It's the mid 1930s and the world is bracing
for a new global conflict. Despite years of attempts at ensuring world
peace through the League of Nations, diplomacy seems to have failed around the world and
militaries once more prepare for war. Yet many nations still remember the historical
cataclysm that was World War I, and are fearful of the death toll of a new war in the mechanized
age. Others, like Japan, look at the staggering
death tolls and years of trench warfighting as a warning- the small island nation is modern
and industrialized, but it lacks the manpower and resources to wage a long, costly war against
a major power. All around the world scientists race to discover
the next ultimate weapon, a device that can either defeat one's enemies or defend oneself
with such killing power that war would be undesirable. For Japan, they thought that weapon would
be the Ku-Go deathray weapon. Japan in the mid 1930s has great ambitions
to become the next global superpower. The first phase of its plan is already underway,
with its troops occupying Manchuria where they have set up a puppet government that
is beholden to Japan. In exchange for Japan's 'protection', the
government of Manchuria exports to the Japanese vast quantities of natural resources that
the nation lacks. Yet Japan knows that in order to secure its
role as a global superpower it must first seize the rich farmlands of southern China,
and then deal with America across the Pacific. Its ambitions are grand, especially for such
a small island nation, and success rides on a knife's edge, as the country will never
be able to afford a protracted conflict against the industrialized might of the United States. A weapon is needed, something so devastating
that the Americans will never dare to disrupt their plans in Asia. Years earlier Nikola Tesla approached the
League of Nations with a proposed superweapon, an electromagnetic weapon so devastating that
it could knock a thousand planes out of the sky at a range of two hundred miles (322 km). Such a weapon would give the side that wielded
it an insurmountable advantage, and interest quickly grew around Tesla's plans. But Tesla didn't wish to construct these weapons
for conquest, but rather, for peace. Given their incredible size and the huge amounts
of power needed to generate 60 million volts of electricity, Tesla knew that these weapons
would not be mobile, and saw this as a purely defensive weapon. Such a powerful defensive weapon, Tesla figured,
would make war completely impossible. Yet despite initial interest, no nation thought
that it was possible to generate the electricity needed to power this weapon, and thus the
idea was disregarded by nations around the world. The seed of the idea however was quickly investigated,
and Britain's attempts to make a death ray would lead to the development of radar, itself
a superweapon which gave Britain a huge advantage intercepting German planes and in naval battles
against German ships during the war. Japanese agents inside the United States learned
of Tesla's superweapon and passed the plans along to Japan, where interest quickly grew
among the military. Preparing for major offensives across the
Pacific, and knowing that the United States stood between victory and defeat, General
Yamamoto was looking for a weapon that would give Japan an edge over the US, and he thought
he found it with Tesla's death ray. Yamamoto would tap Japanese physicist Yoji
Ito, a leading mind of his time, who along with two other physicists- Maso Kotani and
Sin-Itiro Tomonaga- carefully poured over Tesla's plans and came to the same conclusion
as the United States: it was impossible to generate the electricity needed to power this
superweapon. But while Tesla's electricity weapon was impossible,
it did get the Japanese thinking along the lines of building electromagnetic weapons. They turned to their ongoing research into
magnetrons, which were being developed at the time as part of their own research into
radar, and planned to develop a much larger, more powerful magnetron. The device would emit high powered beams of
very short radio waves which would be capable of causing intense psychological or even physiological
harm to soldiers in the beam's path. It was possible even that the beam could make
internal combustion engines stop, making it powerful enough to stop everything from tanks
to airplanes in their tracks. With promising initial results, the Japanese
invested heavily into the project, and it was put under the control of General Sueyoshi
Kusaba, based in a brand new laboratory established at Shimada, Shizuoka Prefecture. The weapon's code-name would be Ku-Go. The Japanese immediately began testing radio
waves on animals as well as car and airplane engines. The first experiments performed on mice, rabbits,
groundhogs, and monkeys showed that waves with a range of 78.74 inches (2 meters) to
22.63 inches (60 centimeters), could cause lung bleeding and destroy brain cells. If it worked on small animals, the Japanese
were sure it would work on human beings. Tests on internal combustion engines were
largely failures however, and while the beam could indeed stop an exposed car engine, it
could not do so if the engine was protected, or simply under a hood. The beam was even less effective against well-protected
aircraft engines, and dreams of shooting down American aircraft with radio waves were dashed. Plowing ahead with the research though the
Japanese looked to the beams' effect on living organisms as signs that the weapon could at
least work against living targets. They built a prototype in 1944 consisting
of an 80-centimeter magnetron powered by 30 kilowatts feeding a dipole antenna at the
bottom of a 1 meter ellipsoid reflector. The oversized beam was first tested on a rabbit,
which was placed in a cage 98 feet (30 meters) away. The beam was powered up and the rabbit zapped,
but it took ten minutes to die from the microwaves. Next they put a groundhog in the cage and
this time the groundhog took twenty minutes to drop dead. Due to war difficulties, Japanese attempts
to test the beam on a monkey were unsuccessful as they couldn't get their hands on a monkey
at the time. Despite the lackluster performance of the
death ray, the Japanese developed plans to seriously upscale the weapon by building a
new ray powered by four magnetrons with an output of 250 to 300 kilowatts. The project's physicist's estimated that this
new weapon would take ten minutes to kill a rabbit at a distance of .6 miles (1 km). This meant that at much shorter ranges the
weapon could be lethal in minutes, and while it was certainly no death ray, it could still
have potential if used as a defensive weapon against American landings. By this time though Japan's empire was crumbling
under the incessant American assault, and research on the death ray was abandoned. Today death ray weapons are at last being
made a reality, though not in the overpowering and war-ending way that Tesla or the Japanese
had envisioned. Instead of death rays capable of destroying
entire armies in one fell swoop, nations around the world are developing high-intensity lasers
which are already proving their effectiveness in everything from ballistic missile defense
to destroying small boats. The US Navy has several ships outfitted with
a powerful laser weapon that can shoot drones out of the sky and incinerate fleets of swarming
suicide boats, while a new push for ballistic missile defense has seen the United States
develop everything from airborne laser systems to satellite-mounted particle beam weapons,
both of which are capable of destroying a ballistic missile from hundreds, maybe even
thousands of miles away. In the end the quest for the ultimate death
ray was an impractical one, but modern laser and directed energy weapons do offer some
of the capabilities that Tesla had dreamt about. With their ability to strike targets at or
near the speed of light, these new death rays are proving that they might actually provide
the long-elusive goal of effective ballistic missile defense, and so while they may not
eliminate war altogether as Tesla had hoped, perhaps the US's ballistic missile defense
shield could at last give us a world where nuclear war is both impractical and impossible. Do you think a true death ray weapon could
ever be built? Let us know in the comments, and as always
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