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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.'"
What country is going to be able to stop the might of a vast army of Hulks once they get this gamma-process down pat?
The only challenge is to get them to stop smashing any tank they see.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons
Because you know, it's not how many people died, it's the weapons used!
Gosh.
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
Dr. Evil not available for comment.
However, this will soon be appearing in an online marketplace near you: http://www.villainsupply.com/superweapons.html
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.
Yes, but all I want to know is if I can get them mounted on the heads of a few sharks I have.
birds and snakes, an aeroplane...
um...
gamma weapons blow us away?
Everybody sing: "It's the end of the world as we know it..."
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
New warfare technology has ALWAYS triggered a new "arms race", starting with the first human being who ever beat another to death with a rock.
Imagine their terror when the first knives, attlatls, and later bows & arrows started to be used in combat?
This is simply the latest iteration of an age-old phenomenon.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
but if people are going to fight, the faster its over the better, in my mind. Maybe I'm mistaken?
I think that if you have super fast battles (read: anti tank missles against a house, or carpet bombing) people end up forgetting that there are real people on the other side. The slower it is (and the more they see), the more people remember that war is dumb. Things are only getting faster, unfourtunately.
Right. I'm sure the President himself told the DOD to go spend money on more nuclear weapons.
Give it a rest.
The military is (and rightfully should be) interested in weaponry that focuses on several key factors, in roughly prioritized order from most to least important:
1) Damage potential (military reasons)
2) Minimizing risk to friendly forces and the delivery systems (political reasons)
3) Accuracy and Precision (cost and political/humane reasons)
4) Cost
This new weapon is a breakthrough in the #1 department, and may be a better technology in every category except for the "accuracy" category, due to the fallout factor. If they can figure out how to maximize the energy release (analagous to how complete the combustion is in a conventional fuel-air combustion), they may be able to bring this factor down to levels that equate it with (for example) using depleted uranium ammunition and armor.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
If I hear one more hulk joke, I'm going to get very angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
> Anyone still asking where you really have to search if you want to find WMD? Small hint: not in the middle east...
Current theory is that Saddam's dog ate them.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You raise a good point, but...
Energy density != Energy efficiency.
You want the former for weapons, the latter for commercial energy production.
(Although in the case of fuel substitutes for cars, both are actually quite important. No matter how much you improve the efficiency and cost of hydrogen or fuel cells, its hard to beat oil's energy density.)
Anyway, based on that article, it appears to me that it takes a heck of a lot of energy to make and "energize" the halfnium with protons (or eventually photons). A lot more than you get out when you eventually shoot the X-Ray in and get that 60-fold increase out. That 60-fold increase is just releasing energy you put in the substance gradually earlier. So it isn't necessarily energy efficient, just energy-dense. Of course, as they make the substance cheaper, that is a sign that they're improving the energy efficiency of the manufacturing process, so who knows how good they'll get at that. Clearly they have a long way to go in any case. Particle accelerators aren't cheap, either dollar-wise or energy-wise.
Well, it's a way to store energy, perhaps, but it can't act as a source in and of itself. Excited-state nuclei aren't just lying around in the ground--they tend to have short half-lives, from decades down to the tiniest fractions of a second. To create these metastable nuclei, you have to put in at least as much energy as you're taking out.
Mind, these metastable isotopes already have nonmilitary uses. Technetium-99m has long been used as a radioactive tracer in medicine. It is produced from the decay of molybdenum-99, and has a half-life of about six hours.
~Idarubicin
Read the story here
Excerpts from the story:
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
How long could one of these weapons stay viable?
They said that the Halfnium component has a 31 year half life. I bet the weapon becomes non-viable long before that.
In one sense that is good. Proliferation of this weapon might not be as much of a long term threat. When the support infrastructure is removed, the weapon might decay rapidly enough to mitigate proliferation issues when compared to Plutonium and Uranium.
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.
You could produce a small yield neutron bomb and do the same thing and be less dirty with the radioactive material.
Huh? A small-yield neutron bomb?
A neutron bomb is a fusion warhead. As such, it requires a fission warhead to set it off. A 'small yield' fission warhead is, at the very least, going to be equivalent to anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand tons of TNT, and the second stage fusion warhead, which releases the neutrons, is going to add to that. "Small-yield fusion bomb" is something of an oxymoron.
