Project Excalibur is one of the Strategic Defense Initiative concepts that arrived before the supporting technology. The proposed array would use energy from a nuclear detonation to drive lasers against re-entry vehicles, missiles, or satellites. Its immediate engineering contradiction is that the weapon and its supporting systems must survive close enough to a nuclear blast to function. Without suitable materials, the concept depends on the equivalent of unobtainium. SDI also included x-ray and chemical lasers, particle beams, hypervelocity railguns, and the LACE satellite, an array of ideas developed much faster than deployable hardware.
Chapter · 30:46-33:44
Project Excalibur needs materials able to survive its own nuclear blast
The nuclear-pumped laser at the heart of Project Excalibur illustrates the gap between a dramatic missile-defense concept and materials capable of making it work.