— A Weapon to End War —

PBS (Tesla - His life and Legacy) ^ | FR Post 02-17-02 | Editorial Staff - PBS

[vannrox]

A Weapon to End War

Tesla inherited from his father a deep hatred of war. Throughout his life, he sought a technological way to end warfare. He thought that war could be converted into, "a mere spectacle of machines."


In 1931 Tesla announced to reporters at a press conference that he was on the verge of discovering an entirely new source of energy. Asked to explain the nature of the power, he replied, "The idea first came upon me as a tremendous shock... I can only say at this time that it will come from an entirely new and unsuspected source."


War clouds were again darkening Europe. On 11 July 1934 the headline on the front page of the New York Times read, "TESLA, AT 78, BARES NEW 'DEATH BEAM.'" The article reported that the new invention "will send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 250 miles..." Tesla stated that the death beam would make war impossible by offering every country an "invisible Chinese wall."


The idea generated considerable interest and controversy. Tesla went immediately to J. P. Morgan, Jr. in search of financing to build a prototype of his invention. Morgan was unconvinced. Tesla also attempted to deal directly with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain. But when Chamberlain resigned upon discovering that he had been out-maneuvered by Hitler at Munich, interest in Tesla's anti-war weapon eventually collapsed.


By 1937 it was clear that war would soon break out in Europe. Frustrated in his attempts to generate interest and financing for his "peace beam," he sent an elaborate technical paper, including diagrams, to a number of Allied nations including the United States, Canada, England, France, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Titled "New Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-Dispersive Energy Through Natural Media," the paper provided the first technical description of what is today called a charged particle beam weapon.


What set Tesla's proposal apart from the usual run of fantasy "death rays" was a unique vacuum chamber with one end open to the atmosphere. Tesla devised a unique vacuum seal by directing a high-velocity air stream at the tip of his gun to maintain "high vacua." The necessary pumping action would be accomplished with a large Tesla turbine.


Of all the countries to receive Tesla's proposal, the greatest interest came from the Soviet Union. In 1937 Tesla presented a plan to the Amtorg Trading Corporation, an alleged Soviet arms front in New York City. Two years later, in 1939, one stage of the plan was tested in the USSR and Tesla received a check for $25,000.


Tesla hoped that his invention would be used for purely defensive purposes, and thus would become an anti-war machine. His system required a series of power plants located along a country's coast that would scan the skies in search of enemy aircraft. Since the beam was projected in a straight line, it was only effective for about 200 miles — the distance of the curvature of the earth.


Tesla also contemplated peacetime applications for his particle beam, one being to transmit power without wires over long distances. Another radical notion he proposed was to heat up portions of the upper atmosphere to light the sky at night — a man-made aurora borealis.


Whether Tesla's idea was ever taken seriously is still a mater of conjecture. Most experts today consider his idea infeasible. Though, his death beam bears an uncanny resemblance to the charged-particle beam weapon developed by both the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.


Nonetheless, Tesla's dream for a technological means to end war seems as impossible now as it did when he proposed the idea in the 1930s.


One of the more controversial topics involving Nikola Tesla is what became of many of his technical and scientific papers after he died in 1943. Just before his death at the height of World War II, he claimed that he had perfected his so-called "death beam." So it was natural that the FBI and other U.S. Government agencies would be interested in any scientific ideas involving weaponry. Some were concerned that Tesla's papers might fall into the hands of the Axis powers or the Soviets.


The morning after the inventor's death, his nephew Sava Kosanovic´ hurried to his uncle's room at the Hotel New Yorker. He was an up-and-coming Yugoslav official with suspected connections to the communist party in his country. By the time he arrived, Tesla's body had already been removed, and Kosanovic´ suspected that someone had already gone through his uncle's effects. Technical papers were missing as well as a black notebook he knew Tesla kept—a notebook with several hundred pages, some of which were marked "Government."


P. E. Foxworth, assistant director of the New York FBI office, was called in to investigate. According to Foxworth, the government was "vitally interested" in preserving Tesla's papers. Two days after Tesla's death, representatives of the Office of Alien Property went to his room at the New Yorker Hotel and seized all his possessions.


Dr. John G. Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody. Following a three-day investigation, Dr. Trump concluded:


His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.


Just after World War II, there was a renewed interest in beam weapons. Copies of Tesla's papers on particle beam weaponry were sent to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. An operation code-named "Project Nick" was heavily funded and placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened. The copies of Tesla's papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened to them.


In 1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions were released to Sava Kosanovic´ and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where a museum was created in the inventor's honor. For many years, under Tito's communist regime, it was extremely difficult for Western journalists and scholars to gain access to the Tesla archive in Yugoslavia; even then they were allowed to see only selected papers. This was not the case for Soviet scientists who came in delegations during the 1950s. Concerns increased in 1960 when Soviet Premier Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage."


Work on beam weapons also continued in the United States. In 1958 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a top-secret project code-named "Seesaw" at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to develop a charged-particle beam weapon. More than ten years and twenty-seven million dollars later, the project was abandoned "because of the projected high costs associated with implementation as well as the formidable technical problems associated with propagating a beam through very long ranges in the atmosphere." Scientists associated with the project had no knowledge of Tesla's papers.


In the late 1970s, there was fear that the Soviets may have achieved a technological breakthrough. Some U.S. defense analysts concluded that a large beam weapon facility was under construction near the Sino-Soviet border in Southern Russia.


The American response to this "technological surprise" was the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Teams of government scientists were urged to "turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."


Today, after a half-century of research and billions of dollars of investment, the SDI program is generally considered a failure, and there is still no realistic means of defense against a nuclear missile attack.


