U.S. Warned of Superconductor Gap With Japan

The Pentagon’s leading scientific advisers warned in a report that the United States is “already well behind” Japan in developing uses for exotic superconducting materials that could revolutionize a wide range of civilian and military technology.

The report, released Tuesday, urges the Defense Department to launch an “aggressive,” billion-dollar effort to explore the military potential of the new materials over the next five years.

The authors, a special committee of the Defense Science Board, said the ceramic materials discovered two years ago--which lose their resistance to electricity at unusually high temperatures--appear to hold “great military significance.”

In light of this potential, the committee said, the military services should organize a concerted effort to develop engineering models of applications that could range from ultra-fast computer chips to electromagnetic tank guns and revolutionary propulsion systems for ships and submarines.

At the same time, the committee warned that Japan’s surging industrial effort to move superconducting materials out of the laboratory and into the marketplace may leave the United States dependent on foreign technology and foreign suppliers in a critical new field.

Basic researchers in the United States are competing effectively with those in other countries, the panel said, but “U. S. industry is already well behind Japanese industry in the development of superconductivity applications.”

The Defense Science Board, composed of about 40 prominent civilian scientists and engineers, is the Pentagon’s leading source of independent advice on science and technology. The panel on superconductor technology was headed by Walter E. Morrow Jr., director of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and a professor of electrical engineering at MIT.

According to the National Science Foundation’s Tokyo office, the Japanese government and industries are spending about $164 million a year working with superconducting materials. The United States spends about $145 million.

Morrow said in a telephone conversation, however, that the disparity is much larger than those figures suggest, partly because the Japanese do not count salaries paid to researchers in the field, who are estimated to number 1,000--a third more than the 750 working on superconductivity in the United States.

The panel’s warning about Japan’s growing lead in one of the most competitive areas of technology followed the voicing of similar concerns by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment in June.

Among the potential applications that may be of “great military significance,” the Defense Science Board listed:

A “hypersonic” tank gun that would use electromagnetic pulses instead of a chemical explosion to fire projectiles at velocities sufficient to penetrate the most sophisticated armor; an ultra-sensitive magnetic mine detector; extremely fast semiconductor computer chips for data processing and new propulsion systems for surface ships, submarines and torpedoes, and perhaps aircraft, that could drastically reduce their weight and noise.