[fode]

Wow, this explains it all! I currently live on the beach in Dakar Sénégal. About 2 weeks ago, I was up late on my balcony and saw these dazzling green lights coming from really far out in the ocean. For one I was wondering what it was, and two, I was surprised that the green lights seemed to be coming from so far out from the ocean, but yet they were lighting up the beach like someone was standing right there with a flash light. And I'm talking super far!

I had a hunch that it might be military related. It was fascinating to see how powerful the green lights were after they bounced off the water and hit the sand.

I'm so glad I caught this article here. I was going nuts for a while there lol

[massaman]

The only known countermeasure is a Bedazzler vest.

[Balgair]

Retro(reflective) man!

https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=12...

[t-writescode]

What’s the danger of blindness?

[hajile]

The Red Cross still considers them to be dangerous.

The human eye (depending on the person) magnifies light 100,000-500,000 times. The inverse square law means that only minor variations in distance can have large differences in effective light (laser irradiance conforms to this law). Rangefinders aren't perfect and the smaller they are, the harder it is to detect the range accurately (inverse square law again). Laser damage happens in just 0.25 seconds, so even a tiny mistake can have catastrophic consequences.

The US military has admitted to their own soldiers being hurt, but it would be an international incident to admit it happened to someone they were fighting, so I doubt you'll see them releasing any stats about that.

https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/57jmcz....

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328516-400-should-p...

https://www.longdom.org/open-access/chorioretinal-injury-cau...

[udue73uru]

Not trying to nitpick but I had trouble following some of your wording. What would the international incident be over if it happened during a fight? I get that blinding civilians by accident during a training exercise could blow up but blinding targets with a high powered laser doesn't seem that different from using flash grenades when storming a building. I was also unsure because you mentioned it happening during a fight and it seems like if you can already lock onto a target to fire a laser into their eyes it'd be more efficient to skip blinding them and just shoot or bombard them.

[bmn__]

A grenade blinds temporarily, a laser blinds permanently. FTA:

> international law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Blinding_Laser_Wea... prohibits the employment of any such system that is deliberately designed to cause permanent blindness.

[udue73uru]

I didn't know! Thanks! But is permanent blindness actually a moral hazard if you're using that blindness to create an immediate opportunity to shoot the subject? I'm not a soldier so I might be way off but I'm assuming being totally blind for even a few seconds is a massive handicap in an engagement.

[salawat]

War is complicated.

Depending on the philosopher or politician, soldier or commander you ask, it's purpose is fairly varied. Resource burn, attrition, making the other poor bastard die for his country... However, in general, the international community has tended to favor diplomacy favoring modalities of war. By diplomacy friendly, of course, it's still lethal, and loved ones are not at all guaranteed to come back home, but it should result in "a warrior's death". It's frankly stupid, but psychologically, to the political classes, and to the civilian classes there is just some grim acceptance of the necessity of conventional warfare and conflict. Conflicts constrained by laws of war seems to be considered somehow "cleaner", and overall more preferable to the industrial scale manufacture of blind, blistered, or diseased cripples out of the young men and women of both sides.

There are, of course, dissenters to this type of thinking, one of which was Lincoln's War Secretary Edwin Stanton if I recall, Douglas MacArthur and Sherman may also have been counted amongst the numbers of those that advocate the practice of no holds barred, total war, where anything and everything goes, since the only moral outcome of an armed conflict is to end it as quickly, brutally, and decisively as possible. To that end, any restraint in application of force is seen as a sin or needless cruelty in prolonging the conflict.

It was and remains a rather controversial view, especially given the destructive potential most first world nations are now sitting on has led to somewhat of a retirement of the philosophy; at least as long as MAD holds out.

[mohaine]

This is pretty much what the article is about.