A new war toy for the Navy was shown off recently in an article published in the Wall Street Journal.The  supergun  as the WSJ s headline refers to it, is really just a large railgun. A railgun is a weapon that uses an electromagnetic charge to fire a round rather than chemical explosives.The only time that cost is mentioned in the article is when it compares the cost of using a railgun projectile versus that of a standard missile. The WSJ reports that each projectile only costs around $25,000 dollars to make, compared to the cost of a $10-million-dollar interceptor missile.  Wow, it almost sounds as if this thing might actually save the military some money in the long-term. It won t though, it s just another military pipe dream that ll end up costing tax payers an arm and a leg   possibly literally seeing as the money that could go towards building these things might have gone to something useful, like a universal national health insurance program.The weapon requires a massive power source the rail gun requires 25 megawatts to work. As Vice pointed out in an article published last year, this need for a huge power source is the reason this technology is going to be quite costly, or even possibly impossible to make practical for a long time. It s hard to conceptualize 25 megawatts, for me anyway. For some perspective, th e Navy s next generation Zumwalt-class destroyer, the 21st-century stealth battleship with electric engines, is powered by a 78-megawatt array of turbine generators. So, firing a rail gun once would take almost a third of the most advanced ship s whole capacity. Most ships today don t have more than 9 megawatts to spare. . . The railgun is going to be tested on the USNS Millinocket next year. The first of three Zumwalt-class ships railgun or no railgun is slated to be delivered to the Navy next year, and the last in 2018. They re estimated to cost $22 billion in total. The bigger problem here is that the United States is entering into a new Cold War era, except this time it is with both Russia and China. Projects like this may give the U.S. a small military advantage over one of these two nations for a few years at least. Then we will have to spend billions upon billions of dollars on new weapons systems that everyone is terrified of actually using, considering the chance that a full nuclear response is a possibility.We have to really ask ourselves is this the road we want the U.S. to go down. Of course, we cannot leave ourselves defenseless but we seriously have to make decisions about what we invest our money into. How exactly do we plan to use these weapons systems, should they ever actually become practical? We also have to ask ourselves if it is more important to spend countless billions of dollars on weapons that are built-in, the justification of defense against the Next Bad Thing, yet will probably end up just being used to  spread a little democracy  to poor nations.I, for one, would prefer to invest in building a nation that makes sure that every person is given the opportunity to get an education, see a doctor, or breath clean air and drink clean water than one that is hell-bent on winning another cold war.You can watch a video of the railgun below. Featured image from video screenshot