting off what little Food they do get now from China, wouldn't that possibly push them over the edge and cause them to do something, China, or not?
Well, if you remember during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we inspected all the ships going in and out of the island, and we let every ship through that was carrying food or normal commerce.
We could do the same thing here.
If the Chinese... Now, what this does, it bottles up the North Koreans.
You know, there's another element to this that we haven't talked about.
Kim now has a new weapon to export.
We know that terrorists are actively seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon.
We know that they've got, I believe they call it a fatwa, they've got a permission from the religious leaders to use the nuclear weapon against the United States.
North Korea needs money.
They have money.
Now the question is, is Kim crazy enough to sell a bomb in a submarine to Al-Qaeda?
And what if Al-Qaeda used that bomb against the U.S.
city?
What if they claimed responsibility for the attack?
Who would we retaliate against?
I'm not a nuclear expert, Kenneth, but I do think that nuclear weapons have very specific signatures.
In other words, if a nuclear weapon went off, for example, in Los Angeles or San Francisco or something, it would not be very long before we knew the origin of the manufacturer.
Am I right or wrong?
What they trace is the uranium and where it was mined at.
Now, one of the things that a lot of people never realize is that a lot of Russian nuclear devices At Chinese uranium.
And they export this material back and forth.
This is not 100% foolproof.
We have, you know, where is Iran getting their material from?
And could we trace that?
Even so, if they retaliate at that point, or if the nuclear genie would be out of the bottle, we have a lot of highly accurate tactical nuclear weapons.
How would the world react if we All of a sudden, unleashed 40 or 50 nuclear weapons to take out North Korean and Iranian nuclear sites.
And, you know, in a retaliatory strike, it opens up a whole can of worms.
If we bottle up Korea, the only way these devices are going to get out, or their submarines are going to get out, well, the subs wouldn't get out because they'd have to go out to sea.
Anything would have to go through Russia, or it would have to go through China, and then that throws the responsibility on them.
The ball's now in their court.
Well, I've got to say, if I was U.S.
President and you had advised me of what you just advised me, the number of submarines they have and the fact they could get a nuclear weapon to the west coast of the U.S.
or wherever else, I don't think I could not order a blockade or something at least of that magnitude to protect the country because this guy is nuts.
And Kim will try to break the blockade.
He'll send a submarine out, and we should have a Los Angeles-class boat there to put a torpedo in it the minute it leaves the port.
We just can't back down on this.
We have to bottle this guy up.
We have to keep him contained.
And as I said, if he wants to export or he wants to get anything out of that country, he's going to have to go through China and Russia, and that puts the blame with them beyond them.
Obviously the first, I would imagine, the first attempt will be through the UN Security Council and we'll see what China does.
Hopefully China will now turn around, but if they don't, that would make a blockade almost impossible, wouldn't it?
You know, I was talking to, I was at a dinner and I was sitting next to one of our congressmen And we were talking about, I have spent a lot of time in China.
I've been there over a dozen times, probably a total of a year and a half.
My first time I was in was right after they started to allow American engineers into China.
And we are basically such an important trading partner to these people.
And I was just, well actually six months ago I was in China.
This technician sat down next to me, and he was so excited because he almost had enough money to buy a car.
I remember going into China, and all they had were bicycles and wear mountain suits.
And you go over there today, and the advances in their standard of living are so great.
And we hear some of the rhetoric coming from their generals, but I don't think they are going to be willing to sacrifice that.
The people like having luxuries.
They like having some comfort.
And war with the United States or confrontation with the United States would jeopardize that because if we don't buy their stuff, who's going to?
For the most part, I agree with you.
I was in China just, I don't know, three weeks, four weeks ago, three or four weeks ago.
I'm very close, about an hour and a half hop over to Hong Kong from here and then on up into China is no problem.
Kenneth, I agree with you on the people, I agree with you on the Chinese economy, and all of that is moving in the right direction, but the Chinese government, of course, is a slightly different matter.
And while I'm sure they enjoy the economic uptick that's taken place with all the trading, they're still communists.
They're still communists, but the people in the government are more reasonable.
The people I worry about are the generals and the admirals and the PLAN.
We in the United States have the security of knowing our military is under control of a civilian government.
Over there, the lines are kind of fuzzy.
And then we have Taiwan.
I guess what I would be worried about, if they are going to use their cooperation in dealing with North Korea... A deal on Taiwan?
That's leverage, right.
It's entirely possible.
It's entirely possible.
And again, putting you on the hot spot here, if our president was presented with a deal of that sort, if you're president, and the Chinese said, all right, look, We're with you basically on North Korea.
We'll help you if you want to do a blockade.
We'll live with that, but we want Taiwan and we want you to sit back while we take it.
What would you say?
Well, that'd be a tough call.
First off, the President is going to do what he thinks is best for our country.
History may judge it differently, but I can only hope he does what's best for our country.
Which, in your opinion, is a blockade right now?
Right now, I think that should be the first thing he orders.
I wouldn't even wait.
I would start sending the ships over there now as a show of force and transferring the materials and the units over right now.
Be ready.
Go to the United Nations.
If he gets it, fine.
If he doesn't get their approval, start dropping the mines in the harbors in Inchon and Wuson.
Take the ships and subs and put the blockade in place.
So unilateral action right now?
These things don't happen overnight.
It takes time to move ships and materials and men into place, but tomorrow people should be moving.
Kenneth, here's another question for you.
What you're talking about is a fairly massive, probably naval, air force kind of operation to conduct a blockade of that sort.
We're stretched A little bit thin right now with what's happening in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
Is it your view, and again please don't give out anything you ought not give out, but are we strong enough right now to do what you just suggested we should do?
The Iraq war is not a naval war.
Although we've been hampered by the drawdown of our submarine fleet.
We have half the submarines we had probably 20 years ago.
However, our boats are fast, they're good, and one of the things about a blockade, especially when you're using submarines, they don't know if they're out there.
They can know if there's a frigate or a destroyer or a patrol boat.
That'll show up on radar, but it may look clear.
And if they try to leave the port, there could be a sub there.
And those subs could be there.
Well, I can tell you right now, there's some there already.
There will be more within the next week.
And it doesn't take that much in the way of the assets.
We know.
We can have that entire country covered.
And anything it leaves could be targeted by a harpoon missile or intercepted by one of our fast attacks.
You're confident enough in our abilities that if we did have a blockade in place, we could take out any damn thing they put to sea?
Plus, we have choke points.
All harbors have entrances going in and out.
and mines can basically bottle up a lot of their ports.
Now, any attack on Japan, of course, would be regarded as an attack on the United States,
unless something's changed I'm not aware of, correct?
They're under our nuclear umbrella, as far as I've been told.
Right.
So, a nuclear conflict could be initiated in any number of ways.
It wouldn't have to be a direct attack on the U.S.
An attack on Japan would do the trick.
An attack, for that matter, on Seoul, South Korea.
I have heard there's about 40,000 pieces of artillery missile tubes pointed towards Seoul.
It's so close to the DMZ.
If we did blockade, that would be one of the points where they could retaliate at.
And if they did, to take out that much firepower, it'd be very tough to do it with conventional weapons.
Okay, we have a lot to talk about.
I want to take a couple of calls.
We've got a lot of people waiting, obviously.
This is such big news.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Art Bell and Kenneth Sewell.
Hello.
Thank you, Art.
Ken, I'd like to, just before I ask my question, I'd like to kind of correct Kenneth.
Art, I believe you're absolutely right that the nuclear, you know, a nuclear device carries a very distinct signature.
And this signature is, you know, not too much to do with the uranium.
so much as the radioactive isotope mix and the refinement required.
So we know reactor to reactor exactly where those bombs are coming from. They know, just they know
whether ours have come from Savannah River or from
out here in the in the West or where they've come from.
Yeah, I thought that was true. Now we might not have a sample, of course, of what
they're producing in North Korea.
Exactly. Okay, my question for Kenneth, and Kenneth's doing a great job,
I did work with nuclear weapons and was in the service during the missile crisis that you mentioned earlier, Art,
and ICBMs.
If Kim had ICBMs, then he'd really be a danger.
But right now, he's bottled in already, he's inside a starving country, and he is going to be an expert in Sun Tzu's art of war, which most of our military people are not.
Although, thank goodness, they're now teaching it at the War Academy.
Sun Tzu says that he who says he's going to war will not go to war, while he who says he is not going to war is in fact going to war.
I think it's more likely that we'll underestimate what Kim is going to do than he's going to underestimate us.
What do you think, Kim?
Well, you know, one of the things that we look at the world, what the United States says isn't believed 100%.
And although we can come out and say, gee, this was a North Korean bomb, and they say, no, it wasn't.
Now we're into this.
We're into this.
Well, will they believe us or will they not?
The thing about him is whether we underestimate him or he underestimates us or whatever, before, several days ago, we didn't have to really worry about this.
Now we have to worry about these people.
And are they going to make the mistake?
Are they going to push, you know, are we going to push them too far?
Are they going to push, you know, us too far?
Right.
And we have a lot of posturing.
There's a lot of politics in this.
And the world's become a very dangerous place overnight again.
It certainly has.
So in your opinion, if they were to use a nuclear weapon in anger, it would probably not be against the U.S.
That would not be their first target.
What would you think?
Seoul or Japan or what?
You know, I really don't believe they have anything to gain by using it.
I think that, you know, there's a great possibility.
A rational person doesn't.
Yes, but there's also a great possibility of accidental detonation.
They could start patrolling with these weapons.
They've set a nuclear weapon off, but, you know, Controlling it under all the circumstances.
You know, we had, I'm trying to remember, I studied this at one time, how many nuclear weapons crashed in airplanes or explosions in missile silos.
And we have nuclear weapons that we've never recovered.
And some of these weapons came very close to, you know, to making large messes of, or actually being detonated.
And what happens if this is an accident?
What happens if a submarine near Japan detonates?
You know, was it intentional?
Was it an attack?
There's so many uncertainties involved in this whole thing by letting him parade these weapons around Asia.
Well, there's going to be a lot of revisiting of everything that we've done wrong by sitting on our collective duffs, more or less, while all of this has been happening.
But now it's a fact.
And I'm more than a little curious how President Bush is going to react.
Do you think it will be something as strong, or at least as strong, as a blockade?
You're pretty sure about that?
I know that's what I would do.
Of course, I'm not sitting in the White House.
Nothing would leave Korea by sea without us taking a look at it.
And if the planes and materials want to go through China, they should have the responsibility of checking that.
But we need to keep their Navy buttoned up.
We need to keep their weapons in that country.
And we've got some time.
Just because they set off one weapon doesn't mean that they've weaponized these devices yet.
