Blast North Korea With Lasers

In April of 2009, Gingrich went on Fox News to declare that North Korea's impending missile launch must be stopped — with "whatever preemptive actions are necessary." To do otherwise would be inviting disaster, he added. "Allowing the North Koreans to launch missiles is an enormously dangerous threat in the long run."

Luckily, America had the means to stop the launch before it ever happened, Gingrich said: "I think you could take it out with very, very minimal risk to anybody."

All you'd have to do is dip into the Pentagon's arsenal of ray guns.

"I'd find a way to have either a small team go in, or a way to deliver either a laser or another kind of device," Gingrich noted.

Gingrich was likely talking about the Airborne Laser, the jumbo jet tricked out with a missile-zapping directed energy cannon. As Speaker of the House, Newt had intervened several times to keep the project alive, despite broken deadlines and mushrooming costs.

Promoters of the laser jet promised that the experimental weapon would be blasting missiles out of the sky by 2002. But by the time of Gingrich's interview in 2009, the Airborne Laser had never gone up against a single projectile, not even in testing. The thing was $4 billion over budget, and "none of [its] seven critical technologies are fully mature after more than a decade of development," the Government Accountability Office noted.

Not long after Gingrich's suggestion to use the laser, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates radically scaled back the Airborne Laser effort — and repeatedly pointed to it as an example of everything that was dumb and wrong about the Pentagon's weapon-development process.

By the way, that North Korean launch? Total flop. The missile's first stage fell into the Sea of Japan, and the remaining stages landed in the Pacific Ocean — no lasers required.

Photo: Wikimedia