Micronuke theory question

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Mostly because I know the small fission devices exist, but small fusion devices probably don't, due to the minimal trigger size issue.

There is no minimal trigger issue. Ten million degrees Celsius/Kelvin is all that’s required and you’re in business. Ten million degrees and you will initiate a hydrogen fusion reaction. One way of doing this is using antimatter, which by the way is being produced as we speak. When antimatter comes in contact with ‘matter’, i.e. any substance whatsoever (it can be a dog turd), the two annihilate one another and are converted into energy, and lots of it. Antimatter is the ideal spark needed to start the ‘fire’ of the fusion bomb.

Also, neutrons are easily directed/reflected into any direction desired. E.g. since day one, even conventional atom bombs have had liners inside them to do this.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam

Originally posted by bsbray11
Aha! You just got how Mr. Bedlam is dividing up the issue.

Which is why one could argue that disintegration via neutron radiation was not the primary mechanism used to bring the towers down.

You see, WE probably agree on that, but not gottago, WITW or a number of others.

Now, one has to establish that this is the only way one could use a small fusion device. Tom says he has no problem with a small fission device for that purpose. Why not a small fusion device for that purpose?

Mostly because I know the small fission devices exist, but small fusion devices probably don't, due to the minimal trigger size issue. You got to get the little boogers moving fast enough to get through each other's Coulomb barrier. And you have do to it to enough of them. And you have to have them do it as many times as you can before they fly apart. That's why you need density (read: pressure) and temperature. Also, fusion devices mostly emit neutrons, especially those reactions that use tritium.

No Tom, I don't think the towers were fried by magic neutrons and that's what brought them down.

I've stressed all along that whatever devices were used, they were finely tailored to mimic as closely as possible a collapse that was bizarre and impossible as explained, but at least had its own coherent internal logic.

I think that, in terms of portability/hide-ability and destructive power, mininukes in the sub-basements make a great deal of sense. A lot more than thermobarics, which are just too invasive.

And I'd argue, one above the impact area for good measure to take out the tops so they didn't fall in a dangerous, anomalous and incriminating lump--since the towers themselves had to be shattered in that cascade, the top had to shatter, too, but all at once. Boom. Big chrysanthemum bloom and bsbray's "dust"-spewing steel members.

Now if you're going to use them under these conditions you're going to carefully plan the event for minimal collateral damage and observable traces.
So I think if you can make them as small as many claim, barely distinguishable from conventional explosives in yield, you'd use an array of small ones to surgically take out the core to minimize the mess of one big bang. Divide and conquer.

Bali indeed is a good indicator of what one of these would look like and what it'd leave behind--relatively, not that much.

Also, I've read reports that the Israelis lobbed a few into Iraq in '93 (I believe that was the year but it's off the top of my head), and you can watch a video of two others going off in that spectacular Baghdad night-time ammo-dump conflagration a few years ago.

And if they weren't mininukes sending those small white mushroom clouds over Baghdad, then they're some other very exotic conventional weapon in our arsenal, and whatever they are, well, there's your culprit right there.

Originally posted by Wizard_In_The_Woods
There is no minimal trigger issue. Ten million degrees Celsius/Kelvin is all that’s required and you’re in business. Ten million degrees and you will initiate a hydrogen fusion reaction.

You have to raise your entire reactant mass to a sufficient temperature, which requires energy. That would be heat, as opposed to temperature. Heat has a temperature (or more likely a distribution of them), but temperature is not heat.

You also need sufficient density to get the rate up. You also need containment time to get the total amount of fusion to the yield you want.

That's why the traditional way of doing this involves a fission nuke on the outside, and another on the inside, albeit very small, of your holraum.

Note that Farnsworth fusors and neutron tubes you use in initiators also "produce fusion" but they don't go bang, why? The rate is too low.

One way of doing this is using antimatter, which by the way is being produced as we speak. When antimatter comes in contact with ‘matter’, i.e. any substance whatsoever (it can be a dog turd), the two annihilate one another and are converted into energy, and lots of it. Antimatter is the ideal spark needed to start the ‘fire’ of the fusion bomb.

Antimatter is heinously inefficient to produce. All the antimatter made wouldn't blow up a dog house. Antimatter must contact its normal matter counterpart to annihilate. Thus anti-electrons (positrons) would not annilate with, say, neutrons.

Charged antimatter is difficult to confine - the more you have of it, the more it wants to leave its confinement due to electrostatic pressure. Enough of it to serve as a primary for a fusion weapon would not be containable.

Uncharged antimatter is difficult to confine - electrostatic fields won't hold it since it has no net charge. Very very tiny amounts (we're talking a few atoms) can be held in a laser trap if it's supercooled, but the amount wouldn't make a grain of salt roll over if annihilated.

