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.

Laser weapons can hit at the speed of light, and they are quickly deploying to each potential fighting domain, whether on property, at the atmosphere , and in sea. But what about beneath the sea? Open-source funding documents, the oldest of which date back to 2011, reveal the Navy’s plans to arm Virginia-class nuclear subs with high performance laser weapons.

Laser weapons can strike at the speed of light, and they’re quickly deploying to every possible fighting domain, whether on land, in the air, and at sea. But what about under the sea? Open-source budget documents, the earliest of which date back to 2011, show the Navy’s plans to arm Virginia-class nuclear subs with high-energy laser weapons. It’s a strange idea seeing as laser weapons definitely do not work underwater.

Russia’s defense minister reported to President Vladimir Putin that a new hypersonic weapon of intercontinental range became operational Friday following years of tests. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed Putin that the first missile unit equipped with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle entered combat duty, the Defense Ministry said.

Such weapons “violate fundamental legal and ethical principles and would destabilize international peace and security,” says a Dutch NGO.

The celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China at the beginning of this month promised plenty of pomp and power projection. In the days leading up to the grandiose parade through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Chinese citizens began sharing photos of tarp-covered vehicles and missiles being rolled into Beijing for a rehearsal.

Pilots of unmanned combat drones are experiencing a new kind of moral dissonance, writes Adam Henschke.

Medieval Myth Busting. 160lbs ENGLISH WARBOW shoots FULL WEIGHT MEDIEVAL ARROWS at reproduced MEDIEVAL ARMOUR. Find out what happens!

Do you remember the sword-fight scene in The Princess Bride? And how Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts kept up a discussion about their various strategems? Turns out those are real, historic fencing references.

A mystery explosion at a Russian weapons testing range involved radioactive materials, authorities admitted on Saturday, as the blast's death toll rose and signs of a creeping radiation emergency, or at the least fear of one, grew harder to mask.

International military exercises “Summer Shield 2019” officially began this week in Latvia. The exercises will take place from May 13 to 25, reported mil.lv.

The global competition to develop fully autonomous weapons systems guided by artificial intelligence risks developing into a full-blown arms race, according to a new report from a Dutch peace group. Lethal autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” as they are described by Pax, the anti-war NGO behind the report, are designed to select and engage targets without proximate human control.

A new initiative by the US Army suggests “another significant step towards lethal autonomous weapons,” warns a leading artificial-intelligence researcher who has called for a ban on so-called “killer robots.” The Army Contracting Command has called on potential vendors in industry and academia to submit ideas to help build its Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS), which a Defense Department solicitation says will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to give ground-combat vehicles autonomous targeting capabilities.

China’s landing of a rover on the far side of the moon grabbed headlines around the world this week. Less noticed, the country’s state media reported on progress in another arena: game-changing naval weaponry. The state-run Global Times said on Thursday (Jan. 3) that Chinese warships will soon be equipped with electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles with “incredibly destructive velocity,” and that the underlying technology was based on ”fully independent intellectual property,” rather than designs copied from other nations. It cited a report that appeared Wednesday on China’s CCTV.

A Chinese navy warship armed with what looks like a mounted electromagnetic railgun has apparently set sail, possibly for testing in the open ocean.

As the fortune of war shifted against Nazi Germany by the mid of 1942, its leadership increasingly placed their hopes in the development of Wunderwaffe (Miracle Weapons) to turn the tide back in their favor. Many of such weapon designs never went further than the concept stage and that which went into combat service, suffered from frequent reliability issues as their production was rushed. While never made in significant numbers to make an impact, their pioneering designs and technology would leave a lasting impact on not just future weaponry and in other fields as well.

China has developed a new portable laser weapon that can zap a target from nearly a kilometre away, according to researchers involved in the project. The ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle is classified as being “non-lethal” but produces an energy beam that cannot be seen by the naked eye but can pass through windows and cause the “instant carbonisation” of human skin and tissues.

The US has dramatically stepped up the effort to overhaul the existing arsenal and prepare for the day when it might once again be enlarged.

New evidence continues to accumulate showing how Official Washington got key elements of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals wrong, especially how these two crimes of state originated in treacherous actions to secure the powers of the presidency, writes Robert Parry. (Mar. 9, 2013)