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Subject: is the USA developing a Anti Matter Bomb?
metalfan182    8/24/2007 3:51:36 PM
I have recently heard that the USA has dedicated an entire particle accelerator to the manufacture and study of Anti Matter.

Could this be for weapons purpose?

I have heard that Anti Matter doesn't give off harmful amounts of radiation on detonation and just generates pure energy. Could this mean a clean nuclear weapon?
 
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WarNerd       8/28/2007 12:48:13 AM
I have to disagree with you on this one:
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.
 
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Herald1234    Some myths to dispel.   8/28/2007 5:37:15 AM
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
 
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Treadgar    Re: some myths to dispel   8/30/2007 9:58:25 AM
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.

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
 
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Herald1234       9/1/2007 4:56:42 AM

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.

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
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 
 

 


 
 
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Treadgar       9/1/2007 8:51:31 AM
Herald1234 we've tested some 600 atomic weapons, but consider we go back to the MAD policy where they were talking about a nuke exchange in excess of 600 weapons in a very short period of time. Most of these would either be air bursts or surface bursts, not like the subsurface tests which I would argue (in a friendly manner) are the greater bulk of the test cases. How many of those tests were above ground? Maybe the blast results would be insignificant (as long as you're well enough away from said blasts), but then you have all this radiation. What about the so-called "nuclear winter?" If we were talking neutron bombs I might be a little less cynical, but from what I've read Russian nukes were especially dirty in regards to residual radiation. Again, you might be right, but if you are, it seems MAD might have been less successful than it has been. It's been a long time since I've taken physics, and I'm pretty hip to history, but I remember both physics teachers and history teachers talking about how terrible nuclear war would be. And just how terrible did they say it would be? We're talking the end of life on Earth as we know it. Maybe it was just hysteria of the times, but you cut that and half and it's still an ugly scenario.

Treadgar
 
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andyf       9/1/2007 1:22:35 PM
problem is all the radioactives would end up concetrated in the creature at the top of each food chain.. and in most cases thats us.
you got your nuclear winter effect on top of that,,
nasty
a frozen over world , people starving and irradiated
just what is needed for the penguins to rise up..
 
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Herald1234       9/1/2007 3:54:56 PM

Herald1234 we've tested some 600 atomic weapons, but consider we go back to the MAD policy where they were talking about a nuke exchange in excess of 600 weapons in a very short period of time. Most of these would either be air bursts or surface bursts, not like the subsurface tests which I would argue (in a friendly manner) are the greater bulk of the test cases. How many of those tests were above ground?^1
 
More than 100+.  Enough to baseline results up to ten orders if magnitude cumulative.

Maybe the blast results would be insignificant (as long as you're well enough away from said blasts), but then you have all this radiation. What about the so-called "nuclear winter?" ^2

Myth. Krakota kicked up more debris than we can as did Thera. The effects of nuclear winter depend on forest fires burning for months based on the Sagan model; trouble is you still don't get over six months ofd burnings what Krakatoa kicked into the air in 15 days.

If we were talking neutron bombs I might be a little less cynical, but from what I've read Russian nukes were especially dirty in regards to residual radiation.^3

Again even more BS. A strontium bomb's effects are still LOCAL. Why do you think its called FALL OUT? With rains and natural erosion processes the fallout  will dissipate in no more thann 5-10 years. Local radiation bursts from the events half life in hours or at most days.

 Again, you might be right, but if you are, it seems MAD might have been less successful than it has been.^4

Sane men would avoid WW II. That was bad enough to ensure that MAD would work. Nuclear weapons bring about famine and industrial collapse as the weapons smash infrastructure. How long can 300 million pampered people survive without electricity or neighborhood delivered food?

Answer, half of them who survive the city kills, will starve to death. The survivors will take twenty years to rebuild to a late twentieth century technology base-mainly rebuilding the industrial base and the powernet. THAT was the reality that your teachers misunderstood and passed on to their students. Needless to say I regard them and the fear mongers of that generation as IDIOTS. They should have taught the TRUTH. Losing the electric powergrid, the transportation network and aservices these two infrastructures support would be bad enough. 
 
It's been a long time since I've taken physics, and I'm pretty hip to history, but I remember both physics teachers and history teachers talking about how terrible nuclear war would be. And just how terrible did they say it would be? We're talking the end of life on Earth as we know it. Maybe it was just hysteria of the times, but you cut that and half and it's still an ugly scenario.^5
 
Its the interruption of easy life as we know it and death certain to our enemies; because they are infrastructure hobbled more than we are, and have no knowledge base or will or resource cushion upon at all to fall back. Listening PRCs?

Fear it yes, but fear it for the correct reasons. We can singe the earth and kill hundreds  of millions of city dwellers, but after the noise dies away, the survivors will pock themselves up and continue.
 
The black death as a Europe damaging event was worse than our grimmest projections.
 
Herald
 
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Treadgar       9/2/2007 9:42:30 AM

First off, to set this discussion off on a neutral tone, I’d like to say your comments are welcome on my part. You sound like you’re pretty well read, and certainly a little opinioated. You wrote “The black death as a Europe damaging event was worse than our grimmest projections.” I’m not sure what you mean by that. Whose projections are you writing about?

 One thing we can agree on is that nuclear war is something to fear. One thing we don’t seem to agree on is the results. You argue that the side effects of a massive nuclear exchange wouldn’t be as bad as say the Sagan model. Like you I’m skeptical of models, and that includes the one you seem to be constructing. Sagan wasn’t some Laplace Demon capable of predicting the future trajectory of all things, nor is anyone on this earth right now gifted or cursed with such powers. I think the effects would linger longer than the 5-10 period you posit. What about Hiroshima, people suffered longer than 5-10 years after the blast, and that was a small bomb compared to the ones built during the height of the Cold War? In a massive exchange that gets worse. Andyf brought up a salient point here: “problem is all the radioactives would end up concetrated in the creature at the top of each food chain.. and in most cases thats us.” That would stay around a long time, simply because this could result in genetic damage that could hang around long after the war.