Antimatter annihilation produces EM. Typically, gamma rays, but the exact wavelength depends on, and is characteristic of, the particles annihilating. Positrons and electrons emit a characteristic 511keV gamma, for instance.

You could use this gamma radiation, if you had enough antimatter, to superheat and explode high density plastics with enormous force, so you could use it as a primary for a Teller-Ulam holraum. However. Most fusion weapons, and certainly the reaction you keep citing, use Li6D as the source for deuterium and tritium for the reaction. The antimatter as a primary does not produce high velocity neutrons as an output. Therefore, you will not get the initial tritium production you need unless you still have the plutonium "sparkplug" in the center of the holraum. This means you'll still have plutonium fission going on. That sort of limits the minimum size of the weapon.

Using liquid DT instead would be unbelievably nasty - you'd need a cryogenic plant to keep it liquid. You might be able to use some other hydrogen carrier to hold your deuterium and tritium in sufficient density without poisoning the reaction but I don't know of one offhand.

An antimatter primary would still have to be in the 1kT range. So it would set the minimum blast size - given a mass of antimatter sufficient to trigger a fusion secondary, you really don't need the secondary for a weapon the size you are conjecturing. Antimatter annihilation emits gammas. Lots and lots of gammas. This would by itself produce dead people everywhere. But I don't recall people dropping dead in the vicinity.

Another issue is that antimatter doesn't tend to react as cleanly as you and the author of the paper you keep posting seem to think. You don't get that nice instantaneous 'bang' you might want. That's because when the front edge of your positrons hits the first electrons, the gamma radiation pressure tends to shove the reactants apart. You get an erratic, pulsating reaction that is not well-defined in time or space, as the stuff just bounces around from the plasma and radiation pressure. This is called ambiplasma oscillation. This is not trivial to deal with.

Also, neutrons are easily directed/reflected into any direction desired. E.g. since day one, even conventional atom bombs have had liners inside them to do this.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

Again, you're missing the boat on scope and duration, probably because you don't have a background in physics or math.

Yes, you use materials that tend to reflect neutrons, like beryllium, in order to reduce the size of the critical mass by reflecting the neutrons back into the core.

This is far from being absolutely reflective. Nor does it endure through the entire reaction. You generally don't give a damn about the reflector once the reaction has progressed for a few generations.

But that's bad for YOUR argument, WITW, because you are one of the ones that is insisting that the fusion reaction disintegrated the concrete with magic neutrons. So, with no neutrons due to your magic 100% reflector, how then are you claiming "powderization?" Not that that's what would happen, mind you, but you invoked it as a mechanism. Often.

Originally posted by gottago
No Tom, I don't think the towers were fried by magic neutrons and that's what brought them down.

Sorry, I certainly thought you were using them as the mechanism of "powderizing" the concrete.

Have you decided that the powdered concrete is typical of a 100+ story collapse?

Also, I've read reports that the Israelis lobbed a few into Iraq in '93 (I believe that was the year but it's off the top of my head),

Got do do "above ground tests" somewhere, eh? I have heard that too.

and you can watch a video of two others going off in that spectacular Baghdad night-time ammo-dump conflagration a few years ago.

And if they weren't mininukes sending those small white mushroom clouds over Baghdad, then they're some other very exotic conventional weapon in our arsenal, and whatever they are, well, there's your culprit right there.

Mushroom clouds can occur with many types of explosion - it's not just a nuclear weapon phenomenon. I'd be surprised if you didn't get them in an ammo dump, frankly.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
You have to raise your entire reactant mass to a sufficient temperature...

Wrong. Way wrong. Just like you don’t have to superheat the entire fuel air mixture coming out of a bic-lighter – a simple spark from the flint is enough, you don’t have to heat all the deuterium-tritium in a hydrogen bomb before it ‘blows’. Start the reaction in one spot – with antimatter – and it will spread from there.

Antimatter annihilates ANYTHING it comes in contact with. Which is why, indeed it is difficult to confine. (It mustn’t be allowed to touch the walls of whatever it’s contained in.)

No neutrons? I have no idea what you are trying to say! Neutrons directed as shaped charges, generated by pure fusion hydrogen explosions are what brought the WTC’s down.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods


[edit on 6/28/2007 by Wizard_In_The_Woods]

Originally posted by Wizard_In_The_Woods
No neutrons? I have no idea what you are trying to say! Neutrons directed as shaped charges, generated by pure fusion hydrogen explosions are what brought the WTC’s down.

