The U.S. Military's New Super Weapon: A Weaponized 'Meteor Strike'?

Task and Purpose

Security, Americas

Yikes.

The applications of the KEP are mainly theoretical for now, and we’re certainly decades away from a floating Thor’s hammer circling the planet.

In the 1950s, Jerry Pournelle imagined the military equivalent of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

(This first appeared in 2017.)

Toiling away as a Boeing operations researcher in the afterglow of the Manhattan Project and the Soviet Union’s First Lightning nuclear test in 1949, the U.S. Army veteran envisioned a weapons system armed not with munitions and other chemical explosives, but massive rods forged from heavy metals dropped from sub-orbital heights. Those “tungsten thunderbolts,” as the New York Times called them, would impact enemy strongholds below with the devastating velocity of a dino-exterminating impact, obliterating highly fortified targets — like, say, Iranian centrifuges or North Korean bunkers — without the mess of nuclear fallout.

Pournelle, whose years of experience in aerospace would fuel a career as a journalist and military science fiction writer, named his superweapon “Project Thor.” Others just called it “Rods From God.” In reality, weapons researchers refer to it as a “kinetic energy projectile”: a super-dense, super-fast projectile that, operating free of complex systems and volatile chemicals, destroys everything in its path.

The idea of kinetic weaponry — raining down inert projectiles on an enemy with deadly velocity — is far from a novel concept. The trebuchet was the backbone of successful sieges for hundreds of years, from ancient China to Hernan Cortes’ subjugation of the Aztecs; during and after World War II, airmen have occasionally deployed clusters of inert “Lazy Dog” bombs — metal cylinders traveling at terminal velocity — on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam.