The Pentagon Launches Plan to Master Lightning

In Greek mythology, it was a weapon of war. Now the U.S. military is looking to tame lightning, which remains one of nature's most confounding -- and feared -- phenomena.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R&D arm of the Pentagon, has embarked on a project called NIMBUS, which seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms of lightning. "Although significant progress has been made in recent years in our understanding of the lightning discharge and related phenomena, fundamental questions remain unanswered," the agency said in an announcement released today.

Lightning has long perplexed scientists. Not only are atmospheric scientists unsure of exactly what initiates lightning, but they also don't understand precisely how and why it is able to propagate over great distances, and where it will strike. That makes it, in DARPA's view, "one of the major unsolved mysteries in the atmospheric sciences."

Gene Blevins, AP

The fanciful-sounding NIMBUS project has a serious goal: curbing the $5 billion in damage that lightning strikes cause each year.

Lightning is not only little understood, it is dangerous and destructive -- strikes cause more than $5 billion in damages annually,according to the Lightning Safety Institute. NIMBUS will look at ways to protect against that destruction, including attempting to direct where lightning strikes. The initiative also includes plans to try to trigger lightning using rockets, which could be used to model and study the discharges.

This by no means is the military's first foray into lightning research. Pentagon officials have in the past expressed interest in other enigmatic phenomena associated with lightning, such as so-calledball lightning. Though its existence is disputed, ball lightning is purported to manifest itself asluminous, energetic spheres during storms.

The Pentagon has even funded modest efforts looking at whether ball lightning could be used as a weapon.

Another, somewhat more straightforward application of lightning, not mentioned as part of the DARPA project, is the possibility of creating a "lightning gun" -- a weapon that shoots bolts of electricity. In fact, the Defense Department has funded work in this area. A Tuscon, Ariz., company called Applied Energetics (formerly Ionatron) has received a number of multimillion-dollar contracts from the Army and Navy to develop a lightning weapon that uses ultra-short laser pulses to channel electrostatic discharges. Another company, Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems, in Anderson, Ind., has built a prototype of a lightning gun, named StunStrike.

But don't look to NIMBUS to yield a deployable death ray. DARPA says the project has a more benign goal: the protection of people and assets.