How can a neutron be used to demolish something? I may not be a physicist, but Neutrons are not exactly solid and can't really destroy something, except organic tissue. Considering this, How did those fire fighters who were in WTC1 as it collapsed survive, considering they were right above this explosive device which sent a beam of neutrons straight up through the core, where they were?

Originally posted by apex
How can a neutron be used to demolish something? I may not be a physicist, but Neutrons are not exactly solid and can't really destroy something, except organic tissue.

Neutrons are solid and have mass. I don't really know the workings of such a device, but the bomb would actually create an explosion. Refer to Tom's posts for the details.

Originally posted by apex
Considering this, How did those fire fighters who were in WTC1 as it collapsed survive, considering they were right above this explosive device which sent a beam of neutrons straight up through the core, where they were?

As Tom explained some, that's a major problem with the theory.

Originally posted by apex
Considering this, How did those fire fighters who were in WTC1 as it collapsed survive, considering they were right above this explosive device which sent a beam of neutrons straight up through the core, where they were?

You don't have to send a beam of neutrons up through the core with a fusion bomb, and I'm pretty sure that didn't happen.

Originally posted by Wizard_In_The_Woods

Wrong. Way wrong. Just like you don’t have to superheat the entire fuel air mixture coming out of a bic-lighter – a simple spark from the flint is enough, you don’t have to heat all the deuterium-tritium in a hydrogen bomb before it ‘blows’. Start the reaction in one spot – with antimatter – and it will spread from there.

I'm sorry, but you're entirely incorrect with this.

The reason that you have to raise the temperature at all is in order to overcome the Coulomb repulsion of the nuclei, the so-called "Coulomb barrier". Temperature translates into average velocity - which is what you need. You have to have sufficient velocity for the nuclei to come into each other's strong force range, at which point they will fuse.

Just having a few reach sufficient temperature won't do it - you need a nearly head-on collision between two nuclei moving at sufficient velocity. So having some nuclei that are at sufficient velocity (given that they meet so that the velocities mostly add) and some nuclei that are not just results in the loss of energy to the slower moving nuclei by elastic collision. That's why you have a Gaussian distribution of velocities for any one average temperature in a gas, and not a lot of fast outliers - they'll quickly trade momentum so that it's evened out.

You have to raise the temperature of the entire sample so that the entire reactant mass has sufficient energy so that the bulk of the mass has a chance to take part in the reaction, because far from every collision will be head-on. Only a small fraction will be meeting at a close enough to head-on angle to pass the Coulomb barrier.

Next, you have to have a sufficient density so that the rate of reaction will proceed quickly enough to be worthwhile. It doesn't do you any good to get a few nuclei to fuse. If you get a small but significant amount fusing it's almost worse - the pressure will disassemble your reactant mass before much energy is released, analogous to a "fizzle yield" in a fission weapon. Thus the requirement for very high density at the point in time you apply sufficient heat to bring the velocity up sufficient to get fusion happening.

Thus you need to increase the density with spectacular rapidity, subsequently raising the temperature with spectacular rapidity and as uniformly as possible so that you have as many able to fuse and available to fuse as possible - at the same time. This is why they use one nuke to compress it and another to heat it. It's not just for fun.

The fact that you think it's like lighting off a gas plume tells me that you understand much less about the subject than I had thought. There are all sorts of devices for causing D-T fusion. You can do it with a cyclotron by bombarding a deuteride target with tritium. You can do it in a neutron tube. You can get enough fusion going in a really nicely built Farnsworth-Hirsch machine to give yourself radiation sickness if you hang around it at full bore for long enough. But in no case does "all the hydrogen fuse like you lit a match to gas fumes". If it did, we would have fusion power in every home.

You can build a fusor yourself. Well, in your case you don't seem to understand enough about it, but I'd bet gottago, bsbray or vicrh could. If it worked as you describe, all you'd have to do is get it fusing, turn up the deuterium and start running generators.

Here's a fusor running in a "star" mode


For a while, Chrysler would sell you a commercially built fusion generator called a "FusionStar", which was a Farnsworth-Hirsch machine running in star mode, for the purpose of cranking out neutrons for activation analysis.



Again, it's not beyond a talented college student with more money than sense to build a Real, Working Fusion Generator®, the only problem is that a Hirsch topology fusor loses 99 times the power it creates due to losing electrons to the grid. But it is fusion, no mistake about it, and it doesn't keep going until it runs out of hydrogen as you say. You have to have everything as close to perfect as you can get, and even then you only get a very tiny percent of the plasma actually fusing out at the fast tail of the velocity Gaussian.

Come to think about it, if you were right, then all the Tokamak experiments would have had fusion galore once they fired the plasma initially, in fact by your description, it would have run away and only stopped fusing when the hydrogen was gone. Sorry. They'd LOVE for that to happen, but it doesn't.


