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C00002 00002	SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE NUCLEAR BOMB POWERED X-RAY LASER WEAPON
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SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE NUCLEAR BOMB POWERED X-RAY LASER WEAPON

If the story is correct, the following considerations arise:

1. I am not sure that I agree with Hans Moravec when he wrote "I wish the
people who read this list who were involved with this could tell us more."
Perhaps it would be better if they had been in a position to keep it
entirely secret.  Perhaps not.

2. The people who advocated research in the beam weapon area for fear of
technological surprise are vindicated, and the opponents of this research
are discredited.  This is especially true of people who put their
reputations behind the proposition that beam weapons were a lot of
nonsense.  (Names on request).

3. The weapon makes most sense fired from satellites accompanied by lots
of decoy satellites, since nuclear weapons are expensive.  This would mean
a very large military space program that would have all sorts of useful
spinoffs.

4. Testing the weapon in space would violate the existing test ban treaty.
Besides that, the tests themselves might be quite harmful to people on
that side of the earth who happened to be looking up unless the test was
conducted on the other side of the moon or at a low enough altitude with a
guarantee of cloud cover over the whole area in sight of the bomb.

5. There is a potential very large military advantage to the side that has
them, but an attacker who relied on them to prevent counter-attack would
have to be very self-confident that all sorts of things would work as
designed.

6. There is an old Chinese blessing, "May you not live in interesting
times".

The above speculations are not based on special knowledge. - John McCarthy