Antimatter weapons

[Ladic]

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order

- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer

Monday, October 4, 2004

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 onNIAC'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."

E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...&type=printable

[Phyrox]

what do I think?

Not going to happen.

[Lynx7725]

Actually it's likely to happen.. given the amount of research in this area, some practical application is bound to come out sooner or later, and given it's easier to have an uncontrolled reaction than a controlled reaction, a bomb is the most likely first product.

I'm just waiting for a laboratory somewhere to vaporize itself and the surrounding countryside...

Thing is, making devices this powerful have very nasty side effect. Just as the world now has a real fear of nuclear material ending up in terrorist hands, the idea of a small bomb with the yield of several nukes is extremely uncomfortable..

[eugimon]

hopefully by the time we start harnessing anti-matter as an energy source, humanity has moved beyond thinking about how better to kill one another.

anti-matter drives in starships, or as powerplants would be so immensely productive, at the same time lowering our reliance on fossile fuels and nuclear energy.

[eriku]

hopefully by the time we start harnessing anti-matter as an energy source, humanity has moved beyond thinking about how better to kill one another.

anti-matter drives in starships, or as powerplants would be so immensely productive, at the same time lowering our reliance on fossile fuels and nuclear energy.

Ditto. I love the idea of finding a use for antimatter, but not for weaponry. We really don't need a better and faster way to blow up the planet.

[JsARCLIGHT]

But the sad truth of scientific advance is that we humans only truly eccell when death is the goal. I bet if AIDS or cancer was threatening our boarders or stockpiling WMD's we'd have a cure in seconds... or if some nutjob banana republic dictator was threatening to blow up the world and the only thing that could take him out was a functioning, reliable electric car.

... of course then again some bigwig in the government would trash those projects in benefit of his company's less reliable, more costly, prone to failure cancer cure...

[azrael]

what do I think?

Not going to happen.

I'd rather say:

Not in my lifetime.

[Lynx7725]

what do I think?

Not going to happen.

I'd rather say:

Not in my lifetime.

You never know. What with improved healthcare and cure for cancer and AIDS... you might live longer, but you wished you didn't.

So you might just be around to see the first anti-matter explosion, or the first anti-matter generator.. the two might be the same though.

[eriku]

So you might just be around to see the first anti-matter explosion...

The pessimist in me says that it would also be the last antimatter explosion.

[Pavlov's Cat]

If it's anti-matter, does it really matter?

[Daishi3500]

If it's anti-matter, does it really matter?

lol

they sould make antimatter hondas

[Anubis]

N2 mines (no fallout nuclear-type weapon), Photon Torpedoes, and Warp Drive. Sweet.

Now where's the update on the Directed Energy Weapon for the F-22?

[Skull Leader]

well, given that in one point in my life I thought commercial space-travel wouldn't be possible in my lifetime, I suppose anything is possible... but I agree with the others here... it seems like the only thing we can build better and more effective is the next bomb....

The sad thing is, even if WE don't do it... SOMEONE likely will....

[Gui]

Let's face it, guys: most of the time, when a new technology comes up it's for a military use. Then it slowly but surely becomes civil, like tourism planes or nuclear-powered power stations

On the other hand, when I imagine the power of such device, I'm not sure to want to see it becoming civil: go figure anti-matter devices for domestic uses and compare them to what happens when there's a simple gaz leak in a building...

[Ghadrack]

Don't be so pessimistic, on the time factor that is, just think, 100 years ago our only means of conveyance was horse and steam, now there is a car in every driveway, a computer in every house and 47 tons of our trash orbitting our planet.

I wouldn't be surprised if we had teleportation technology, personal space craft and vacations on Mars by the time I am 90. That. or one of our new super weapons will have eradicated life as we know it, you know, either or

[Gui]

Indeed, progress have been rather quick during the latest century but technology becomes always more complex which means that significant advances always require even more efforts, i.e. more time and money

The examples you have given are pertinent but they all correspond to a ponctual market which grew according to a specific 'need' and its specific marketing campaign. I'm not sure the weapons market follow exactly the same rules, especially with such thing...

[Mr March]

Not exactly news to me, but a very interesting article nonetheless. I try to follow a few subjects about new technology and research, just to keep myself up to date as I write about sci-fi. Anti-matter is so much fun

[LORD KUNGFU]

ohh, if we develope anti matter, than we can make earth into the death star.........Im yo father....Im yo father.....im yo father....Im yo father.....knock em out the box luke, knock em out.....knock em out the box luke,...knock em out.....

