Some ion cannon particles have potential practical applications, such as anti-missile defense systems or meteorite defenses. However, the vast majority of the concepts of these weapons belong to the world of science fiction, where this kind of guns are present in great abundance. They go by many names: phasers, rarefied particle cannons, ion cannons, proton beam cannons, beam cannons, etc.

Concept

The concept of partial beam weapons comes from sound scientific principles and experiments that are currently being carried out around the world. One effective process for damaging or destroying a target is to simply overheat until it is instantly gone. However, after decades of research and development, partial beam weapons are still at the research stage, and we have yet to test in practice whether such guns can be used as effective remedy defeat. Many people dream of assembling an ion gun with their own hands and testing its properties in practice.

Particle accelerators

Particle accelerators are a well-developed technology that has been used in scientific research for decades. They use electromagnetic fields to accelerate and direct charged particles along a predetermined path, and electrostatic "lenses" focus these streams into collisions. The cathode ray tube found in many 20th century televisions and computer monitors is a very simple type of particle accelerator. More powerful versions include synchrotrons and cyclotrons used in nuclear research. Electron Beam Weapons are an advanced version of this technology. It accelerates charged particles (in most cases electrons, positrons, protons, or ionized atoms, but very advanced versions can accelerate other particles such as mercury nuclei) to near the speed of light, and then releases them at the target. These particles have enormous kinetic energy, with which they charge the matter on the surface of the target, causing almost instantaneous and catastrophic overheating. This, in essence, is the basic principle of the ion gun.

Physical Features

The main capabilities of the ion gun still come down to the instantaneous and painless destruction of the target. Charged particle beams diverge rapidly due to mutual repulsion, so neutral particle beams are most often proposed. Neutral particle beam weapons ionize atoms by stripping an electron from each atom, or by allowing each atom to capture an additional electron. The charged particles are then accelerated and neutralized again by adding or removing electrons.

Cyclotron particle accelerators, linear particle accelerators, and synchrotron particle accelerators can accelerate positively charged hydrogen ions until their speed approaches the speed of light, and each individual ion has a kinetic energy of 100 MeV to 1000 MeV or more. Then the resulting high-energy protons can capture electrons from the electron of the emitter electrodes and thus be electrically neutralized. This creates an electrically neutral beam of high energy hydrogen atoms that can flow in a straight line near the speed of light to smash its target and damage it.

Overcoming speed limits

The pulsating particle beam emitted by such a weapon can contain 1 gigajoule of kinetic energy or more. The speed of the beam approaching the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s in vacuum) combined with the energy created by the weapon negates any realistic means of protecting the target from the beam. Target hardening by shielding or choice of materials would be impractical or inefficient, especially if the beam could be maintained at full power and accurately focused on the target.

In the US Army

The US Defense Strategy Initiative has invested in the development of neutral particle beam technology to be used as a weapon in outer space. Neutral beam accelerator technology has been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A prototype neutral hydrogen beam weapon was launched aboard a suborbital sounding rocket from the White Sands Missile in July 1989 as part of the Beam Experiments Aboard Rocket (BEAR) project. It reached a maximum altitude of 124 miles and successfully operated in space for 4 minutes before returning to Earth. In 2006, the recovered experimental device was transferred from Los Alamos to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. However full story development of the ion gun is hidden from the mass layman. Who knows what other weapons the Americans acquired for Lately. The wars of the future may surprise us greatly.

In the Star Wars universe

IN " star wars ah" ion air cannons are a form of weaponry that produces ionized particles capable of destroying electronic systems, can even turn off a large capital ship. During the Battle of Sikka Island, continued fire from these guns from several ships caused significant damage to the hull of at least one Arquitens-class light cruiser.

The Eta-2 class light interceptor used the same cannons, which belched plasma, which could cause temporary electrical failures in the mechanism upon impact.

Y-wing fighters were also equipped with these cannons, primarily those used by the Alliance Gold Squadron. Although their field of fire was somewhat limited, the ion cannons were powerful enough that three explosions were enough to disable an Arquitens command cruiser, and only one to completely disable a TIE/D Defender fighter. This was demonstrated during a firefight in the Archeion Nebula.

At the start of the Clone Wars, she equipped the massive heavy cruiser Sujugator with huge ion cannons. Under the command of General Grievous, this cruiser attacked dozens of Republic warships and made them feel the destructive power of ion weapons. After the Battle of Abregado, the Republic learned of them.

