In April of 2009, Gingrich went on Fox News to declare that North Korea's impending launch of a missile must be stopped — with "whatever preemptive actions are necessary!" reports Wired.
"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, according to Wired.
Despite being $4 billion over budget, "none of [its] seven critical technologies are fully mature after more than a decade of development," the Government Accountability Office noted in a report.
Wired continues:
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.As for the North Korean missile that Gingrich so feared, it was as big a flop as the laser Gingrich wanted to fight it with. The missile's first stage fell into the Sea of Japan, and the remaining stages landed in the Pacific Ocean.
