I don’t know enough about the physics involved, but could antimatter boosting make it possible to have very small nukes that have large yields? Like say… a 100 kt bunker buster that might fit in the casing of the conventional bunker-buster bombs?
Yeah, I was thinking of miniguns mounted on a spaceship for orbital bombardment. According to a poster above, the explosion of a 9mm antimatter bullet would be around the same strength as a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead. Increase the caliber and you can get a megaton per bullet. Put them into a few 10,000 rounds per minute miniguns and a small ship could lay waste to an entire planet.
Assuming improved antimatter production and containment technology.
It’s the only way to be sure.
On irradiation (because I was curious and haven’t seen this laid out anywhere) –
I’ll take the 9mm projectile as a point of reference and call it 8 grams of antimatter.
Each nucleon-antinucleon annihilation has scores of possible outcomes, with any number of exotic mesons produced alongside the “normal” stuff. The heavier species will decay quickly, leaving most of the energy to deposited via photons, muons, and charged pions. While the photons and muons can transmutate nuclei, their irradiation impact will be small compared to the pions. Essentially every negative pion and about half of the positive pions will cause an ambient isotope to change. If each annihilation eventually results in roughly two charged pions, then that’s about 1.5 isotopic changes per annihilation, or about 7x10[sup]24[/sup] transmutated nuclei.
Even if all of these were troublesome isotopes, the total mass of radioactive material would be about 300 times smaller than in the WWII detonations, so we could probably stop here. However, many of these isotopes won’t be troublesome, so things aren’t even this bad. The primary transmutation mechanism (charge exchange) can only change one neutron to a proton or vice versa. Very few stable isotopes lying around on earth have long-lived neighbors. Oxygen (the most abundant element on earth) has only [sup]18[/sup]O–>[sup]18[/sup]F, but even that only lives for two hours and [sup]18[/sup]O is only 0.2% of the oxygen around. Neither silicon nor aluminum have candidates. Iron and calcium both have some candidates, and one that stands out is [sup]40[/sup]Ca–>[sup]40[/sup]K, as potassium is biologically active. [sup]40[/sup]Ca makes up 4% of the earth’s crust. Assuming half the irradiation occurs in the crust (and the other half in the atmosphere), then 9 grams of [sup]40[/sup]K would be created and dispersed. If this falls out over 5000 km[sup]2[/sup] and mixes in with the top 1 cm of soil, it would increase the natural abundance of [sup]40[/sup]K by one part in 10[sup]7[/sup]. So, nada.
There is also the direct perturbation of nuclei in the annihilation process, but you will still end up primarily with unstable or very short-lived isotopes that won’t make it to any fallout stage. Given the safety margin calculated for the irradiation of potassium, I’m not going to go through the math on direct production of long-lived isotopes, as it will come out similarly tiny.
So, it certainly seems like an antimatter weapon would be quite clean.