Well, I think that before, you would certainly, you would not use the only weapon you had in a test.
So, the thinking is, I've seen a wide range of estimations, but most people think they've got at least a half dozen, maybe as many as 11 weapons ready to go.
I've read that also.
I didn't know, I didn't know that they were that far in advance. If you have the materials, I've read that they
had the materials for at least a half dozen or more weapons, but you're going to
be refining that design.
You don't want to commit to building these weapons when they're the size of
Volkswagen.
So, as a hope...
You know, I started out the hour somewhat comforted with the
by the fact that obviously they cannot get one to the West Coast of the U.S.
with a missile right now, and then you destroy that confidence by reporting to me the number of submarines they have.
So based on that knowledge, I think you're absolutely right about the blockade choice that our president would have.
If he's to protect our country, and that's what he has sworn to do, he would have no choice but to do at the very least a blockade.
And a blockade is passive.
We're not dropping bombs.
We're not killing North Koreans.
We're inspecting everything that goes in and out of that country.
Well, I'm trying to think how the North Koreans would react to an order to stop for inspection.
They've not been good about that kind of thing in the past.
Well, the orders in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I believe, was to shoot away the rudder.
Listen, buddy.
Yeah, that's right.
That was the first order.
Shoot away the rudder.
Listen, buddy.
We're out of time.
Kenneth, I can't thank you enough for coming on.
Well, thank you for having me.
Take care and good night.
More from Manila in the Philippines for all of us in a few moments.
Good morning from Asia, Southeast Asia.
I am Art Bell.
If you're just tuning in, and I know that a lot of you will be because you're probably glued to CNN or Fox or one of the news channels as well you should have been, apparently North Korea has detonated a nuclear weapon.
Here's what we know at this hour.
The weapon apparently detonated in an area called Hwardy or something like that in North Korea, the same area where they did some testing, mostly unsuccessful testing I might add, of Some missiles.
I'm sure all of you are aware of that news story.
The nuclear weapon was, if it was, detonated at 0136 Greenwich Mean Time, just a few hours ago.
Now, here's what we know.
The initial magnitude measured in South Korea of the geologic event was 3.5.
The USGS in Florida measured an initial magnitude of 4.2.
Based on the 3.5, the United States intelligence agency said that perhaps the North Koreans did not get what they wanted, which was in excess of 400 kilotons of yield.
Now that may or may not be true with the other estimate of magnitude 4.2.
So all that's up in the air right now.
In fact, U.S.
intelligence right now says they cannot yet completely confirm that there was a nuclear test, but I think most people, most pundits, most newscasters now believe that there indeed was a test.
Japan has said it represents a grave threat.
The South Korean stock market is falling like a rock at the moment.
The prospects are many, the possibilities are many.
It could touch off an arms race.
The Japanese, who now have a great deal of stored nuclear material, could, and of course have the technology to construct bombs within weeks or short months.
So, there it is.
The North Koreans apparently detonating a nuclear weapon.
Today is the day the world changed.
The North Koreans are a crazy bunch of people.
You know, even that's not fair to say.
The North Korean leadership is crazy for sure.
The North Korean people, for the most part, are just starving to death.
Now, in the first hour we had Kenneth Sewell, and again, thank you Ian for making him available to us on very short notice.
He suggested the first thing a U.S.
President should do under these circumstances would be a complete Blockade of North Korea.
Kenneth Sewell suggested they've got a submarine fleet that would be perfectly capable of carrying even a crude nuclear device to the U.S.
West Coast unless they were stopped.
Coming up shortly, Doug Beeson.
Talk about lucky scheduling.
Doug Beeson is the Associate Laboratory Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Let me say that again.
Doug Beeson is the Associate Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass destruction.
A portfolio exceeding $670 million with line responsibility for over 1,600 researchers.
He has over 29 years of experience that spans conducting basic research to directing national security programs and formulating national policy.
He is the author of 14 novels and 50 scientific publications.
He previously served on the White House staff working for the President's Science Advisor under both the Bush and Clinton administrations, where he was an adjunct member of the National Space Council, and was the key White House staffer for space science and technology at NASA.
He has performed research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, directed a plasma physics laboratory, and taught at the U.S.
Air Force Academy as an associate professor of physics and director of faculty research.
Now, my guess would be that Fox News and CNN would love to have him instead of me having him right now.
And I did a little pre-question.
To him, before we got started here at the top of the hour and had my board ops back there ask him if he was prepared to comment on all of this, and his comment to me was he has not been cleared to talk very much about it.
So we really have the right person, but perhaps at the wrong moment.
We'll see what we can find out with our guest, Dr. Doug Beeson, in a moment.
Once again, we are very fortunate in a way to have Dr. Beeson on right now, Associate
Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Doctor, welcome to the program.
Well thanks, I appreciate that.
I appreciate the fact that this happened just literally moments before the program and that puts you, I guess, in a very awkward position.
Well, in a way it does.
I'm not in a policy position right now.
It's really a technical support being at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
We're one of several laboratories in the National Lab System that work for the National Nuclear Security Agency.
And part of our mission is to support the government in helping analyze these types of situations.
But right now, because it is ongoing and breaking, we're working on the problem, but really haven't been cleared to release any information.
In other words, you know more than you can say?
Well, I did get a phone call about an hour ago from one of my colleagues back in Los Alamos, and I'm in Washington, D.C.
right now, and this lady heads up a unit for me that does this type of analysis.
And what she was able to tell me over a line was that we were able to confirm at least the location through some of the news sources.
And that's, again, about all that I can say.
Sorry.
But on the other hand, you know, you never want to upstage your bosses.
And also, things like this are very fluid.
And with the changing world situation and with the analysis, The analogy I might use is, suppose there's a forest fire somewhere.
You might not exactly know where that forest fire is, or you might not even know how big it is, or what started it, but there are a lot of what we call signatures that accompany that.
You know, there's smoke, there's reports from people, but you might not actually have visual confirmation on that.
So you kind of put all these pieces together, And then you make a decision based upon the available data that you have.
Let's see what I can ask you.
Just tell me that you cannot answer a question if I pose one that you can't answer and that's probably what I'm going to be doing here.
The initial reports of the magnitude of the geologic event in North Korea were from South
Korea at 3.5, magnitude 3.5.
Now CNN, or Fox rather, reported that and then said that U.S.
intelligence said, well that might mean that 400 kilotons or better, which is what
the North Koreans wanted, was not in fact what they achieved.
Now, there was then a secondary report from Florida, USGS in Florida, that it was a magnitude 4.2.
Do we have a way, this is just a generic question, do we have a way, Doctor, of correlating the magnitude of the geologic event with the yield of the weapon?
Well, there are several ways to do that.
You have to understand what type of soil that the experiment took place in, if it was indeed an experiment.
And that would tell you how much the blast or the shock or the device couples, that is, works with the environment.
And from that, you can back out I estimate of the yield of the weapon, that is how powerful it is.
But again, there's no really right answer on this because the data that you get from these different seismic stations are all going to be a little bit different.
And so the experts really have to make the best guess based upon their judgment as to what the yield is.
And when I say that there's no exact right answer, each of these data points that you get have what we call error bars.
That is, there are errors that are associated with obtaining the data.
And when this occurs, then again, you have to use your best judgment as an expert in the field as to what caused those errors.
And from that you can back out what the yield might be.
Well, whether it was what they expected or not, you know, it seems it's increasingly clear that they did detonate something or another.
And, of course, if North Korea has a nuclear device now, they probably have more than one.
I think most intelligence, even public, agrees on that, possibly a half dozen or more of them.
I went into the beginning of last hour, Doctor, sort of confident that, well, the West Coast of the United States is safe because obviously they don't have a method of delivery to get particularly what probably is a big, physically big bomb.
You know, across that kind of distance.
And then my guest reminded me that North Korea has a fleet of submarines.
And I asked my last guest what he would do if he was president.
He said he'd have a blockade of North Korea up very, very quickly, a complete blockade, and simply not let anything out.
Does that sound like a reasonable response to you?
Well, that's certainly one option, but I think galvanizing the entire international community would really be the first thing that the President would probably do.
And you made a very good point on this, and a lot of people, I think, missed that point, is that just because somebody has a nuclear capability doesn't mean that they have what we call a revolution in military affairs.
That is a way to actually use that capability.
China, for example, in the 60s, detonated an atomic bomb.
But it wasn't until recently where there was a means to deliver that atomic bomb where they actually caused a revolution in their own military affairs.
And so it's just not the device itself, but it's also the delivery mechanism.
The nuclear weapon is typically something that's very big.
It wasn't until the United States itself Had worked for many years trying to define, refine rather, our own designs that we were able to put them on delivery vehicles that were able to be transported very far distances.
Because remember, these are really paradoxical weapons in the sense that they're not only the most destructive weapons known to man, but also the most dangerous, but they also have to be made the most safe Because you never want to have an incident or a safety incident where they might go off accidentally.
And so as a result, to keep this huge amount of power leashed up in a way, you have to put in safety mechanisms to prevent that, which makes it very large.
And unless you have a very sophisticated engineering program to go along with the development of this, It's pretty tough to get this in a very small package that you can smuggle it unknown through typical type of delivery vehicles.
Typical.
Again, my guest last hour suggested to me they have quite a submarine fleet in North Korea.
Not the modern nuclear submarines that we have, of course, but apparently submarines that are quite capable of making it to the U.S.
West Coast.
Now, to put all this in perspective, let's just suppose that the yield was in the area of 400 kilotons.
If a 400 kiloton device went off, Close to a U.S.
city, for example, in the harbor of San Francisco or something like that, how much destructive power would a device, again, we're talking in general terms now, would a device of that size have?
Well, it would really depend, believe it or not, where that device was located.
I'm not trying to be flippant, but if it was, say, close to the ground, you wouldn't have
as much as destructive power as you would if it was, say, elevated some distance above
the ground.
And the reason for that is that the closer to the ground that you get with a device like
this, the more coupling, that is, interaction with the ground that you're going to have,
and the less, say, blast effects.
There's a whole library of data that have been built up over the past several decades
from underground and above ground tests that show what the optimum height burst might be,
what a ground burst would be versus an air burst, and it really depends upon the effect
that you want to have.
Of course, any burst at all would be devastating near an American city, but it would really
depend upon the location of where that burst would be.
The blasts in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were about what size, kiloton-wise?
Around 19, 18 kilotons, on the order of 20 kilotons.
20 kilotons.
And again, the estimations are perhaps 400 kilotons or less for this device just set off in North Korea.
I can't really comment on the yield, but 400 kilotons would be incredibly, incredibly high.
In fact, I think what I might have seen on CNN was actually 400 tons, and not 400 kilotons.
Really?
