Death Rays Deferred

Death rays missed the bus for World War II. But the U.S. Government took them seriously enough to engage a first-rate engineer, Dr. Albert F. Murray, to examine all suggestions. Recently Dr. Murray told of his experiences with the death projectors.

First he decided that a useful death ray would have to 1) burn a half-inch hole in a four-inch plank in five seconds; 2) burn a six-inch live tree two miles away in three minutes; 3) kill small animals at 5,000 feet in three seconds. Reason: anything milder would not be valuable militarily.

He examined lots of death rays, which inventors claimed could melt rocks, kill animals at great distances. None met his specifications. Some were fakes; their inventors fled as soon as Dr. Murray hove in sight. Best performer: a heat-projecting gadget which, its inventor claimed, cooked a canary (in Spain) at 30 feet.

But now, Dr. Murray feels, the death-ray business may be looking up. After V-J day, a promising idea was presented to Government scientists. The inventor was told to continue his work in private, with Government blessing.

The new, encouraging factor is probably atomic energy. Chief trouble with earlier death rays was that no known source of radiation was strong enough to kill at a distance. But atom bombs do kill by radiation, mostly heat and gamma rays. If a method is developed to concentrate nuclear radiations into a narrow beam, death rays may be available to enliven World War III.

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