>
> How about particles of antimatter! Then the target will be annihilated
> instantly just leaving some energy (most probably heat energy!) behind!
>

The state-of-the-art just isn't there for 'anti-matter' weapons... yet. There are issues of cost, danger, and utility.

Currently, it takes a large particle accelerator to 'produce' (unnaturally, in ways we can collect it) antimatter. Antimatter is currently made as individual particles (anti-protons, positrons/anti-electrons, etc) and only in VERY small quantities. We are only just now learning how to combine them into the simplest of atoms (1H - 'anti-hydrogen'). Storage requires a high-grade vaccum, very cold temperatures, and intense magnetic fields. We can currently store the stuff in fixed locations only. Portable 'containment units' are likely decades away. Production and storage of enough for just one 'shot' would be prohibitively expensive. There are many other potiential weapons systems out there that would be MUCH more cost-effective.

Anti-matter is very dangerous to have around. Containment failure of, for instance, one ounce would produce a global disaster. And its use in anything other than bombs has huge issues. If one had a direct-fire weapon that 'shot' a projectile or beam made of anti-matter, one would find that the anti-matter would start reacting as soon as it 'hit' the air. This would kinda ruin YOUR day, in addition to possibly ruining the day of the target. Anti-matter weapons really only make sense in either space applications (where the matter density is the intervening distance is VERY low, or in applications where it is suddenly de-contained (bombs).

Also, the energy produced in a matter/anti-matter annihilation event is in the form of gamma rays. Thermal effects would be produced by the gamma rays interacting with surrounding matter. The gamma rays would produce some nuclear changes themselves, and depending on the size of the 'fireball', one could have some heat-induced fission/fusion as well. Don't count on antimatter weapons being 'clean'.

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https://youtu.be/iY57ErBkFFE

#Texit

Don't blame me, I voted for Johnson(L) in 2016.

Truth is dangerous... especially when it challenges those in power.

It's hard to focus, but yes, you can (essentially) be cooked by microwave radiation. Ask any radio station's technician - chances are that a microwave uplink is used between the studio and transmission site.

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The Directed Energy Directorate (DE) of the Air Force Research Laboratory
is the Department of Defense's center of expertise for lasers,
high-power microwaves, and other directed energy technologies.
The directorate conducts research into a variety of energies
that might be transformed into future weapons systems.


http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/

http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/factsheets/ActiveDenial.html


Federation of American Scientists

http://www.fas.org/main/home.jsp

use the search feature for:

Active Denial System

Directed-energy weapon

I'm thinking if strong enough electro-magnetic pulses could be generated they could effectively shut down a mechanized armed force or a city for that matter. Grounding the choppers and killing the ignitions on the humvees would stop troop movement while knocking out communications as a bonus.
Do you need a nuclear blast to do this? I dont know.
But it would be a great advance in warfare if you could kill an army without killing it's personnel....cc

I think it would be greater advancement if we didn't need armies or weapons - just diplomacy.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

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> I think it would be greater advancement if we didn't need armies or weapons -
> just diplomacy.
>
> The pen is mightier than the sword.
>

Only if your enemy is willing to read.

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Red Bull Air Racing

Gas price by zip at Seti

Let me have a Dream, will you?

---

>
> I'm thinking if strong enough electro-magnetic pulses could be generated they
> could effectively shut down a mechanized armed force or a city for that
> matter. Grounding the choppers and killing the ignitions on the humvees would
> stop troop movement while knocking out communications as a bonus.
> Do you need a nuclear blast to do this? I dont know.
> But it would be a great advance in warfare if you could kill an army without
> killing it's personnel....cc
>
That is why most armies of the world are going for "hardened" hardware lately. Meaning that the pulses do not affect them or do so in such a manner as to not disable them.
You could even aim a pulse at a speeding vehicle if you were a Police Officer but the problem is focusing the beam tight enough and then what do you do with an electronically fried car that can't be driven?
If you can harden the system, so can the thieves/enemy!

