How the Military Responded to the Laser

“I feel as do others here that the LASER may be the biggest breakthrough in the weapons area since the atomic bomb.” This statement, made in 1962 in a letter by Major General August Schomburg, head of the Army Ordnance Missile Command, reflected an attitude that was pervasive in the military in the first years after the birth of the laser. According to one contemporary assessment, there was “scarcely an Air Force, Army [or] Navy agency that does not now support, or talk of sponsoring in the near future, some type of basic or applied research or experimental development with optical masers.”