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OctOber 29, 2015 | the Jewish Home
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arly last month, in an undisclosed location deep in the Negev Desert, a cohort of Defense Ministry officials and senior Air Force officers conducted a final test on one of the most important military tech breakthroughs of the past one hundred years. At high noon, technicians activated the radar systems mounted on a small truck which fed into a nearby light projector. Support staff then launched a dummy drone from a rocket-powered catapult. Once the aircraft had reached its predetermined altitude, the radar and other sensor signals activated the projector which emanated a highly focused beam of invisible light. Approximately three seconds later, testers observed a large hole being burned through the dummy drone, which at that point was flying some two kilometers in the distance. Approximately one second later, the drone’s structure broke apart, and the aircraft fell from the sky. Testers were jubilant. Years of re-
search and experimentation had finally paid off. Iron Beam was operational.
A Well-Earned Breakthrough The official announcement of this successful test was delivered by the Defense Ministry’s Combat Infrastructure and Technology Department, known by its Hebrew acronym MAPAT. “This is truly a historic event of global proportions,” said MAPAT chief General Yaniv Rotem in a conversation with journalists. “For the first time, there is a country that has demonstrated the capability of both firing and intercepting with an energy weapon.” Rotem emphasized that the new platform had become, in the recent period, a tremendous priority by the defense establishment and was put on the fast track to becoming operational. “Over the last month, we worked around the clock on the proving grounds to make sure we made the Passover deadline – and so it was.” The exact specs of Iron Beam are, not surprisingly, highly classified. But the defense ministry did release some general
With a Trick of the Light, the Iron Beam is Laser-Focused on Israel’s Defense By ShammaI SISkInD
points about what the system does and how it operates. Iron Beam is a laser weapon. What that means essentially is that it projects specific light frequencies in incredibly focused streams. The generator feeds 100 kilowatts of electrical power into each burst, which is what enables the beam to penetrate even extremely dense alloys. Now, before we go any further, let’s just put that into perspective: A small to medium-sized household in a moderate climate might consume somewhere between 200-400 kilowatts per month. This means the new laser system focuses the amount of energy typically consumed by four people over the course of ten days into a five-second burst. In terms of its unique technology, Iron
Beam was able to overcome many challenges in the field of lightwave research. The word “laser” is actually an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. In layman’s terms, a laser produces light by stimulating the release of photons, i.e., light particles. This allows the resulting light to achieve incredible energy levels – about one million times the intensity of the average light bulb. Lasers themselves are not new. The first operable laser-like machines have been around since the 1950s and today have a wide range of applications, especially in commercial welding and other large-scale manufacturing processes. But to deploy a laser as a weapon – the fantasy of Star Wars fans and governments
