Antimatter Belt Discovered Around Earth

And it would still likely induce some radioactive fallout. IIRC, antimatter detonation throws out a lot of hard gamma, as opposed to lots of X-rays and neutron and a smidgen of gamma like normal nukes. Still, if you want the minimum of fallout while denying it to your enemies, orbital KEW are the way to go.

Yes, but don't forget the fusion which makes the core of the bomb gives off a lot of neutron radiation.

Gamma rays don't make what they hit radioactive. Neutron radiation, however...

Why would fusion be involved in an antimatter explosive?

Because a pure antimatter weapon is not practical (Not even close to practical) with current technology or technology we could realistically develop in the foreseeable future. We could, however, build an antimatter-fusion weapon that uses a small antimatter charge to set off a significantly more powerful fusion reaction. We already do the same thing using a fission bomb core to jump-start a fusion reaction... but a fission weapon is extremely dirty, and so a fission-fusion bomb is dirty as a result. An (antimatter)annihilation-fusion bomb would be significantly cleaner. This greatly reduces (by multiple orders of magnitude) one of the main problems with using a nuclear weapon - the radioactive fallout.

edited 9th Aug '11 4:43:30 AM by Lessinath

You think fission-fusion bombs fall-out is bad?

Wait until we detonate Bruce Willis.

edited 9th Aug '11 5:54:56 AM by Baff

Only in a deuterium/tritium reaction. A quad-protium reaction releases EM band radiation and beta radiation only.

It's only a matter of time until this is used to create an antimatter-themed supervillain, possibly called Anti-Man.

I can see that one going over well with the Feminazi crowd.

And now we have our hands on a significant quantity of antimatter. What could go wrong?

Technically, it's just within reach. The trick is actually holding on to it.

^^ Not much, here's one hypothetical harvester ship, it would collect at a rate of 25 nanograms a day. On annihilation, that's about 4.5 megajoules, which is the equivalent of 0.3 gallons of gasoline, or 6 ounces of hard liquor.

...well, it's something for research purposes I guess, but forgive me for not being impressed with a multimillion dollar project to collect about 10% of the energy I expend commuting to work.

The cool part isn't the amount of energy, it's how concentrated it is. Think of the difference between a hot plate and a soldering iron.

But it's such a tiny soldering iron

Well, yea, but if we have a probe up there for 20 years collecting 4.5MJ worth of antimatter per day, that's 32,871.6MJ, which is suddenly a quite substantial amount. That's 0.36 milligrams of antimatter. If we did that with 30 probes - considering they could likely be quite small - that would suddenly be 986 gigajoules... which should be enough, given a properly designed bomb, to create a single antimatter-fusion bomb using the antimatter as a "spark plug" for the fusion bomb. Maybe two bombs. But probably not.

edited 10th Aug '11 9:39:10 PM by Lessinath

You're still gathering energy at a rate slower than I can gather its equivalent in firewood.

I'm not even good at chopping firewood.

Yes, but you can't use your firewood in a nuke.

Like I said before, using it as a means to nuclear activation is way more likely to be useful than the actual annihilation energy, and we totally need to jump on that much.

Though FFS we've got enough nukes already. The most useful thing that came out of the ones we have is a disarmament treaty that resulted in a shitload of fuel for commercial reactors.

edited 10th Aug '11 9:57:59 PM by Pykrete

If we had radioactive fallout-free nukes, we could actually use them. And not end the world in doing so

edited 10th Aug '11 10:05:15 PM by Lessinath

The biggest risk in nuclear weapons isn't radioactive fallout, it's escalation. If enough people are dropping huge bombs everywhere, you kick enough detritus into the atmosphere that it barely matters if it's glowing or not.

Yeah, even with no radioactive fallout, nuclear winter will still going to kill a lot...

Not necessarily. In practice, lower-yield weapons are better to use for a number of reasons, mainly cube root (you can destroy more of a city with 3 properly placed 20kt bombs then you can with one 60kt bomb) and the extreme difficulty of delivering a high yield bomb. This means that most of the mushroom clouds do not enter very far into the stratosphere, if they do at all, and most of the dust is rained out in a few weeks. Nuclear winter is a VASTLY overblown threat.

edited 10th Aug '11 10:58:45 PM by Lessinath

More importantly, the technological set back of having the bulk of infrastructure and production slagged is likely going to do some very bad things.

..

That too.

Also, most nuclear detonations would be air bursts, which produce little fallout compared to ground bursts, because when the crater is excavated in a ground burst all that material is vaporized and contributes to fallout in addition to anything small enough to be pulled into the updraft tower (the stem of the mushroom cloud), where as with an air burst only material small enough to be puled into the updraft tower contributes to fallout...

The only things that require a ground burst are rail yards, which you actually need to dig out of the ground but a very, very small bomb will do the trick due to the relatively small size of most - the mushroom cloud would not reach the tropopause - and bunkers, which also can (for the most part) be killed with a small bomb.

edited 10th Aug '11 11:15:06 PM by Lessinath

Gimme a second to dig up the links: Ah, they're on Subject101 for reference. For the most part, you can remove the stuff about radiation and be good with it.

• : Nuclear Warfare 101
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