Naval Surface Warfare Center particle beam weapon program

Post-Cold-War repurposing question — could relativistic electron beams weld submarines? Tom's answer: too much power, too much shielding, not practical. Used to illustrate the upper end of the heat-intensity scale and the limits of "just throw more energy at it."

I taught a class a few years ago in the early '90s, '92 or '93. The Naval Surface Warfare Center had spent about a quarter billion dollars trying to develop a particle beam weapon. This was going to be the new Phalanx system: you shoot down an incoming missile from a surface ship using relativistic electron beams that go thirty miles at close to the speed of light. They built these units up at White Oak and some of the National Labs. Then peace broke out with the former Soviet Union, and all of a sudden they had this technology — what do we do with these pulsed-power relativistic electron beams? So they had a three-day workshop and invited me down to help them understand whether they could weld nuclear submarines. They saw Navy work — let's apply it to welding submarines. I got down there, I looked at what they had — megawatts of power — and I said, well, you might be able to melt a submarine but I'm not sure you could weld. You only need about ten to a hundred kilowatts to weld, and you've got so much more energy. Plus it gives off x-rays to beat the band; you have to have two feet of radiation protection, and you can't just clear out the whole shipyard because you're going to start welding a joint. So I had to explain some practical things to the scientists.