That's right.
In fact, from what I've seen on the news services, they were quoting senior intelligence officials as saying it's more than a fizz and a pop, which would lead me to believe, again, from unclassified sources, But they might not have gotten quite the yield that they were expecting.
But again, we might have to wait on what they finally settle out on in terms of the magnitude of the geologic disruption that resulted.
Is that fair?
Yes, absolutely.
Tonight, I'm actually being interviewed for my book on Directed Energy, and I'm not representing myself in an official capacity from being from Los Alamos.
I'm answering these questions as a private citizen.
You never want to upstage your boss.
It's called getting out in front of the headlights.
You never want to do that.
I really do understand, believe me.
And I'll try and be as gentle as I can.
And there's another purpose for that, R2.
You never want to quite tip your hand either on what information you do know because that gives adversaries or other people a knowledge of what your capabilities are as well.
Well, that's right.
I mean, if we have satellites that can detect a nuclear explosion, for example, independent of any other source, we wouldn't want them to know that.
Or any other type of way to get the data.
Or any other way.
Yes, indeed.
Including human intelligence or whatever else you might have.
Of course, you don't want to tip your hand, and I don't want you to tip any hands at all at the moment.
And I know it's very awkward for you, but it's almost impossible for me not to discuss this.
Can you venture into the world of just your opinion without getting in trouble?
Sure, but I'll make it clear there's my opinion.
Okay, let's do it that way then.
The politics of this, if you were our president right now and you were mulling over, obviously there's going to be a lot of UN Security Council action very quickly on this, or at least we can hope there will be.
But the United States would have to also, I think, be considering the possibility of some sort of unilateral action just for our own protection.
If you were the President, would you be mulling unilateral action, or would you be saying, no, let's do this Security Council thing first?
Well, again, in my opinion, I don't think that you ever want to take anything off the table, and that you want to be able to consider a spectrum of options.
Because remember, the President is charged, his primary duty is the defense of the United States.
You never want to take any option off the table, but then you might want to prioritize which ones you might want to go for first.
And the first one, as I said before, is to galvanize the international community.
Again, the reason you never take an option off the table is that you never want to limit yourself.
Because there's always, when it gets down to it, there's always things that you must do in your own national security interest.
Doctor, you know, there's been a lot of talk about just how crazy Kim is, how crazy this government of North Korea is.
How crazy do you think they are?
Oh boy.
I feel very, just because of the association, if you were to come up to me and ask me on the street, I guess I could say one opinion, but just because of the association with Los Alamos, I think that this is somebody that our government deals very carefully with, very seriously with, and again, it's something that they are pushing to work with the international community on.
And again, I'm sorry for...
No, it's alright, Doctor.
All right.
My guest is Dr. Doug Beeson, who is, for obvious reasons, being very, very careful.
He is the Associate Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
And in a way, it's a very unfortunate time for him to be here, in view of the breaking news that we all have right now.
And again, apparently, North Korea has detonated A nuclear device, and without question, that changes the world in one day, just like that.
I'm Art Bell.
I talk about having luck and the right guy, but at just the wrong time.
Dr. Doug Beeson is the Associate Laboratory Director for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass Destruction.
Now if that isn't the right guy, I don't know who is on two or three hours old news that North Korea has probably detonated a nuclear weapon.
We'll see what else we can find out from Dr. Beeson.
It may not be a lot because he's not been clear to say a whole lot about this so far and
We'll do all that in a moment a dream and a nightmare
Here I've got exactly the right guy at the wrong time.
Dr. Beeson, you've written a book called The E-Bomb, How America's New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Wars Will Be Fought in the Future.
How long has your book been out?
It came out about this time last year in hardback, and they just reissued it, in fact, this month, the beginning of the month, in mass market paperback.
Yeah, just out within the past few days.
Which means that it's a reasonable buy, very reasonable now on Amazon.com and places like that, right?
Absolutely.
In fact, it's really, talk about being at the right place at the wrong time, the North Korea threat is one of the first ones that I use in the opening chapters of my book.
Alright, then let's approach it this way.
Let's talk about the chapter that you wrote on North Korea.
Right.
Well, one of the real worries is that having a rogue nation like North Korea that had a limited capability to loft intercontinental ballistic missiles, what do you do to stop that threat?
Well, that was one of the problems that General Ron Fogelman, who is the four-star Chief of Staff of the Air Force had actually encountered back during the first Iraq war and it was then that they, the U.S.
military, had realized is that trying to go after the Scud missile threat, those were tactical ballistic missiles, was nearly impossible because the Iraq was so large trying to try to find these missiles before they were launched was nearly impossible because Iraq was such a large country And trying to target them and then get them to down them was, again, nearly an impossible task.
And that's when the concept of having a huge weapon, weaponizable laser that is a laser that was big enough to actually bring down ballistic missiles and put that on an aircraft was considered to be one way to be able to kill ballistic missiles as they were being launched.
And this concept Uh, that is known as the airborne laser actually grew, uh, from the, uh, from the 90s.
A special program office was established at Kirtland Air Force Base outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And, uh, today we have a jet aircraft the size of a 747 that is out being outfitted with a laser that is in what they call the megawatt class, uh, power level to be able to fly outside of a of a avatars
borders and when a missile is launched up the US will soon have the capability
to bring that missile down
with using not a anti-missile missiles but by using a huge powerful laser that's on board this
aircraft backing up just a little bit doctor there was a lot of
controversy about how many scuds which actually were launched
that we brought down with anti-missiles Do you know what the actual record is or was?
Well, from what I understand, there was actually no 100% intercepts of the warhead itself.
That is, if you look at the Patriot missiles that were used during the first Iraq conflict, None of the warheads were directly hit.
On the other hand, some of the missile bodies were hit.
But what, from what I understand, is that this is the post-war analysis that was conducted, that there were no actual warheads that were directly hit by any of these Patriot missiles.
Wow.
But we actually did bring some down by hitting the missile bodies?
Or else we were very close.
We were able to detonate very close to them.
Of course, that was using that 1980s technology with that.
But the problem, though, with trying to intercept a missile with another missile is that these missiles, anti-missiles, all travel at ballistic missile speed.
That is, many thousands of feet per second.
And during that time, these missiles can take what they call evasive maneuvers.
That is, they can try to detect the oncoming anti-missile And they can try to move if you have that type of sophisticated apparatus.
Now, of course, nowadays, the adversary countries such as North Korea, it's debatable whether or not they have that capability.
But if you were to go against any type of adversary using a traditional conventional warhead, then You always have to take the time of flight into consideration.
That is, you have to calculate where the missile's going to be, and you have to not shoot directly at the missile that you're trying to bring down, but you have to calculate the trajectory and then try to shoot that missile down where you think it's going to be.
And that's one of the beauties of having a directed energy weapon such as a laser.
That is, because lasers are made up of So, hitting a missile in flight is not so tough for a laser compared to an anti-missile?
That's right.
at the speed of light. Laser energy travels at the speed of light. And so therefore, all
you have to do is aim it and you have, and you instantly deposit the energy where you
want to aim it.
Right. So hitting a missile in flight is not so tough for a laser compared to an anti-missile.
That's right. Now, it's still a pretty tough problem. And as...
And in fact, our whole missile defense strategy is based upon not just relying on one type of technology to bring down these missiles.
And that's why I think that it will be a very successful program, because you're not looking for what is known as just a silver bullet.
That is just one type of technology.
That is at the very beginning of the conflict, when the adversary is just launching these missiles, You go after the missiles, those missiles, in what they call the boost phase.
That is when the missiles are still accelerating into the air, you can detect them very easily, and they're very fragile.
Yeah, they're moving quite, quite slowly compared to what they're going to be doing.
Exactly, and the United States has chosen to use the airborne laser, for example, as one of the ways to kill off a certain percentage of those missiles while it's still in that so-called boost phase.
Okay, again, Doctor, I don't want to ask you anything classified, but one obvious question is, what would the range of such a device be?
Well, the typical scenario of the airborne laser is to stand off a few, at least 100 kilometers, if not further, from the adversary's borders.
And when the missile launch is detected, you watch that missile as it rises above the ground, and there are various sensors that you can engage to do that.
And it's just not one sensor, but there are radar sensors, there are optical sensors, and some of those sensors are actually on board the airborne laser itself.
And then when the missile accelerates above what they call the cloud layer, that is typically above 30,000 to 40,000 feet, Then the airborne laser engages its laser onto that missile.
That is, it locks onto it.
There are several smaller, lower-power lasers that actually track the still-accelerating missile.
They not only track it, but also they compensate for the atmosphere.
That is, the atmosphere itself is changing.
It's fluctuating.
There's differences in the atmosphere because of the Atmospheric differences, there's dust in the air, there's water in the air, and all these things causes the laser beam to break up as it's going towards the missile.
And there are methods that is called atmospheric compensation methods that actually focus the laser beam through these distorted atmosphere patches so that when it reaches the actual missile itself, It's at its focal length, that is, at its most powerful.
And so this whole process takes on the order of seconds, anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute for the laser to lock onto the target, for it to compensate through the atmosphere, and then for the high-powered beam to propagate.
And that happens over at least 100 kilometers.
Dr. Beeson, how much difference in effectiveness is there using a weapon of that sort from ground level to, let's say, 35 or 40,000 feet?
Actually, it's more effective the higher the laser is.
I understand.
And the reason for that is that you have less atmosphere to go through.
The atmosphere is less dense when you're higher.
And so that's the whole idea of putting this weapon class laser On a 747 size aircraft and trying to get up as high as you can so that you don't have to punch through the atmosphere.
Okay, so... In fact, the range that you can shoot this laser out is even greater because when you're on the ground you only have a very limited field of view, but when you're up in the air you have a much greater field of view.
That is, you can actually see further.
And also the atmosphere is a lot less dense, so you can actually propagate that laser further.
Right.
That's kind of what I was asking.
How much difference in effectiveness between ground level and, say, 40,000 feet?
It's a tremendous difference, I guess, right?
Tremendous.
In fact, I could give... There are things called optical depths that I could throw out.
That's the distance where a certain percentage of the laser energy is absorbed by the atmosphere.
That optical depth decreases radically the higher up that you go.
That's why the airborne laser wants to operate above 35,000 to 40,000 feet.
Well then, Doctor, didn't Ronald Reagan have it right?
In other words, if what you're telling me is true, about the higher you go, the more effective it is, and you pointed out the better view you have, well then, hell, if you've got a satellite up there, Not only do you have a better view, but you have almost no resistance at all from some level of orbit above the Earth, yes?
Well, that's true, but on the other hand, a lot of other problems pop up with that.
