Those of you who love karma or schadenfreude (as I do) probably have watched YouTube videos of Somali pirates being shot up by various warships.

Schadenfreude is German and it’s made up of the words ‘schaden’, which means ‘harm’ or ‘damage’, and ‘freude’, which means ‘joy’. By definition, finding joy in someone else’s misfortune. What is very interesting is that one can see, by the splashes all around the pirate boat, the many missed shots of the warship. In the video, one sees the minigun spewing out bullets like a sewing machine and around the pirate ship a veritable ring of splashes until, finally, the pirate boat gets hit.

This is all very surprising. In this day of reusable rockets and self-driving cars and supersonic missiles, one would imagine that an accurate, stabilised gun platform on a ship would be no big challenge. But seemingly not. However, the US has now revealed a laser gun. Wikipedia states: “The general idea of laser-beam weaponry is to hit a target with a train of brief pulses of light. The rapid evaporation and expansion of the surface causes shockwaves that damage the target.” So, get one of those beams on the pirate boat fuel tank and it’s good night sweet prince – which will result in a dramatic fall-off of pirate recruits, one imagines. Since the weapon is a laser beam, it is dead accurate and thus unaffected by wind or gravity (unlike a normal bullet or shell) and it would not be difficult to disable targets with simplicity. Or, put more honestly, kill people dead with ease.

The question is: Will this end wars as we know them, and will this bring an end to the stoned and drunk 16-year-old child soldier walking around with an AK 47 rifle acting as front-line cannon fodder in drug and diamond wars? No. Laser guns are expensive, while AK 47 rifles and dagga and booze are not.

However, one can see that the laser weapons will change conflicts in some real way, since one could erect live barriers and traps, which will render certain areas no-go.

I’m reminded about the atomic bomb. Many don’t realise that the first bomb, the uranium bomb, was not tested beforehand. The Little Boy-type of bomb (dropped on Hiroshima) triggered a nuclear explosion by firing one piece of uranium 235 (U235) into another. The resulting fission chain reaction produces a nuclear explosion. The bomb’s gun-barrel shape was believed to be very reliable and had never been tested. In fact, testing was out of the question, since producing Little Boy had used all the purified U235 produced hitherto. Fat Man (dropped on Nagasaki) contained a sphere of the metal plutonium 239. It was surrounded by blocks of high explosives that would compress the plutonium sphere to a critical density and set off a nuclear chain reaction. Scientists at Los Alamos, in the US, were not entirely confident in the plutonium bomb design, so they scheduled the Trinity to test it.

And then . . . Soviet Russia made a bomb (like Little Boy) and tested it in 1951. At this stage, one would have thought that somebody would say: “Well, we’ve killed about 150 000 people, mostly civilians, and we’ve reduced towns flat horizon to horizon; our opponents have the bomb, so let’s not make any more.” This didn’t happen. The US went on to make a whole lot of fission bombs and then developed fusion bombs (as in hydrogen bombs), as did the Russians.

Perhaps, as long as Joseph Stalin was in charge in Russia, the US had a right to be fearful and needed deterrent bombs. After all, Stalin was no stranger to having hundreds of thousands of people killed. Bombing the US would hardly keep him awake at night. But once he was gone, surely, the pace could have slowed down a bit. But it didn’t. Bomb numbers increased. And so it is with all weapon technology: continuous development for no good reason. A great pity.