White Oak particle beam weapon program

Quarter-billion-dollar Star Wars-era program for relativistic electron beam anti-missile weapon.

During the Star Wars buildup in the mid 80s, there was lots of money for lots of things. The US Navy at White Oak, Maryland, was developing — spent a quarter billion dollars developing — a particle beam weapon. This was to be a relativistic electron beam, millions of electron volts, that if there was a cruise missile or an Exocet missile coming in to attack the ship, this was to take it out. This was after the Falklands War, when the French Exocet missile hit the British destroyer HMS Sheffield and destroyed the ship. The reason it destroyed the ship had nothing to do with the explosive charge of the Exocet or setting off the charges. It was the fact that the ship had an aluminum superstructure, and the superstructure caught on fire. You can't put out the fire, and the whole thing burned.