cheap power = antimatter weapons?

Great Debates
1

One of humanity’s chief goals is to tap into the nearly limitless supplies of solar energy and controlled nuclear fusion. Some dream of a time when clean energy can be extracted from our environment for practically nothing.

Assuming this laudible goal is attainable (doubtful, but we’re still trying), it got me wondering: What would be the impact of cheap energy on warfare?

Arguably, having cheap and limitless power would greatly reduce the liklihood of war, as there would be less to fight about. But say not everyone is given access to these resources, or religious fanaticism still drives global conflicts. We shouldn’t discount the possibility of war even under what should be utopian conditions; after all, we have more power, technology, and resources at our disposal than our ancestors could ever have dreamt of, but gross socioeconomic disparities still exist, and our newest weapons can kill more people more efficiently than any time in the past. Nuclear proliferation still continues apace, and as the technology becomes more accessible, more an more nations have nuclear weapons in their armament.

The only weapon I can think of that could exceed the hydrogen bomb’s destructive capability would be an antimatter bomb. 1kg of antimatter, if quickly and completely reacted with matter, would produce an explosion of energy equal to that of 43 megatons of TNT. The trouble is, this bomb would cost roughly $63 quadrillion to produce (cite). Making antimatter weapons equalling the destructive power of an average thermonuclear warhead would cost millions of times as much as said warhead, and hence antimatter currently is hopelessly impractical as a weapon.

That may remain true forever; but if it doesn’t, I wonder if it is reasonable to expect humans will develop antimatter bombs. Really, it seems it would be within our reach if we can generate power about 1E5 to 1E6 times as efficiently as we do now. I bet over the last thousand years our ability to generate power has increased by a similar factor(what’s the difference in output between a bonfire and a nuclear reactor?), so it seems not impossible that within few millennia, we might see comparable gains in power generation capability.

If so, would we be in danger of antimatter wars? To me, if antimatter could be produced inexpensively enough, it might be more attractive in war than atomic weapons, as it would produce a quick burst of energy across a broad spectrum (like a nuclear weapon) without out as much unwanted fallout; there’s less of a deterrent. And if one nation could build antimatter bombs before any other, it might be more tempted to use them, since it would suffer fewer self-defeating side-effects from the aforementioned lack of fallout (though the “nuclear winter” doomsday scenereo might still be something to worry about). Seems to me ever more cheap and plentiful power gives rise to some interesting potential problems.

Well, what do you think?

2

Or atheist fanaticism. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and many other war-mongering despots weren’t very religious.

3

Whatever. The point is, in the past some optimists have predicted technological advancements would obviate war by improving the human condition. That hasn’t happened. There are plausible reasons why we shouldn’t assume future advances in technology will halt military escalation or violent conflicts.

4

Well, I think the trend is more towards being able to attack your enemies with a scalpal instead of a sledge hammer. I see nations like the US developing more sophisticated means to deliver death with higher and higher precision and accuracy, to do more with smaller and smaller forces, not making bigger and bigger hammers. What good are nukes except as a deterrent anyway? You can’t really use them without obliterating a hell of a lot of people, infrastructure, etc, and its just a detail if there is no lingering radiation.

The US (and the Russians for that matter) already have nukes capable of killing a lot of people but leaving the area relatively radioactive free within a short time period. Nor do I see AM weapons as trumping regular nukes either…after all, say the US developed AM weapons.

What would be different from now, when we have the majority of nukes? And AM weapon won’t suddenly make regular nukes obsolete after all…they would still be able to vaporize OUR cities (if they could hit them) if we attacked someone with conventional nukes…correct? And if we just arbitrarily attacked someone without AM weapons how would that be different than now if we attacked a nation with no nukes with our own nukes?

Nukes (either conventional or exotic AM varieties) have only a very limited use in war…mainly that of preventing all out total war scenerios between those powers that possess them. To actually USE them though…no, I don’t see it. So, I seriously doubt anyone will try and create an AM super nuke (especially considering how difficult and costly it is to get ANY AM, at least right now)…there would be no point IMO.

-XT

5

Why bother with antimatter weapons? Sure, you need very little mass of antimatter for the warhead, but you need a mother of a containment system, probably with quadruple redundancy, because you damn sure don’t want the thing going off accidentally whilst in storage. By the time you have a safe containment system, your warhead’s probably at least as large, if not larger, than a nuke.