[Final Vegeta]

You are leaving, depart! Away from Geneva, everyone!

Saturn shall be changed from gold into iron;

The opposite of the positive ray is able to exterminate everyone!

Before they lash out, Heaven will shown signs.

Nostradamus

I acknowledged I misunderstood the Compendium and mistakenly thought that Valkyries run on antimatter, but what does it mean that pair-annihilation doesn't provoke fallout? Gamma rays should make things radioactive, maybe not all things but there will surely be some atomic disorder around. It sounds like Rumsfeld saying he'd like to study mini-nukes to see if they could destroy anthrax bacteria (gamma-ray sterilization?).

I am skeptic, but I think there might be some serious disinformation going on. Non-lethal weapons are in fact almost-lethal, smart bombs are not so smart and so on. No weapon is ever designed as to absolutely prevent collateral damage.

FV

[rocco_77]

I would love to see great advances in antimatter research... Unfortunately, the use of antimatter as a weapon is far more likely to occur before an antimatter space ship... I just hope that after the weapon is created, that we don't blow each other up before we finish the space ship...

And as for the time line... I think that we will see an antimatter weapon in our life time...

What ever happened to nuclear FUSION??

[ewilen]

An antimatter bomb is primarily useful as a terror weapon if it's used on Earth, due to the potentially small size and enormous but indiscriminate destructive power. It might have some limited military applications, which I'll get to later.

I wonder how efficient it is to use antimatter either as a weapon or as a fuel. Antimatter isn't readily available in nature--it needs to be created. A perfectly efficient process would convert the mass-energy of one proton into one antiproton; this could then be used to annihilate a proton, yielding the energy of two protons. However, we are very, very, very far from that level of efficiency. For one thing, some of what I've read suggests that we do not have a way of converting energy directly into antiparticles. I.e., to create an antiproton, we use a process that actually creates a proton-antiproton pair. Such a process can't possibly yield more energy than is put into it.

Because of the enormous inefficiencies of creating antimatter, the primary benefit it offers is energy density, or the yield of energy per unit mass that goes into the reaction. An antimatter bomb could theoretically be tiny. A spaceship which uses a matter-antimatter reaction for power could go farther/faster while carrying less fuel and reaction mass than a chemical rocket, or a fission or fusion-powered ship.

It's a bit inaccurate to say that an antimatter bomb would produce less radiation than a nuke. It would produce an enormous amout of radiation in the form of gamma rays. But it would produce little or no long-lived radioactive isotopes. So it could be used to attack deeply-buried, hardened targets like missile silos and command bunkers, and while the blast might cause significant collateral damage and casualties, there wouldn't be much in the way of fallout. This has been an objection to the current plans for "burrowing nukes"--such nukes would almost certainly cause fallout. It is also possible that a fusion reaction could be triggered by a small amount of antimatter, resulting in a large explosion with little or no fallout.

But aside from that very limited application, it's very hard to imagine a scenario where a antimatter bomb is significantly more useful than a nuke. Once you start frying cities and killing millions of people, if your opponent has "old-fashioned" nukes, he's not likely to be restrained by the fact he's going to cause fallout when he hits you back. Perhaps, if either a pure antimatter bomb or an antimatter/fusion bomb could be made cost-effective relative to an "old fashioned" nuke, it would be useful in space warfare. That's about it.

[Max Jenius]

Vegita, political stuff is frowned upon here. Please keep that in mind when making posts/adding links.

Thank you.

[Kin]

edit: sorry posted in a wrong topic!

Edited October 8, 2004 by Kin

[Agent ONE]

I am all for increasing our killing power.

[The_Major]

as long as i can view all the destruction from an out bound starship, to some far off colony, then i dont have a problem with the whole weapons thing.

[F-ZeroOne]

"The next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gain such a victory as this."

- Sir Arthur Wellesley, The Duke of Wellington, commenting on the aftermath of Waterloo.

[mikeszekely]

There's some theory out there, damned if I can remember it, that says that x ammount of energy is required for a population of a certain size to achieve a certain level of technology. It's without question that technology has grown incredibly in the last 200 years, as humans learned to create electricity with generators and pipe it into indivdual home, and to power engines and and the aforementioned generators by burning various fuels.

Technology growth has also begun to slow down. We are burning fuel at ever greater rates as our planet's population grows, but we're essentially burning the same fuels we've been using since World War II.

