Airforce Pursuing Anti-Matter Weapons

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Linnea
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Airforce Pursuing Anti-Matter Weapons

Post by Linnea » 10-07-2004 10:04 PM

AIR FORCE PURSUING ANTIMATTER WEAPONS
PROGRAM WAS TOUTED PUBLICLY, THEN CAME OFFICIAL GAG ORDER
By Keay Davidson
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, October 4, 2004

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 93GPK1.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 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.

Following an initial inquiry from The Chronicle this summer, the Air Force
forbade its employees from publicly discussing the antimatter research
program. Still, details on the program appear in numerous Air Force
documents distributed over the Internet prior to the ban.

These include an outline of a March 2004 speech by an Air Force official
who, in effect, spilled the beans about the Air Force's high hopes for
antimatter weapons. On March 24, Kenneth Edwards, director of the
"revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air
Force Base in Florida was keynote speaker at the NASA Institute for Advanced
Concepts (NIAC) conference in Arlington, Va.

In that talk, Edwards discussed the potential uses of a type of antimatter
called positrons.

Physicists have known about positrons or "antielectrons" since the early
1930s, when Caltech scientist Carl Anderson discovered a positron flying
through a detector in his laboratory. That discovery, and the later
discovery of "antiprotons" by Berkeley scientists in the 1950s, upheld
a
1920s theory of antimatter proposed by physicist Paul Dirac.

In 1929, Dirac suggested that the building blocks of atoms -- electrons
(negatively charged particles) and protons (positively charged particles) --
have antimatter counterparts: antielectrons and antiprotons. One fundamental
difference between matter and antimatter is that their subatomic building
blocks carry opposite electric charges. Thus, while an ordinary electron is
negatively charged, an antielectron is positively charged (hence the term
positrons, which means "positive electrons"); and while an ordinary proton
is positively charged, an antiproton is negative.

The real excitement, though, is this: If electrons or protons collide with
their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they
unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear
bombs.

The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons "is 10 billion times
... that of high explosive," Edwards explained in his March speech.
Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal "23
space shuttle fuel tanks of energy." Thus "positron energy conversion,"
as
he called it, would be a "revolutionary energy source" of interest to
those
who wage war.

It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive force available in a speck
of antimatter -- even a speck that is too small to see. For example: One
millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms
(83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple
calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a
blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the
FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Unlike regular nuclear bombs, positron bombs wouldn't eject plumes of
radioactive debris. When large numbers of positrons and antielectrons
collide, the primary product is an invisible but extremely dangerous burst
of gamma radiation. Thus, in principle, a positron bomb could be a step
toward one of the military's dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called
"clean" superbomb that could kill large numbers of soldiers without ejecting
radioactive contaminants over the countryside.

A copy of Edwards' speech on NIAC's Web site emphasizes this advantage of
positron weapons in bright red letters: "No Nuclear Residue."

But talk of "clean" superbombs worries critics. " 'Clean' nuclear
weapons
are more dangerous than dirty ones because they are more likely to be used,"
said an e-mail from science historian George Dyson of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., author of "Project Orion," a 2002 study
on a Cold War-era attempt to design a nuclear spaceship. Still, Dyson adds,
antimatter weapons are "a long, long way off."

Why so far off? One reason is that at present, there's no fast way to mass
produce large amounts of antimatter from particle accelerators. 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.

Another problem is the terribly unruly behavior of positrons whenever
physicists try to corral them into a special container. Inside these
containers, known as Penning traps, magnetic fields prevent the
antiparticles from contacting the material wall of the container -- lest
they annihilate on contact. Unfortunately, because like-charged particles
repel each other, the positrons push each other apart and quickly squirt out
of the trap.

If positrons can't be stored for long periods, they're as useless to the
military as an armored personnel carrier without a gas tank. So Edwards is
funding investigations of ways to make positrons last longer in storage.

Edwards' point man in that effort is Gerald Smith, former chairman of
physics and Antimatter Project leader at Pennsylvania State University.
Smith now operates a small firm, Positronics Research LLC, in Santa Fe, N.M.
So far, the Air Force has given Smith and his colleagues $3.7 million for
positron research, Smith told The Chronicle in August.

Smith is looking to store positrons in a quasi-stable form called
positronium. A positronium "atom" (as physicists dub it) consists of an
electron and antielectron, orbiting each other. Normally these two particles
would quickly collide and self-annihilate within a fraction of a second --
but by manipulating electrical and magnetic fields in their vicinity, Smith
hopes to make positronium atoms last much longer.

