The World - News from Aug. 18, 1989

The former head of U.S. laser weapons research said he was impressed by a Soviet laser he saw melt a piece of metal but added that neither superpower would consider the equipment state-of-the-art technology. John Hammond said the powerful “megawatt carbon dioxide” laser he witnessed along with a group of congressmen at a secretive branch of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Troitsk, near Moscow, once was thought to have potential military applications, but now other types of lasers are more promising. “This type of laser technology . . . does not have a lot of relevance to more strategic-type weapons such as SDI,” he said, referring to the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative.