page_title: Project Excalibur
section_title: Excalibur ends
hierarchical_section_title: Project Excalibur / History / Excalibur ends
caption_attribution_description: English: 1/13/1989 President Reagan shaking hands with Edward Teller during a photo op with the White House Science Council in the Oval Office
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: By 1986 it was reported that the SDIO saw Excalibur primarily as an anti-satellite weapon, and perhaps useful as a discrimination tool to tell warheads from decoys. This, along with the results from the most recent tests, made it clear it was no longer considered to be useful as a BMD weapon on its own. By the late 1980s, the entire concept was being derided in the press and by other members of the lab; the New York Times quoted George Maenchen as stating "All these claims are totally false. They lie in the realm of pure fantasy." The stories prompted a 60 Minutes interview with Teller, but when they began to question him on Woodruff, Teller attempted to rip off the microphone.
  Funding for Excalibur peaked in 1987 at $349 million and then began to rapidly reverse. The March 1988 budget ended development as a weapon system, and the original R group was shut down. In the 1990 budget, Congress eliminated it as a separate item. X-ray laser research continued at LLNL, but as a purely scientific project, not as a weapons program. Another test, Greenwater, had already been planned but was ultimately canceled. In total, ten underground tests were used in the development program.
caption: Teller remained a regular visitor at the White House, seen here meeting President Reagan in January 1989.
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