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9 March 2020

Laser weapons are almost ready for the battlefield


When martians descend on England in H.G. Wells’s novel “The War of the Worlds”, published in 1898, they incinerate troublesome humans and lay waste to suburban towns with heat-rays that turn all before them into a “a smoky dance of lurid flames”. Such ray guns have been a recurrent feature of science-fiction ever since.

Despite the efforts of military types, though, reality has lagged far behind sci-fi. In 1934, to no avail, Britain’s Air Ministry offered £1,000 to anyone who could use rays of some sort to kill a sheep at a distance of 180 metres. A decade later a Japanese device that generated microwaves managed to snuff out a rabbit that was 30 metres away. But it took ten minutes to do so. Even the invention of lasers, in 1960, failed to usher in the age of the directed-energy weapon, as ray guns are known in the jargon. Ronald Reagan’s effort to weaponise lasers in the “Star Wars” programme of the 1980s was spectacularly unsuccessful.

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