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Ming aimed at Earth in the Flash Gordon serials; they are a reality that can be launched on a guided missile, separated from a booster, aimed by an internal computer guidance system at any incoming device, whether an ICBM warhead or a space vehicle, and fired with devastating effect. This weapon has been a true Army R&D nrnAnnn ata success story. "The possibilities for benefits to the military are enormous, "| wrote to General Trudeau in my 1962 analysis of the potential for directed energy weapons. "Although, as we have seen, even the most rudimentary of directed energy products, the microwave oven, has more than repaid the initial research and development overhead through consumer product sales, it is the military that will see the greatest benefits from directed energy and is already seeing the potential from it in the applications that are being projected for the laser which is only two years old." The concept of a weapon that relied on a directed energy beam, whatever the nature of that beam was, was not a completely new concept to the military community, although its origins were totally shrouded in secrecy. The first test of a directed energy weapon, a particle beam accelerator code named Seesaw whose beam was to be aimed at incoming guided missiles, was first conducted in 1958, two years before the successful demonstration of the laser, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Although the test took place the year that | was in Red Canyon, New Mexico, | had known about the project first when | was on the National Security Council at the White House and then again after the successful experiments against a simulated target. In theory, the particle beam weapon looked like it would work, assuming the technological development of power generators, electrical storage apparatus, and the computer software to aim and fire the weapon. We already had a rough model for the particle beam weapon in nature: the lightning bolt, a pure, intense beam of electrons firing between opposite poles and destroying or incapacitating anything it hit that was not grounded. Scientists from Benjamin Franklin to Nikola Tesla have tried to chain the force of lightning as a power source. Now the Advanced Research Projects Agency was experimenting with the theory to apply it to a new and deadly weapon. If they could build the hardware and write the software, the developers at ARPA decided they would be able to generate an intense beam of either electrons or neutral hydrogen atoms, aim it at an incoming target, and fire the particle beam inpulses that would travel near the speed of light and excite the atoms in the target until they literally blew apart. Whatever didn't blow up would be destroyed electronically and rendered useless. Officially, the project would remain secret until funding could be acquired and the technological development of the components moved far enough along to allow us to build working prototypes. The great fear of the developers at ARPA was that the Soviets, realizing what we were trying to construct, would maximize their effort to build one before we did, rendering our newly developed Atlas ICBM obsolete before it even got to the launching pad. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was a highly secretive network of defense scientists, members of the industrial defense contractor R&D community, and university researchers operating either under the formula of a government grant or the tacit acknowledgment of the Defense Department that their research would come under government control at some point. ARPA was founded in1958, in part, | believed, because up to then Army R&D had been a disorganized department barely able to manage the core research necessary to keep us technologically superior to our enemies. This created a gap in research that the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to fill. Working on military defense oriented research, many times far in advance of any concrete proposals for the development of a weapons system or a product, ARPA often acted as a forward skirmish line for the development of military weapons or simply facilitated the basic scholarship necessary for the more concrete items to be developed. However, too many times it was in conflict with the military because ARPA had its own separate agenda, especially after General Trudeau had reorganized the entire military R&D apparatus and refocused it so that it ran like a machine. In 1969, during the era of large main frame computers, under a contract to develop a network of networks linking universities, defense contractors, and the military, the ARPANET was born. And in the 1970s after the Advanced Research Projects Agency changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, it instituted a project to create an "internetting" of all the existing computers on its system, instituting the software protocols that would link networks running on different operating systems. By1974, the Transmitting Control Protocol/Internet Protocol was born and the ARPANET became the Internet. In the late 1980s, the European laboratory for Particle Physics launched a hypertext language, originally conceived of by Vannevar Bush, as a search mechanism on the Internet and by 1990 married it to a graphics user Interface that combined hypertext and graphics. The World Wide Web was born. In 1958, when it was first developing the concepts behind the particle beam weapon, ARPA was only a year old. It was formed in1957, when | was still at the White House, in response to the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik because the government realized that the United States needed an independent research organization to marshal the resources of the academic, scientific, and industrial communities. ARPA was formed to fund basic research, and even though it didn't have a military orientation at the outset, it quickly became associated with 100