Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons touted publicly then gag order

[seemslikeadream]

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons
Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order


Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, October 4, 2004

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 most powerful potential energy source presently thought to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-fiction films and TV shows, whose heroes fly "antimatter-powered spaceships" and do battle with "antimatter guns."

But antimatter itself isn't fiction; it actually exists and has been intensively studied by physicists since the 1930s. In a sense, matter and antimatter are the yin and yang of reality: Every type of subatomic particle has its antimatter counterpart. But when matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate each other in an immense burst of energy.

During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. With the knowledge gained, some Air Force insiders are beginning to think seriously about potential military uses -- for example, antimatter bombs small enough to hold in one's hand, and antimatter engines for 24/7 surveillance aircraft.

More cataclysmic possible uses include a new generation of super weapons -- either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn't emit radioactive fallout. Another possibility is antimatter- powered "electromagnetic pulse" weapons that could fry an enemy's electric power grid and communications networks, leaving him literally in the dark and unable to operate his society and armed forces.
more
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL

[truthisfreedom]

1. touted, then gag? silly wabbit. tricks are for kids.

just more hooey.

[saigon68]

52. This will be used to suppress Labor Dissent/Strikes

Wow---- what a weapon to do away with those pesky picketers.

[KlatooBNikto]

2. Time and again, throughout history,conquerors have fantasized about

one superweapon after another giving them supposed supremacy over the entire human race.This is going to be no different.The same minds that are capable of conceiving these type of weapons are also at work in Beijing or Bombay or Moscow and given the current economic conditions will be able to produce these weapons at a far lower cost than us.The entire mindset of relying on force and superiority is a curse that we must get rid of if our human race is to survive.

Along the same lines,Wolfowitz and Kristol, argue in the PNAC manifesto, for work on genetic warfare to "control unruly populations"
( read, genocide).

At the dawn of the twentyfirst century such are the workings of the human mind;instead of ennobling these detestable creatures, education
(is that the right word?) has made them more barbaric than ever.

[salvorhardin]

3. Yes, just wait

till they figure out that the research going on at places like Brookhaven could be used to create a "black hole bomb."

[Radius]

4. We've got plenty already

The Hydrogen Bomb is plenty super enough to kill every man woman and child on the face of the planet. VX by the kiloton.

If such energy existed it would be a clean method of generating power without reliance on combustion. Paradigm shift.

Sounds like cold fusion however..

You may want to be careful with the genetic assertion. You may have made it in good faith, but this has origins in Jews cooking up the "super virus" to kill the Arabs.

It is bad science, even if a virus could perform IF THEN logic it can not tell a Jew from an Arab at the genetic level. Same with all races. To be clear I'm not calling you a racist but letting you the origin of that information.

[KlatooBNikto]

6. I would simply refer you to the PNAC website for the open assertion

of the potential for genetic warfare to control unruly populations.

http://www.newamericancentury.org

[Radius]

28. Search is broken...

Can't validate if they said it. But can tell you genetic "weapons" are not suitable for that application.

genetics can be used to modify existing organisms to kill differently, but not selectively on race.

[daleo]

29. Try it again

I got it just fine:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

The report is called "Rebuilding America's Defenses".

"And advanced forms of biological warfare
that can “target” specific genotypes may
transform biological warfare from the realm
of terror to a politically useful tool."

Look on page 72.

[Radius]

34. Out of context

you left out the previous paragraph, where it put the context on terrorism and bio weapons.

Still it is a genetic farce. Arabs and Jews for example are both Semitic and can not be selected for genetic attack.

Bad science.

[daleo]

36. I agree that it probably is bad science

I don't think human biology conforms much to sociological notions of race or nationality, at least not with the specificity that would probably be needed for this kind of weapon to work in the fashion described. I certainly hope it is bad science.

Here is the full paragraph for interested readers, who can judge the context for themselves. I think the phrase "politically useful tool" conveys a wider sense than just terrorism. In fact, it is the sort of language I would associate with state governments more than terrorists. This document is well worth reading for anyone that is interested in current events.