And I talk about that in my book, The E-Bomb, is that you can actually put a laser on an airplane and get a lot of the weapon effects that you can Just about the same effect that you can by putting that laser in space.
The problem is, is that if you put the laser in space, sure you have a much greater field of view, but your problems escalate exponentially.
For example, now you have to put it on a, like you said, a satellite.
And when you put a laser on a satellite, you have a lot more problems in storing the material, in re-energizing the material, keeping the beam stable.
And it's just incredibly more difficult to put the laser in space than it is by flying it in the air.
Now, one solution to that, to extend the length of the laser even farther, is not to put the laser itself in space, but to put a mirror in space and reflect the laser beam off of that mirror and direct that to nearly any point on the Earth.
And in fact, an experiment was conducted back in the 1990s called the Relay Mirror Experiment, RME, the Relay Mirror Experiment, where a satellite was actually flown with a mirror on it, and a laser beam was directed from the Earth onto another target that was many kilometers away.
That is, the laser went from the ground up to space and was redirected onto a target, and so it was proven that that technology can work.
Is there any current agreement that we have internationally that would prevent us from doing that?
Not from actually moving the laser through space.
There might be some international agreements that would have to be worked out by putting the laser in space, and that is by There are agreements about not weaponizing space itself.
Right.
No, no, no.
I was referring to just the mirror assembly aspect of it.
It's kind of like a bomb being lofted intercontinentally.
The bomb traverses through space, be it an atomic bomb or whatever, but it's not originating from space. So there's a
difference from keeping that bomb in space and then dropping it versus
just traversing through space.
So it's the same type of concept.
Okay, so we could then conceivably not get in international political trouble by having a
mirror there that would reflect what we fire from the ground.
Right.
In fact, you'd want more than just one mirror on that.
You'd want several so that you could be able to reach any point on Earth.
In fact, right now there is an experiment that is being conducted to put a mirror not on a satellite, Which had already been proven at lower powers, but to put a mirror on an airship that is a high altitude balloon that goes up many thousands of feet, and to be able to show that you can use a laser weapon in a tactical scenario, that is on a tactical battlefield rather than a strategic battlefield, and that is
It's a missile defense agency, an MDA program, where a mirror is going to be lofted by a dirigible, kind of like one of those old hydrogen crafts that you're probably familiar with, and to keep that in the air over a battlefield so that you can actually divert lasers from the ground or from the air onto this mirror and divert it to other parts of the battlefield.
That's incredible.
Since you're in the field of directed energy weapons, I've been following the HAARP project now for a long time.
HAARP up in Alaska, I'm sure you're quite familiar with it.
Right, right.
Can you tell me, Doctor, whether there are... I know the wall I'm going to run into here.
Are there any military applications for HAARP that you're aware of that were not?
Well, I guess if I were to say yes, I'm a werewolf, I can't tell you about it or whatever.
One interesting thing I've heard about, Mark, to kind of divert the question, is that if
a low-altitude nuclear burst were to occur, that could upset the plasma in the Van Allen
belt, which is a charged particle belt that encircles the Earth. And if that plasma is
upset by a low-altitude nuclear burst, then it could actually hurt communication satellites,
because it affects what we call the plasma transmission frequency. That is, you know
how when spacecraft are coming into the Earth, when the shuttle comes into the Earth, we
lose contact, radio contact with that.
That's right.
And that's because of the plasma that's built up around the spacecraft.
Plasma is the fourth state of matter.
It's, you know, the first three states are solid, liquid, and gas.
Well, there's a fourth state of matter out there.
And actually, about 99% of the universe is in this state of matter.
And that's what the stars are in the state of matter.
That's where the electrons are ripped away from the atomic nucleus.
And it's kind of like a hot, soupy, gaseous mixture that exists.
Ninety-nine, again, percent of the universe is in the state of matter.
But there is a phenomenon known as the plasma cutoff frequency, that radio waves below a certain frequency cannot propagate through it.
Again, that's why Radio contacts cut off with the shuttle.
Well, if a low-altitude nuclear burst were to occur, then the plasma would be energized in these radiation belts and communication might be cut off.
In fact, this phenomena actually occurred during the 1950s when the Starfish nuclear explosion was detonated How far above the South Pacific was that detonated?
I'm not sure of the exact height, but it was several hundred kilometers.
And if something like that were to occur, then communication could be cut off for a certain period of time.
Anyway, the whole point of this story is that some people said, gee, it might be possible to use HAARP to actually A change in some of the environmental parameters in those electron belts.
That is, if we were to energize them in a certain way, we might cause some of those electrons to fly out of that belt.
Can you believe that?
That could be true?
It could be.
It would take a lot of power to do that, and it would be kind of tough, but that will actually work.
All right.
Doctor, hold it right there.
We're at the top of the hour.
Dr. Doug Beeson is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Well, it's a dream, and it's a nightmare.
Here we have news breaking all around us that North Korea just detonated a nuclear weapon, and who do I have on the air but Dr. Doug Beeson, Associate Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Labs, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass destruction What a day!
I've got a little more information for you all right now, including the good doctor.
According to USGS, I've got the report in front of me, the magnitude was 4.2.
They're apparently now confirming a magnitude 4.2, higher than the original estimates apparently.
The location for those of you with maps who do this kind of thing is 41.311 North That's 41.311 North and 129.114 East.
Let me repeat that.
North and 129.114 East. Let me repeat that. 41.311 North, 129.114 East in North Korea.
The depth of the explosion or the geologic event, location uncertainty plus or minus
14.9 kilometers, by the way, for that location that I just gave you.
Bye.
The depth is zero kilometers.
Let me repeat that.
Zero kilometers set by the location program.
This is information that has now been reviewed by a seismologist.
That's information you usually get after a number of seismologists have had an opportunity to review the information.
So again, the depth set at Zero, which is sort of ominous from a geological point of view, that probably means it was a test.
Dr. Doug Beeson back in a moment.
Once again, Dr. Doug Beeson.
Dr. Beeson, again, I've got this report in front of me showing the where and the when of this event in North Korea.
And again, it shows now after being reviewed that this geologic event occurred at zero kilometers depth.
Without giving anything away, that's already reviewed by a seismologist.
Does that sound to you like a nuclear test versus a geologic event?
Well, it certainly indicates that.
But on the other hand, there would be ancillary type of signatures, like we talked about earlier tonight, that would exist.
The closer to the surface it would be, the more signatures you would have.
For example, if it was not buried at all, then there are optical type of signatures that occur.
there would be debris that would be boosted into the atmosphere,
which you would be able to detect at distances very far away.
And so really when it says zero to death, I have a gut feel it's probably several hundred feet, at least, in the ground.
I mean, within the error bars, that's probably right.
Yes.
But that does sort of sound like a nuclear test versus... Well, that's right.
I don't think... I'm not a geologist, but I bet that not too many earthquakes occur right at the surface or even a thousand feet above, I mean, below the surface.
Indeed not.
What else would you look for?
You say, obviously, if it was above ground there'd be plenty of evidence, but I suppose you would look for any signature.
Is it possible, Doctor, let's just get theoretical for a second.
We've done plenty of our own nuclear testing.
Is it possible to go underground and test a nuclear device and have no radiation leakage above ground at all?
Boy, that's, of course it's possible if you were to go deep enough.
But that involves just a huge technological challenge because you really do have to burrow really very deep into the ground.
Even our own nuclear test that occurred in Nevada, the Nevada test site, you had evidence of nuclear tests because of collapsing craters.
That is, what happens is that when a nuclear detonation occurs underground, the rock Around the device actually vaporizes and there's a void, a huge void that is created.
And because of the pressure of all the dirt and material, ground material above it, that collapses down.
And what you have is a recession crater that forms.
And that recession crater, you have debris from that.
Sometimes you have leakage, you have radiation, you have gases.
And so unless it's buried very, very deeply underground.
You're always going to have some kind of evidence.
And because this seismic report that you were reporting about said that it had a, it was
virtually a surface burst, I bet that it wasn't that buried deep enough to completely mask
all the other type of evidence that we might be able to collect.
Okay, well then, without revealing...
So, that's good enough without saying too much?
Right, right.
Without revealing directly any knowledge you might have about this specific event, would
it be your guess, doctor, that your bosses already know if this really was a nuclear
test or not?
The way things like this typically work are that You want to be able to make the best assessments from the available data.
And those assessments, again, are all collected.
And the analysts give their best judgments.
And then you get a judgment from what we call the community, which is used and presented to various decision makers.
Some people have criticized that judgment in the past.
For example, the intelligence community.
The way that they judged the existence of weapons of mass destruction back with Iraq, there was a lot of criticism, now even, about the methodology, that the way that that data was presented, that is, was it tainted by people having, they were prejudging the data.
And so I just don't want to speculate on what will come out of this process.
Not at this point.
Okay.
But I tell you, taking off my Los Alamos hat and stepping back and looking at all the data that's coming out, it's pretty tough not to be convinced that something pretty serious happened.
Yes, indeed. If you were Japan right now and you had a nuclear stockpile, which we all
know Japan has lots of raw material and they obviously have the technology to put together
all the nuclear weapons they would want, I would imagine.
I I would think that I just can't imagine how Japan would not be thinking really hard about their own bomb to protect themselves at this point.
Can you not imagine that?
Well, another scenario is that Japan may be looking at other mitigation type of techniques, high-tech techniques.
It doesn't have to be.
I mean, that's certainly one path that they could go down.
Another path might be to join with the United States and others in missile defense type of technologies.
And we talked about one earlier, that is investing in something like the airborne laser.
That would be a very high tech way of preventing the launch of any of these ballistic missiles.
Only problem with that is, would be, you know, you mentioned you would need something the size of a 747 aircraft off the coast of the country in question.
Now, there's not a whole lot of time once something is in, in, in, boost phase has been detected to get an aircraft in the proper place.
You'd almost have to have it there already, wouldn't you?
Right.
In fact, that's the scenario right now.
Air Combat Command, ACC, They are the combat command of the United States Air Force that is charged with these type of activities.
Their scenario is to have up to seven of these airborne lasers.
That is that they would have a fleet of seven 747 type aircraft where you would have two to three of these aircraft continuously in the air.
These type of events just don't occur Uh, without any warning.
That is, you have some kind of buildup, like what we've seen in this, uh, alleged, uh, North Korean, uh, nuclear detonation.
You have enough time to deploy the aircraft.
You, just like any other high-value asset, like our AWACS, Airborne Warning and Control System, you would deploy them outside of the adversary's, uh, boundary, and that you would rotate them, that is, let them go, uh, seven, eight, ten hours at a time, And you would have two or three of these in the air at all times so that if something like a launch would occur, then you would not only have plenty of assets in the air, but also that you would have them pre-positioned in the optimum place to be able to go ahead and shoot down any ballistic missiles that may be launched.
