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.
Read more: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/03/05/laser-weapons-are-almost-ready-for-the-battlefield?source=Snapzu