"Although it may take several decades
for the process of transformation to unfold,
in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and
sea will be vastly different than it is today,
and “combat” likely will take place in new
dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and
perhaps the world of microbes. Air warfare
may no longer be fought by pilots manning
tactical fighter aircraft sweeping the skies of
opposing fighters, but a regime dominated
by long-range, stealthy unmanned craft. On
land, the clash of massive, combined-arms
armored forces may be replaced by the
dashes of much lighter, stealthier and
information-intensive forces, augmented by
fleets of robots, some small enough to fit in
soldiers’ pockets. Control of the sea could
be largely determined not by fleets of
surface combatants and aircraft carriers, but
from land- and space-based systems, forcing
navies to maneuver and fight underwater.
Space itself will become a theater of war, as
nations gain access to space capabilities and
come to rely on them; further, the distinction
between military and commercial space
systems – combatants and noncombatants –
will become blurred. Information systems
will become an important focus of attack,
particularly for U.S. enemies seeking to
short-circuit sophisticated American forces.
And advanced forms of biological warfare
that can “target” specific genotypes may
transform biological warfare from the realm
of terror to a politically useful tool."

[troublemaker]

50. No an energy source

The energy required to genertae the anti-matter would be millions of times the energy yield.

It's just another way of concentrating an entire factories energies over time into a portable bomb to release a small fraction of those energies all at once.

[Radius]

5. Begs the question, would Rome have fallen if it had Nukes, and used them?

[bemildred]

13. Yes, it would.

It's collapse was internal, not a result of external military
pressure. The barbarian invasions finally succeeded because the
Roman political system rotted out internally, not the other way
around. The parallels with our own situation are, in some respects,
striking. To be sure, they might have left a few big pockmarks
around Europe if they'd had nukes, but it would not have fixed their
internal problems, nor would it have stopped the barbarians.

[Radius]

18. A great subject..

As much as I dislike the administration I love the US.
I think that a nuclear strike would have broken the barbarians had the ability to withstand a wide open coordinated assault.

I really hope our country can get its act together. The world has become much more complicated since we moved over here.

This is a great topic to talk about over beers.

[bemildred]

21. These are all matters of opinion at this point, of course.

But the issue of stopping the barbarians with nukes is somewhat
analogous to stopping the influx to the US from Latin America
with nukes. One might manage to wipe out, say, Alaric's army
before it sacked Rome, but one would not be able to fix the conditions
that allowed Alaric's army to get to Rome in the first place, that
is the collapse of the Legions and the tax system that supported
them, and in the meantime one would be making various areas that
one was "protecting" uninhabitable and having various other pernicious
effects. Meanwhile the next batch of barbarians would be showing
up, just as dumb, ignorant, violent, and desperate as the last.

[Fovea]

49. Changing the focus a bit

Would have France won against the Algerians if they had used nukes?
I also remember the Avalon Hill alternate rules for War in Europe using nukes... douse the map in lighter fluid, and set it alight on the nuke deployment move.

The underlying science would, if feasible, have so many non-military uses that it would constitute a fundamental paradigm shift.

OTOH Google Siberia tukunguska explosion, for a possible collision of a chunk of anti-matter with a rather impressive hunk of Siberia.

It is like the Gahan Wilson comic about discovering the alien civilization with the dangerous, but promising new form of energy...

[Sterling]

71. barbarians

What if the barbarians had nukes too?

[AngryAmish]

20. Not for a long time

Romans had no problem with genocide (Third Punic war, Julius Ceasar in Gual). They would have found their population centers and nuked them away from the Roman heartland. Barbarians won because they had more folks than Rome. That is why Rome had to let Barbarians into the army - they had too large of an Empire to man with citizens.

Counterfactuals are fun if somewhat silly.

[bemildred]

23. They had no populations centers, they were nomads.

They let barbarians into the army because the Romans lost
interest, and the barbarians served very well for quite a
long time, for the most part all the barbarians wanted was to
be citizens of the empire too. The barbarians were not trying
to destroy the empire, they were trying to join it.

[amber dog democrat]

24. Empires come and go.

Why should ours be any different?

[Scooter24]

7. It is still very expensive.

It costs about $1 billion to manufacture 1 gram of antimater.

