page_title: Project Excalibur
section_title: Dauphin success
hierarchical_section_title: Project Excalibur / History / Dauphin success
caption_attribution_description: English: George Maenchen (left) and George Chapline Jr. (right) stand in front of the instrumentation head for the Dauphin nuclear test, which took place in November 1980. The head frame contains a new type of X-ray laser designed by Peter Hagelstein.
context_page_description: Project Excalibur was a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Cold War-era research program to develop an X-ray laser as a ballistic missile defense for the United States. The concept involved packing large numbers of expendable X-ray lasers around a nuclear device. When the device detonated, the X-rays released by the bomb would be focused by the lasers, each of which would be aimed at a target missile. When detonated in space, the lack of atmosphere to block the X-rays allowed attacks on missiles thousands of kilometers away.
  Excalibur appeared to offer an enormous leap forward in BMD performance. Previously, missile-based anti-ballistic missile systems faced the problem that they attacked the warheads, not the ICBMs that launched them; a single ICBM could carry multiple warheads in a MIRV system, so if the attacker added a single new missile to their fleet, dozens of interceptors would have to be built to counter it. Excalibur would attack the missiles before the warheads separated, and a single Excalibur contained as many as 50 lasers and could potentially shoot down a corresponding number of missiles.
context_section_description: Peter Hagelstein was in an undergraduate physics program at MIT in 1974 when he applied for a Hertz Foundation scholarship. Teller was on the Hertz board, and Hagelstein soon had an interview with Lowell Wood. Hagelstein won the scholarship, and Wood then went on to offer him a summer position at LLNL. He had never heard of the lab, and Wood explained they were working on lasers, fusion, and similar concepts. Hagelstein arrived in May 1975, but nearly left when he found the area to be "disgusting" and immediately surmised they were working on weapons research when he saw the barbed wire and armed guards. He stayed on only because he met interesting people.
  Hagelstein was given the task of simulating the X-ray laser process on LLNL's supercomputers. His program, known as XRASER for "X-Ray laser", eventually grew to about 40,000 lines of code. He received his Masters in 1976 and took a full-time job at the lab intending to lead the development of a working laser. The idea was to use the lab's powerful fusion lasers as an energy source, as Hagelstein and Wood had suggested in their review paper. Hagelstein used XRASER to simulate about 45 such concepts before he found one that appeared to work. These used the lasers to heat metal foils and give off X-rays, but by the late 1970s, none of these experiments had been successful.
  After the Diablo Hawk failure, Hagelstein reviewed Chapline's idea and came up with a new concept that should be much more efficient. Chapline had used a lightweight material, a fiber taken from a local weed, but Hagelstein suggested using a metal rod instead. Although initially skeptical, Wood came to support the idea and successfully argued that both concepts be tested in Chapline's shot. The critical test was carried out on 14 November 1980 as Dauphin, part of Operation Guardian. Both lasers worked, but Hagelstein's design was much more powerful. The lab soon decided to move forward with Hagelstein's version, forming the "R Program", led by another O-Group member, Tom Weaver.
caption: George Chapline, Jr. (right) and George Maenchen (left) at the world's first X-ray laser prior to the Dauphin underground nuclear test.
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