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Air Force Researching Antimatter Weapons
mlmitton writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding."
But destructe research wins over constructive alternatives hands down.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
isn't this a tremendous waste of money? I'm generally pretty high on national defense, but is our biggest national security threat really that nuclear bombs aren't powerful enough?
We can not afford a mine shaft gap!
Alternatively antimatter may blow up just fine without any assistance. It's all theory just now. We'll have to drop a gram of it to be sure.
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How many megatons yield per aircraft?
OK, now I'm scared.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
and war is part of the human psyche, we may as well develop weapons that just kill cheap humans and don't fuck up the planet or start nuclear winters.
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
Are we sure they're pursuing weapons? We are talking about the Air Force, and it's funny how they'd compare the relative energy to a spaceship fuel tank, of all things...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Paraphrasing the article:
"Oh, they're safer, there'll be no fallout..."
A couple pounds of antimatter, combined with matter, and there'll be no earth to fall to.
If they succeed, this is it.
In 10 billion years, some future race will detect a gamma ray burst from the Milky Way Galaxy...
During a panel at LACon II in '84, Dr. Forward mentioned that calculations showed that an anti-matter bowling ball wouldn't go up in a blaze of light and gamma, it'd sit on the floor sizzling like a drop of water on a griddle for several minutes. From what I gathered, the matter and anti-matter only interact as they come into contact with each other, and even in a normal Earth atmosphere there's a limit as to how many particles touch at any given time. Also, of course, the reaction heats the air up, causing convection currents that lower the pressure. Thinking about it, I guess you'd get the fastest reaction with an anti-dust so that there's as much surface as possible.
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Look for a patent infringement suit.
A bigger bomb isn't the answer. Guerilla warefare has shown you have to fight door-to-door. Daisy-cutters, as impressive as they were and 'Shock and awe' seem, upon reflection, to be greatly overrated in their effectiveness. People fear nuclear weapons, not just because they can kill so many, but because they can poison the land for years to come.
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So yea, woo hoo anti-matter power!
Sure, it's radioactive, just like fission, but hey antimatter is cheap at $62.5 trillion per gram, and it's 10-100 times more powerful!
Not sure what the point would be in antimatter weapons, besides serious coolness. Nukes are at least stable at room temperature, and if you drop a ball of plutonium on your foot, all you get is broken toes. Wouldn't want to have a power failure anywhere NEAR antimatter.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Why do people make a big deal over positronium, aside from the fundamental physics that can be learned from it? Positronium, like hydrogen, is a neutral particle and as such, is unaffected by magnetic fields. It seems to me that the storage problems would increase by storing antimatter as positronium as opposed to storing it as seperate positrons and anti-protons.
Exactly what military threat do they envision where they need a bigger "boom" than what they have now? Every current military threat isn't a matter of having insufficient explosive power, but having difficulty ascertaining the target. This stuff may have practical use as a non-military explosive (e.g., asteroid deflection) but the U.S. military already has the necessary force to blow up anything on earth using existing technology.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
How about using this kind of power for POSITIVE purposes? Like low-cost, efficient, and safe energy?
This is research has two paths either great and powerful things or some sort of "nuclear mineing" ( they would use nuclear weapons to do strip mineing. The air force needs to do something better with its time. Anti-matter weapons. In a couple of years we will see this ... "Aircraft carrier vanishes in large explosion because of anti-matter containment field failing". How foolish....
Maybe it is an arm's race against the terrorists who are taking away America's liberty ?
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Antimatter is currently the most expensive substance on earth, at $1.75 trillion per ounce.
And antimatter bombs have been proposed as far back as the 70s, but of course anything's "new" when the public hears about it regardless of when the ideas were first conceived. The militarization of space, super efficient warheads, "brilliant" weapons (as opposed to "smart"): all have been under thorough investigation by the USAF for decades. All have been underlying trends in military scientists' minds representing a natural progression in defense technology, with nothing extraordinary about them.
All of those things, in today's sensationalist world, are perceived as indicators of the US military's suddenly new drive to take over the world, when in reality, there's nothing new about them. We all gasp when we hear about them, but to the aged scientists working at Edwards, it's all old hat. The USAF's overall plans haven't changed (though they certainly have progressed), only the public's perceptions.
Antimatter research is extremely valuable science. Insight into the mechanisms of anti/matter annihilation, and its total (or nearly) conversion to energy, will inform science from nuclear energy to nano (femto?) tech and beyond. It's best performed in space, away from the rest of the world which it can contaminate with either annihilable (anti)material or radiation from the reaction. But budgeting the Air Force to make bombs out of it is insane. We've already got expensive ginormous bombs that scare everyone silly, and send the craziest of us into terrorism to compete. How about we just shift that Pentagon budget across to NASA? That will satisfy the aerospace bribers^Wlobbyists who are pushing this stuff, but keep them serving a sustainable market.
