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.

 

Making antimatter go boom is easy, getting it not to do so until you want it to is extremely hard.

 

Regular matter atoms have a cloud of negatively charged electrons on the outside which repel each other and act as a sort of bumper to prevent the atoms from getting to close. Antimatter has positively charged anti-electrons (positrons) instead of electrons on the outside. These electrons and positrons are loosely bound so that they can get a fair distance from the atom, and because they are opposite charges will be attracted to each other instead of repelled, quickly resulting in a small boom.

 

Once one of the electron / positron pairs is removed, the charges on the nucleus’s (positive fro normal matter, negative for antimatter) are unmasked and the 2 nuclei rush together for a bigger boom.

 

As for the initial reaction/explosion slowing down because the antimatter is scattered, I am afraid that the effect will be the exact opposite. The matter/antimatter reaction is a bit like a fuel air bomb, the more finely the material is dispersed the faster it can react.

1. The US has to this point acumulated less than 10^-18 grams of antiprotons.

2. we've held that resevoir in a stable mirror charge trap for more than eighteen years. Magnetic fields contrary to popular belief don't decay all that easily-especially self maintaining ones.

3. If we set off all the ordnance we have Humanity's nuclear arsenals we would temporarily damage about 3% of the surface area of the Earth and kill less than 1/100th of 1% of its biomass. When you consider that a Katrina event is the equivalent of 15%-20% of the US arsenal in effective energy unleashed over a wide area, you have to wonder about the nuclear weapon effect exaggerations that plague our popular imaginations. For example- the Czar bomb would leave a ground crater about 10 kilometers wide and about two kilometers deep. It would vaporize Everest surely, but it would hardly destroy the Earth or do more than local immediate damage to the environment. The sustained damage in the form offall out would be bad for a couple of years, but then so was the fall out from Krakatoa [radioactives included by the way] which was far worse in yield as well as the debris kicked into the air.  

 

You have to understand what is really needed to Chicxilub us. That would be Mount Everest traveling at a good  20 kilometers per second headed straight for a plate tectonic fault. THAT would fix us good. At 115 MILLION megatons energy released or about 1000 tomes [3 orders of magnitude] of the entire Human nuclear arsenal, it will kill off anywhere from 55% to 90% of all species currently alive-probably anything larger than a chicken, just from the shock waves..   

.

THAT is what you need to wipe out Humanity. We don't even come close to that kind of power to do work on ourselves.........yet.

 

Herald

I'm not sure where the popular notion that electromagnetic fields decay comes from. It's not the field I'm worried about, but the reliability of the equipment that contains the antimatter. From what I've heard these traps aren't very effective. From what I've heard those little positrons seem to just wander off, zip right through the field and anilihate in tiny acts of atomic desctruction.

Treadgar

Herald1234 I guess I can't easily take your word for some of the claims you made. I'm not saying I disagree, but your statements regarding the popular imagination and nuclear war seem incredible to me. Where did you get this information, it seems contrary to everything I've read about nuclear war? Ever the cynic of things well known I'd like to read up on that.

The area footprint effect is a circle of a 2.0x10e15 [half a megaton of TNT] joule event is approximately 55 square kilometers. Detonating 30,000 such devices yields a surface damage of 1,650,000 or 10e6 square kilometers in area.

 

The Earth is 148,300,000 or 1.43e8 square kilometers in area. Do the math. I was being generous at 3% of the land surface area of the Earth being damaged.

 

The antimatter containment is based on permanent ferromagnetic field bottles, not electromagnet generated ones. 

 

What I told you about nuclear weapon effects is straight out of common PHYSICS and history.; We have detonated close to six hundred nuclear weapons of all sizes and shapes all over the planet. We have data.Review it on the web of your interested  GOOGLE: Nuclear weapons tests-especially US nuclear weapon tests..

 

Herald 

 

 

 

Treadgar