Even then, I could think of a million other uses for this energy than weapons. Boys and thier toys....

[Radius]

9. Does anybody have links to this

in the scientific world. MSM has always played fast and loose with science.

Go easy on the Military Industrial Complex. I spent lots of time in college in observational astronomy classes, behind telescopes. The best optical telescopes use technology directly from spy satellites.

Mirrors that have thousands of smaller mirrors mounted on gimbals that can change to adjust to the atmosphere are descended from spy sats.

As is the CCD. This is the guts of a digital camera.

Software written to compare sat images is used to compare mri and ct scans.

Nothing is black and white.

[Scooter24]

16. try this

http://www.antimatterenergy.com/economics.htm

[Dudley_DUright]

27. Correction, you are off by about 11 orders of magnitude!

From the linked article:

With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion, according to an estimate by scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and elsewhere, who hope to launch antimatter-fueled spaceships.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

31. Much more expensive than plain tickets and box cutters. Not cost

effective.... so we'll probably make several tons of it.

[Scooter24]

35. wow...

still a bargain..lol

[Bucky]

8. Does anti matter exist, or does it anti-exist?

[Teaser]

11. People regard antimatter as something weird.

It's just the copy of a particular particle with opposite spin and charge. It has positive energy.

Now, strange matter (that has a negative rest energy) that's some weird shiznit. You can use it for all sorts of cool things, like propping open wormholes, creates faster-than-light drives...
Gotta get me some of that.

[bemildred]

15. Yeah, much more interesting stuff.

Black holes "evaporate" by accreting strange matter, thus
losing mass ...

[Dudley_DUright]

25. Right you are Teaser

You can even make yourself a time machine (maybe) out of a propped up wormhole according to Kip Thorne (which was used as a plot device in the book and movie "Contact" by Carl Sagan). :-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/timetripqa.shtml

[shadu]

26. negative rest energy!

could you see strange matter?
touch it?
is it hot or cold?
heavy or light?

[Occulus]

65. oh please provide

some links to info on that. It would make for some very interesting reading...

[Scooter24]

17. here's the best way to explain it

Antimatter is a mirror image of matter and can be a solid, liquid, gas or plasma. Antimatter is also composed of elements. The Periodic Table of Elements has 109 matter and 109 antimatter elements. Each of the antimatter element's nuclear, physical, and chemical properties has been identified to such an extent that people know almost as much about antimatter as matter. When matter and antimatter come together, energy is produced according to Einstein's equation of mass times the speed of light squared or E = mc2.

Edit: Ok, so maybe its not the best way. LOL..Oh well, it's way over my head anyways. :P

[Teaser]

10. anti-matter drives are a good idea

For spaceship. They can get you up to a good fraction of the speed of light, if efficiently designed. Then you just engage the warp drive I'm working on...

[Dudley_DUright]

44. Teaser

you just outed yourself as Zefram Cochran. ;-)

[bemildred]

12. Bullshit for the rubes, and more money for the defense bidness.

We can make plenty big explosions already. Anti-matter might have
some value as an energy source, but is in the same category as
zero-point energy and cold-fusion at this point, that is rank
speculation. If they cannot get fusion to work, there is little
reason to think they will get an handle on anti-matter any time soon.

[Xithras]

39. WRONG

There's nothing hypothetical about antimatter. Antiprotons and antineutrons are routinely created in supercolliders, and the CERN collider in Europe made some anti-Hydrogen recently. Unlike zero point energy and cold fusion, antimatter is a real, observable scientific fact.

The only thing speculative here is whether it can be weaponized. As far as I'm aware, nobody has actually slammed any matter and antimatter together to see how big the bang actually is since...well...the big bang!

[Dudley_DUright]

41. Actually Fermilab and CERN do slam matter and antimatter

together routinely (but only very minute quantities). That is what a supercolliders are all about, but I know you were talking about macroscopic quantities of matter and antimatter. ;-). Carlo Rubia, Noble Prize winner in physics, once said that what colliders do is make "little bangs".

[Xithras]

43. Yes, I was referring to whole anti-atoms

We know what happens when antiprotons and antineutrons strike normal matter, but what happens when an entire anti-Hydrogen atom strikes normal matter? A big bang, or a big fizzle?