For many years scientists and researchers have sought for Tesla's missing papers with no apparent success. It is conceivable that if Nikola Tesla knew a means for accurately projecting lethal beams of energy through the atmosphere, he may have taken it to the grave with him.

[vannrox]

A very good read.

[tbeatty]

Today, after a half-century of research and billions of dollars of investment, the SDI program is generally considered a failure, and there is still no realistic means of defense against a nuclear missile attack.

I think I would describe it as "in development." But then again, I'm not from the ultra-left wing PBS.

[It'salmosttolate]

ARMY OWNS THE WEATHER

[dighton]

... the SDI program is generally considered a failure ...

Typical dishonest use of the passive voice. Such writers are generally considered fit for flogging.

[Free the USA]

Bump List

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man and to this day still doesn't receive the credit he deserves for so many of his discoveries and inventions.

[Billy_bob_bob]

I've read a couple of bio's about Tesla, and I'm of the opinion that he was pretty much losing it by the late thirties. He was a truly brilliant mind, one of the greatest scientist of all time who made contributions to the science of electromagnetism that touch all of our lives every day. Sadly, he seriously declined in his later years, ending up living off of his reputation and former glory. A brilliant technical mind, but not so good with the business side of things.

[Libertarian_4_eva]

A Weapon to End War

Is one of the lies the public has been fed for many weapons for hundreds of years. Here is a very small list of weapons that was going to end all wars touted by the press at their time.

Machine Gun
BattleShip
Tanks
Nuclear Weapons

Has war ended? No now I am not against war but lets just stop the crap. I am shure with a little reasearch you guys can find more of these weapons that will end war examples.

[Cyber Liberty]

Of your list, and contrary to the peaceniks' bleating, "nuclear weapons" probably did the most to save mass quantities of humman life through prevention of war.

[manx]

If SDI was a failure why have they already shot down several missiles and are now building a laser to fit in the nose of a large plane.

The future is in laser technology and many people are going to be eating thier words before long.

[ThinkLikeWaterAndReeds]

We have already experienced "The war to end all wars". Is a new weapon going to thwart the greed, anger, and selfishness of mankind?

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

To: Libertarian_4_eva Of your list, and contrary to the peaceniks' bleating, "nuclear weapons" probably did the most to save mass quantities of humman life through prevention of war. 9 posted on 2/17/02 10:52 AM Pacific by Cyber Liberty

Strictly speaking, this is not really true.

What nuclear weapons have done, is deny the Aggressor Powers (herein defined as the USSR and Red China) the opportunity to force a military decision on the central theater of conflict. MAD doctrine having frustrated their desire to engage their opponents (the NATO West) in a direct engagement, it was necessary instead for them to pursue their expansionist goals by the prosecution of "proxy wars" in peripheral theaters (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan).

I am not saying that this is in any way a "bad thing". Nuclear Weapons have fulfilled the primary goal of any Republic, which is to defend its own citizenry from external aggression.

But having given nuclear weapons this credit, we should not pretend that they have "prevented war" (the swift conclusion of WWII against Japan being the only real example I can think of in that respect). Rather, they have redirected wars. But they have certainly not "prevented" them. As a matter of objective history, the latter half of the Twentieth Century has run red with the blood of millions killed in these vicious little non-Geneva-Convention "proxy wars".

That's simple fact.

Well you'll work harder with a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers 'til you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake

Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son... What you need, my son...
Is a holiday in Cambodia
Where people dress in black
A holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll kiss a** or crack
Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot...

And it's a holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll what you're told
A holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul
-- "Holiday in Cambodia", The Dead Kennedys, Give me Convenience or Give me Death

I'll credit nukes for keeping these wars off our shores, no question.
But not for "preventing" War. They have done no such thing.

[sam_paine]

No. A very "uninformed on the state-of-the-art" read!

USAF Airborne Laser Project

[Joe 6-pack]

Tesla Statue at Niagara Falls

As one of eastern-european descent, I've long admired his brilliance...

[Orual]

Whether Tesla's idea was ever taken seriously is still a mater of conjecture.

But it was a mother of an invention.

[satchmodog9]

What kind of pinko site did you link to. Good god.

[archy]

My grandfather was a senior officer with Western Electric, responsible for the laying of transatlantic phone cables and other major Bell System eastern seaboard projects. He was a personal acquaintance of Thomas Edison, and held a couple of patents on the use of underwater propulsion by electrical motors from his own research.

In the early 1970s, he was interviewed for the Bell company magagine Bellcore and was asked what he'd have done differently had he known in the early days of his career what he knew at the end of it.

*Well, we should have listened to Tesla,* he said. *We'd be living in a completely different world....*

[Joe 6-pack]

"*Well, we should have listened to Tesla,* he said. *We'd be living in a completely different world....*

I've heard that sentiment echoed in many converstation ranging from capital punishment (the electric chair) to conservation (power generation.) Much of the world we live in, is the result of the fact that Edison was a better PR man...not a better inventor.

[archy]

No. A very "uninformed on the state-of-the-art" read!

USAF Airborne Laser Project

See FReep thread *here* for a REALLY uninformed on the state-of-the-art" read....

-archy-/-

[George from New England]

Didn't Tesla have something to do with the invention of the EMP bomb. The electro-magnetic pulse generator is partially due to the Tesla coil invention, right?

Can someone chip in on this.

The EMP bomb wouldn't necessarily end war, but it would end the American way of life. Nothing electronic would work anymore. We'd see the clock turned back 100 years in only a microsecond.