Slashdot Mirror
Warfare at the Speed of Light
unassimilatible writes "From the They Said It Couldn't Be Done Dept., the Oakland Tribune reports that the Lawrence Livermore Labratory is ensuring that the Pentagon, inside of a decade, could be armed with a beam weapon that is near-instantaneous, gravity-free and truly surgical, focusing to such hair-splitting accuracy that it could avoid civilians while predetonating munitions miles away - perhaps someday even being mounted on Humvees."
Won't be long before this thing is pointed at *us*.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Hey, Dubya, please remember to kill all those dictators who own weapons of mass destruction. But please do us a favour, start with the greatest of them, yourself.
its time like this i'm glad i live in california
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I know this is meant to be a joke but the actual technology involved in deploying a battlefield laser is immense. Here in the lab we've been working on civilian grade laser weapons (obviously at much lower power than the military; they are purely non lethal) and there are several major obsticals.
The main problem is that any reflecting surface can act as a mirror, meaning that you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you. What is worse is that if the surface is concave and you are roughly a focal length away then the beam with become focussed upon you and will so be many times more powerful. You can overcome this by making your laser beam non monochromatic and out of phase, but the engineering challenges in doing this are immense.
In addition the power contained by a laser can be enough to break down the chemical bonds in many innocuous compounds to form toxins. We had one nasty incident where our laser hit a puddle of water and turned the h20 into h202 which is deadly hydrogen peroxide. This would not look good for the US government if it started turning enemy cities into poisonous wastegrounds with a supposedly surgical weapon.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
... that I'm worried about.
The US executed the biggest terrorist activity in recorded history: the 'Shock and Awe' campagin, not so long ago against the Iraqi people. Thousands died. This wasn't because the weapons weren't accurate enough. It's because the Pentagon deemed the Iraqi civilians to be expendable.
Plenty more Iraqi civilians have been shot while protesting about such things as food, water, and ( get the irony of this one ) PETROL. Numerous reports come out of Iraq each week about US soldiers shooting indescriminately into crowds of protestors to silence them and have them 'step back into line'.
Against this backdrop of US aggression, I don't feel particularly good about any weapons developments. Just who are they planning on 'defending' ( pre-emptively striking ) next? Surely having the largest stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction on Earth is enough for them?