That I live in a country that even considers using such evil technology is one thing that keeps me up at night:

Air Force touts laser weapon’s “who, us?” feature by John Murrell I know I’m just a crazy, naive idealist, but dammit, it still bothers me to see the U.S. military promoting a new weapon technology on the basis that it makes it easier for the government to lie. In PowerPoint presentations to technical audiences about the aircraft-mounted Advanced Tactical Laser (affectionately known as the “long-range blowtorch”), Air Force representatives like to include a slide listing the many advantages it has over conventional weapons. A briefing given to the 2007 Air Armament Symposium by the head of the Air Force’s Capabilities Integration Directorate lists the following benefits of the laser weapon: “Ultra-precision target engagement; speed of light engagement; reduced collateral damage; scalable effects; covert — plausible deniability; improved ISR supporting BMC4I; encompasses entire kill chain.” Back up a little to “plausible deniability.” The same advantage shows up on slide in a June briefing given to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association by Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate. Plausible deniability is, of course, the slightly more polite way of saying we could use this thing, lie about it, and nobody could prove otherwise. As John Pike, analyst with defense think-tank Global Security, puts it, “The target would never know what hit them. Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike.” The less advantageous flip side of this, of course, is that if anything in the world ever gets blown up by a mysterious and intense heat source, we will be blamed and all denials will be deemed implausible. The precision, scalability and reduction of collateral damage claimed for this technology are impressive. Shame they didn’t include a moral compass in the specs.