Forge also created a neutralizer device that could theoretically deprive any superhumanly powerful being of his or her superhuman abilities.
On presidential orders Henry Peter Gyrich, an agent of the National Security Council, took possession of the only existing model of Forge's neutralizer in order to use it against Rogue, a member of the mutant X-Men who was falsely suspected of killing an agent of the intelligence organization SHIELD. Forge was outraged; the neutralizer was still untested, and he did not know if it would remove a target's superhuman powers temporarily or permanently, or possibly even kill him or her. Forge physically attempted to prevent Gyrich from using the device on Rogue, but Gyrich instead shot Rogue's fellow X-Man Storm with it, as she attempted to protect her colleague. Her own superhuman powers apparently entirely removed, Storm fell into a river, from which Forge rescued her.
Feeling guilt and responsibility for the loss of her powers, Forge brought Storm to his headquarters in Dallas, Texas. There Storm revived, and she and Forge grew strongly attached to each other. However, when Storm learned that Forge had designed the neutralizer gun that had deprived her of her powers, she felt betrayed. Furious at Forge, she left his building, but returned on learning he was in danger from the Dire Wraiths. The Wraiths were aware that Forge's neutralizer could not, in its present stage of development, harm them and intended to kill him before he could improve it. Together, Storm, Forge, the X-Men, Magik, and the sorceress Amanda Sefton defeated the Wraiths who came after Forge, but Storm's hatred of Forge persisted.
Forge further improved his neutralizer so that it would negate the Wraiths' mystical abilities, and created several of these improved devices, but he was still guilt-ridden over Storm's loss of her powers. Fearing that people would use his neutralizers against other superhuman Earth beings, Forge did not want to give them the devices even for use against the Dire Wraiths. But after joining forces with the Wraiths' greatest foe, the space knight Rom, to battle Wraiths in Dallas, Forge decided to construct a gigantic "neo-neutralizer" in Earth's orbit. Powered by Rom's own neutralizer, Forge's orbiting device could cast all the Dire Wraiths on Earth into other-dimensional Limbo.
But Gyrich intended to use the neo-neutralizer to eliminate the superhuman powers of every being on Earth. To thwart Gyrich's plan, Rom and Forge aimed the neo-neutralizer not at Earth but at the Wraith's homeworld, Wraithworld, which was approaching Earth through hyperspace. The device negated Wraithworld's magic, the source of the Wraiths' own mystical powers, therefore causing Wraithworld to cease to exist and depriving Wraiths throughout the universe of their mystical abilities. Thus Forge is responsible for saving Earth from the Dire Wraiths.
Forge has ensured that the neo-neutralizer cannot be used against Earth's superhumanly powerful beings, and all known specimens of Forge's neutralizer have been destroyed. One neutralizer was used by Tony Stark to depower the superhuman criminal, the Termite, and was subsequently destoyed.