[Dudley_DUright]

45. Likely the positron in the anti-hydrogen would annihilate with the

electron in the hydrogen, but then the two nuclei (p and p-bar) would also have to get close enough together to annihilate. Since they have opposite charge, I would think it would be relatively likely.

[struggle4progress]

63. Yeah and they do that in Km-long tubes under high vaccuum. eom

[struggle4progress]

62. Of course antimatter has been known since Anderson discovered ...

... the positron something like seventy years ago. But an antimatter weapon sounds like a really stupid idea to me: the beam won't be cheap to produce and there's all that nice ordinary matter to interact with as the beam seeks its target.

[bemildred]

70. If you read what I wrote carefully, you will see

that I am talking about the utility of anti-matter as an
energy source and for weapons systems, not about the
physical reality of it, which is well established.

[struggle4progress]

61. Agree. BS PR to justify boondoggle. eom

[MatrixEscape]

14. hehe ...

After you read about these new technologies and physics forays, you can end up wondering when they are finally going to do that one experiment that collapses our part of the Universe in an instant ;) Ooops!

[oneighty]

19. Hmmmm

What sort of a vessel would contain anti-matter?

Sort of like carrying a bucket of water without the bucket?

My head hurts. I know! A magic lamp.

180

[Dudley_DUright]

22. At accelerator labs like Fermilab

antimatter (antiprotons) are created then accumulated in a storage ring before being injected into the main ring to be collided with protons. However, we have never made anywhere close to a gram of antimatter in all the physics labs in the world.

http://www.fnal.gov/

If we could make and store large quantities of antimatter, it would immediately solve our energy production problems! However, this is much harder than this article would lead you to believe.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

33. The answer to many energy problems are being developed with

hydrogen based technologies. The ocean is full of it. A gel, derived from the borax in death valley is also promising... off gasses hydrogen... and can be recharged.... waycool.

www.milleniumcell.com
For years, scientists have known that boron hydrides store a significant amount of energy. However, direct combustion of boron hydrides presented a difficult engineering problem, so work on these compounds as a fuel source was largely abandoned in the 1960's. Recently, Millennium Cell has invented, patented, and developed a proprietary process that takes advantage of the inherent energy density of boron-hydrogen compounds, but that allows this energy to be accessed in a straightforward way. This process, called Hydrogen on Demand™, safely generates high-purity hydrogen from environmentally friendly raw materials. The produced hydrogen can then be consumed in a fuel cell or hydrogen-burning engine to produce useful power.

www.ch2bc.org <----------- Tomorrows solutions to energy dependance.

[Xithras]

42. The solution to that has always seemed obvious to me.

Eventually, probably by the time our great grandchilden are born, I figure this is the route we'll go: Orbital solar powered antimatter generators. Sound far fetched? It shouldn't. The problem with antimatter generation is that it takes far more energy than we get out of it. The only way antimatter power generation could ever be feasible is to make the magnetic rings dependent on solar power. Solar yields on the Earths surface are far too low to power the kind of equipment we're discussing here, but a large solar array much closer to the sun, coupled with a large solar-orbiting antimatter generation facility, could harness solar power with efficiency levels high enough to generate relatively large amounts of antimatter. As an added bonus, the antimatter produced by the facility could be used to both contain and power the spacecraft transiting the material back to Earth, effectively neutralizing the cost of moving the matter across the solar system.

One day, it will happen. I just hope I live long enough to see it.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

48. Do you think they will tap zero point, and if they do... do you think they

will say anything about it???

[mhr]

30. A Magnetic Bucket - It Really Makes The Head Hurt

eom

[HysteryDiagnosis]

32. A vacuum... inside a magnetic bottle. n/t

[oneighty]

37. Yes Medialize,

That is what I said "A magic lamp."

Hee hee hee. And. If one has matter that really is not matter and put it into a vacuum then there would no longer be a vacuum? Would anti-matter lead react with anti-matter helium? Or does the anti matter matter have to be matching anti-matter matter?

180

Sigh.