Hydrogen bombs, on the other hand, have adequate yields for any imaginable military purpose (at least, until someone gets around to inventing some sort of energy-absorbing shield, a la Pournelle’s “Langston Field” or the ubiquitous shields in Star Trek/Wars/whatever). Note that the major nuclear powers could, if they wished, build truly monster warheads with yields of 10 megatons and greater, and yet they actually stick relatively dinky little 250 kiloton warheads on top of their MIRVs. They also default to not exploding, unlike anti-matter bombs, which is a very non-trivial difference when it comes to safe handling.

6

I’ve never understood why what you call optimists have always assumed that technology can cure the world’s ills. Men fight, not just because of resources, but because of pride, vanity, anger, jealousy, lust for power, and just plain fun. Technology has given us the ability to feed every hungry person on earth, but until men have a change of heart, people will starve. And people will fight wars.

7

I think the main advantage of antimatter weapons is that they are “clean”, and pack a lot of punch into a small space. Bombs in the megaton range weigh thousands to tens-of-thousands of pounds, which is part of the reason you don’t see them on ICBMs.

This link mentions some of the antimatter containment ideas I have heard of, the most intriguing being antihydrogen ice doped with ionic inpurities suspended in an electromagnetic containment vessel.

This link seems to indicate we’re getting better all the time at producing antimatter; exponentially better, in fact.

Antimatter can serve as a primer for thermonuclear reactions. Presently, thermonuclear warheads react heavy isotopes of hydrogen by heating and squeezing with a fission bomb as the primer. I suppose with proper containment and tamping, reacting antihydrogen with matter around, say, a deuterium core might make a bomb that packs quite a wallop and is still relatively clean compared to its fission-based counterpart.

8

Well, again I don’t see the point. They can’t really do anything that can’t be done by conventional nukes…and in the end nukes themselves are of very limited use. Nukes today can be made clean so that the radiation is mostly gone after a few hours. They can certainly be made larger if thats whats wanted. All it would take is for a nuclear power like the US to resume testing and development and we could make much bigger nukes that fit into smaller lighter packages. Much easier than building AM nukes.

If we could ever make AM cheaply, and figure out a way to encapsulate it in something neutral that wouldn’t set it off, I think it would be put to better use as a power source (AM powered ships, planes even armored vehicles…power armor anyone?? :)), perhaps conventional weapons uses (a small dollup of AM encapsulated in a bullet or artillary/tank shell that releases its energy on impact) or even for propellent for guns/cannon to give more vellocity to the shells (you’d need the mother of all breach blocks of course, but you could probably fire stuff off at several miles per second…maybe even into orbit). But short of interstellar war with the new alien menace I don’t see the point of AM nukes over conventional nukes.

-XT

9

What’s this about “clean” nuclear bombs? A lot of the recent outcry over the Bush Administration’s desire to develop “tactical nuclear warheads”, especially for use as bunker-busters, centers on the fallout issue. Opponents to tactical nukes use as their main arguing point the alleged fallout problem, which is supposed to remain deadly on the order of months or years. In fact, it has been argued that such weapons are of limited use because they render the battlefield too deadly for your own soldiers to enter for weeks or months. There’s a good article on this in the current issue of Scientific American.

I assume the fallout issue just gets worse the larger the yield of the bomb. And megaton bombs can blow huge amounts of radioactive fallout well into the stratosphere, where it can literally drift around the world long before it has decayed into stable isotopes.

10

So, am I to understand that the principle reason that we are reluctant to use nuclear weapons is because they are heavy and we worry about nuclear fallout?

That’s just absurd.

A lot of people think it is immoral to vaporize hundreds of thousands to millions of people at a time. Unless anti-matter weapons perform a preemptive first strike on human ethics and the tenets of major world religions, the chance of intentionally using anti-matter weapons for mass destruction is no different than the chance of using nuclear weapons. You’re focusing too much on technology and not enough with the human element.

11

Also, cheap antimatter would most certainly be used as a power-source. It’s the most efficient fuel nature can provide, pound-for-pound, and containment, while a challenge, is not impossible. I do agree, though, that any device containing antimatter could be a huge liability in combat if it is breached prematurely.