Fury's ion cannons were disabled by Republic Shadow Squadron during a battle near the Caliida Nebula. The giant cruiser was later destroyed when Jedi General Anakin Skywalker captured the ship from the inside and caused it to crash into the Dead Moon of Antar.

During the early rebellion against the Galactic Empire, Gold Squadron's bombers were equipped with ion cannons. The MC75 cruisers used by the Rebel Alliance were armed with heavy ion mounts.

During the Galactic civil war The Rebel Alliance used a stationary ion cannon to disable Death Squadron's Star Destroyers during the evacuation of Echo Base.

Program for DDOS

Low Orbit Ion Cannon is an open source network utility and denial of service attack application written in C#. LOIC was originally developed by Praetox Technologies but was later released to the public free of charge and is now hosted on several open source platforms.

LOIC performs a DoS attack (or, if used by multiple parties, a DDoS attack) on a target site by targeting the server with TCP or UDP packets to disrupt the service of a specific host. People have used LOIC to join volunteer botnets.

The software inspired an independent JavaScript version called JS LOIC, as well as a web-based version of LOIC called the Low Orbit Web Cannon. It allows you to perform a DoS attack directly from a web browser.

Protection method

Security experts cited by the BBC have pointed out that well-designed firewall settings can filter out much of the traffic from DDoS attacks through the LOIC, thus preventing the attacks from being fully effective. In at least one case, filtering all UDP and ICMP traffic blocked a LOIC attack. Because ISPs provide less bandwidth to each of their clients in order to provide guaranteed levels of service to all of their clients at the same time, these types of firewall rules are more effective when implemented at a point upstream of the application server's Internet upstream. . In other words, it is easy to force an ISP to reject traffic destined for a client by sending more traffic than it is allowed to, and any filtering that occurs on the client's side after traffic traverses that link cannot prevent the ISP from rejecting excess traffic. intended for this user. This is how an attack is made.

LOIC attacks are easily identified in system logs and the attack can be traced back to the IP addresses used.

Anonymous's main weapon

LOIC was used by the Anonymous group during Project Chanology to attack the Church of Scientology websites, and then successfully attacked the Recording Industry Association of America website in October 2010. The application was then used again by Anonymous during their Operation Occupy in December 2010 to attack the websites of companies and organizations that opposed WikiLeaks.

In response to the shutdown of the Megaupload file sharing service and the arrest of four employees, members of the Anonymous group launched DDoS attacks on the websites of Universal Music Group (the company responsible for the lawsuit against Megaupload), the United States Department of Justice, the United States Copyright Office , the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the MPAA, Warner Music Group and the RIAA, as well as HADOPI, on the afternoon of January 19, 2012 - through the same "gun" that allows you to attack any server.

The LOIC app is named after the ion cannon, a fictional weapon from many science fiction works, video games, and in particular the Command & Conquer series of games. It's hard to name a game that doesn't have a weapon with that name. For example, in the game Stellaris, the ion cannon plays an important role, despite the fact that this game is an economic strategy, albeit with a space setting.

The impact on the surface with electrons and ions is carried out using devices called, respectively, electron guns (EP) and ion guns (IP). These devices form beams of charged particles with specified parameters. Main General requirements, imposed on the parameters of electron and ion beams intended for impact on the surface for the purpose of its analysis, are as follows:

• 1) minimum energy spread;
• 2) minimal divergence in space;
• 3) maximum stability of the current in the beam with time. Structurally, in EP and IP, two main blocks can be distinguished:

emission unit(in electron guns) or ion source(in ion guns), designed to create the charged particles themselves (cathodes in the EP, ionization chambers in the IP), and beam forming unit, consisting of elements of electronic (ionic) optics, designed to accelerate and focus particles. On fig. 2.4 shows the simplest scheme of the electron gun.

Rice. 2.4.

