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The Station of Extreme Light (SEL, 极端光物理线站) is laser facility aimed at producing a laser with 100 petawatts (PW) of peak power. The station is currently under construction in Shanghai, China. The laser may be powerful enough to produce matter and antimatter directly from a vacuum (the Schwinger effect).
Patterns of activity at a remote military base suggest China could be using a ground-based laser weapon to try to hack Western satellites. China recognizes that satellites give Western military forces, particularly the U.S. military, a tremendous advantage in wartime.
China's space programme, like its' nuclear programme, expanded from military to civil uses. China built up its space launch capabilities on the foundations of Its Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMS) and the technology to improve their performance from the United States.
Laser weapons have long been a staple of science fiction, but in recent years, significant strides have been made in their development and deployment by the United States military.
The Peresvet (Russian: Пересвет), named after Alexander Peresvet, is a Russian laser weapon for air defense and anti-satellite warfare.
Germany announced on October 27 that a high-energy laser weapon system mounted on the frigate Sachsen had successfully killed drones at short and very short ranges for the first time.
Executive summary. As the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) seeks to become a “world-class military,” its progress in advanced weapons systems continues to provoke intense concern from its neighbors and competitors.
The People's Republic of China has developed and possesses weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and nuclear weapons. The first of China's nuclear weapons tests took place in 1964, and its first hydrogen bomb test occurred in 1967 at Lop Nur.
Lockheed Martin delivered to the U.S. DoD the most powerful laser weapon ever built.
Laser strength
The strongest lasers tested could hypothetically require under a year to redirect an asteroid a safe distance from the Earth, while the weakest lasers could take up to 10 years. The advantage of a weak laser is that requires less energy to power and, as a result, costs less than a higher powered laser.
U.S. Defense giant Lockheed Martin recently revealed that it had delivered a 300-kilowatt laser to the Defense Department for use in future Army high-energy laser demonstrations. It is the highest-powered laser to date for the U.S. Department Of Defense.
Producing the world's most powerful laser systems
Lithuanian scientists have long been on the quest to develop ever more powerful and stable laser systems, and their research has resulted in an impressive number of breakthroughs, especially in amplifying the power of ultrashort lasers.
"Magen Or" (Iron Beam) is the next step up in Israel's self-defense: a laser system that can "cook" rockets, missiles or drones from afar, and at zero cost compared to the Iron Dome.
Could a one-dollar material render a billion-dollar weapon technology useless? It is possible, but the improvement in protection would also force laser scientists to further increase the power of the weapons, he said. China, for instance, is developing a compact 10 gigawatt power source for directed energy weapons.
In international humanitarian law, the use of laser weapons is prohibited when they are specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices.
Gunpowder was a Chinese invention that revolutionized warfare. The Chinese used explosives on a wide scale beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The cannons, flamethrowers, and grenades that they used in battle were quickly adopted by European forces for battles on land and at sea.
An American naval expert has warned US military planners that the US Navy might lose to China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, which enjoys a substantial numerical advantage over the US, saying, “the side with the most ships almost always wins.”
In other words, on a proportional basis, China is now roughly 75 percent as advanced in innovation and advanced-industry production as the United States. If this relative growth continues apace, China will surpass the United States by 2035.
The most cutting-edge military technology in the world is found in the United States of America (U.S.A.). France, China, Russia, and the United Kingdom are the other nations in the world with the most advanced military technology.
Dragonfire is a British laser directed-energy weapon technology demonstrator.
MBDA and its partners in the DragonFire consortium say that they have successfully carried out the first static high-power laser firing of a sovereign UK capability at the range in Porton Down. The test was carried out on the 17th October 2022.
Although directed energy weapons (DEWs) are not currently used within the Department of National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF), various laser technologies have been in the inventory for decades.