is the USA developing a Anti Matter Bomb?

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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

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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