So I have a hard time seeing the use of antimatter-driven vehicles, etc., because blowing them up releases enormous amounts of energy all at once in places you may not want. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a tank or a ship powered by antimatter in the field of battle.

But, a missile buried deep, deep underground might be reasonably safe from bombardment; plus attack or sabotage in the silo leads to an explosion well beneath the surface where it’s not as big of a problem. If the enemy has a good ABM system, you might expect that some percentage of the bombs get blown up in space, but up in space the biggest issue then is damage to the ozone and maybe EMP, which are less of a problem (at least in the short term) then having it right next to you. And if the bomb does reach its mark, you vaporize some target and then march in immediately. Can’t do that with nukes.

I dunno, maybe it is crazy, but maybe not.

12

I could be wrong (and hope I am, actually), but I think that the only major practical deterrent right now to tactical nukes is fallout. If there were no nuclear weapons, and the poisonous after-effects they cause, we would have little issue with killing millions of civilians by conventional means if there were another world war. Have you forgotten the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden?

In fact, MAD is probably the only thing that has kept us from another world war. If we could have won the cold war by cleanly vaporizing half of Russia before they had the chance to fight back, I don’t doubt we might have tried it. If we were the only power with nuclear weapons we would still have been reluctant to use them on a massive scale because, as we found out shortly after dropping the first two, they are so polluting, not because they kill lots of people.

13

I can scarcely believe this, but reasearch that originated at Penn State has spun off into its own company, Positronics Research.

Wild.

14

Loopy and Liberal have voiced my own opinion already: “Who says we need to fight about energy?” People will always find some reason to hurt their neighbor.

I do not forsee that unlimited energy would mean Peace on Earth. In fact I find it inevitable that the first group to achieve such technology will do their best to hold it over the heads of the rest of humanity. “Gotta make a buck before the Peace on Earth happens!”

Also … why so down on the idea of limitless energy? I consider it to be only a matter of time. I am not about to put odds on many of us living that long, but I believe very firmly that one day mankind will master fusion (or something else we have not even conceived of).

15

I’m not down on it as long as it gets used responsibly. Controlled fusion will be a wonderful thing, and there’s enough deuterium in the oceans to keep all of humanity happy for thousands of years at least.

But, as liberal pointed out above, we could feed everyone on Earth if we all really wanted to; but we all don’t. We could have world peace if that’s what we were all really after; but we all aren’t.

But the “why are people so bad” debate wasn’t what I had in mind for this thread. Rather it’s the potential liabilities of limitless clean power, if it’s not used only for good. I see people talking about the great promise of renewable energy and fusion; but I don’t hear much discussion about antimatter weapons. Maybe it’s crazy, but maybe not. We know how to make antimatter. We know how to contain it. Scientists are crazy keen to make as much as possible, because they need lots of it to study nature. After all, we’ve never demonstrated that antimatter falls. Of course, we have no good reason to think it wouldn’t, but nothing beats experimental proof.

Enter the anti-atom. Antihydrogen might do. Scientists want to see if antihydrogen behaves the same way hydrogen does. So, they’re putting together positrons and antiprotons and making it. They’ll get better at it. For the purposes of scientific discovery, they will go about perfecting antihydrogen production and containment.

Antihydrogen is about the perfect fuel. Frozen chunks of antihydrogen would pack more useful energy in a small space than almost anything conceivable. We’re going to want antihydrogen ice. There’s nothing in the laws of physics that says we can’t produce it, contain it, or use it. The only real limitations are technological, relating to available energy and safe packaging. Neither are theoretically insurmountable problems.

Well, what makes good fuel also makes a great expolsive weapon. Gram amounts of antiprotons could cause massive destruction and produce instantaneous bursts of lethal radiation. I think the only sound military suggestion to using such a technology would be, as rightly pointed out above, it might be more trouble than it’s worth. Nukes make a big bang too, and they’re easy to deal with compared to antimatter.

But they’re extremely dirty, like I said. So, if cheap power gave us a weapon of nuclear-sized destruction, only minus the deadly and long-lasting fallout, would we not exploit it?

I would hope not, but I’m not sure; and it seems to me the closer cheap power is, the closer is the issue of its military applications. That automatically precludes, in the hawkish mind, its free distribution. Cheap power means a military advantage if only you have it, and a levelling of the field if you don’t.

