That's the technology that can beam radio frequencies to destroy missile and aircraft components, scramble radar screens, and even alter human mind functions. The same technology, with modifications, could disorient and even tranquilize military personnel, rendering them virtually helpless in the battle zone. These are the new weapons of war we will examine in this series. For the past 40 years, the world has been riveted by the threat of nuclear war, and more recently by the prospect of space defenses using lasers and other modern technologies. But while both sides of the Geneva Summit will be focusing on these matters, progress is being made in even newer weapons that could render any arms agreement relatively useless.
Lightning is the most dramatic form of energy to be found in nature.
Scientists have succeeded in creating limited types of artificial lightning. And some think that these could be the forerunners of a new type of directed-energy weapon, part of a family of weapons that operate within the radio frequency segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, and are thus referred to as radio frequency weapons. Dr. James Fraser has researched electromagnetic effects for the Air Force for over ten years and he, like a growing number of weapons experts, feels that radio frequency, or RF, weapons could be the wildcard in the ongoing arms race. Fraser You could have tremendous amounts of radiated power, and what you did with that power, then, is a matter of engineering design, and what your goal is. DeCaro Robert Bass, a physicist and Ph.D. in mathematics, is working on U.S. weapons research.