To continue significant advances in technology, new fuel sources must be worked out. Nuclear fusion, some kind of chemical mix that's easier to produce and burns cleaner and more efficiently than oil, hybrid technology... those are short-term solutions. To that end, anti-matter research may not give us anti-matter reactors to power starships in our lifetimes, but they will be the method of choice for future generations.

And to the pessimist that worry about the research coming out of the military... most of the technology we use today... laptop computers, cell phones, GPS navigators, the internet, satellite TV, commercial flight, nuclear fission... we have today because of the military. And we haven't destroyed the world yet.

[ewilen]

Technology is speeding up.

And the issue facing us in the future isn't fuel, but energy sources and energy efficiency. Fuel-cell powered vehicles, for example, still have to get their energy from the same sources we use to light our homes--it's just that they use it very efficiently (and cleanly).

As I wrote above, antimatter is so hard to produce that (barring a really far-out breakthrough) it's going to be a net energy sink, not a producer. But it might provide a way to store energy in very small packages, which would make space travel easier even if we never manage to turn antimatter into an energy source.

[bsu legato]

Somehow, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this. Whatever advances might be someday made in anti-matter, it will happen long, long after we are all dead, buried and worm food. But I'll be sure to mention it to the grand kids someday, so they can be forewarned.

But on the outside chance this comes to fruition, you guys can all come north to my place. We'll hole up with guns n ammo in northern Manitoba until civilization falls apart after the bomb. Then we'll loot and pillage the survivors and live like kings!

[JsARCLIGHT]

But on the outside chance this comes to fruition, you guys can all come north to my place. We'll hole up with guns n ammo in northern Manitoba until civilization falls apart after the bomb. Then we'll loot and pillage the survivors and live like kings!

Only if I can shave my hair into a mohawk, dye it red, don football pads and black leather and cruize around in search of "Gazzoline".

[bsu legato]

Only if I can shave my hair into a mohawk, dye it red, don football pads and black leather and cruize around in search of "Gazzoline".

Hmmm....I never figured you for the type of guy who'd favor assless chaps. Oh well, our hardy group of survivors will be equal opportunity pillagers, so bring your bike and crossbow. However, I'd imagine the L's will be a little disappointed when you chose some blonde bitch-boy over her.

[rocco_77]

There's some theory out there, damned if I can remember it, that says that x ammount of energy is required for a population of a certain size to achieve a certain level of technology.

I believe you are thinking of the "Civilization Types" chart of sorts. Basically it says there are 4 types of intelligent civilizations based upon each civilization types ability to control certain levels of energy.

Here's some more specific info:

Type 1, 2, & 3 Civilizations

A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies. They might, for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the power to manipulate planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release the energy of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization.

A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV program Star Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny fraction of the near-by stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be able to manipulate the power of solar flares.

A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in the Star Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy from hundreds of billions of stars.

By contrast, we are a Type 0 civilization, which extracts its energy from dead plants (oil and coal). Growing at the average rate of about 3% per year, however, one may calculate that our own civilization may attain Type I status in about 100-200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years. These time scales are insignificant when compared with the universe itself.

On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different types of civilizations:

Type 0

Chemical rockets

Ionic engines

Fission power

EM propulsion (rail guns)

Type I

Ram-jet fusion engines

Photonic drive

Type II

Antimatter drive

Von Neumann nano probes

Type III

Planck energy propulsion

Judging by this scale, we are still a Type 0/Type 1 Civilization.... I would say in order to manufacture and utilize Antimatter type power sources with any level of efficiency, we are looking about 100 years into the future, maybe more, and very unlikely less time than that, but remotely possible.

[JsARCLIGHT]

Hmmm....I never figured you for the type of guy who'd favor assless chaps. Oh well, our hardy group of survivors will be equal opportunity pillagers, so bring your bike and crossbow. However, I'd imagine the L's will be a little disappointed when you chose some blonde bitch-boy over her.

It's either that or bulk out and wear tight leather hot pants and a hockey mask... and I think Agent One covets that role...

... plus L's would love me in leather and assless chaps.

[bsu legato]

... plus L's would love me in leather and assless chaps.

Good. She just has to beat this guy for your affections.

[GreenGuy42]

hopefully by the time we start harnessing anti-matter as an energy source, humanity has moved beyond thinking about how better to kill one another.

anti-matter drives in starships, or as powerplants would be so immensely productive, at the same time lowering our reliance on fossile fuels and nuclear energy.

Wait.. wait.. human responibility with something with that much destructive potential?

....growing past war? Haha..... HahahHAh.. Ahah. AHaHAHahaHAHAHAH!!!

....sorry, the cynic in me never sees THAT happening.