pbs | 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.
