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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."
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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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.
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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But destructe research wins over constructive alternatives hands down.
Given that matter + anti-matter is a purely destructive process to begin with, it isn't surprising that this is a key area of military research. On the brighter side, tons of everyday inventions funnel down from military funded projects, so it's not all doom and gloom.
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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.
Because of the vast amount of energy required to create antimatter. The sun is an energy source because it's there and only needs to be harnessed. Likewise sun created energies such as wind, wood and petroleum. The energy has already been created and stored.
Any energy you have to 'make' invokes the Second Law. This doesn't mean you shouldn't bother, because we still need ways to store and transfer energy, which is what we do with hydrogen, antimatter or storage batteries. The fact they are total energy negative isn't the point, it's that they put the energy where we want it in an extractable form.
And extracting energy where you want it is what weapons technology is all about.
Lots of energy. It doesn't matter what that energy cost you in energy.
KFG
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?
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.
... 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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