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Stimulated Gamma Decay Weapons
ExRex writes "New Scientist is reporting on a USDOD project to produce super explosives. 'An exotic kind of nuclear explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology could trigger the next arms race.'"
My basic question concerning this is two-fold, is this realy needed, and if it is created will we be able to control the techology. With world events the way they are now it seems like one of the last things that we end is a small high yeild weapon that can fall into the worng hands. At least with nuclear weapons there are some means of detecting their presence, but it seems that these weapons will not have the same signature.
While I don't condone weapons research, I think this is certainly interesting. If the RPGs flaunted around today were capable of Tomakawk-size destruction, i think we'd simple see skirmishes ending faster, in a "disease-burnout" kind of way. I'd hate to see this effect be used as weaponry by anyone, but if people are going to fight, the faster its over the better, in my mind. Maybe I'm mistaken?
I'm suprised that the potential for batteries wasn't discussed. What if this technique allowed better energy storage than we have now? What if we could store electricity when and where we produce it, and move it to where and when we want to use it? I guess what I'm asking is: when can I run my laptop off of one, and will it cause "flipper-babies?"
A weapon so small that a suicide bomber can use it to wipe out significant parts of city centres. So "we" have to have more and better of them first in case someone else develops them. How much security is going to be needed to make sure none of these interesting munitions escape into the wild? How much civil liberty will we have to give up so we can enjoy increased protection? I'm beginning to think what the world really needs is a development program for a weapon that destroys military installations and leaves people standing.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The effect of a nuclear-isomer explosion would be to release high-energy gamma rays capable of killing any living thing in the immediate area. It would cause little fallout compared to a fission explosion, but any undetonated isomer would be dispersed as small radioactive particles, making it a somewhat "dirty" bomb. This material could cause long-term health problems for anybody who breathed it in.
I'm wondering how big a problem this "dirty bomb characteristics" issue is. How much of the isomer really doesn't detonate (and why?) Is this a 1% of the substance doesn't detonate (decay suddenly when hit with an X-ray) problem or a 50% doesn't detonate? And if the amount of the material is small enough (e.g. a gram), perhaps this falls below injurious-in-practice threshholds? I.e. how close to conventional low-yield nuclear really is it?
--LP
and means of detonation, this isn't much different than neutron bombs. You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
As a military member myself, I cannot say that this weapon is "attractive" to me. As a commander, I wouldn't want to use it as a matter of course any more than I would want to use a nuke. I WOULD use a nuke or this weapon, however, in a dire emergency, which appears to be precisely what this weapon is NOT intended for. It is seen as something with general use potential...to some in DOD halls where everything is clean theory but not to me, a line guy.
As far as I am concerned, use of such a weapon would barely be a step up from use of a dirty bomb, which would rightly be seen as illegal and an act of terror. Not me, no thanks.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Why not combine this gamma producing technogy with the nuclear reactor waste processing technology (which conveniently requires gamma rays) and everyone can be happy? http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94056> waste processing
Some people suspect the Soviet Union's little "accident" with smallpox a couple decades back may not have been an accident but an experiment on their own people.
"And the idea that if Vietnam fell into Communist hands the entire Asia/Australian region would go under (The Domino Theory) proved worthless."
This theory was quite valid. After South Vietnam was conquered, Laos and Cambodia fell next. Burma remains a socialist hellhole to this day. Thailand was endangered, but it was protected partially due to the awareness of what the Domino Theory was.
The Domino Theory was nothing more than a realization of the reality of Soviet imperialism, announced when Lenin said his empire would take over the world (at which point he conqured a dozen nations outside of Russia's borders).
Just because every domino did not fall does not mean that the theory is invalid.
" But don't believe the old ideas that the Soviets were a barbarian horde frothing at the mouth to take over every inch of land. (Stalin was frothing at the mouth but he was insane)"
Lenin frequently announced his intent of total global empire. He and each of his successors conquered and added new nations to the empire.