So, as with the promise of nuclear power and its associated perils, does anybody concerned with policy contemplate the pluses AND minuses of endless, cheap, and clean energy? Should somebody? Because, as far as I can tell, practical fusion power will lead inexorably to large-scale antimatter production. It’s only a question of time.

16

Antimatter weapons? Bah, what we need is some good, ol’-fashioned Gridfire…

17

Let me put this as gently as I can: you’re wrong about fallout. The two most effective deterrents to the use of nuclear weapons are the worry that there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war and the political repercussions of wiping out a city.

To illustrate, do you remember the firebombings of Pyongyang during the Korea War? Or the demolition of Ho Chi Minh City during Vietnam? Or the levelling of Baghdad during both of the Gulf Wars, or the annihilation of Belgrade during the Kosovo War? No? Eh, because they didn’t happen. Compare that to the international outrage at the Russian destruction of Grozny, or more illustrative yet, the condemnation of the massacres in Sudan, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Christ, even think about the international angst at how Israelis sometimes level Palestinian refugee camps. People simply no longer accept that killing thousands to millions of civilians is a legitimate way to wage war. It has nothing to do with radioactive particles in the atmosphere.

We did indeed have that chance, and we did not do it. Curtis LeMay thought that we should have vaporized the Soviet Union when we had the chance. Well, we had ample opportunity to do so right up through the early 1960s, and we did not. Eisenhower and Kennedy (once in office) knew very well that the “missile gap” issue of the 50’s and 60’s was completely bogus, and that we had an overwhelming superiority in nuclear arms. (IIRC, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviets had about 12 ICBMs – not to discount the destruction that nuclear bombings from Rooskie aircraft would have caused, but we easily could have wiped out the Reds.) Truman went so far as to fire McArthur for continually bringing up the subject of nuking Chinese cities, if you recall, and Mao didn’t have the Bomb until 1964.

So, is it possible that these Presidents were swayed by the argument that nuclear fallout was too dangerous? I severely doubt it. We were still conducting atmospheric nuclear tests until 1962, I believe was the precise year. No, these presidents, and their successors, were undoubtably more concerned with having the blood of tens of millions on their hands, rather than how long the American people might have to stay in their fallout shelters.

18

Could antimatter be used to make a 1920s-style death ray?

19

No, but antimatter plasmas and particle beams would be pretty deadly. They probably would only be usable in space, but the militarization of space may be an issue someday. Pulses of antiparticles accellerated to relativistic speeds would have a devastating effect on any target, causing a huge fireball, as well as producing huge amounts of ionizing radiation.

20

It would be nice if our leaders were the menschen you believe they were, but I don’t buy it at all. In every instance you cited, the use of nuclear weapons proved counter to our military objectives; and in later conflicts, nuclear escalation invited nuclear retaliation, which in all these cases would have been an unacceptable risk to the homeland. Even if we had a 100:1 advantage, that one bomb on a US city was more than we were willing to bear. As it is, we came very close to a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the nation, as well as our leaders, were in mortal fear of the consequences, even if we could win. They weren’t afraid of what would happen to them, the were terrified of what would happen to us.

We tested bombs on isolated atolls for a reason, and atomospheric testing produced nowhere near the fallout issues that a nuclear conflict would. Above ground testing provides hardly an example of our cavalier attitude toward radioactivity; and it is largely because of outcry over environmental concerns that we resorted to testing bombs underground long afterward. What we know about underground tests has rekindled interest in tactical nukes, as well as strident outcry against their use. The complaint about bunker-busters, for instance has never been their yield; it has been collateral damage. Dropping nuclear bunker-busters in Afghanistan (for instance) would be unacceptable (in the minds of some) because it rains fallout on parts of the country we wish to save, as well as endangers our troops. Despite this, the fear endemic to the War on Terror has led to active work on a new class of weapon, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, and the subsequent repeal of the Spratt-Furse Law prohibiting the testing and production of low-yield nukes. It’s interesting to note that “low yield” is “only” about 1/3 the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. You’re behind the times; our current leaders are actively pursuing conventional nukes, and show all signs of seriously contemplating their use. The only issue standing firmly in their way is fallout.

As for Korea: It’s rather chilling to think how close we did come to using nuclear weapons in that war. And the interest in such a strategy went as high as the oval office. Check this out: Korean War FAQ Korean War History Korean War History Korean War FAQ