Shiva Star

Shiva Star, originally just SHIVA, is a high-powered pulsed-power research device located at the Air Force Research Laboratory on the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As it was first built in 1974, SHIVA I consisted of four banks of capacitors arranged in a cross shape with the experimental chamber in the middle.

The idea appears to have been to create compact toroids of high-density plasma that would be ejected from the device using a massive magnetic pulse.

Doughnut-shaped rings of plasma and balls of lightning exploded with devastating thermal and mechanical effects when hitting their target and produced pulse of electromagnetic radiation that could scramble electronics.

A relatively new technique, magnetized target fusion, compresses a small plasma load with an imploding metal foil.