"The effect of a nuclear-isomer explosion would be to release high-energy gamma rays capable of killing any living thing in the immediate area." They call this an explosion, and they use tons of TNT as the benchmark. Is it really an explosion? The primary killing force in this device seems to be gamma radiation. I believe when they say "energy" in this article, they mean gamma radiation, and not explosive force, but I can't confirm it.
If 1g hafnium > 50 kg TNT, wouldn't this make an excellent fuel for a spacecraft's propulsion system? How does the energy density stack up against conventional/current experimental rocket systems? As I understand it one of the difficulties in sending a probe to Pluto is not getting there, but carrying sufficient fuel to be able to slow and enter orbit once it arrives.
Could this be used for the next rocket fuel? Controlled explosion of high density hafnium-178m2. The research doesn't necessarily have to create the next bomb. Could this be the way we reach Mars?
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Wars end lots faster than they used to; it used to take 6-12 months *minimum* to raise an army of 50,000 men that consisted primarily of poorly equipped hand-to-hand infantry. But once the hacking and slashing finished a year or so later, everybody was done for good long while.
Now it seems that we (at least the US) can put an armored force of 200,000 anywhere it wants within a couple of months and win the war in 90 days..but the low-grade fighting just doesn't stop. The Israelis took the west bank in '67 (or was it '73? I forget), but have been essentially fighting the Palestinians for control since.
It's the same way everywhere; we don't fight wars for a few years anymore; we fight them in 2-3 months and then switch to low-grade guerilla tactics for the next year.
My conspiracy theory is that Lawrence Livermore or Area 51 or some such government run hush hush spot may have a weapon based on this on the drawing board, or even in development. When the dudes published the idea in 2000, Lawrence livermore published fake negative results to keep the other countries of the world from working on the idea, and then secretly have been working on it ever since. Now that mini-nukes are back in style since 9/11, they can even say they're working on it in public and don't have to hide their research.
Eat at Joe's.
It appears there is still some controversy about those results:
controversy
Controversy is usually a good thing in science. It often means that there is an effect we don't entirely understand. In other words: There is a cool new effect, we don't entirely understand!!!
Judging from the difference in results coming from sources of differing bandwidth, it would appear that is an important factor. Which makes sense since this is essentially a resonance process.
Incorrect, according to the Honorverse web encyclopedia. You're probably thinking of grav lances or the fact that grasers in the Honorverse use gravity lenses for focus and aiming. GRASERs are in fact weapons based on Gamma Rays Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This is done with nuclear stimulation because nothing else can provide the energy to stimulate the emission of gamma rays. Saying gamma rays are "just very highly energetic photons" is like say that that supersonic craft are "just very fast planes." There are engineering problems that require vastly different approaches that common, less extreme implementations of the basic ideas (lasers or planes).
By the way, "microwave lasers" are usually called MASERs. The L in LASER only refers to visible light.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The apocryphal nuclear suitcase bomb notwithstanding, it is very difficult to make nuclear weapons small enough for tactical use. To save you from greater chance of carpal tunnel syndrome, I am aware of nuclear artillery shells, but they only fit the largest of howitzers. On the other hand, weapons based on this technology could conceivably be deployed at the squad level in a manner similar to an RPG or bazooka. It makes it much harder to control its use when deployed in such fashion. With standing armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers the fallout from such a weapon used in combat would probably litter the countryside in a manner similar to land mines in such now forgotten conflicts (by most in the Western world) as the Namibian war for independence from South Africa.
To join in with the amoral, technophilic point of view preferred in this forum. From a technical point of view the problem with fallout seems to be related to the rate at which the halfnium explodes compared to the rate at which its volume is exposed to an x-ray source. Thus it seems that forming the halfnium in a thin shell around, and surrounded by, an x-ray source should mitigate fallout. However, I can't think to too many switchable x-ray sources other than a fission reaction which off course will cause its own problems...
