Military: particle-beam weapons: a controversy: `highly questionable' is the label applied by four M.I.T. scientists, but the U.S. department of defense is betting on the new scheme

With just two particle-beam weapon systems installed on satellites in geosynchronous earth orbit at 40000 km, a country could, theoretically, neutralize ICBMs or submarine-launched ballistic missiles fired from any site in the world. Such 'death ray' weapons, it is reported in a study by four physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could - again theoretically - destroy enemy missiles the moment they climbed out of the earth's atmosphere and entered space.