Electrons emitted from the cathode are focused depending on their initial speeds departure, but all their trajectories intersect near the cathode. The lens effect created by the first and second anodes gives an image of the point of this intersection at another distant point. A change in the potential at the control electrode changes the total current in the beam by changing the depth of the space charge potential minimum near the cathode). As cathodes for low-power electron guns, refractory metals and oxides of rare-earth metals (operating on the principles of obtaining electrons by thermionic and field emission) are used; to obtain powerful electron beams, the phenomena of field electron and explosive emission are used. To diagnose the surface, IPs with the following methods of obtaining ions are used: electron impact", vacuum spark method, photoionization", using strong electric fields", ion-ion emission; interaction of laser radiation with solid; as a result of the attachment of electrons to atoms and molecules (to obtain negative ions); due to ion-molecular reactions; due to surface ionization.

In addition to sources with the listed ionization methods, arc and plasma ion sources are sometimes used. Sources are often used in which field ionization and electron impact are combined. The scheme of such a source is shown in fig. 2.5. The gas enters the source through the inlet tube. The current leads of the emitter and the ionization chamber are fastened on a ceramic washer. In the electron impact ionization mode, the cathode is heated and the electrons are accelerated into the ionization chamber due to the potential difference between the cathode and the chamber.

Rice. 2.5. Scheme of an ion source with field ionization and electron impact:1 - current leads;2 - tube for gas inlet;

• 3 - ceramic washer; 4 - emitter;
• 5 - cathode; b - ionization chamber;
• 7 - pulling electrode;8 - focusing electrode; 9, 10 - corrective plates;11 - collimating plates;12 - reflective electrode; 13 - electron collector

The ions are drawn out of the ionization chamber by means of an extraction electrode. A focusing electrode is used to focus the ion beam. The beam collimation is carried out by collimating electrodes, and its correction in the horizontal and vertical directions - by corrective electrodes. The accelerating potential will be applied to the ionization chamber. During ionization by a high-voltage field, an accelerating potential is applied to the emitter. Three types of emitters can be used in the source: tip, comb, filament. For example, we will give specific voltage values ​​used in a working IP. When working with a thread, the typical potentials on the electrodes are: +4 kV emitter; ionization chamber 6-10 kV; pulling electrode from -2.8 to +3.8 kV; correction plates from -200 to +200 V and from -600 to +600 V; slotted diaphragms 0 V.

Beam weapons - how real is it?

Beam gun reload chamber.

("Cruise missiles in sea ​​battle"B.I. Rodionova, N.N. Novikova, ed. Military publishing house, 1987.)

Beam weapon

So we got to the notorious ion cannon. However, a beam of charged particles is not
necessarily ions. These can be electrons, protons, and even mesons. can be accelerated and
neutral atoms or molecules.

The essence of the method is that charged particles with rest mass are accelerated in
linear accelerator to relativistic (of the order of the speed of light) speeds and turn into
a kind of "bullet" with high penetrating power.

Note: the first attempts to adopt beam weapons date back to 1994.
The US Naval Research Laboratory conducted a series of tests, during which it turned out that
that a beam of charged particles is capable of penetrating a conducting channel in the atmosphere without any special
losses propagate in it at a distance of several kilometers. It was supposed
use beam weapons to combat homing anti-ship missiles.
With a “shot” energy of 10 kJ, the targeting electronics were damaged, an impulse of 100 kJ
undermined the combat charge, and 1 MJ led to the mechanical destruction of the rocket. However
the improvement of other ways to deal with anti-ship missiles made them
cheaper and more reliable, so beam weapons did not take root in the fleet.

On the other hand, researchers working within the SDI have paid the closest attention to it.
However, the very first experiments in vacuum showed that a directed beam of charged particles
cannot be made parallel. The reason is the electrostatic repulsion of the same name
charges and curvature of the trajectory in the Earth's magnetic field (in this case, it is the Lorentz force).
For an orbital space weapon, this was unacceptable, since it was a question of transferring
energy over thousands of kilometers with high accuracy.

The developers went the other way. Charged particles (ions) were accelerated in the accelerator, and
then in a special recharging chamber they became neutral atoms, but the speed
while practically not lost. A beam of neutral atoms can propagate arbitrarily
far away, moving almost parallel.

There are several damage factors for a beam of atoms. As accelerated particles are used
protons (hydrogen nuclei) or deuterons (deuterium nuclei). In the reload chamber they become
hydrogen or deuterium atoms flying at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometers per second.

Hitting the target, the atoms are easily ionized, losing a single electron, while the depth
particle penetration increases by tens and even hundreds of times. As a result, there
thermal destruction of metal.

