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means of testing the performance of the reactor and how it could be maintained at an utterly desolate location in the harshest climate on the planet. The plant was the first of its kind. It had a completely modular construction that had separately packaged components for air coolers, heat exchangers, switch gear, and the turbine generator. The power plant also had a mechanism that used the recycled steam to melt the ice cap surface to provide the camp's water supply. The entire construction was completed in only seventy seven days, and the camp remained in operation from October 1960 to August 1963, when the research mission completed its work. The entire operation was successfully taken apart and placed in storage in 1964, and the site of Camp Century was completely restored to its natural state. | received reports about the camp's operation during the later months of 1962 after General Trudeau had asked me about the feasibility of the army's portable atomics program as a way to instigate research into a launchable atomics program for generating power in orbit. | was so enthusiastic about the success of our portable atomics and the way they provided the research platform for the subsequent development of mobile atomics that | urged the general to provide as much funding as R&D could to enable the Fort Belvoir Army Nuclear Power Program to construct and test as many mobile and portable power plants as possible. Each power plant gave us a kind of a beachhead into remote areas of the world where the EBEs might have wanted to establish a presence because they believed they could go about it undetected. They were a kind of platform. Once we had demonstrated the ability to protect remote areas of the earth, we'd be in a better position to establish a presence in space. The atomics program, which was in part a direct outgrowth of the challenge posed to us from our analysis of the Roswell craft, ultimately helped us develop portable atomic power plants, which are now used to power Earth satellites as well as naval vessels. It showed us that we could have portable atomic generators and gave the army a longer reach than anybody might have thought. Ultimately, it allowed us to maintain surveillance and staff remote listening posts. It also provided the basis for research into launching nuclear power facilities into space to become the power plants of new generations of interplanetary vehicles. The portable atomics program allowed us to experiment with ways we would develop atomic drives for our own space exploration vehicles, which, we believed, would enable us to establish military bases on the moon as well as on the planets near us in the solar system. And from our successes with atomics, we turned our attention to the development of the weapons we could mount on surveillance satellites in orbit, weapons we developed directly from what we found in the flying saucer at Roswell. Embedded in the army field reports and air materiel Command engineering evaluations analyzing the Roswell craft were descriptions of how the spacecraft might have utilized a form of energy known as "directed energy, " powerful beams of excited electrons that could be precisely directed at any target. We didn't know very much about directed energy back in 1947, or more precisely put, we didn't know how much we knew because in reality we knew a lot. But the information that had been readily available since the 1930s was lying sequestered at a public storage facility, under the authority of the federal government, over on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the notes of the mysterious inventor Nikola Tesla, whose experiments and reputed discoveries have become the stuff of bizarre but exciting legend. The laser surgical cutting tool found in the Roswell wreckage was one form of directed energy beam device whose ability to fire rapidly and with precision revealed that the extraterrestrials had a potential in weaponry far superior to ours. However, if the craft had been brought down by lightning, itself a directed energy beam of one of the highest magnitudes, then it revealed their vulnerability to bolts of electrons. That stimulated the thinking of army scientists and researchers into the analysis of the potential of a directed energy beam weapon. Today, fifty years after the crash of the spacecraft at Roswell, these weapons are far more than the device that the Emperor 99 CHAPTER 16 "Tesla's Death Ray" and the Accelerated Particle Beam Weapon