The plausibly deniable death ray.
The great thing about laser weapons, New Scientist says, isn’t just that you can fry your enemy from miles away. You can also shrug your shoulders and say, “No, really, I didn’t zap that guy!”:
As the term suggests, “plausible deniability” is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it.
Corley and Kaiser did not respond to requests from New Scientist to expand on their comments. But John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear.
“The target would never know what hit them,” says Pike. “Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike.”
Tags: engineering, optics, physics
When was the last time the American government had to come up with a plausible excuse?
Aren’t we the Shaggy of political affairs?
“Plausible deniability” is a phrase so wrapped in the fabric of bureaucracy that even the “plausible” part carries around its own ironic quotation marks.