In addition, during deceleration of the beam particles in the metal, the so-called "braking effect" will arise.
radiation” propagating in the direction of the beam. These are X-ray quanta of the hard
range and x-ray quanta.

As a result, even if the hull skin is not pierced by the ion beam, bremsstrahlung with
with a high probability will destroy the crew and disable the electronics.

Also, under the influence of a high-energy particle beam, vortex waves will be induced in the skin.
currents that give rise to an electromagnetic pulse.

Thus, beam weapons have three damaging factors: mechanical
destruction, directed gamma radiation and electromagnetic pulse.

However, the "ion gun", described in science fiction and appearing in many computer
games is a myth. In no case will such a weapon in orbit succeed
break through the atmosphere and hit any target on the surface of the planet. As well
its inhabitants can be bombed with newspapers or rolls toilet paper. Well, unless
the planet is devoid of atmosphere, and its inhabitants, who do not need to breathe, freely roam the streets of cities.

primary goal beam weapons- warheads of missiles in the atmospheric area, shuttle
ships and aerospace planes of the Spiral class.

BEAM WEAPONS

The damaging factor of a beam weapon is a sharply directed beam of charged or
high-energy neutral particles - electrons, protons, neutral hydrogen atoms.
The powerful flow of energy carried by the particles can create an intense energy in the target material.
thermal impact, shock mechanical loads, initiate x-ray radiation.
The use of beam weapons is distinguished by the instantaneous and suddenness of the damaging effect.
The limiting factor in the range of these weapons is the particles of gases,
located in the atmosphere, with atoms of which accelerated particles interact, gradually
losing your energy.

The most probable objects of destruction of beam weapons can be manpower,
electronic equipment, various weapons systems and military equipment: ballistic and
cruise missiles, aircraft, spacecraft, etc. Work on the creation of beam weapons
gained momentum shortly after the proclamation by US President Ronald Reagan
SOI programs.

Center scientific research in this area was Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Experiments at that time were carried out on the ATS accelerator, then on more powerful accelerators.
At the same time, experts believe that such particle accelerators will be a reliable means of
selection of attacking warheads of enemy missiles against the background of a "cloud" of decoys. Research
beam weapons based on electrons are also being conducted at the Livermore National Laboratory.
According to some scholars, there have been successful attempts to obtain a flow
high-energy electrons, exceeding hundreds of times in power obtained in
research accelerators.

In the same laboratory, within the framework of the Antigone program, it was experimentally established that
that the electron beam propagates almost perfectly, without scattering, through the ionized
channel previously created by a laser beam in the atmosphere. Beam weapon installations have
large mass-dimensional characteristics and therefore can be created as stationary or
on special mobile equipment of high carrying capacity.

PS: by chance in a well-known community science_freaks dispute over reality
systems of beam weapons, moreover, opponents more and more advocated precisely for its unreality.
Having rummaged in the sources open to the entire Internet, I dug up a lot of information, some of which I cited
higher. Interested in who can say what is reasonable in terms of the presence of existing and prospects
development of new weapons systems classified as beam weapons?

Science fiction films give us a clear idea of ​​the arsenals of the future - these are various blasters, lightsabers, subsonic weapons and ion cannons. Meanwhile modern armies, like three hundred years ago, you mainly have to rely on bullets and gunpowder. Will there be a breakthrough in military affairs in the near future, should we expect the appearance of weapons operating on new physical principles?

Story

Work on the creation of such systems is being carried out in laboratories around the world, however, scientists and engineers cannot yet boast of special success. Military experts believe that they will be able to participate in real hostilities no earlier than in a few decades.

Among the most promising systems, the authors often mention ion guns or beam weapons. Its principle of operation is simple: to destroy objects, the kinetic energy of electrons, protons, ions or neutral atoms, accelerated to enormous speeds, is used. In fact, this system is a particle accelerator put into military service.

Beam weapons are a real brainchild of the Cold War, which, along with combat lasers and interceptor missiles, was intended to destroy Soviet warheads in space. The creation of ion cannons was carried out as part of the famous Reagan Star Wars program. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, such developments ceased, however, today interest in this topic is returning.

A bit of theory

The essence of the work of beam weapons is that the particles are accelerated in the accelerator to enormous speeds and turn into a kind of miniature "projectiles" with enormous penetrating power.

