USAF WANTS ANTIMATTER WEAPONS

No way. “The U.S. Air Force is qui­etly spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars inves­ti­gat­ing ways to use a rad­i­cal power source — anti­mat­ter, the eerie ‘mir­ror’ of ordi­nary mat­ter — in future weapons,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Beyond the pointed-​​ear cool fac­tor, anti­mat­ter would make a pow­er­ful weapon — at least in the­ory. “If elec­trons or pro­tons col­lide with their anti­mat­ter coun­ter­parts, they anni­hi­late each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even ther­monu­clear bombs,” the Chron explains.

The energy from col­lid­ing positrons and anti­elec­trons “is 10 bil­lion times … that of high explo­sive,” Kenneth Edwards, direc­tor of the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary muni­tions” team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, noted in an address to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Moreover, 1 gram of anti­mat­ter, about 1/​25th of an ounce, would equal “23 space shut­tle fuel tanks of energy.” Thus “positron energy con­ver­sion,” as he called it, would be a “rev­o­lu­tion­ary energy source” of inter­est to those who wage war.
It almost defies belief, the amount of explo­sive force avail­able in a speck of anti­mat­ter — even a speck that is too small to see. For exam­ple: One mil­lionth of a gram of positrons con­tain as much energy as 37.8 kilo­grams (83 pounds) of TNT, accord­ing to Edwards’ March speech. A sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion, then, shows that about 50-​​millionths of a gram could gen­er­ate a blast equal to the explo­sion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, accord­ing to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Unlike reg­u­lar nuclear bombs, positron bombs wouldn’t eject plumes of radioac­tive debris. When large num­bers of positrons and anti­elec­trons col­lide, the pri­mary prod­uct is an invis­i­ble but extremely dan­ger­ous burst of gamma radi­a­tion. Thus, in prin­ci­ple, a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military’s dreams from the early Cold War: a so-​​called “clean” super­bomb that could kill large num­bers of sol­diers with­out eject­ing radioac­tive con­t­a­m­i­nants over the coun­try­side.
A copy of Edwards’ speech on NIAC’s Web site empha­sizes this advan­tage of positron weapons in bright red let­ters: “No Nuclear Residue.”

It’s wet-​​the-​​bed scary, sure. But don’t get out the rub­ber sheets, yet. Right now, only about 84 bil­lionths of a gram of antipro­tons are made world­wide, accord­ing to Los Alamos physi­cist Steve Howe, who is study­ing antimatter-​​driven trips to Alpha Centauri for NIAC.
“With present tech­niques, the price tag for 100-​​billionths of a gram of anti­mat­ter would be $6 bil­lion,” accord­ing to the Chron.

October 4th, 2004 | Ammo and Munitions, Bizarro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.