Why a Notorious Japanese Doomsday Cult Tried to Buy a $400,000 Laser From a Silicon Valley Tech FirmIn 1995, the Japanese cult behind the deadly sarin gas subway attack was in touch with a California-based laser manufacturer. 

The original article first appeared in the Laser Wars newsletter, which focuses on military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

Just days before the March 20, 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, an agent for Aum Shinrikyo — the Japanese apocalyptic cult that would go on to kill 14 people and injure thousands in one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in history — was on the phone with an American laser manufacturer.

For roughly two weeks, Aum operative Yasuo Hiramatsu had been negotiating with sales and technical representatives at Hobart Laser Products in Livermore, California for the purchase of a 3 kilowatt industrial laser welder worth approximately $400,000. The discussions grew detailed enough that Hobart’s representatives eventually patched in Aum’s Minister of Science and Technology in Japan to clarify the system’s intended use. The responses, according to an expansive 1995 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing held the following October, raised more questions than they answered.

The cult wanted the laser operable from inside a glove box — a sealed environment in which an operator manipulates equipment through thick rubber gloves, useful when biological toxins, contact poisons, or nuclear emissions are a concern. It planned to use the welder on canisters made of aluminum oxide, a material more resistant to chemical corrosion than stainless steel, including, Hiramatsu specified, “canisters within canisters.” Cash was available, and delivery was needed immediately.

The laser was never delivered. The system had to be custom-built and would have taken weeks to complete and ship, Hobart reps explained on March 18, after which the Aum reps abruptly broke off communications. The Tokyo subway attack unfolded two days later.

The Hobart negotiation was not an isolated incident. It was the culmination of a years-long effort by Aum Shinrikyo to acquire laser technology, one that spanned three continents and stretched from a Nobel Prize winner’s living room to the research laboratories of some of Japan’s largest defense contractors — a cautionary tale of how terrorists might someday attempt to turn laser technology into a tool of their evil aspirations.

Aum Shinrikyo became infamous for sarin, but the group’s founder and self-proclaimed messiah, Shoko Asahara, had grander ambitions than nerve gas. Born Chizuo Matsumoto, Asahara built the cult around an apocalyptic ideology that blended Buddhism with millenarian prophecy, centered on his prediction that nuclear war would bring about Armageddon and that Aum’s members would be among the sole survivors. After the group’s humiliating defeat in Japan’s 1990 parliamentary elections — in which Asahara received only 1,783 votes out of half a million cast — he accused the government of fraud and shifted the cult’s mission entirely from surviving the apocalypse to starting it.

The original article first appeared in the Laser Wars newsletter, which focuses on military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.