The destruction of objects occurs due to:

• electromagnetic impulse;
• exposure to hard radiation;
• mechanical destruction.

The powerful energy flow that particles carry has a strong thermal effect on materials and construction. It can create significant mechanical loads in them, disrupt the molecular structure of living tissue. It is assumed that beam weapons will be capable of destroying aircraft hulls, disabling their electronics, carrying out remote detonation of a warhead, and even melting the nuclear "stuffing" of strategic missiles.

To increase the damaging effect, it is supposed to apply not single blows, but whole series of pulses with a high frequency. A serious advantage of beam weapons is their speed, which is due to the huge speed of the emitted particles. To destroy objects at a considerable distance, the ion gun needs a powerful source of energy such as a nuclear reactor.

One of the main disadvantages of beam weapons is their limited effect in the Earth's atmosphere. Particles interact with gas atoms, losing their energy in the process. It is assumed that under such conditions, the range of destruction of the ion gun will not exceed several tens of kilometers, so for now there is no talk of shelling targets on the Earth's surface from orbit.

The solution to this problem can be the use of a rarefied air channel, through which charged particles will move without energy loss. However, all this is only theoretical calculations, which no one has tested in practice.

Now the most promising area of ​​​​application of beam weapons is considered to be anti-missile defense and the destruction of enemy spacecraft. Moreover, for orbital impact systems, the use of not charged particles, but neutral atoms, which are preliminarily accelerated in the form of ions, looks most interesting. The nuclei of hydrogen or its isotope, deuterium, are usually used. In the recharging chamber, they are converted into neutral atoms. When they hit the target, they are easily ionized, and the depth of penetration into the material increases many times over.

The creation of combat systems operating within the earth's atmosphere still looks unlikely. The Americans considered beam weapons as a possible means of destroying anti-ship missiles, but this idea was later abandoned.

How the ion gun was made

The emergence of nuclear weapons led to an unprecedented arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. By the mid-1960s, the number of nuclear warheads in the arsenals of the superpowers numbered in the tens of thousands, and the main means of their delivery were intercontinental ballistic missiles. Further increase in their number did not make practical sense. To gain an advantage in this deadly race, the rivals had to figure out how to protect their own facilities from missile attack enemy. This is how the concept of anti-missile defense was born.

On March 23, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan announced the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its goal was to be a guaranteed defense of the US territory from a Soviet missile attack, and the instrument of implementation was to gain complete dominance in space.

Most of the elements of this system were planned to be placed in orbit. A significant part of them were most powerful weapon developed on new physical principles. It was intended to use nuclear-pumped lasers, atomic buckshot, conventional chemical lasers, railguns, and beam weapons mounted on heavy orbital stations to destroy Soviet missiles and warheads.

I must say that the study of the damaging effect of high-energy protons, ions or neutral particles began even earlier - approximately in the mid-70s.

Initially, work in this direction was more of a preventive nature - American intelligence reported that similar experiments were being actively conducted in the Soviet Union. It was believed that the USSR had advanced much further in this matter, and could put the concept of beam weapons into practice. The American engineers and scientists themselves did not believe too much in the possibility of creating particle-shooting guns.

Work in the field of creating beam weapons was supervised by the famous DARPA - the Pentagon Advanced Research Office.

They worked in two main directions:

1. Creation of ground-based strike installations designed to destroy enemy missiles (ABM) and aircraft (Air Defense) within the atmosphere. The American army acted as the customer of these researches. A test site with a particle accelerator was built to test prototypes;
2. Development of space-based combat installations placed on the Shuttle-type spacecraft to destroy objects in orbit. It was planned to create several prototype weapons, and then test them in space, destroying one or more old satellites.

It is curious that in terrestrial conditions it was planned to use charged particles, and in orbit to shoot with a beam of neutral hydrogen atoms.

The possibility of "space" use of beam weapons aroused genuine interest among the leadership of the SDI program. Several research works were carried out that confirmed the theoretical ability of such installations to solve missile defense problems.

Project Antigone

It turned out that the use of a beam of charged particles is associated with certain difficulties. After leaving the installation, due to the action of the Coulomb forces, they begin to repel each other, resulting in not one powerful shot, but many weakened impulses. In addition, the trajectories of charged particles are curved under the influence of the earth's magnetic field. These problems were solved by adding a so-called reload chamber to the design, which was located after the upper stage. In it, the ions turned into neutral atoms, and in the future they no longer influenced each other.

