Secret Ray Indicated as New Weapon

Atlantic City — (AP) — There is one clue in the reports of the secret Anglo-American weapon said to outrival the atom bomb as credited yesterday to Prof. T. D. J. Leech in New Zealand.

That clue points to a ray or radiation of some sort.

The sentence reads: “One means of application would have some similarity to one method of using the atomic bomb.”

There are two methods of using the power of the atom; one in an explosive bomb, the other in the radioactive rays from common substances that are transmuted into temporary radioactivity. These would form a gas in the same sense as poison war gases. Most of the latter are not gases, but fine dusts or mists. The atomic poison gases would be the same.

THEIR POSSIBILITY was explained to President Roosevelt by scientists in 1939 and more recently Glenn Martin mentioned them as bombs that American military authorities are studying. Half a mile radius is the generally stated distance for such radioactivity to be effective in war.

No new sources of death rays were reported during the war, but such rays were known to electrical theorists before the war. They were considered useless even as possibilities.

Short-wave radio rays were one. It was considered possible to make such a ray that would be effective at four miles, not for killing that far away, but for crashing planes by interfering with the electrical portion of their engines.

THE DIFFICULTY was, for such a ray, the need of power equal to about 10 times that of Niagara Falls and a reflector, perhaps of pure aluminum, two hundred feet in diameter.

Close by, this sort of radiation was expected to be fatal. These engineering dreams were made before the great advances in very short radio waves that came out of the war.

If there is any possibility of concentrated radar or other short wave length rays that will kill men, no hint of that lethal power has leaked out.

NIKOLA TESLA, the father of induction in electricity, asserted frequently before his death a few years ago that he knew how to produce what he called curtains of force that no plane could fly through. He never explained them.

The Germans during the war printed some speculations on how to build a sun gun. This would be a huge burning glass, or plastic, floating several hundred or thousand miles above the earth’s surface which could be focused to destroy life by fire in vast areas. The scientific principles of producing such a satellite of the earth, really equivalent to a tiny moon, are unknown, but there is nothing at all in present scientific achievements to overcome the difficulties of launching or even of construction.

Post-war secret weapons included a cosmic ray bomb. This had its origin in misunderstandings on the part of laymen and never came from any scientific source.

A STARLIGHT BOMB would be easier to conceive of, because total starlight is many times more energetic than the total energies of cosmic rays.

A single cosmic ray is millions of times more energetic than any single beam of starlight but there is no known possibility of concentrating them.