Camera Shy? Pentagon Builds a Portable Lens-Destroying Laser
‘The Pentagon’s newest laser weapon has a peak power of more than a million megawatts, so intense that it warps the air around it. When the beam strikes the target it vaporises the impact site, producing a plasma fireball and a highly destructive shockwave.
The end result: a tiny crater barely visible to the naked eye.
That’s because the so-called “laser crazer” is designed not to burn up missiles or tanks, but to scratch lenses. It’s a portable nonlethal weapon designed to take out enemy optical systems at long range — ruining an adversary’s night-vision gear, sniper scopes and binoculars in a fraction of a second — by sandblasting their lenses with ultrashort pulses of laser light.’
