Chinese Smog Probably Could Disrupt America's Laser Weapons

China’s smog—and gleeful Western schadenfreude over the fact—is old news, but the city of Beijing is now out-smogging its own smoggy self. For the sixth day in a row, Beijing has recorded hazardous pollution and advised its citizens to stay indoors. On Friday, the pollution alert was raised to level “orange,” the second-highest danger level. The World Health Organization declared it a crisis.

But according to Navy Rear Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong of the People’s Liberation Army, the smog has an upside. America’s new laser weaponry is "most afraid of smog," he said according to South China Morning Post .

"Under conditions where there is no smog, a laser weapon can fire [at a range of] 10 kilometres. When there's smog, it's only one kilometre. What's the point of making this kind of weapon?" he asked.

Well, mostly the point of the laser weapons is that they look impressive enough to earn more funding from the Pentagon, but there is one being deployed to the sunny Middle East. It will ride on the Navy’s USS Ponce.

Is Zhang right? Could smog jam a laser like the one on the Ponce? Almost definitely.

As Paul Marks at New Scientist wrote about issues with the deployment of the Ponce’s new laser, “One important challenge is to make the system cope better with atmospheric phenomena like fog, rain, and airborne sand and dust, which can slash the infrared laser beam's power and range.”

Smog is certainly a phenomenon like fog, and it’s worth remembering that smog refracts and scatters light like crazy. Particulates added to the air, like in Beijing, are blocking sunlight after all. Contrary to popular belief, smog doesn’t make sunsets more beautiful, it makes them washed out and lousy.

Even when the laser is working, it’s sort of working against itself. When the laser hits the wing of the drone, say, a cloud of vaporized wing material is kicked up and blocks the beam, which is why the drone-killing lasers you’ve seen are actually pulsing really quickly to mitigate this effect. Shooting through the heavily ionized, ozone-laden air of China's most polluted cities is that much more difficult, and it takes an enormous amount of power to generate a strong enough beam working under the best of conditions, such that the only vehicle capable of carrying a laser weapon is a battleship that can generate megawatts from its engines.

But then, even if Zhang is looking for the silver lining on the smog cloud, it’s not really clear what that is: not only are the fates of America and China too intertwined to make war between the nations terribly feasible, America’s laser weapons aren’t really going to be a part of an invading force anytime soon. Nevin Carr, a retired two-star admiral who was the head of the Office of Naval Research, told Wired that he “doubts that the first wave of Navy lasers will be able to generate the 100 kilowatts that’s generally considered militarily relevant.”

“It’s a good capability for softer targets like UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] and boghammers—small, fast-swarming boats,” Carr said, before admitting that the laser isn’t really useful for something like an anti-ship missile. “You aren’t gonna do that with a solid-state laser,” he said.

So who knows what Zhang was getting at. He claims he was misquoted to make it sound like he was pro-smog, although he totally isn’t. The Chinese government has tried putting a positive spin on the smog in the past, saying that it brings people together against a common enemy and the such.

According to estimates by Greenpeace and Peking University's School of Public Health, exposure to PM 2.5 particles in the air, which are causing the smog, contributed to 8,572 premature deaths in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi'an in 2012. It's not technically "scorched earth," but Chinese air quality might dispel any outside forces simply by virtue of being repulsive.