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Even though the context in which Rumsfeld blurted his statement about 'armies going to war with what they've got' showed disdain for the questions put to him at the time, his statement holds some truth.

Most armies can, and will, make do with whatever they happen to have at hand.

We already know that electronic jamming is very effective in disrupting command and control.

As to a police officer being concerned about what to do with a disabled vehicle? What's your point? If the object is to disable the vehicle, the officer is not concerned with how much the car might bring come time to resell it.

The whole point was to stop the car. If they can do that, that's meeting the objective.

Escalation of offensive weapons and the obvious escalation of defensive measures to combat those new weapons is no reason not to pursue weapon development.

I tend to think if law enforcement had a non-lethal means to disable a vehicle with a shoulder fired pulse of energy, even if it was only effective half the time, they would welcome it. Bystanders to high speed chases would most likely be appreciative too.

I kind of like the idea proposed below, ....that of the reverse of the neutron bomb, destroy the enemies machines without destroying their lives, or the lives of civilians caught in the middle. With more and more weapons being electronically dependant, there may be some possibilities along those lines.

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> How about particles of antimatter! Then the target will be annihilated
> instantly just leaving some energy (most probably heat energy!) behind!
>



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons
Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer

Monday, October 4, 2004



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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.

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Interesting article! :-)

The main problem about antimatter is storage, so, for weapons small particle generators would be an option! If a small amounts of positrons hit something, it might be dead things or some biological structures, even a small amounts of positrons will annihilate with their counterpart and leave the nucleus of protones and neutrones without control! The heat from the annihilation and the heat released from the nucleus, when there are no electrons to keep the atom in a equilibrium, must be tremendious! I think a small amount of protones can create so much heat that dead things will burst into fire or melt and biological structures will collaps when the cells start to be overheated.

For energy, I don't know! Again, it's an equilibrium how much antimatter we can have here in our world of matter, before every protones are annihilated, and the heat has not been too strong to ignite fires around!

Maybe we should find ET soon, so we can get some help getting away from here, when we loose control and the Earth starts to melt down! A boiling lump of melted iron may be the last trace of our stay here!!!

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> Interesting article! :-)
>
> The main problem about antimatter is storage, so, for weapons small particle
> generators would be an option!

Lena we all know that anti-matter is stored in Magnetic bottles and the reaction is controlled by the flow of Matter and Anti-Matter through Dilithium Crystals...

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.

>
> Lena we all know that anti-matter is stored in Magnetic bottles and the
> reaction is controlled by the flow of Matter and Anti-Matter through Dilithium
> Crystals...
>

Oh, I didn't know! Funny, because about ten years ago I got an idea for a thriller, which had antimatter as weapons in the plot, so I started to do some research, but got away from it! So my knowledge is not up to date. So I'll find some articles to read about the subject! And, maybe my thriller will be written! But fiction is harder to write than people, including myself, think!

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"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
- Tom Clancy

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Reality check....

The household ac current we are all using was invented by Nikola Tesla around the turn of the 20th century and in some places they still burn coal to provide steam for turbines and provide drive for alternators or generators.
What a joke !

> >
> > Lena we all know that anti-matter is stored in Magnetic bottles and the
> > reaction is controlled by the flow of Matter and Anti-Matter through
> Dilithium
> > Crystals...
> >
>
> Oh, I didn't know! Funny, because about ten years ago I got an idea for a
> thriller, which had antimatter as weapons in the plot, so I started to do some
> research, but got away from it! So my knowledge is not up to date. So I'll
> find some articles to read about the subject! And, maybe my thriller will be
> written! But fiction is harder to write than people, including myself, think!
>

Lena dear that was a joke. Read STAR TREK!!!

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I'd rather speak my mind because it hurts too much to bite my tongue.

American Spirit BBQ Proudly Serving those that courageously defend freedom.