And neutron bombs are rather dirty, indeed. In addition to the fallout from the fission primary, the intense neutron flux transmutes many substances, notably metals, in the surrounding area into radioisotopes. Some of those will have rather long half-lives.
The "Davy Crockett" is more accurately described as a portable recoilless rifle launched nuke. It's about the same size as a more modern TOW setup, can go on a tripod. It probably took 4 or 5 guys to carry all the stuff on foot, so it's not really a bazooka (an anti-tank weapon).
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It had a "dial a yield" warhead from 10 to 250(1) Tons of TNT. The higher settings would cause almost certain death to the launch crew as the lethal radiation kill zone was much farther than the maximum range of even the biggest launcher (2 miles or so).
One of the new thingies or an old Davy Crockett might be a good device to wipe out a bunch of tanks out in a desert, but it's still a friggin huge weapon compared to the precision stuff used nowdays. (I doubt any army will be dumb enough to go head-to-head against the US Army in desert tank battle for a looonngg time. Even the Iraqis didn't try it a second time.)
Here's some links with pictures:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nucl
http://www.guntruck.com/DavyCrockett.html
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.
The article says they're planning to make this isomer in gram quantities by shooting gamma rays into a sample of ground-state 178Hf, which is the reverse of the decay process. The problem is that the cross-section is going to be very low, for exactly the same reason: it's hard to get a photon to carry many units of angular momentum into or out of a nucleus. People have discussed making small (microgram) quantities of it for use as a high-spin target in reactor experiments, but nobody could figure out any reasonable way to do it.
You also have to realize that although the half-life of 31 years is long compared to most isomeric states, it's still relatively short compared to, say, 235U, which lives for gazillions of years. The relatively short half-life means that even if you could get a gram of this stuff, it'd be virtually impossible to handle safely. It would be much more radioactive than a subcritical mass of weapons-grade fissionables.
There's a long history of impractical ideas like this, going back to the Reagan-era idea of a gamma-ray laser. Luckily we're still only faced with the same basic bomb threats that've been around since the Kennedy administration, but that's bad enough. The real thing to worry about, IMO, is the nuclear cauldron that's shaping up in Asia: Iran, Afghanistan, India, and North Korea.
OT: Are other people finding Slashdot extremely slow and unresonsive recently? I can hardle even access it anymore.
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The U.S. is bound by international treaty not to use Chemical or Biological weapons, ever, under any circumstances.
Yeah, and the U.S. is known for following international law.
We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of the dreams.
The article claims that the AF supplier, SRS Technologies, said that technology to provide the materials needed in "gram quantities" would be about five years away (he say they "would exist within five years").
;).
Certainly, for a project such as this, it is completely unbelievable that one of the key entities in the weapon development would give anyone and everyone a remotely precise estimate as to when larger scale production (and real weapon production) could possibly begin.
The true timeline must be years away from that. In one of the two directions possible... Which poses an interesting question: are real weapons based on this technology available today already, and did they agree to participate in the story simply to "prepare" the general public for real-world testing which will happen in the following year or two? Or do they know that others are working on this technology as well, and therefore need to tell their nation that "they're right on it", when some other country launches their tests within the next year or two?
That's speculation. Time will show.
What will be interesting to see, too, is how the real testing will commence. Currently they are working on three possibly viable materials. Most likely they will have different characteristics, and their exact effects in a real-world scenario will be impossible to simulate.
In 1945, there were two materials available for fission weapons - uranium and plutonium. One bomb was made with each, and the two bombs were dropped on each their civilian target. Hiroshima got Uranium, Nagasaki got Plutonium.
Which three cities will this new weapon be tested on? And to raise the bar, which city will get Hafnium, which one will get Thorium, and which one will get Niobium?
Oh, and don't tell me war has gone soft and that the weapon would not be tested on civilian targets this time... A gamma discharge weapon has many of the properties of a neutron weapon - it is extremely useful mostly against people (and electronics - it will kill you *and* your Aibo, oh the wonders of modern civilization
On a second note... Did anyone notice how there is no longer anything called a "neutron bomb"? It is, today, called a "low yield" bomb. In the media at least. Because it's blast and heat isn't as great as "real" fusion weapons. Neutron weapons are now almost politically correct - at least, the public wouldn't raise an eye if they were told a low-yield bomb was dropped to stop riots in some third-world city.
Now, to go find lead coating for my tinfoil hat.
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.