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means that it also generates incredible heat. Laser light is burninglight. In The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells, with characteristicprescience, wrote of a ray that caused whatever it touched to bum .He called it “that pitiless sword of heat, ” 10a fairly good descriptionof the modem laser. In popular culture, especially in science fictionand futuristic adventure films, a laser beam, emitted from a gun,will cause a person or thing to vaporize. Scientists have alreadyacknowledged the laser as a potential antipersonnel weapon ofastonishing destructive capability. Nehrich, Voran, and Dessel, intheir basic book Atomic Light: Lasers—What They Are and How TheyWork, write that “[t]he use of the laser for a death ray cannot beavoided as a possibility. It stands to reason that a light ray powerfulenough to penetrate steel could also bum through a nice soft humanbeing. ” "T he amount of energy used in a laser does not indicate its power.In Lasers: Tools of Modem Technology, Ronald Brown explains: “Apulse from a ruby laser, focused by a lens, can blast a hole in steelplate a third of a centimeter thick, yet it does not contain enoughenergy to boil an egg. There is no contradiction here: although thetotal energy in a pulse is not very great, it is very highlyconcentrated. ” 12According to O. S. Heavens in Lasers:The hazard of the high-power carbon dioxide laser—which willbum a hole through a firebrick in seconds—is an obvious one sofar as danger to humans is concerned. Less obvious is thepotential harm that can result from looking at say, a heliumneonlaser beam of only one thousandth of a watt. Because thelens of the eye focuses the beam on to a minute spot on theretina, the intensity of illumination on the retinal cells couldeasily be high enough to cause damage. 13[Italics mine]In 1964, the United States Navy issued a report on hazards to laserpersonnel:Whether the laser is used in the laboratory as a research tool,in the field as a simulator or as a weapon, or in a space vehicleas a means of communication, its property of generating intense