The project to create beam weapons was withdrawn from the Star Wars program and received its own name - "Antigone". This was probably done in order to preserve the developments even after the closure of the SDI, the provocative nature of which did not cause much doubt among the army leadership.

The overall management of the project was carried out by specialists from the US Air Force. Work on the creation of an orbital beam gun went quite briskly, several suborbital rockets with prototype boosters were even launched. However, this idyll did not last long. In the mid-1980s, new political winds began to blow: a period of detente began between the USSR and the USA. And when the developers approached the stage of creating prototypes, Soviet Union ordered to live long, and further work on missile defense lost all meaning.

At the end of the 80s, Antigonus was transferred to the naval department, and the reasons for this decision remained unknown. Around 1993, the first draft designs of ship-based missile defense based on beam weapons were created. But when it turned out that huge energy was needed to destroy air targets, the sailors quickly lost interest in such exoticism. Apparently, they did not much like the prospect of carrying additional barges with power plants behind the ships. And the cost of such installations clearly did not add enthusiasm.

Beam installations for Star Wars

It is curious how exactly they planned to use beam weapons in outer space. The main emphasis was placed on the radiation effect of a particle beam during sharp deceleration in the material of the object. It was believed that the resulting radiation is guaranteed to disable the electronics of missiles and warheads. The physical destruction of targets was also considered possible, but it required a greater duration and power of impact. The developers proceeded from the calculations that beam weapons in space are effective at distances of several thousand kilometers.

In addition to destroying electronics and physically destroying warheads, they wanted to use beam weapons to determine targets. The fact is that when entering orbit, the rocket launches dozens and hundreds of false targets, which on the radar screens are no different from real warheads. If such a cluster of objects is irradiated with a particle beam of even low power, then by emission it is possible to determine which of the targets are false, and which ones should be fired upon.

Is it possible to create an ion gun

Theoretically, it is quite possible to create a beam weapon: the processes occurring in such facilities have long been well known to physicists. Another thing is to create a prototype of such a device, suitable for real use on the battlefield. Not without reason, even the developers of the Star Wars program assumed the appearance of ion cannons no earlier than 2025.

The main implementation problem is the energy source, which, on the one hand, must be quite powerful, on the other hand, have more or less sane dimensions and not be too expensive. The foregoing is especially relevant for systems designed to operate in space.

Until we have powerful and compact reactors, projects for beam anti-missile defense, as well as combat space lasers, are best shelved.

The prospects for ground or air use of beam weapons seem even less likely. The reason is the same - a power plant cannot be installed on a plane or tank. In addition, when using such installations in the atmosphere, it will be necessary to compensate for the losses associated with the absorption of energy by air gases.

In the domestic media, materials often appear about the creation of Russian beam weapons, allegedly possessing monstrous destructive power. Naturally, such developments are top-secret, so they are not shown to anyone. As a rule, these are the next pseudo-scientific nonsense such as torsion radiation or psychotropic weapons.

It is possible that research in this area is still ongoing, but until fundamental issues are resolved, there is no reason to hope for a breakthrough.

If you have any questions - leave them in the comments below the article. We or our visitors will be happy to answer them.

Self-guided particle accelerator. Boom! This thing will fry half the city.
Corporal Hicks, feature film "Aliens"

Fantasy literature and cinema use a variety of yet existing types. These are various blasters, and lasers, and rail guns, and much more. In some of these areas, work is currently underway in various laboratories, but there has not yet been much success, and the mass practical application of such samples will begin at least in a couple of decades.

Among other fantastic classes of weapons, the so-called. ion guns. They are also sometimes called beam, atomic or partial (this term is used much less often due to the specific sound). The essence of this weapon is to accelerate any particles to near-light speeds with their subsequent direction towards the target. Such a beam of atoms, possessing colossal energy, can cause serious damage to the enemy even in a kinetic way, not to mention ionizing radiation and other factors. Looks tempting, doesn't it, gentlemen of the military?

