I’ve a couple questions about antimatter weaponry.
Yes, I know that at the moment it is infeasible to create a large enough amount of it for use in weapons.
Would an antimatter warhead cause a mushroom cloud like a nuclear weapon? If yes, what would its shape be like compared to a conventional nuke and if no, what would it look like, looking at it from a safe distance (in space if need be).
Are antimatter warheads the most powerful kind of warheads possible? Since it converts all mass to energy?
What would its area effects consist of? A huge amount of gamma radiation and? Would it have a huge shock wave?
3.1) Would it irradiate a large area around, making it uninhabitable for a long time, like in Chernobyl?
How much would it take to make uninhabitable an area the size of the US or the whole of the EU? (detonated in the most optimal area for the largest possible area of effect) In kilograms.
4.1) How much would it take to completely annihilate everything in such an area?
4.2) Would the explosion from 4.1 reduce said continent to a giant crater, taking a large chunk out of the planet or would every human (and natural) structure simply be blown away?
Are there any promising theorized antimatter production methods (that aren’t feasible at this time because of the limitations of other technology possibly)
5.1) Same question for their containment.
What would a 9mm antimatter bullet do to a person? Destroy a large chunk of them or just completely erase that person from existence? For convenience assume that 90% of the bullet’s mass is antimatter.
A 9mm bullet weighs about 8 grams, so that’s 7.2 grams of antimatter. According to this page, 7.2 grams of antimatter reacting with matter releases about as much energy as a 300 kiloton nuclear weapon. I think it’s fair to say that the person will indeed be erased from existence, along with a large amount of the surroundings.
Yes, if it were detonated in air cleanly. Mushroom clouds are caused by thermal gasses rising. Don’t know what shape it would be
I think that kinetic weapons sped up to .99999999c impart more energy than a non-relativistic chunk of antimatter of the same rest mass. I may be off by a few nines, but if so, just throw in some more nines as needed.
A huge shock wave and radiation. However, it would be much cleaner than a nuclear bomb as far as fallout goes because it would not contain any primary radioactive isotopes, only those isotopes that were caused by the radiation. I can’t say those would be zero but they would be minimal.
There is nothing uniquely ‘nuclear’ about a mushroom cloud, any large explosion containing a massive fireball detonated in a planet’s gravity & atmosphere will make a mushroom cloud, it’s just that really powerful explosions like nukes make very large & distinct ones.
They would be several orders of magnitude greater than fission or fusion, but otherwise who knows.
If detonated around matter as in on a planet’s surface (as opposed to outer space) then:
► Shock wave- Yes (again, that’s part of any explosion)
► Ionizing radiation- Probably not
I’m sure scaled-up figures exists based on the tiny amounts of antimatter that has been made in labs but what they are specifically I don’t know. As for its effect, it would cause an enormous explosion releasing huge amounts of energy (i.e. heat) and if detonated on a planet a huge destructive pressure wave (again, all explosions do). It wouldn’t have any special ‘disintegration’ effects that would vary on living vs non-living or artificial matter, atoms are atoms.
It’s convenient shorthand to say that an antimatter weapon would 100% convert mass to energy, but in practice, that’s not really true. Assuming that your mass is mostly antiprotons and antineutrons, most of your energy is going to end up in neutrinos, which will just pass harmlessly through absolutely everything and carry the energy calmly out into space. There’s still plenty left over for a bang bigger than any bomb ever built, though.
That leads into the second problem with antimatter weapons, though: There’s no real use for them. The bombs we already have will destroy a city clear out to the horizon. A hypothetical bomb many times more powerful would just destroy the same city out to the same distance. It’d destroy it more energetically, maybe, but the important thing is that it’s destroyed either way.
A mushroom cloud wiull probably be shaped like a mushroom.
It doesn’t matter if your big bomb is fuelled by plutonium or antimatter; it’s going to look the same. A flash of blinding light and a fireball that rises into the air, leaving a mushroom cloud.
This is like a thought experiment conducted by Edward Teller when he was thinking about “the Super,” a theoretically scalable hydrogen bomb design capable of very high megaton explosions. At some point, Teller realized, most of the energy would be spent lifting the atmosphere over your target city into space – and adding more energy at that point would mostly lift more atmosphere into space without increasing the destructive radius much (and of course, without increasing the deterrent effect of the weapon, which was its primary purpose.)
Oh, and it should also be mentioned that really big conventional bombs, containing nothing more exotic than TNT or gasoline, can also produce mushroom clouds.
I’m not sure how clean an antimatter explosion would be; the (presumed) antiprotons could collide with heavy nuclei and blast them apart into (presumably) radioactive fragments. To say nothing of secondary effects (pure gamma can induce isotope changes). Cleaner per joule certainly but not fallout-free.
The beauty of nuclear weapons is all of the matter that gets converted to energy does so in a small fraction of a microsecond. There’s no way to “assemble” an Antimatter bomb fast enough to achieve the same fast energy release. Not to say it wouldn’t cause a lot of distraction, but a Fusion bomb of the same mass would probably make a bigger bang.
I’m not so sure about that. For a fission bomb, you need to assemble it, because the process depends on the expensive stuff being packed very tightly. For an antimatter bomb, though, even if the original configuration of antimatter gets blown apart, all of the fragments are still going to react with ambient matter.
Of bigger concern would be safety. Yes, you want a bomb to explode, but only when it’s supposed to. Until it’s actually in place, you want it to be very, very hard for it to accidentally go off. Nuclear bombs achieve this, but with antimatter, if your containment system (whatever it is) fails, it’s going to blow.
Remember that in most cases, the first matter your antimatter projectile will hit is whatever you’re using to shoot it. Best case scenario, it will only take the gun and its shooter out.
Think about this:
What makes a bigger bang -8 lbs of TNT or 1 gallon of gasoline burning in air?
Gasoline has 10x the energy content of TNT - the reason it isn’t used as an explosive is the reaction rate is limited to how fast the gasoline can be combined with air. Same with antimatter - it would be like throwing a pound of Potassium into a pool. It might make a fun display, but it wouldn’t produce an enormous explosion, because on the surface can react with the water around it,
Ah, wait, I see… You’re positing the mother-of-all-Leidenfrost effects, with a “vapor barrier” of hard gammas and relativistic particles holding the matter and antimatter apart. I suppose that might work, though I would expect that the initial surface reaction would serve to mix things pretty well.
For the record, though, gasoline burning in air isused in bombs.
Oh, yeah - I’m aware of them.
But, you understand how they work, right? - A large quantity of flammable liquid is spread over a huge volume of air, and then ignited. I don’t think that would be possible for an Antimatter bomb (because the individual particles would be reacting as they were dispersed).
I guess we’ll just have to make one, and find out!
(It might be fun to simulate this on a supercomputer - anyone have any grant money available?)
I wonder – if this “fizzle” effect would occur with massive antimatter, if we might be able to use it to make less deadly containment vessels. Have massive antimatter all in one place on purpose-- If the container leaks – streak goes through the sky and irradiates people but no big explosion. It would be engineered so there would only be a big explosion if there were precisely sychronized bits of compressed matter sent toward the antimatter chunk, like they do with a plutonium bomb.