US Navy particle beam weapons welding research

Navy spent a quarter billion dollars on proton-beam anti-missile weapons through the mid-80s to early 90s. After the Cold War ended, the program looked for applications. Tom was invited to a workshop to assess welding nuclear submarines with the 5-megawatt beams; he pointed out you only need tens of kilowatts. He got a mid-90s research project to evaluate the technology for welding and heat treatment.

In the early 90s, the military had spent a quarter billion dollars developing particle-beam weapons — proton beams the Navy was supposedly going to shoot through the air to shoot down a missile coming toward the ship. In the Falkland Islands War in the 80s, a French Exocet missile fired by the Argentinians hit the British cruiser Sheffield, and an aluminum fire started. There's debate on whether it was an aluminum fire, but it probably was, and it wiped out the entire ship. One small missile that you could buy from arms dealers anywhere in the world could wipe out a capital ship of one of the world's major navies. So the US Navy was trying to develop these particle-beam weapons from the mid-80s through the early 90s, and then peace broke out with the former Soviet Union. They weren't quite as concerned anymore, but they had spent a quarter billion dollars and they wanted to find some application. They had a three-day workshop, invited me to it, and said, "Can we use these to weld nuclear submarines?" I went down and said, "Well, maybe you can melt a nuclear submarine, but with 5 megawatts of power, you don't need that to weld. You only need a few tens of kilowatts."