Dr. Beeson, it almost seemed as though SAC's mission, and I spent quite a bit of time on SAC bases, SAC's mission was just about over, and what you're describing sounds an awful lot like a SAC mission.
Well, in a way, but it's kind of a high-tech version of that.
The Strategic Command now has really evolved over the years from being just relying upon the so-called nuclear triad, that is the ground, The air and the sea-launched missiles to one of being more concerned about conventional forces, information flow, global situational awareness, and of course the nuclear part of that.
But the arm of the military that actually conducts the delivery of strategic forces now includes the Navy, the submarine forces, as well as the Air Force's Air Combat Command.
And this Air Combat Command, yes, in a way, has evolved from being purely just charged with delivering strategic bombing missions, which SAC, that was SAC's primary mission, to one of both tactical missions as well as the new strategic mission of the airborne laser when that's finally deployed.
And Doctor, if we were to really move hard toward deployment of what we're talking about right now, these airborne lasers, how long might it be, if it had, you know, the correct amount of funding, before we could deploy a blanket of that sort, you know, seven aircraft that were in the air all the time, with these lasers?
How far away from that are we?
Well, the actual deployment of all seven lasers is going to take up to more than five years.
And on the order of the funding right now, probably around 10 years.
And that's because of, that's right, we're still paying for the Iraq War and other things.
And in fact, the airborne laser, although every single part of the airborne laser has been demonstrated on the ground, and some of it in the air, that is the acquisition of the missile, The atmospheric compensation, the beam control, changing the beam quality, and also the generation of the high-power beam, it has yet been all been integrated on a craft that's been flying, and a missile has not yet been shot down, even though they've been tracked and that.
That actual test is supposed to take place sometime next year.
And once that test succeeds, and a lot is depending upon that, because if it doesn't succeed, I think directed energy as a whole is going to be hurt by it.
But once that test does succeed, then a decision is going to be made to go on with the second and subsequent airborne lasers.
I was, I comfortably went strolling into the first hour of the show tonight, and then my guest Kenneth Sewell dropped on me the fact that North Korea has a substantial fleet of submarines, albeit not new nuclear submarines, but a substantial fleet of submarines.
And while I was sitting there comfortably imagining their big, no doubt, big nuclear weapon, Couldn't possibly be delivered to the United States or anywhere near it.
He shot holes in that with with this submarine fleet now The president's charged with protecting this country the United States here I sit in the Philippine saying this country the United States and It seems to me that if there is a possibility a weapon could be brought by submarine to near the shores of the u.s.
The president has to take that into account Probably so, but boy, when you look at the logistics of that, like you said, putting a device that big into a submarine, it's a diesel submarine, one that I think that our U.S.
Navy is, right this minute, probably on top of tracking every single vehicle around North Korea, and something like a diesel sub One that, unlike a nuclear submarine, has to surface, has to be near the surface to go on its way.
They're very quiet, but that's only when they're running on batteries.
And it's impossible to get to the United States running just on batteries from North Korea, which means that they're going to be making a lot of racket with their diesel engines.
And I think that if something like that were to occur, our Navy would be right on top of it.
You know, I wouldn't even be asking these questions at all if we were, for example, talking about the Soviet Union, perhaps even China.
I mean, here we're talking about fairly rational people who are not suicidal.
But I'm just not sure we can say that about the North Korean government.
And now we apparently have a nuclear weapon in the hands of people and a government that's absolutely crazy.
No other way to put it.
Well, like we talked about before, though, there's a difference between showing that you have a capability of detonating a nuclear weapon and then versus actually delivering that.
Big, big difference.
I'm not trying to be flippant here.
It's a concern we have to take.
But even though this government is not quite on par with the stability, let's say, of other governments that we're used to dealing with, I think that the immediate danger to us is not as great as it is, say, to Japan, which of course is a lot closer.
Or perhaps to Seoul.
Right, exactly.
But still, Thinking about the high-tech responses that we have now and that we have the ability to invest in within the next few years, we're going to have some very big decisions coming up on what type of strategic defenses are we going to put in place that can offer the President a lot of options to go against threats of this type.
And to me, the type of option that we want to give the President Is not one where it takes a long time for that option to occur.
That is, if we want to respond to an international incident, the best option we could give, we, me as a scientist, can give the president, is one where we have what we call an instantaneous response.
That is, that there is very little time, if no time at all, between when the decision is made And when the effective military force is put into effect... And if the President needed that option from you at this very moment, you could not give it to him, could you?
Well, of course, he has a suite of options, and they run from conventional forces to nuclear forces, and not too many... No, I meant that immediate option.
Right, right.
Yeah, there's not too many with directed energy.
There are only two strategic ones on the That are just about available.
The first, of course, is the airborne laser.
If we had relay mirrors, for example, in space, and we had ground-based lasers, there would be an option that the President would have to be able to deliver energy, what we call energy on target, anywhere in the world, almost instantaneously.
And in fact, that's one of the beauties of directed energy weapons, things like lasers
and high-power microwaves, is that they travel at the speed of light.
The speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, is fast enough to circle the Earth seven times
in less than a second.
And so if a decision is made to project that energy anywhere in the world, you might be
able to do so, say, with relay mirrors.
Another advantage of having a directed energy weapon is that it's inherently not an offensive
weapon.
You probably remember seeing the War of the Worlds, H.G.
Wells story, where the Martians are taking out cities.
Well, actually, the reason why directed energy weapons such as lasers get their power and are so powerful is that they're able to focus their beams, not spread them out over large areas.
And so that means that they are inherently a defensive weapon.
They work the best against things like missiles, against things like very small targets.
Got it.
All right.
Doctor, hold tight.
We'll be right back.
All right.
Good evening, everybody.
It's a tough night for everybody, myself, because breaking news is always very difficult, particularly breaking news of this sort.
The North Koreans apparently have detonated a nuclear weapon.
The Russians are reporting that they're... Russians are confirming that they know that it was a nuclear weapon.
Dr. Doug Beeson is my guest, and to give you some idea of who we're dealing with, he is the Associate Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass destruction.
Now, I have additional news that I'd like some of you to confirm for me, if you're able.
Todd in British Columbia, Canada.
He's fast blasting me.
Yikes, he says, Art.
CNN is reporting Japanese military ships on their way to North Korea.
Now I have no way of confirming that other than to ask some of the rest of you if it is so.
back to Dr. Beeson in a moment.
Once again Dr. Doug Beeson, his book by the way is one you definitely might want
to peruse is...
It's The E-Bomb, How America's New Directed Energy Weapons Will, In Fact, Change the Way Wars Will Be Fought in the Future.
Doctor, a couple of questions for you again.
Feel free not to answer them, but this weapon, making the assumption that it was a nuclear device just detonated, how crude and how big would you imagine it to be?
Well, it would really depend upon the device.
If it's a plutonium device, then there are certain ways to engineer that to make it detonate.
If it was a uranium device, there are different ways to make it detonate.
And each of those have their own peculiar engineering challenges and characteristics.
It would really depend upon the information that we get out from the explosion as to how we can determine what type of device it was.
Or, you know, information from the North Koreans themselves, of course, would always help.
Hmm.
Unlikely.
With regard to something in the first hour, maybe you can clear this up.
I would really like to know, a lot of people would really like to know, and that is, if a device were to go off somewhere, anywhere, Would the United States have the unambiguous ability to know where this device was constructed?
In other words, after the fact, can we look at whatever it is that we look at after an explosion of that sort and know where it was manufactured?
Oh, manufactured?
Yes, sir.
There are various ways to locate where a device has been detonated.
There's more than, as we discussed earlier, there's more than one signature.
A seismic signature, for example, is one type of signature.
So that once you geolocate it, that is find where and when it had been detonated, then there are other signatures that you can determine from the explosion
to try to back out information about that explosion.
Let me back up a little bit.
What I meant, Doctor, is let's say that the unthinkable occurred and something went off near San Francisco.
Would we be able to discern from analyzing whatever we would analyze exactly where that bomb came from?
In other words, could we get down to the point where we could say, all right, it was manufactured in North Korea and handed to some idiot terrorist who did this?
Would we know where it came from?
Well, there are various characteristics that you can get from detonation, which I really can't go into here.
But on the other hand, there are certain unique characteristics that you would be able to pull out from the different signatures that might enable you to put together an array of options.
You know, being able to trace back exactly where something was manufactured And where it went from there is always tough.
But it's kind of like a big mystery puzzle that you're putting together.
And it's just not one measurement that you're making.
But it's bringing into account the the intelligence community, what they call all source data, human intelligence, different signatures that occur, as well as the technical signatures that you can pick up from the device itself.
And then once you put all these together, typically a an intelligence assessment will be made and that will be vetted
with different organizations that have different expertise on each of those areas and then an assessment with some
type of probability will be given.
For example, we know that North Korea is is coming up I guess with plutonium
from the reactor that they have there.
Is there anything unique in the manufacturing of this plutonium that would tell us, if something went off, that, aha, it came from the reactor in North Korea?
Well, there are always unique signatures associated with any type of manufacturing process, be it plutonium or whatever.
And it just depends upon, again, what type of data you have, how accurate the data is, and how well you can put it together.
And that's probably the best that I can say.
Okay.
From your point of view in your job, hearing today that the North Koreans detonated this nuclear device, how concerned are you personally?
Well, anytime something like this happens, it concerns me greatly.
And that's personally, as well as professionally, because my whole professional career, I've been training to get to this job that I've been at now for the past few years, and that is trying to help prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
And this is an example of the worst type of weapon of mass destruction.
Especially in a regime that has the attributes that this regime has.
And so, to me, it's very disturbing.
Now, I have to balance that, of course, with the practicality of what I know about the delivery systems they have, probably the state of the engineering of this device.
And so, it's always what we call a risk-based assessment.
That is, what is the real risk and very cold On emotional terms, balanced with what I feel personally.
Personally, I don't feel too good about it.
Yes, I can imagine.
Are you able to tell us anything about how close Iran might be to a bomb?
I guess I'd feel very uncomfortable talking right now on the radio about that.
I understand.
I realize I got a call about an hour before this show from my colleague.
I'm in Washington D.C.
right now and I got a call from some of my colleagues back in Los Alamos that were telling me about the activities going on.
And I was thinking to myself, oh great, here I am trying to talk about directed energy.
I can just imagine how this is going to be subsumed.
I'm doing the best I can.
I understand.
I understand.
But obviously, I mean, nobody is talking about anything else right now, and although the directed energy aspect of this obviously comes into play, or hopefully it comes into play, and I would hope that one failure, if there's an initial failure in, for example, the laser program we were talking about, it wouldn't stunt it, because I just...
