Until some of the Axis of Evil achieve similar capacity... this could be worse than nukes because it would not generate any radioactive fallout to make subsequent ground based conquest harder. Think of a party like Iran or North Korea not nuking, but lasering targets in Washington.
The Chinese and the Russians have been working on this as an ASAT weapon for years in defiance of international treaty(ABM Treaty).The same treaties we signed back in 1972. It is rather recently that we have started working on this and achieved great strides. IMHO, we are making better weapon systems than the Russians and to a certain extent the Chinese. The Chinese or Russians have nothing like the ABL.The next world war will be in space using laser weapons.