errrr, no.

antimatter is astonishingly energy intensive to make , and expensive.

utterly inneficient as a weapon

Plus, who told you this?

far as I know its hard gamma rays

owww

I'd further note that antimatter would be spectacularly effective as a weapon, but equally effective at crashing your economy. Not to mention monsterously unstable - if the containment went wrong it would always detonate - no fizzle.

 

Yes it’s expensive to produce now but so was the original uranium made for the little boy bomb. Actually most expensive military project in history. I heard it from the history channel and from what my understanding of the stuff is it is pure annihilation resulting in pure heat and light energy. Nothing left at all to make radioactive fall out.

Treadgar

 

The matter / anti-matter reaction is a pure matter to energy conversions, each particle becoming a single photon with an energy equivalent to the particle's mass. 

 

Any heat results not from the annihilation but the interaction of the photons with other matter.  It is similar to the production of the fireball from a nuclear explosion in atmosphere, except a nuke ONLY produces soft X-rays (10-100KeV).

 

Electron / anti-electron annihilation produce ~0.5MeV hard gamma photons (2 per annihilation)
Proton / anti-proton and neutron / anti-neutron annihilation produce ~900Mev gamma radiation (actually in the cosmic radiation range).

The "clean" weapon aspect comes from the fact that the basic reaction does not produce the free neutron that react to form radioactive fallout.  However, this is only really the case for hydrogen / anti-hydrogen reactions, reactions  between anti-hydrogen and heavier elements should produce some spectacularly unstable nuclei.

well if we study it maybe we will discover better ways to contain the stuff. The USA is studying it, they don't deny that.

All of the above points aside, what the hell would possess someone to make one of them? What, the ability to destroy all life on Earth several times over not quite enough firepower for you?!?

 

Seems like a pointless exercise to me.

 

B.L.

because if we don't build it then some one else might. Its called MAD, Mutually Assured Distruction. If we can figure out how to use the stuff then who know what the possibilities for it as a weapon are.

 

I see it as a opertunity to build the next generation of WMD. Last great  invention was the H-Bomb and that was only about 5 years after WWII. I think that its time to make something new.

Considering that you can irradiate materials and cause them to become radioactive, hitting a target with an atomic bomb's worth of energy is still going to do really unpleasant things for a considerable amount of time. I don't know the specifics, but I would suspect that the contribution to fallout of the initial fissile material is very small.

Plus heat and light are both forms of electromagnetic radiation, the spectrum of which stretches from radio frequencies to gamma rays, with the energy levels for a specific photon going up with the frequency. A matter-antimatter reaction would release lots of everything.

There is one thing that just occurred to me. One advantage that might accrue to antimatter is you don't need as much of it to get the effect that an atomic weapon would need. Maybe you have an artillery shell that has an antimatter trap in the core, say maybe less gram. The shell impacts, the trap collapses...that might be interesting. Still it's an expensive bullet.

I beg to disagree that there is any reason to want to build an antimater bomb.

 

A) producing antimater is massively expensive

 

B) storing antimatter is horribly difficult.

 

C) even if you have produced it, making it actually go boom is rediculously hard and any explosion you produce is horribly inefficient. In sci fi all you need is a brick of antimatter and a brick of matter and you put them together and boom. But in real life only the very edges of such structures would react and the resulting explosion would scatter the rest. In an atmosphere eventually all of the antimatter would hit something and react but it would take awhile and the reusult might be more of a burn than a blast.