We just haven't had a lot of luck, as far as I can see in the testing we've done so far, in trying to knock down ballistic missiles, particularly ones that have left the atmosphere and are coming back in, with anything at all.
Is that fair to say?
Well, no, actually, I was under that impression, but going back and looking at over the data, there are, well, first of all, there are three phases, three different phases to ballistic missile flight.
The launch phase, what they call the mid-phase, which is after the warhead is ejected by the satellite bus, and then the incoming phase.
The toughest phase to get these incoming missiles is exactly what you pointed out, Art, is when it's coming into the atmosphere, because it's hurtling down at tens of thousands of miles an hour, and it is just a point target that is ultra-hard, Ultra hard because it's built to last and get through the harsh environment of the atmosphere as it's coming in.
And that's a tough time to try to knock out a weapon of mass destruction.
And the easiest time is during the launch phase.
And that is when, that's why a decision has been made to use these long-range, very instantaneous type of delivery vehicles, such as airborne laser, to try to bring down the missiles during the launch phase.
Now the intermediate phase, there's been a spectacular success in being able to intercept warheads, simulated warheads, above the atmosphere with kinetic energy weapons that is launched from the Kodiak Island launch site in Alaska.
And so, at least the mid-part of these missile defense systems have been proven.
The first part... Is that the Brilliant Pebbles kind of thing?
Well, Brilliant Pebbles, except it's not being launched from space to intercept these missiles in the mid-course, but it's actually these intercept vehicles that are being launched from Alaska itself To intercept these missiles.
Kind of like hitting a bullet with a bullet is the concept.
But that has been proven.
And in fact, I'm very impressed by the results of that.
It's just the first phase of this, that is the initial launch phase, destruction of these missiles have not yet been proven by these lasers.
And that's really the big unknown.
And what a lot of people are hoping will be successful with the airborne lasers test sometime next year.
Doctor, maybe you can answer this, but probably not.
You're into lasers, so this is a laser-like question.
It was not but a few days ago that there were rumblings of a story, Doctor, that the Chinese had blinded, or attempted to blind, we have no way of knowing without being privy to the kind of intelligence you probably have.
Some of our best spy satellites now, it seems like interesting timing that the Chinese would, if they did, try to blind our satellites a few days prior to a North Korean nuclear test.
Now, do you know offhand whether they actually did attempt that?
Whether it was successful?
Whether that's something in the world of lasers that That you can talk about, or whether you'd just rather go on to whatever the next subject is?
I'd rather go on, but you know, but when you say that, people always assume that, you know, they do.
Yeah, I would be very disturbed if something like that happened.
But, you know, first, it would be very tough.
We have, of course, there are a lot of, you know, satellites in orbit.
And, you know, what you can attribute to one country is always a matter of speculation and debate as well.
But I think, especially from the reaction that I've been seeing from the news tonight
that the Chinese have, that they were pretty upset about these tests
that the North Koreans have conducted.
Boy, I hope so.
To say that there's a collusion there is pretty far-fetched, I think.
So you would think more of a coincidence?
If it occurred, it would probably be a coincidence, but if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anyway.
Okay, well then let's talk generically.
Lasers are fascinating, and certainly they would have the potential to blind satellites, wouldn't they?
Well, they might have the capability to do that, but doing something like that, to me, is not the best use of a laser, because if you were to blind satellites, what would you really get out of it?
You would only bring attention to yourself, and then you might cause other assets to be brought against you for observation.
And again, because there's more than one satellite, the first time one is blinded, Then you know that people would be aware and on the lookout for this happening again.
So just doing it just to do it doesn't really make too much sense.
But yeah, lasers have just an immense capability of, as we talked before, a very precise engagement of putting laser energy on targets up to thousands of kilometers away.
And that's one of the nice things about using a relay mirror is that you might be able to actually direct laser energy to targets on the other side of the Earth and to do so near instantaneously with very precise timing.
Well, it would take a very great less power to blind a satellite than it would to destroy something at 40,000 feet, right?
Perhaps, but remember that even laser energy loses power, so to speak.
The farther it travels, the less energy it has on target.
The reason is that that energy spreads out.
No matter how precise the laser is, you always have something associated with the beam called diffraction limited propagation.
That's just a fancy way of saying the laser beam spread out.
We've shot laser beams to the moon, But those beans still spread out as they go over distance.
Doctor, I have a question for you with regard to lasers.
I understand how radio propagates.
For example, when you transmit using some sort of a beam antenna or even a satellite dish as a reflector, you transmit a main lobe and then you have side lobes as well.
That's true at RF frequencies.
Is that true for laser projection as well?
Well, that's very insightful.
Yes, it is.
But the lobes are very, very small because the lobes are really dependent upon the size of the wavelength.
As it turns out, laser wavelengths are 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller than RF wavelengths.
And as a result, those lobes are going to be on the same order, very small.
So you do get side lobes, but they're just infinitesimally small.
And not dangerous compared to the main lobe?
Not as dangerous compared to the main lobe, but they do exist.
In fact, that really brings up a fascinating topic that for directed energy weapons, lasers are only one half of the story.
The other half of the story are what they call high-power microwaves.
And that's just high-frequency radio waves.
That is, anywhere from a gigahertz to tens and hundreds of gigahertz.
And this is something that's being explored now by the military, because unlike lasers, which propagate in a very ultra-precise target, these high-power microwaves are more like radio waves, and they spread out.
That is that you can envelop large amounts of area, such as a battlefield, for example, And so the idea is that perhaps one day you might be able to develop a high-power microwave weapon that could go after not just one or two targets, but all the targets on a battlefield, and perhaps knock out all the electronics on the battlefield.
The Japanese, for example, in 1945 had this vision, and they created a magnetron, which is a type of radio frequency oscillator, where they actually tried with experiments to knock down airplanes from the sky.
This is back in 1945.
But the magnetrons were not powerful enough to really affect the planes at that time.
Now in the laboratory, what we're starting to see are that the high-power microwave fields are high enough that electronics are effective.
And you can not only jam them, but you can also turn them to what they call smoking ash.
That is, that you can Completely disrupt electronics.
So you're saying that you could bring down a plane?
In the future sometime you might be able to.
The problem is that the development of high-power microwaves are anywhere from 20 to 30 years behind that of laser weapons.
And the biggest reason is that the amount of money that's being put into high-power microwaves versus lasers.
For lasers, about a half a billion dollars per year has been put into it.
For high-power microwaves, it's on the order of about $20 million.
Money, money, money.
Doctor, hold on.
We're at the top of the hour.
When we come back, we're going to open the phone lines, and then they will ask you questions that you can't answer.
From Manila in Southeast Asia, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Indeed, my guest is Dr. Doug Beeson, Associate Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Labs, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass destruction.
This guest, within hours of what now appears almost surely to have been a nuclear test by North Korea, something the world has been fearing for some time now, and I'm going to ask the audience to be If you can be, please, as sensitive as possible to the position Dr. Beeson is in right now.
And I think by now, if you've been listening, you all understand what that position is.
I've got a couple of additional questions for Dr. Beeson and then we're going to go
to the phones when we come back.
Once again, Dr. Doug Beeson.
Dr. Beeson, a couple of sort of follow-up questions here.
With respect to lasers, is it true or not that current technology depends upon pulsing the laser to get the kind of effect you're talking about, taking something out, for example, in the boost phase at 30 or 40,000 feet?
Are you using a pulsed laser to do that?
Well, I guess I guess the best way to answer that is yes, that's technically correct, but no in the sense of that the pulses occur so quickly together that for all practical purposes nothing can tell that it's pulsed, that it thinks that it's a continuous wave.
That is, when the pulses occur within sub-millionths of a second together, that is, the material itself that the pulse interacts with thinks that it's a continuous pulse.
Now, there are several types of what we call continuous wave lasers that are also being used or projected to use.
For example, deuterium fluoride is a type of laser that has been used by the U.S.
Army, a White Sands Missile Range, to successfully shoot down Katyusha rockets.
In fact, over 30 Katyusha rockets, the same type that were launched against Israel just several months ago.
If you remember those attacks against Israel, I think everybody does.
The Katyusha rockets were brought down about four years ago in the White Sands by a deuterium fluoride laser, which was a continuous wave, or continuous type of laser.
The airborne laser uses a coil, or chemical oxygen iodine laser, which is a type of also a CW laser, or continuous wave laser.
And so when you talk about power level, some people say, well, you can have high powers by having these very short pulses, and it's not really very much energy.
And that is true to an extent, but what is important in the damage mechanism, that is being able to kill ballistic missiles or Katyusha rockets or whatever, is the amount of energy that you actually put on a target.
The amount of energy, that brings up my next question.
In early science fiction, with regard to lasers, even those that might be space-based, nuclear power was going to be required to actually power the lasers efficiently.
Is that still true?
Well, some of the lasers that The old Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars program, wanted to use some of those concepts, did use nuclear explosions to drive lasers.
In fact, Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, had proposed using a laser powered by nuclear explosions called Excalibur, put nuclear explosions in space to power these lasers as anti-ballistic missile lasers.
However, nowadays, we have enough energy via chemical means, be it coil-type lasers or deuterium fluoride, to achieve nearly the same amount of power level.
But in the future, what we're going to see are even more efficient ways of producing lasers, and that is with electric lasers.
Things such as the free electron lasers, by actually accelerating beams of electrons to produce laser light, is extremely efficient.
And if we're going to have The powerful lasers needed for long distance strategic type applications.
I think it's really going to be something like electric lasers, like free electron lasers that are going to be used instead of the chemical lasers which we use nowadays.
On the surface of it, this might seem like a dumb question, but the more I thought about it, it's not so dumb.
Steve in Texas says, couldn't you put mirrors all over the missile and then the laser would be useless?
Well, obviously mirrors wouldn't survive a launch, but a highly reflective surface of a missile might have roughly the same effect.
Would that be a deterrent?
Yeah, actually, Steve has a great question.
That was one of the very first criticisms that were brought up of using lasers for anti-ballistic missile purposes.
Yes, lasers are reflected by mirror surfaces, but on the other hand, one of the big problems in building these huge strategic lasers is to be able to direct the laser beam itself.
That is, you have to use mirrored surfaces, which are so highly refined That you want to keep away from absorbing any part of the beam itself.
That's right.
As a result, that's because you would destroy the laser itself.
As a result, much effort's been given in producing mirrors that are of extremely high quality that can focus these beams.
Now, if you were to try to put the same caliber or same quality of laser on a rocket body, You would weigh the rocket body down so much that it wouldn't be able to launch.
And plus, you were absolutely right, Art, is that it would lose its quality as it was going through the atmosphere.