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So lets not decieve each other about who such a weapon will be used on, nor its ultimate purpose. Such a bomb would be a weapon designed to kill off the civilian population of a country while leaving their oil fields standing. OK, maybe I'm a little cynical, but I grew up during the height of the cold war at what would have been ground 0 had there been a war. I think I've earned the right to be a bit cynical.
It's been a while, but I believe I heard about several treaties back in the day banning the research on the "Neutron Bomb." No one particularly liked the idea of a clean weapon that could kill off a large population. All you'd have to do is bomb a region, send some guys in to clear the bodies out and then start moving your own people in. I wouldn't trust the most saintly of governments with a power like that, much less my own.
I would not, however, object to a particle/beam weapon that could cut an enemy tank or missile up like a big piece of cheese.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think you've got it. Consider that space shuttle.
It's something like 95% fuel by weight on takeoff. Now, if your engines are burning antimatter, you can replace all that weight with payload and still reach orbit!
If the antimatter could be manufactured for a reasonable multiple of the energy cost, it would cause the cost of getting stuff into space to drop dramatically.
Wake up, folks. It's bullshit.
If the military needs a 10MT bomb they're use a nuke. It's known, reliable technology. It's even safe... at least for us.
But if the military wants to hit a target with, oh, 100T to 2000T - that's tons, not kilotons - it doesn't have a lot of options. Conventional cruise missiles can carry a few tons (actually far less but modern chemical explosives are far more powerful than TNT). Aircraft can drop heavier bombs, up to MOAB, but that requires you to actually get a heavy bomber into the area. That can take hours, it has to get past air defenses, etc. You can't just launch a bunch of cruise missiles from a submarine or destroyer and be done with it.
This is why the military was looking at "mini-nukes"... but there's a lower limit on the size of nuclear weapons and actually testing one will cause a lot of problems on the world stage. Not that this administration gives a damn about that but it is a consideration.
An antimatter bomb can be as small as you need to disable the target while minimizing the collateral damage. It doesn't even have to be explosive - an intense "sizzling" gamma ray source may even be better than an explosion. It'll kill personnel, disable electronics, wipe magnetic media, etc. without causing the infrastructure to collapse beyond any damage caused by the initial penetration.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
... which points out one of the silly things about this. The headline stated:
;)
"Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power"
No. Such weapons would easily eclipse nuclear weapons in *fuel energy density*. They would not eclipse nuclear weapons in energy, or even overall energy density, without radical breakthroughs. Antimatter is just too expensive to produce, and requires such large containment structures, that you can't get either sizable amounts of raw antimatter energy, nor great energy density. Perhaps antimatter-catylized fusion might produce new, useful weapons (small fusion bombs that don't need a fission bomb to start the reaction), although I personally am not in favor of blurring the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.
Still, I guess there is one good thing that will come of this: I always felt we should spend more money on basic research and less on the military. Here, the military is spending its money on basic research
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Considering that I have no idea where they'd get the required amounts of antimatter from, I think the military is having fun blowing smoke up our collective asses. (And those of our enemies.) However, the military *may* be looking into Antimatter catalyzed fissionweapons. Such weapons would need only a few particles of antimatter to fuel a fission warhead that could fit in the palm of your hand.
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" either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn't emit radioactive fallout"
Good and bad. Good is no radioactive fallout... the long term consequences of their use, and the collateral damage, are dramatically reduced.
But thats bad too, since lower consequences will likely mean more likely to use.
The vast power of a small amount is also troubling. How easy would it be to use a small amount? Sure, any amount would cause a boom, but it might not be practical to weaponize small quantities with the difficulties of safely containing antimatter for long term use. From the article, micrograms are only equivalent to about 83 pounds of TNT, so if amounts that small can be safely and effectively weaponized it could be useful. On the other hand, how far does that initial gamma ray burst travel?
Interesting technology, but there are serious questions.
You will still have a "nuclear winter" where debris from the earth are blown up into the atmosphere. You will still have a shitload of gamma radiation ionizing and sterilizing everything in the blast radii.
If you want a super WMD (gee, didn't we invade IRAQ over those supposedly) that won't have alot of fallout, the "neutron bomb" is a better candidate (has little fallout and leaves buildings standing).
No this isn't about creating anything useful. Don't delude yourself.