PLA building anti-laser shields in case smog isn’t strong enough defense

A few weeks ago the lovely PLA Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong received many a sarcastic tweet after boasting that American laser weapons ‘are afraid of smog.’ Just in case the China’s PM2.5 isn’t enough to fight off US laser-beams, the PLA is rolling out big fancy laser deflector shields, because arms races are more fun with space-age tech.
PLA researchers claim to have crafted metal-based coatings that can “turn away lasers or even reflect them back to their source,” which were built in explicit response to the US Navy’s development of a laser-based gun which is set to be deployed on ships in the Middle East this summer.
Much of the PLA’s science seems to be built on the assumption that China and the United States will inevitably clash, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to get their work done on the cheap. According to SCMP, the theory behind an anti-laser coating instead of a Chinese version of a laser weapon is that “‘a shield’ was much less expensive to develop than ‘a spear,'” and that, presumably, smog can’t always be counted on to scare the lasers away.

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