The Space Weapon Background to a Kerntechnik Paper about a New Type of Nuclear Fusion Reactor

Summary of Erik Witalis's article in RSAWSPJ no 3 2001.

The United States is planning - for the third or fourth time - to try to build up a missile defence. Even if this article is not about the techique that is now developed, i.e. ”to hit a bullet with a bullet”, it reveals an interesting aspect to the work with space based defence systems during the latter part of President Ronald Reagan’s SDI programme. Erik Witalis, who is an expert in plasma physics and former employed at the Swedish Defence Research Establishment, pulished an article in 1988 in the West German journal Kerntechnik, in which he presented his theories of an idea for a new type of fusion reactor. But the plasma whirls he describes were also to be used as weapons in space. You need not to understand all the physical terms to take part of the thoughts in this article.

In the article, which is written in English, Witalis presents his work during many years to better understand the characteristics, especially the dynamic processes which lead to fusion reactors of non-thermal type. One theoretical possibility for a space based weapons systems emerged in the beginning of 1986. By a lucky coincidence there were some plasma physics in the nuclear weapon laboratorium competent enough to seriously look at the proposal, given by Witalis in February 1986, to use many and quite easy whirl structures in plasma form made out of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium as projectiles directed against missiles in space. The proposal contradicts in quite a few ways fully to conventional views within the fusion energy research, but also explains its total failure during almost half a century, to be compared with the only few months needed in Los Alamos to be convinced that the wepons would work in space. A significant number of events and published information verifies that in 1986 a transition was made within the US space weapon defence.