Simply polishing a rocket body or trying to put a mirrored surface on it just wouldn't work, because even if you were to be able to reflect 99.9% of all laser radiation, you'd still absorb that one-tenth of a percent And that would still be enough to harm you.
And so that answer.
Yeah.
And that was a great question.
Great criticism.
And they actually went through a very long day.
The U.S.
military went through a very long testing process to show that that is not a viable defense.
All right, and since you talked about microwaves, a subject that we've talked about a lot here on Coast to Coast, and we've had a number of experts here on it.
As you know, we all know, we're in an energy shortage situation, peak oil maybe.
Certainly prices are going up through the roof and we need energy now.
One perhaps viable concept has been to have a satellite in space collecting solar energy at a very, very efficient percentage and then microwaving it back to Earth.
What do you think about that idea?
Well, I think that you might have read one of my fiction books and you're setting me up as a straight man.
I had a book out called Ill Wind that I wrote with a friend of mine, Kevin Anderson.
He's written some of the Dune books.
In fact, this book was just optioned by ABC as a mini-series.
Part of the premise of this book is that to help with some of the energy crisis that is ongoing, that a series of satellites had been lofted into space and converts uh... solar energy into microwave energy and beams it down
to earth we did so very so
we did that for a very specific purpose uh... in the book
to get around some of the uh... energy crisis that we're developing in the
fictional account that kevin and i wrote about but in practicality
uh... studies have shown that uh... that is not only possible but this might be the
preferable way to help
uh...
uh... solve some of the energy crisis the reason is that
uh... just by putting out solar rays on earth that is not enough
There's not enough space on Earth to be able to gather enough solar energy power for our electrical needs that you have to be more efficient to do so.
And a better, a more efficient way is to collect that in space where you can have larger areas, convert it to something like microwaves and beam it to Earth.
Of course, there are always problems that people talk about.
Birds flying through the beam or our airplanes.
Well, as it turns out, the energy that you're beaming down, you can do so at energy densities of less than one-tenth of what sunlight is.
But yet, because of the frequency of radiation and the conversion efficiencies, you can actually pull back energy in a very, very efficient way.
And so, yes, it's possible.
It's an extremely expensive way to try to do that.
I like it because it's high-tech, but it doesn't mean that it's actually the best way to help solve the energy crisis.
Okay.
All right.
We're going to go to the phones.
I have no idea what you're about to meet up with, and so here we go.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Doug Beeson.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
I want to commend you for this terrific program.
Thank you.
I want to commend Dr. Beeson.
I'm a retired social scientist from the University of Wisconsin, and I just think he's terribly clear and very, very tactful in what he's telling us.
I want to commend him for even showing up.
One question, though, I did want to ask you, and it's from my background in Air Force intelligence during the Korean War, which means I'm an old soldier.
I recall that, pardon?
We didn't say anything.
Okay, you're hearing me good.
I've followed intelligence work for 50 years, and my recollection is that Francis Gary Powers in the U-2 was shot down at 50,000 feet.
Can you talk somewhat about the ability to maneuver away from anti-aircraft fire like the Russians shot at Powers?
The thing that you said earlier, which touched me off on this, was that you had to get these rockets when they were in their forthcoming stage, and you had to be about 100 kilometers away.
Seems to me the big 747 would be extremely vulnerable to rocket fire like the Russians brought power to.
Yeah, that's a very good question, Doctor.
Yeah, that's a great question.
In fact, that was one of the, again, one of the early criticisms of the airborne laser.
Is how do you protect it against, first of all, how do you get it close enough so that you can make sure the laser energy that you're putting on target is energetic enough, but yet how do you move it away far enough to be able to attack the aircraft?
Well, as it turns out, the concept of operations, that is the CONOPS that Air Combat Command has right now, is just like it has with any other what they call high-value target, that is, There are several very slow-moving, yet very valuable assets that the U.S.
military uses, such as the Airborne Warning and Control System, AWACS, or even fuel tankers that need to be brought up close to the adversaries' borders.
But you don't want to bring them so close that they're close enough for surface-to-air missiles.
That's the biggest threat.
And the second threat is other enemy aircraft.
And so what you typically do is that you, excuse me, you provide it with CAP, or close air patrols, that is aircraft, fighter aircraft, that surround it to keep it safe from enemy aircraft.
And also you keep it far enough away from the enemy border so that the surface-to-air missiles can't reach it.
And so that type of technique is already used for other type of aircraft, and it's envisioned that that type of technique will be used to protect the airborne laser.
But in addition, something else that is nice about the airborne laser is that because it can defend against rockets that are ballistic missiles that are punching through the cloud barrier, you can also use the same sensors on board and also the laser on board to protect itself against any surface-to-air missiles.
So not only do you have the concept of operations that helps, that is you keep it away from the borders, you have the fighter aircraft protecting you, but also you use the laser itself on board as a health protection mechanism.
Great question.
Here's another question out of left field.
I interview frequently Dr. Michio Kaku, who is one of our nation's premier theoretical physicists, and when you really pin that man down, He's not exactly what you would call pro-nuclear in any way at all.
But when you really pin him down, he describes several Ah, levels that mankind will likely go through.
In other words, we're a Type 0 planet right now, and we're on the verge of becoming a Type 1 planet, which would then control more energy in Type 2 and Type 3 on down the line, long after we're dead.
But we're in this strange little transitional phase right now between Type 0 and Type 1, and when you really, really pin him down about what he thinks our chances are of surviving the discovery of Element 92, It's really extremely depressing.
In other words, with proliferation going the way it has been going, and today we have a great example, he just doesn't think that we will as a species survive.
What do you think?
Well, I think that I'm more optimistic than that.
Every generation has its own set of problems.
There are some that are more dangerous than others.
Well, for example, when I arrived in Washington, D.C.
yesterday, I had a little bit of time.
I went over the National Archives, and one of the things I discovered was that back in the 1700s, George Washington had actually discovered that the British were using smallpox as a biological weapon.
That is, that they were affecting people and sending them out to infiltrate the American colonies.
As a weapon against the US, and there's been some coincidence measurements and data that have come out, that this is one of the first uses of widespread bioterrorism.
And so we will always have, no matter what age we're in, the threat of the generation.
I think that plutonium is a threat of our generation.
It's one that with the correct It's just not one of the better days in that campaign today.
will, I think that we can mount an effective campaign.
But I just don't...
I guess I'm more optimistic in the resilience of the human spirit to be able to rise up
against something like this.
And it's just not one of the better days in that campaign today.
Well, that's right.
Today is particularly bad.
Today is particularly bad.
But I've always been optimistic.
Wild Card Line, you're on here with an optimistic Dr. Beeson.
Hello.
Hello.
Congratulations, first of all, there Art.
Thank you.
I wanted to bring up the point that it was reported sometime back, I think it was around 10 years, that none other than Donald Rumsfeld was involved in giving North Korea plutonium.
Okay, actually that's a pretty good question.
Doctor, do you know whether we have... I can't imagine that we would have delivered plutonium to North Korea, but... I'm not aware of that.
Wouldn't seem like the first thing we'd be doing or ever do.
There might have been some help that the U.S.
I know gave to North Korea about trying to incentivize it to use What kind of actual hopes do you have, Dr. Mason, that we can succeed with nonproliferation?
It's a bad day to be asking that, but what do you think?
What kind of actual hopes do you have, Dr. Beeson, that we can succeed with non-proliferation?
It's a bad day to be asking that, but what do you think?
Well I think part of the message here is that simply treaties and things like that can't
prevent proliferation.
We've seen, again I'm speaking as a private citizen and not my Los Alamos hat on, but from what I've seen, especially 10 years ago with the Pakistan and India nuclear test, where they circumvented the world proliferation constraints.
We've seen now, if this is indeed a nuclear test, we've seen now North Korea And there are other countries out there that people worry about as well.
And so, I think that's something that the nations have to step up to a more aggressive role in, rather than just relying on pure policy to prevent the proliferation of these type of weapons.
That's against the private citizen.
Yes, of course.
Do you think that today's news will reshape the kind of attitude you just talked about?
Well, I think it's going to depend on what happens after this, actually.
That's a good point.
All right, Dr. Doug Beeson is my guest.
He's exactly the right guy at the wrong time.
He's Associate Laboratory Director of Los Alamos National Labs, responsible for programs tasked with eliminating the global threat of weapons of mass destruction.
Today's news in that category is extremely worrisome.
It's always difficult to cover any kind of breaking news, but that's what we're doing this night.
From Manila, I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, here I am.
My guest is Dr. Doug Beeson.
Good day, everybody.
Stan has an interesting question from Los Angeles, and we'll give Dr. Beeson a moment to think about that, or decide he won't answer it.
And that is, where did North Korea get the material they've used for these bombs?
Now, we know they got it from a reactor they have there, but the question really from Stan is whether they have the natural reserves of it In their own country, or whether they got it all from someplace else.
It's a pretty interesting question.
We'll be right back with it.
All right.
Dr. Stan in Los Angeles has, I think, kind of an interesting question.
Does North Korea have natural reserves of uranium to mine to be doing all this?
Or did they get it somewhere else?
Well, I'm sure that they got it somewhere else.
I don't know where.
But that was part of the deal, I think, that was struck about 10 years ago in trying to help them with their nuclear capability.
for peaceful purposes.
And if you remember in 2003, when the U.S. confronted North Korea about violating the
intent of carrying out a peaceful nuclear program for energy purposes, in 2003, the
North Koreans pulled out of the Non-Proliferation International Treaty and refused anybody else,
of course, to come and look at their facilities.
That's when, of course, the escalation began publicly.
But of course, it had to begin years before then, because you just can't generate that
much nuclear material of the right quality and quantity to conduct a test with a span
of just a few years.
Indeed.
Okay, let's go to a wildcard line and Bill in Arizona.
Bill, you're on the air with Dr. Doug Beeson.
Hello, Doctor.
Hello, Art.
First of all, congratulations, Art.
Thank you.
And my first question is, however unlikely, what is the chances that they may have set off some explosion?
I mean, big enough?
You know, is there any possible way it would have been big enough to maybe give the intentions That they're actually, you know, have the nuclear power?
Or put another way, you're asking, could they have faked it?
Exactly.
That's a great question.
In fact, from the news reports, the Unclassified News reports coming out that there was around 500 tons of explosion or something, a seismic event.
Typically when a nuclear explosion occurs, about 50% of a nuclear weapons yield or explosive
power goes to radiative type effects and the other 50% goes to blast type effects.
What we mean by blast effects, that's typically what couples into the ground to create the
seismic effect.