[Dudley_DUright]

40. anti-matter lead and anti-matter helium

would behave the same as lead and helium interacting. You would need to have antimatter interact with matter for anything to go "boom". Some astrophysicists hypothesized whole galaxies made of antimatter, but that is unlikely since galaxies do interact and there is no evidence for galaxy-antigalaxy collisions.

[sam sarrha]

69. well... no evildence left that is.

[shaolinmonkey]

54. That's the big question. They can barely contain a fusion reaction

what are they going to contain this stuff with? Ridiculous.

[Kimber Scott]

38. Why don't we all (humanity) just shoot ourselves now and get it over with?

:nuke:

[VegasWolf]

46. Antimatter drive propulsion is what * is relying on for his Mars

exploration mission next year. * wants to terraform Mars
by 2008 so that he can be united ruler of the solar system.

New Information Shows Bush Indecisive, Paranoid, Delusional

[bobthedrummer]

47. Dennis Kucinich tried to get a handle on a lot of "exotic weapons"

but that portion of his HR2977 The Space Preservation Act of 2001 was excised from the revision, HR3616 The Space Presevation Act of 2002.

Read this slowly, even if you've seen it before.

http://www.raven1.net/govptron.htm

[AcesFull]

51. That's nothing compared to Cobalt thorium G

Cobalt thorium G has a radioactive halflife of ninety three years. If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud.

If you don't believe me, look it up.

[daleo]

56. I have heard of this, as well

Apparently, the fallout effect is so widespread that nobody but a Dr. Who type villain would consider it. By a Dr. Who type villain, I mean one of those psycho sci-fi types who wants to wipe out civilization and himself at the same time. I believe that work on these sorts of bombs was rejected by both sides during the cold war.

[newyawker99]

59. Hi AcesFull!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Name removed]

53. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ReadTomPaine]

55. Correct regarding what? Agree with whom?

The poster made no assertions. What are you talking about?

RTP

[Ezlivin]

57. The engines can't take anymore, captain!

I'm all for antimatter research, but we'd better have an engineer as good as Scotty.

[NervousRex]

58. Heheheh...

I was waiting for the Star Trek reference...:D

[VegasWolf]

60. Pope has just declared antimatter research to be a sin, also electricity

New Information Shows Bush Indecisive, Paranoid, Delusional

[porkrind]

64. Ze whole point of ze doomsday device

is to not keep it a secret!

[gavodotcom]

66. <self-delete>

[gavodotcom]

67. Nice Strangelove reference, particularly applicable to N. Korea..

I say good on the DoD for letting this leak, then making it secret to make Pyongyang sweat it out. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to do this than throwing money at a missle defense shield, in my opinion. If you attempt a shield, your enemy develops countermeasures that are fairly cheap to devise and implement. If you come up with a brand new way of killing lots of people more efficiently, your enemy has to spend massive amounts of resources to catch up.

This is a basic cold war tactic, against a basic cold war opponent.

You'll notice this story comes a week after N. Korea announces it's become a nuclear power.

We've just said, "Oh, so you can blow us up, eh? Well can you blow us up this well?"

We can easily afford to throw more money at a new weapons system than N. Korea can, and N. Korea "cannot afford an anti-matter gap!" You can't get more dead than dead, and since we're already at the level of extinction-level weaponry, it doesn't matter now how it is delivered, so I'm not sure what some people's uproar is about this.

Anyway, if you're not familiar, if N. Korea decides it's in its interests to develop anti-matter weapons on its own, they'll be producing even more guns than butter, and the N. Korean population becomes increasingly on the brink of revolution through starvation.

As an aside, I've become convinced that Kim Jong-Il is an old school Soviet-era despot, he just plays the batshit crazy card to keep the US on edge and give in to his extortion.

[sam sarrha]

68. so how bil a unit do i need to run my house's electrical needs and how

often do need to change the batteries..?? and my car of course.. will the oil people allow this

[Supersedeas]

72. quietly spending millions - Repub version of govt accountability

[bobthedrummer]

73. I heard on WPR that USAF has awarded a contract for a EMF weapon

aircraft-that's a microwave directed energy weapon aerial platform to complement the land and sea EMF weapons already deployed.