 

Treadgar
 
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Jeff_F_F       9/3/2007 8:54:29 AM
As a point of reference, this was the damage done to Hiroshima & Nagasaki by aproximately 15kt nuclear weapons.
 
so 55sq miles for a 500kt nuke is probably reasonable. So how many nukes does it take to eleminate a city:
 
The New York metro area is 8680 sq miles with a population of 18.7 million people. Assuming that to destroy a city you need to saturate the entire area, it would take 157 nuclear weapons to destroy.
 
Assuming that the entire area of a city needs to be saturated, 30,000 nuclear weapons of 500kt yield woul be enough to destroy outright the 47 most heavily populated metropolitan areas, with a total population of 481 million people.
 
This probably underestimates the damage, because what you really need to do to destroy a city is create enough firestorms that the firestorms merge and they wipe out the city. I have no idea at what point this would happen. Also cutting all lines of communication between the city and the outside world would be an extremely effective way of dooming most of the inhabitants to death by starvation. Destroying dams would also be an effective way to wipe out large areas downstream of those dams. Even simpler would be simply detonating the weapons in the stratosphere to create massive EMP which would have the same effect over time by preventing transportation of food, but with a very much larger area of effect.
 
Note that EMP is caused by the gamma radiation of the blast, so if sufficient antimatter could be produced, an antimatter bomb might make an extremely effective EMP weapon.
 
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Treadgar       9/3/2007 11:52:13 AM
All these calculations seem incredible to me. I've seen so many instances where models collapse in the real world. Maybe our cities are tougher than I have believed, but I'm not entirely convinced either way. Yet at the same time I think back to the incredible damage wrought upon Axis cities during WWII. I've seen film clips that go on and on, and as far as you can see everything is blasted ruin. I remember reading that the Russians were astonished at the amount of damage produced by the gigantic Allied bomber offensives, and I've been to Germany and it is difficult from what my eyes told me to imagine what happened there some 65 years ago. I've been talking about an all out nuclear exchange here, one where the belligerants go all out to wipe out each other. The bomber offensives of WWII took some time to get going, so this was damage over a greater span of time, and the scenario I envision includes that kind of damage over a short period of time, say days, at the most weeks. Then you have the lingering effects of radiation. But who knows what might really happen, how such a war might play out? There are certainly variables involved that are not represented by any of the models I have seen.

Treadgar
 
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andyf       9/3/2007 3:42:58 PM
nukes are far more destructive than a carpet bombing raid in ww2
in the ww2 scenario you get to use things like firemen to alieviate the fires,
and you have civil defence shelters with huddling civilians that get rescued and come out after the raid and sing stirring songs while they sift through the rubble
 
in a nuke strike all of the above are dead or irradiated
or trapped in a firestorn of Dresden proportions
 
and there is no help from distant cities - they are gone too
 
you can not win a nuclear war
didnt you watch 'war games' for god's ske?
 
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Ehran       9/4/2007 12:53:29 PM
watched a show on the history of explosives a couple days ago and antimatter bombs came up briefly.  one of the scientists said it would take billions of years to accumulate enough antimatter to make a bomb.  even if he's off by half a dozen orders of magnitude it doesn't look like antimatter bombs are anything to worry about.  well unless the string theory guys are actually right. 
 
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andyf       9/4/2007 5:43:28 PM
the stuff that worries me is 'strange matter'
thats scary
a contagious 'explosion' that would eat the world
 
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Herald1234       9/4/2007 7:52:09 PM

watched a show on the history of explosives a couple days ago and antimatter bombs came up briefly.  one of the scientists said it would take billions of years to accumulate enough antimatter to make a bomb.  even if he's off by half a dozen orders of magnitude it doesn't look like antimatter bombs are anything to worry about.  well unless the string theory guys are actually right. 


The string fellows are dangerously close to being correct. They don't have the correct mathemetics to solve the gravity question. So until then its the standard model or bust. Once that gravity folded in, our collective geese are cooked.
As for the above comments on nuclear war? I just describe what the numbers tell most anybody who wants to crunch them instead of ":imagining" what will happen. the numbers are there. You take the amount of radiactives, the deay rates[half lifes] the blast area of a standard device and you run it through the old equations.    1.7-3% of the Earth's land area  is pulverized and firestormed. 500-3000 million city dwellers get killed [most of them in East Asia and the EU], the survivors eat tainted food form five to ten years and the cancer rate doubles for a couple of centuries.
 
Now that is not as bad as losing two thirds of your population to a diusease and having a guaranteed two epidemic recurrences that will knock your population base down and set economic progress back so far, it will take three hundred years to recover.
 
Reality versus suppose. A nuclear war we can rebuild back in a generation or two.  
 
Disease takes the heart of the fight out of us.
 
Herald  
 
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Treadgar       9/5/2007 6:13:36 AM
Herald, I have reread your earlier comments on nuclear war in greater detail. I've moved a little bit in your direction because they seem a little less severe than when I first read them. I still stand by my argument that number crunching leaves a little to be desired. There are so many instances when people do this and try to predict what will happen in the future. Time passes with different results. It's not that there is something wrong with their math, only that some variables are not accounted for. Although I share your sentiments about the PRC, I sure hope we don't have to actually experience the kind of atomic war we've been discussing here. That doesn't mean I'd cave if things get tough.

Treadgar
 
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