Lasers! Everybody loves them, everybody wants them. But outside a few niche applications they have failed to live up to the destructive potential that Saturday morning cartoons taught us all to expect. In defiance of this failure, a company in China claims to have produced a “laser AK-47” that can burn targets in a fraction of a second from half a mile away. But skepticism is still warranted.
The weapon, dubbed the ZKZM-500, is described by the South China Morning Post[1] as being about the size and weight of an ordinary assault rifle, but capable of firing hundreds of shots, each of which can cause “instant carbonization” of human skin.
“The pain will be beyond endurance,” added one of the researchers.
Now, there are a few red flags here. First is the simple fact that the weapon is only described and not demonstrated. Second is that what is described sounds incompatible with physics.
Laser weaponry capable of real harm has eluded the eager boffins of the world’s militaries for several reasons, none of which sound like they’ve been addressed in this research, which is long on bombast but short, at least in the SCMP article, on substance.
First there is the problem of power. Lasers of relatively low power can damage eyes easily because our eyes are among the most sensitive optical instruments ever developed on Earth. But such a laser may prove incapable of even popping a balloon. That’s because the destruction in the eye is due to an overload of light on a light-sensitive medium, while destruction of a physical body (be it a human body or, say, a missile) is due to heat.
Existing large-scale laser weapons systems powered by parallel arrays of batteries struggle to...