When you say, was it a nuclear test or was it a high explosive conventional test, if
it was high explosive conventional, then you can multiply that number of about 500 tons
by a factor of 2 and so you get about 1000 tons, which is about a kiloton of equivalent
high explosive energy that would have been needed to create the same type of effect that
we would have seen seismically.
Plasmidly, I see.
So it's possible, but also there are other characteristics that are different.
One characteristic is that the high-explosive test lasts much longer.
Nuclear tests are over very quickly.
I can't get into the right exact time scales, but it happened on the order of sub-millisecond, where a millisecond is a thousandth of a second.
Conventional high-explosive tests, like we see in TNT or C4 or whatever, last over many, many tens of milliseconds.
There's a time difference that you'll also see.
And since they haven't said anything about the time differences, I'm sure that's part of the data that they're analyzing right now.
Would it be your view, Doctor, without telling me, again, anything at all classified, that at the highest levels we already know if this was a nuclear test or not?
I'm sure the President's been given the assessment of the intelligence communities.
And that position has been fully vetted among the different agencies that advise the President.
So all that's already happened?
And it's ongoing, I'm sure, as we gain additional data as well.
Do you, would you even want to hazard a guess about when the intelligence community will, through our political leadership, announce that in fact it was a nuclear test or not?
No, I just don't, I just can't imagine when.
And it's not because I don't, it's mostly because I don't know.
Okay.
Let's go, what's to the Rockies to Lynn in Washington?
Hello, I'm calling from an island near Seattle, so I guess I must be calling in from Ground Zero tonight, according to the news.
I always get so plugged in by this conversation, it really gets me mad, because it seems so hypocritical when we talk, we do all this hand-wringing about other countries having a nuclear weapon, because here we sit, armed to the eyeballs, with nukes pointed in every which way, and And yet earlier tonight the guest was real, there was a lot of concern about if North Korea could reach the West Coast.
How many places can we reach?
Not almost.
We can reach them all, dear.
You're absolutely right about that.
But there is a qualitative difference in North Korea and the United States, or even India and Pakistan.
North Korea, obviously, we all know, is a very different kind of situation, and surely you understand that.
No, I disagree.
Historically, we're the only country on earth that has split the atom usage against a civilian population.
Not once, but twice.
That would make us historically the most dangerous population on the earth.
Would it?
Well, alright.
Doctor, respond to that.
I'm here to be interviewed about a book on the E-bomb.
That's true.
I don't respond to it.
That's fine.
Hey, by the way, let's go ahead and plug your... You're absolutely right.
I mean, that's what you were here for.
And so your book is available at a very reasonable price right now, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
In fact, Amazon.com or even through my own website, DougBeeson.com, you can learn about not only How to obtain the book, but also more about directed energy.
I try to give you not only information about that, but to also get you to other sites that talk about lasers, high-power microwaves, some of the advances.
In fact, there are even some educational websites that are out there.
There's the Center for Directed Energy in Dayton, Ohio, for example, that is involved with looking at the effects of directed energy weapons.
And again it's called the E-bomb, how America's new directed energy weapons will change the way wars will be fought in the future.
And I guess the way it's going right now, we better hope the very near future.
Let's try, well let's see, first time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Beeson, hello.
New energy weapons, I've understood for years That we have a bomb called the Neutron Bomb, known as a real estate weapon.
A neutron explodes at the speed of light, hits a human being, explodes, and leaves the real estate intact.
Nobody ever talks about this weapon.
As I understand it, we have it.
This is the perfect weapon for a situation like Korea or anyone else.
Also, my observation is what we do here with Korea will also tell what Iran's going to do next.
But could you talk a little bit about the neutron bomb and how it works and maybe have a little information on that?
Sure.
We can ask anyway.
Dr. Beeson, the neutron bomb.
Well, I know that about 15 years ago it was publicized that the possibility of producing one of those was possible.
I can't really talk about what's in our inventory now, but I don't think that any more work had really been carried out on that.
Because of different high-level policy decisions.
But neutron bombs are really not directed energy, because they don't direct any of the neutrons, which are elementary particles, in any direction.
They go in all directions.
And in fact, the type of directed energy weapons, when people talk about DEW, or directed energy weapons, include really just lasers and microwaves, high-power microwaves.
About 10 years ago, Particle beam weapons, which consist of either electron beams or neutral particle beams or charged particle beams, were being considered as part of directed energy.
The difference here is that those are actual beams of matter versus, say, lasers or high-power microwaves, which are just various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Particle beams actually use elementary matter, be it electrons or our ions to accelerate those to use as weapons, kind of
like lightning weapons, if you could harness weapons, but in a very directed, very lethal way.
The problem with that is that we know that lightning is very destructive, but it's almost
impossible to harness that energy because you can't make it go where you want to go.
It takes the successful tests that they've been able to field that demonstrate that it
is possible to propagate particle beam weapons, use buildings the size of aircraft carriers
to produce the power to produce the right environment to do it, and it's just not practical
to weaponize anything like that.
And so the result is that that type of work has kind of fallen off.
They've concentrated just on lasers and microwaves, and no type of either neutron or other particle
type weapons are really being looked at right now.
I wonder why.
I mean, the neutron bomb, the rough assessment or description of the neutron bomb was that it explodes, it doesn't destroy any real estate, it just kills all the people.
And if it's not in our inventory, I mean, why not?
I wonder what the rationale for not putting it in our inventory would possibly be, because As horrible as it is to kill people, it seems to me that not destroying the real estate and making it unlivable for the rest of forever would be a big advantage over a giant explosion making everything unlivable for generations.
Well, you still have an explosion with a neutron bomb because you need to be able to generate it.
It's just that that was a policy decision that was made at the highest level of our government many years ago, over a decade ago.
And as a scientist, I really can't, especially as a scientist that's aborting the government now, I really can't go against, you know, policy type decisions.
Of course not.
All right, let's go, I'm looking at the times here, let's go east of the Rockies.
You're on the air with Dr. Beeson.
Hi.
Hi.
A couple quick questions.
Does it raise any eyebrows as far as Japan being able to develop a nuclear bomb with the armistice signed at the end of World War II?
I would think that would be a definite, you know, no way.
And, you know, they were just pointing their bayonets at everybody in the region back 63 years ago.
But while the Korean situation is urgent, you know, if Iran develops the Shahad missile, will Germany be able to develop nuclear weapons?
Well, that's the whole proliferation question.
Excuse me.
You know, I don't know.
If I were Japanese right now, I would be thinking very heavily, I guess, about protecting myself.
Now, if you were to put yourself, doctor, in the place of the Japanese right now, And you had the raw materials to do it.
We certainly know the Japanese have the expertise to do it.
Would you be, if you were an advisor to the Japanese government, would you be advising them to be putting together nuclear weapons, or would you be advising them in some other way?
Well, I know that the Japanese are not prohibited by any external armistice uh... the term was used uh... earlier
on that it's mostly a part of their constitution about uh...
how they have their own uh... defense force
um...
and of course they have all the options that are open to them as a uh...
sovereign nation and it would really depend upon uh...
uh... the path that they decide to go forward on i guess i thought i'll just
step back on that
i i i do know that uh... that they are very interested in using uh...
on nuclear power for uh... civilian peaceful purposes uh... the old local global nuclear energy program a project
that the current administration is pushing
is one that has been realized uh... worldwide that uh...
to get away from the
environmental disastrous environmental defects of having uh...
coil or coal or oil
uh... burning uh...
uh... nations uh... to get away from that and to go to something which is
much cleaner much safer
uh... that you're gonna have to embrace uh... more nuclear energy
And I know that the Japanese are very interested in that are really leaders in the world right now and developing a very efficient, uh, highly safe type of nuclear reactors along with several other countries.
And, uh, here they are in a situation where They may feel threatened, but again, like any nation, they have a variety of options that are open to them.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Beeson.
Hello.
Hello, thank you for taking my call, and congratulations too.
Thank you.
I've got one quick comment and one quick question.
I know time is short.
First, to answer your question about the Japanese ships, I've been watching the news And there are no Japanese or U.S.
military assets moving towards North Korea.
I appreciate the update.
Thank you.
And the question is, are you a doctor?
Is your research, are the Heisman Alamos experimenting with directed energy weapons on submarines or warships at this time?
And I'll take my answer off the air.
Thank you.
Yeah, well, thanks for the question.
Great question.
As it turns out, the United States Navy is very interested in developing what is known as a free electron laser, an FEL,
free electron laser.
And the way that that works, it's an electric laser where an electron beam,
a form of elementary particle, is accelerated past a series of magnets called a wiggler.
And they're called a wiggler because the magnetic fields cause the electron beams to wiggle.
And if the conditions are right, that is the right energy level of the electrons and the right spacing of the magnets,
what comes out of the electrons as they wiggle past these fields is a very coherent light that is in phase with each
other.
And that's exactly what a laser is.
It's coherent light that's in phase with each other.
What that means is suppose that you have an electromagnetic field Where all the wave fronts are exactly matched.
It's kind of like having soldiers that are all stepping right in line, all pointing in the right direction.
That's all a laser is.
And this pre-electron laser can generate this laser field very efficiently.
That is, with a very low loss of power.
And it can produce high levels of power.
That is, in the megawatt or millions of watt class.
Well, the Navy wants to develop a This is a program that will probably take five to ten years to come to fruition.
its new electric ship, and the reason is to use it for defensive purposes against the
high-G cruise missiles that are coming online right now that might be used against Navy
vessels.
This is a program that will probably take five to ten years to come to fruition.
They're very interested in this, and the reason, again, they want to go to free electron lasers
is not only because of the high power and the high efficiency, but you can tune the
wavelength of this laser.
Typical wavelengths that you have on lasers are in the infrared, that is the heat, or they're in the visible, but they all have problems because they either scatter or they're absorbed by the atmosphere.
These free electron lasers, though, you can tune them so that the frequency can be optimized to just slip right through the atmosphere so that it's not absorbed by the water vapor, it's not scattered that much, And if the Navy is successful, then it could put a very accurate, very highly precise weapon on one of its electric ships sometime in the future.
All right, Dr. Beeson, our time is up.
I want to thank you for being here.
It was indeed a brave act for you to even continue to agree to be on the program under these circumstances.
Dr. Beeson, under other circumstances, I want to have you back and we'll do a show that, just like a laser beam, focuses on what you're doing or writing about, I guess I ought to say.
Buddy, thank you for being here.
That's great.
And if people would pick up a copy of the e-bomb, I'd really appreciate that.
Indeed so.
Doctor, good night.
Thank you, good night.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's it.
As I said, doing a program under these extreme circumstances is pretty wild in the first place, but we got it done for this weekend.
That's it.
I'm Art Bell at MindSpring.com from Southeast Asia.
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