Ryan opened his portfolio and set a photograph on the low table. Next came a diagram. “Mr. President, this is a satellite shot of what we call sites Bach and Mozart. They’re on a mountain southeast of the city of Dushanbe in the Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic, about seventy miles from the Afghan border. The mountain is about seventy-six hundred feet high. We’ve had it under surveillance for the past two years. This one”—another photo went down—”is Sary Shagan. The Russians have had ballistic-missile-defense work going on here for the past thirty years. This site right here is believed to be a laser test range. We believe that the Russians made a major breakthrough in laser power here two years ago. They then changed the activity at Bach to accommodate it. Last week they ran what was probably a full-power test.
“This array here at Bach is a laser transmitter.”
“And they blasted a satellite with it?” Jeff Pelt asked.
“Yes, sir,” Major Gregory answered. “They ‘slagged it down,’ as we say at the lab. They pumped enough energy into it to, well, to melt some of the metal and destroy the solar power cells entirely.”
“We can’t do that yet?” the President asked Gregory.
“No, sir. We can’t put that much power out the front end.”
“How is it that they got ahead of us? We’re putting a lot of money into lasers, aren’t we, General?”
Parks was uncomfortable with the recent developments, but his voice was dispassionate. “So are the Russians, Mr. President. They’ve made quite a few leaps because of their efforts in fusion. They’ve been investing in high-energy physics research for years as part of an effort to get fusion-power reactors. About fifteen years ago that effort was mated with their missile-defense program. If you put that much time and effort into basic research, you can expect a return, and they’ve gotten plenty. They invented the RFQ—the radio-frequency quadrapole—that we use in our neutral-particle beam experiments. They invented the Tokamak magnetic-containment device that we copied up at Princeton, and they invented the Gyrotron. Those are three major breakthroughs in high-energy physics that we know about. We’ve used some of them in our own SDI research, and it’s for sure that they’ve figured out the same applications.”
“Okay, what do we know about this test they ran?”
It was Gregory’s turn again. “Sir, we know that it came from Dushanbe because the only other high-energy laser sites, at Sary Shagan and Semipalatinsk, were under the visible horizon—I mean, they couldn’t see the satellite from there. We know that it wasn’t an infrared laser, because the beam would have been seen by the sensors on the Cobra Belle aircraft. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say that the system uses the free-electron laser—”
“It does,” Judge Moore noted. “We just confirmed that.”
“That’s the one we’re working on at Tea Clipper. It seems to offer the best potential for weapons applications.”
“Can I ask why, Major?” the President asked.
“Power efficiency, sir. The actual lasing occurs in a stream of free electrons—that means they’re not attached to atoms like they usually are, sir—in a vacuum. You use a linear accelerator to produce a stream of the electrons and shoot them into the cavity, which has a low-energy laser shining along its axis. The idea is that you can use electromagnets to oscillate the electrons crosswise to their path. What you get is a beam of light coincident with the oscillation frequency of the wiggler magnets—that means you can tune it, sir, like a radio. By altering the energy of the beam, you can select the exact light frequency you generate. Then you can recycle the electrons back into the linear accelerator and shoot them back into the lasing cavity again. Since the electrons are already in a high-energy state, you gain a lot of power efficiency right there. The bottom line, sir, is that you can theoretically pump out forty percent of the energy you pump in. If you can achieve that reliably, you can kill anything you can see—when we talk about high energy levels, sir, we’re speaking in relative terms. Compared to the electrical power that this country uses to cook food, the amount needed for a laser defense system is negligible. The trick is making it really work. We haven’t done that yet.”
“Why not?” The President was interested now, leaning forward slightly in his chair.
“We’re still learning how to make the laser work, sir. The fundamental problem is in the lasing cavity—that’s where the energy comes off the electrons and turns into a beam of light. We haven’t been able yet to make a very wide one. If the cavity is too narrow, then you have such a high power density that you fry the optical coatings both in the cavity itself and on the mirrors that you use to aim the beam.”
“But they’ve beaten the problem. How do you think they did it?”
“I know what we’re trying to do. As you draw energy into the laser beam, the electrons become less energetic, okay? That means you have to taper the magnetic field that contains them—and remember that at the same time you have to continue the wiggling action of the field, too. We haven’t figured that out yet. Probably they have, and that probably came from their research into fusion power. All the ideas for getting energy out of controlled fusion are concerned with using a magnetic field to contain a mass of high-energy plasma—in principle the same thing we’re trying to do with the free electrons. Most of the basic research in that field comes from Russia, sir. They’re ahead of us because they’ve spent more time and money in the most important place.”
“Okay, thank you, Major.” The President turned to Judge Moore. “Arthur, what does CIA think?”
“Well, we’re not going to disagree with Major Gregory—he just spent a day briefing our Science and Technology people. We have confirmed that the Soviets do have six free-electron lasers at this place. They have made a breakthrough in power output and we’re trying to find out exactly what the breakthrough was.”
“Can you do that?” General Parks asked.
“I said we’re trying, General. If we’re very lucky, we’ll have an answer by the end of the month.”
“Okay, we know they can build a very powerful laser,” the President said. “Next question: is it a weapon?”
“Probably not, Mr. President,” General Parks said. “At least not yet. They still have a problem with thermal blooming because they haven’t learned how to copy our adaptive optics. They’ve gotten a lot of technology from the West, but so far they don’t have that. Until they do, they can’t use the ground-based laser as we have, that is, relaying the beam by orbiting mirror to a distant target. But what they have now can probably do great damage to a satellite in low-earth orbit. There are ways to protect satellites against that, of course, but it’s the old battle between heavier armor and heavier warheads. The warhead usually wins in the end.”
“Which is why we should negotiate the weapons out of existence.” Ernie Allen spoke for the first time. General Parks looked over to him with unconcealed irritation. “Mr. President, we are now getting a taste—just a taste—of how dangerous and destabilizing these weapons might be. If we merely consider this Dushanbe place to be an antisatellite weapon, look at the implications it has for verification of arms-treaty compliance, and for intelligence-gathering in general. If we don’t try to stop these things now, all we’ll get is chaos.”
“You can’t stop progress,” Parks observed.
Alien snorted. “Progress? Hell, we have a draft treaty on the table now to reduce weapons by half. That’s progress, General. In the test you just ran over the South Atlantic, you missed with half your shots—I can take out as many missiles as you can.”
Ryan thought the General might come off his chair at that one, but instead he adopted his intellectual guise. “Mr. Allen, that was the first test of an experimental system, and half of its shots did hit. In fact, all of the targets were eliminated in under a second. Major Gregory here will have that targeting problem beaten by summer—won’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir!” Gregory piped up. “All we have to do is rework the code some.”
“Okay. If Judge Moore’s people can tell us what the Russians have done to increase their laser power, we have most of the rest of the system architecture already tested and validated. In two or three years, we’ll have it all—and then we can start thinking seriously about deployment.”
“And if the Soviets start shooting your mirrors out of space?” Alien asked dryly. “You could have the best laser system ever made on the ground, but it won’t do much more than defend New Mexico.”
“They’ll have to find ’em first, and that’s a much harder problem than you think. We can put ’em pretty high up, between three hundred and a thousand miles. We can use stealth technology to make them hard to locate on radar—you can’t do that with most satellites, but we can do it with these. The mirrors will be relatively small, and light. That means we can deploy a lot of them. Do you know how big space is, and how many thousands of pieces of junk are orbiting up there? They’d never get them all,” Parks concluded with confidence.