Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

[OneBlueSky]

Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order
by Keay Davidson
San Francisco Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, October 4, 2004

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL

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 . . .

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL

[7th_Sephiroth]

1. try harnessing mitochondria

each one can produce 200,000v of heat and electrical energy

[soothsayer]

2. yipes! scary world out there

[benburch]

3. Are WE the Klingons?

Seems to me that we'll have the weapon to fight an interstellar war long before we can actually build a starship....

[disgruntled_goat]

4. oh goody

cuz you can only destroy the world 117x over with current 'girlie-man' nukes.

[salvorhardin]

5. and at a cost of only

several trillion dollars per gram of boom too.

This is so fucking idiotic I don't know where to begin.

Even assuming the ability to produce antimatter in large quantities (instead of in single subatomic particles as we currently do) and the ability to produce it sans its' regular matter counterpart, the first and foremost thing that comes to mind is... containment!

You can't just bottle the stuff! Any contact with regular matter and boom! The only way of containing it is in a 100% vacuum, suspended by magnetic fields. If the vacuum isn't 100% then boom! If the magnetic field fails, boom!

[7th_Sephiroth]

7. jeez, i have lots of anti-matter

i have a trick for produceing it

[Hobarticus]

6. Set your course for Alderaan...