Smith's storage effort is the "world's first attempt to store large
quantities of positronium atoms in a laboratory experiment," Edwards noted
in his March speech. "If successful, this approach will open the door to
storing militarily significant quantities of positronium atoms."

Officials at Eglin Air Force Base initially agreed enthusiastically to try
to arrange an interview with Edwards. "We're all very excited about this
technology," spokesman Rex Swenson at Eglin's Munitions Directorate told The
Chronicle in late July. But Swenson backed out in August after he was
overruled by higher officials in the Air Force and Pentagon.

Reached by phone in late September, Edwards repeatedly declined to be
interviewed. His superiors gave him "strict instructions not to give any
interviews personally. I'm sorry about that -- this (antimatter) project is
sort of my grandchild. ...

"(But) I agree with them (that) we're just not at the point where we need to
be doing any public interviews."

Air Force spokesman Douglas Karas at the Pentagon also declined to comment
last week.

In the meantime, the Air Force has been investigating the possibility of
making use of a powerful positron-generating accelerator under development
at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash. One goal: to see if
positrons generated by the accelerator can be stored for long periods inside
a new type of "antimatter trap" proposed by scientists, including Washington
State physicist Kelvin Lynn, head of the school's Center for Materials
Research.

A new generation of military explosives is worth developing, and antimatter
might fill the bill, Lynn told The Chronicle: "If we spend another $10
billion (using ordinary chemical techniques), we're going to get better high
explosives, but the gains are incremental because we're getting near the
theoretical limits of chemical energy."

Besides, Lynn is enthusiastic about antimatter because he believes it could
propel futuristic space rockets.

"I think," he said, "we need to get off this planet, because I'm
afraid
we're going to destroy it."

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Post by Guest » 10-07-2004 11:22 PM

I think we would all be surprised by the wepons we have not pulled out of the magic sack in future wars the wepons will be far cleaner (no radiation ) BUT FAR MORE DEADLY

Lord Moon
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Even beyond Anti Matter will be

Post by Lord Moon » 10-12-2004 10:26 PM

although anti matter weapons will be powerful....and probably much cheaper to create than once orignally thought, now that lasers have been succesfully used to create desktop linear accelerators, they will not be the ultimate weapon...

Weapons made of dark matter will be far more powerful... and much more destructive.... recently an object the size of a red blood cell with the weight of about 20,000,000 tons was tracked going through the earth...because it set off seismic detectors normally used to monitor earthquakes...it sliced through the earth like a knife through butter and then went on out into space...one can only guess at the magnitude of the foces locked up in such a tiny mass...

at any rate maybe this is the whole point of our evolution.. to create bigger and bigger explosions.. until maybe someday we will recreate, through an interdimensional breach, a reverse big bang and things will start all over again.... that is if we haven't blown ourselves up yet...

The only real alternative to this is to learn to love people just the way they are and stop trying to change everyone into something else...

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Laird
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Post by Laird » 10-16-2004 10:18 PM

Ah come on ... the PhD's working for motorola all know how to build cheap electronic busters from radio shack products ... this is old black hat. my goodness sakes, the Air force has been testing
this technology since the early 70's in NM firing stuff at a suspended boeing 747. its not a secret
"Speak softly and carry a big stick" Teddy Roosevelt

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smadewell
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Post by smadewell » 10-16-2004 10:47 PM

I'd like to know whatever happened to the T.H.E.L. - after they finished using it to shoot down the Columbia(?) or was that HAARP? Oops! My bad! Seems it was a bit of foam.


Laser shoots down rocket for first time

Laser gun zaps missile

At any rate, they'll need some sort of phasers or something to battle those evil aliens who want to stop us from proving Richard Hogland right. ;)

White House Go-Ahead On NASA Nuclear Prometheus Project

NASA Chief Outlines New Nuclear, Space Plane Efforts

NASA To Go Nuclear; Spaceflight Initiative Approved


~ Don't take me too seriously, folks. ~
S.Madewell - "If the truth shall kill a man ... let him die!"

Guest

Post by Guest » 10-17-2004 07:06 AM

Archangel wrote: I think we would all be surprised by the wepons we have not pulled out of the magic sack in future wars the wepons will be far cleaner (no radiation ) BUT FAR MORE DEADLY


I stand corrected by Sir Charles Shulz there might be SHORT TERM radiological effects

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