US Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

[0iD]

I was just reading the following article

Monday, October 4, 2004 (SF Chronicle)
Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons/Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGM393GPK1.DTL

Now this is eiter bunk with some fact (which is quite clever), or mostly fact which I find very scary. How do you see it?

[Zedmeister]

Ah well, true or not, it wouldn't surprise me. Bloody belligerent american military. No doubt doing it for "Homeland security"...

[jamadaia]

Yep I agree, nothing suprises me about them anymore.
Iv finally come to realise just how much they mean it, when they effectively say;
'we have the God given right to look after the world'
Now if they could just re-direct more of that military **** towards actual good for the World, as tehy tout, as opposed to pursuing there own interests. We may actually have a bit of a better World.
Ok ill quit dreaming

[Alex]

I have very little doubt they are researching it, I mean, it is being heavily researched by physicists as a theoretical power source, and I see no reason why the army wouldn't be incredibly interested in this. After all, you would need about 1 gram of antimatter to level a city. If there is information out about their research, you can be sure that its quite likely that theyir research is far beyond what they let out they know about, if they had developed an antimatter warhead/bomb, they would not want the public knowing about it.

I guess that at least they are working with anti-electrons, or positrons, as these are much less massive than anti-protons or anti-neutrons, so have much less potential destructive power. If my memory of my A-Levels serves me correctly, a positron would have about 1/1837 of the destructive power of a anti-proton. I guess that if they get on the ladder of working these things out, they will eventually be making entire anti-atoms though, which would be bad. I suppose that the only up of them is that, compared to nuclear bombs, there would be no radiation poisoning afterward or for the people living nearish to the blast, but out of the blast radius.

Oh well, whether they're developing them or not, lets just hope they never use them, eh?

[Alex]

On a side note, are Iraqis allowed to come and kill us now? I mean, if we're allowed to kill them because they may have had (though they didnt) WMDs, and they now know that we are developing weapons of (even more) mass destruction, and are a threat to them, why would them declaring war on us be any more wrong than us doing it to them? After all, we have terrorized Iraq pretty well...

EDIT: And on a similar sideline, can you imagine terrorists with antimatter bombs?

[Rave]

I reckon that for practical purposes this will be pretty impossible; it'll just cost way too much to produce them, since every antiparticle has to be made one by one in a particle accelerator. In practical terms I'd prefer them to be dropping antimatter bombs than nuclear ones due to the aforementioned lack of radioactive waste/fallout. They could also (according to the article) be used to generate large electromagnetic pulses that would knock out electrical devices without killing people.

As I said though, it's not going to happen any time soon- or in my opinion, ever.

Rich :¬)

[Rave]

Besides, Lynn is enthusiastic about antimatter because he believes it could propel futuristic space rockets.

"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm afraid we're going to destroy it."

Anyone else find that ironic?

Having read the article, they reckon that an antimatter bomb of a given weight would be 10 billion times more powerful than a similarly sized high explosive bomb. The reckon that a gram would release as much energy as 23 space shuttle fuel tanks. Now, by my calculations that would make 1g equal to 10,000 tons of high explosive; I don't know how much a space shuttle tank weighs but 430ish tons sounds in the ballpark.

The thing is, 10 kilotons is a very low yield nuclear device; to get up into the range of some of the largest nukes (which are in the megaton range), they'd need hundreds of grammes or even kilograms of antimatter. To me, the chances of them being able to produce and store that amount of antimatter affordably and reliably in a format that can be easily transported are infinitisimally small.

Rich :¬)

[Alex]

46.58g of mass apparently is one megaton of energy. Thus, 23.29g of antimatter and 23.29g of matter would be required to make a megaton reaction.

The largest nuclear reaction was apparently about 100 megatons, thus 2.3 kilogrammes of the stuff, which is, as you say, quite unfeasible (especially if they are only working with positrons)

I can imagine that they will find ways int he future of getting it to work though, most of the great inventions and developements in science have been labelled as impossible at some time or other...

[G4Z]

I would say that its only a matter of time tbh rave.

Might take 10 years but they will get there, Im sure people said similar things about atomic weapons 10 years before they were developed.

[Rave]

Would you care for a wager?

Rich :¬)