Actually, not quite. While good figures for Chem/Bio are a bit harder to find, at least where it comes to Nukes the Russians are well ahead of the US, at least according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. We've built more in total, but dismantled many as they became obselete.
Why?
While we're on that subject (Since I'm gonna get modded down now anyway) did anyone read between the lines with the recent Liberia situation? I could just see Bush talking about how we were considering sending troops (Translation: "I asked for an oil report on the country, and if it looks good I might do my good friends at Hallow-Burton a favor.") Then it got bad and he couldn't wiggle out of sending a couple of marines over. Did anyone else read it that way? That's sure how it looked to me.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You mean like the beautiful ruins the Romans left us in Carthage? Oh, wait...
The ability for an army to raze a city is not something unique to the past century. Or the past millenium, for that matter. The "beautiful ruins and philosophy" you speak of are only there because they were built by the winning side. Note that you said:
- "Greeks" instead of "Iranians"
- "Romans" instead of "Lybians"
- "Egyptians" instead of "Sudanese"
And the only reason I can't think of somebody the Middle Kingdom raped/pillaged/slaughtered off of the top of my head is that the schools I attended had a "Western" bias."When nuclear weapons were being developed, it was to create something that would make future warfare impossible (same with the machine gun)"
Wrong on both counts. The goal of both weapons was to make warfare easier, quicker, and less bloody. Dr. Gatling's concern was the number of men needed in formation to achieve X rate of fire, and his reasoning was that reducing that number of men while achieving the same rate of fire would reduce the need for men to even be there to begin with. As for nuclear weapons, peruse the internet a little and take a look at what Eisenhower's philosophy was on them (nutshell: use them early and often to reduce the need to send in actual soldiers).
"but we know how that turned out."
It's a little to soon to say how nukes have turned out, but in many ways Dr. Gatling was successful. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons have lowered the number of men needed to take and hold an objective, which works to lessen collateral damage. For all the carnage that happened in places like Stalingrad and Berlin during the Second World War, think about how much worse it would have been if all the troops had to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in formation.
"Meanwhile, this thing seems to be purely for killing:"
However, nuclear weapons (and this new concept) are different from the other two classifications of WMD in that they actually have valid military uses. Chemical and biological weapons are all but useless against a moderately prepared force, and their only real use is against civillian populations. However, there are times when you really need a powerful explosive to take out a military target (such as underground bunkers). Yes, it's meant to kill people, but it's only intended to kill certain people in certain places, not "everybody in the downtown area." The fallout is a side-effect that even the DOD wants to eliminate because it hampers the weapon's usefullness in a tactical situation (it's better to take and hold an objective than to deny its use to everybody).
"Why am I paying for the development of a whole new type of weapon when I can't afford school because of the resession?"
DOD = federal
education = state
"and massive defense spending is what caused this deficit mess we're in now..."
FY 2001
Medicaid: 7%
Medicare: 12%
Defense: 16%
Social Security: 23%
Source
Personally, I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
Beyond the obvious Hulk jokes, did anyone follow the link in the articles? This story describes how this technology is slated to be used in powering UAVs that could stay aloft over a combat zone for months at a time. IMHO, channelling and controlling the energy in a useful way such as this is much cooler than being able to build a straight energy-release bomb.
I just started thinking about this
/. mode I guess I'll post it anyway
<Mode = "Hypothetical situation">
Let's say you have a country with lots and lots of nearly identical desert and you're descretely making let's say 1 medium sized WMD/BCW a week.
Now, I would have them cart the thing out to some not-previously-determined spot in the desert and descretely bury it, and take a GPS reading of the spot.
So people don't find the GPS co-ordinates just written down somewhere, I'd make a deposit in an off-shore numbered account related to the Co-ords and let it earn intrest at a fixxed rate so it would be easy to calculate the original value.
Then again that's only how I'd do it... not that I've tried it... yet... ummm...
</mode>
I've just realized this is completely off topic, but since my brain has shut back down to
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!