'It's a PanGalactic Federation Star-ship, Captain!!' 'Activate force wall. Fire Z-Ray 3!!' The laser's popular image has always been as a death ray. But so far, in the real world, it has never achieved that fictional promise. Since it was invented 25 years ago, it has been just almost everything else - a bloodless scalpel, a precision welder, a source for ultra-fast light communication. But now, at last, fiction may become reality as the superpowers square up to set the laser on the warpath....