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?
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