Israel’s Laser Defenses Are a Major Technological Breakthrough

Over a decade ago, Israeli engineers found a way to do what had long seemed impossible: they developed a system that could knock missiles out of the sky with a high degree of accuracy—as difficult, as one skeptic put it, as hitting a bullet with another bullet. The Iron Dome, together with other missile-defense systems, has saved countless lives in the past two years alone. Now Israeli ingenuity has created a device that accomplishes the same thing with lasers. These beams of “directed energy” have long been used for civilian purposes at close range, but it was thought infeasible to use them on anything far away, let alone at the ten-kilometer range of the newly debuted Iron Beam.