As part of the work on the Strategic Defense Initiative in the United States, several concepts for intercepting enemy missiles were considered. Among others, the possibility of using ion weapons was also studied. The first work on the topic began in 1982-83 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the ATS accelerator. Later they began to use other accelerators, and then the Livermore National Laboratory was also occupied in research. In addition to direct research on the prospects for ion weapons, both laboratories also tried to increase the energy of particles, naturally with an eye on the military future of the systems.

Despite the investment of time and effort, the Antigone beam weapon research project was withdrawn from the SDI program. On the one hand, this could be seen as a rejection of an unpromising direction, on the other hand, as a continuation of work on a project that has a future, regardless of a deliberately provocative program. In addition, at the end of the 80s, Antigone was transferred from strategic missile defense to ship defense: the Pentagon did not specify why this was done.

In the course of research on the effects of beam and ion weapons on the target, it was found that a particle beam / laser beam with an energy of the order of 10 kilojoules is capable of burning anti-ship missile homing equipment. 100 kJ under appropriate conditions can already cause an electrostatic detonation of the rocket charge, and a beam of 1 MJ literally makes a nanosieve out of the rocket, which leads to the destruction of all electronics and to the explosion of the warhead. In the early 1990s, an opinion appeared that ion guns could still be used in strategic missile defense, but not as a means of destruction. It was proposed to shoot particle beams with sufficient energy at a "cloud" consisting of warheads of strategic missiles and decoys. As conceived by the authors of this concept, the ions were supposed to burn out the electronics of the warheads and deprive them of the ability to maneuver and aim at the target. Accordingly, by a sharp change in the behavior of the label on the radar after a salvo, warheads could be calculated.

However, in the course of the work, the researchers faced a problem: in the accelerators used, only charged particles could be accelerated. And this "small fry" has one inconvenient feature - they did not want to fly in a friendly bunch. Due to the charge of the same name, the particles repelled and instead of an accurate powerful shot, a lot of much weaker and scattered ones were obtained. Another problem associated with firing ions was the curvature of their trajectory under the influence of the Earth's magnetic field. Perhaps that is why ion guns were not allowed into the strategic missile defense system - it required firing at long distances, where the curvature of the trajectories interfered with normal operation. In turn, the use of "ion throwers" in the atmosphere was hampered by the interaction of the fired particles with air molecules.

The first problem, with accuracy, was solved by introducing a special reload chamber into the gun, located after the upper stage. In it, the ions returned to a neutral state and no longer repelled each other after leaving the "muzzle". At the same time, the interaction of bullet particles with air particles has slightly decreased. Later, during experiments with electrons, it was found that in order to achieve the lowest energy dissipation and ensure the maximum firing range, it is necessary to illuminate the target with a special laser before firing. Due to this, an ionized channel is created in the atmosphere, through which electrons pass with less energy loss.

After the introduction of the reload chamber into the cannon, a slight increase in its combat qualities was noted. In this version of the gun, protons and deuterons (deuterium nuclei consisting of a proton and a neutron) were used as projectiles - in the recharging chamber they attached an electron to themselves and flew to the target in the form of hydrogen or deuterium atoms, respectively. When hitting a target, an atom loses an electron, scatters the so-called. bremsstrahlung and continues to move inside the target in the form of a proton/deuteron. Also, under the action of the released electrons in a metal target, eddy currents may appear with all the consequences.

However, all the work of American scientists remained in the laboratories. Approximately by 1993, preliminary designs of anti-missile defense systems for ships were prepared, but things never went beyond them. Particle accelerators with combat-grade power were of such a size and required such an amount of electricity that a beam gun ship had to be followed by a barge with a separate power plant. A reader familiar with physics can calculate for himself how many megawatts of electricity are required to give even 10 kJ to a proton. The US military could not afford such expenses. The Antigone program was suspended, and then completely closed, although from time to time there are reports of varying degrees of reliability that talk about the resumption of work on the topic of ion weapons.

Soviet scientists did not lag behind in the field of particle acceleration, but they did not think about the military use of accelerators for a long time. The defense industry of the USSR was characterized by constant looking back at the cost of weapons, so the ideas of combat accelerators were abandoned without starting work on them.

On this moment there are several dozens of different charged particle accelerators in the world, but among them there is not a single combat one suitable for practical use. The Los Alamos accelerator with the recharge chamber lost the latter and is now used in other studies. As for the prospects for ion weapons, the very idea will have to be shelved for the time being. Until humanity has new, compact and super-powerful energy sources.