You really should do some basic reading in physics, I'm sure there are some good explanatory texts that avoid as much math as possible.

Antimatter annihilates ANYTHING it comes in contact with. Which is why, indeed it is difficult to confine. (It mustn’t be allowed to touch the walls of whatever it’s contained in.)

Again, totally incorrect. Antimatter is a catch-all term that describes any contra-terrene matter. However, each particle of antimatter can only annihilate its terrene counterpart. A positron can only annihilate an electron, an anti-proton can only annihilate a proton and so forth. This is one of the reasons you get ambiplasma oscillation. Once you annihilate the electron shell off a nucleus using positrons, the positive charges of the terrene matter's protons repel the positrons you're trying to inject, and on top of that you get a "Coulombic explosion" which drives the exposed protons away from each other at great velocity. So it forms a very energetic plasma which tends to shield the terrene matter from the antimatter. Thus you get buffeting and oscillation.

This is really quite basic. I had thought you understood more about your subject than you obviously do.

No neutrons? I have no idea what you are trying to say! Neutrons directed as shaped charges, generated by pure fusion hydrogen explosions are what brought the WTC’s down.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

I'm not certain I can make it simple enough for you. Here's a try.

1) Most fusion weapons use lithium-6 deuteride in order to not have a cryogenic plant keeping a DT mix liquified. The equipment needed to keep DT liquid for any length of time is far too bulky for you to conjecture.

2) Li6D has the deuterium at hand bound to Lithium-6. Lithium-6 will fission under the impact of fast neutrons to release Tritium (among other things). So you make the Tritium on the fly. The fusion of the Deuterium and Tritium releases more neutrons that make more Tritium ad infinitum. This works really well when you have a Plutonium "sparkplug" in the center of your holraum, but if you don't, you don't have enough fast neutrons to get this to work. Antimatter reactions produce gammas, not neutrons. Thus you either still have a conventional T-U holraum or you are using liquid DT and have a cryogenic plant.

3) D-T fusion indeed releases neutrons, and lots of them. The reaction has a neutronicity of 0.80, which means that 80% of the entire reaction energy is carried off as the kinetic energy of neutrons.

4) Neutrons are not anywhere as easily directed as you want to believe.

5) When neutrons give up energy by elastic collision as with a moderator (air, water, paper, any matter with a large scattering cross-section) then that matter is heated. A LOT of neutrons happening really fast heats that material a LOT, really fast. When neutrons give up energy by being captured to material with a large capture cross-section, then the capturing material is usually rendered radioactive, and it's heated. A lot of neutrons happening really fast will heat it a LOT, really fast. The material will usually react by rapidly emitting a beta ray. Then (in most cases) it will become unstable and will continue to decay over the next few days.

6) When neutrons are deflected or reflected by elastic collision, their paths are random. The first matter that your putative neutron stream hits will scatter it in all directions. Thus "directing them" does squat. Each floor in the way will re-radiate a sphere of high energy neutrons. Killing everyone as far as the eye can see.

7) In both cases, some percentage of the neutrons' energy will be radiated away as very high energy photons, we call this "gamma rays" or "x-rays". The percentage of total energy reradiated as high-energy photons is quite high. These penetrate things really well. They kill people really efficiently. They will not be in a beam. They will also radiate away in a sphere. More dead (or more thoroughly dead) people as far as the eye can see.

8) Heating material to a great degree very quickly with neutrons, or, really any other means, has inescapable consequences. The air in the building will be heated by the neutron flux. Given that you think the material will be "powderized", one can only assume that the neutron flux will be quite fierce.

Air will moderate this flux. It will absorb energy. It will heat up. Air that is heated expands. It does so by what we like to call "Boyle's Law", which states that PV=nRT. With the volume held constant, and the temperature raised, the pressure will increase. The more you raise the temperature, the higher the pressure will go. In this case, it will become quite high in a twinkling of an eye. This causes something called "an explosion".

9) There really isn't any setting on matter called "powderize". You have solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Materials have what is known as a phase behavior, which we usually print out on what we like to call "phase charts" or "phase diagrams". This tells you what sort of solid, liquid or gaseous phases you have at any given pressure and temperature. A material may have more than one solid phase, for instance. No-where on there is "powderize".

That being the case, you don't really have the option where application of energy can put a steel beam into the "powderize" category on a phase diagram. Vaporize, yes. Should this happen, though, it will be a gas, and now you're back in Mr Boyles' courtroom of overpressure. Many megamoles of iron gas at thousands of degrees C won't be sitting there at sealevel pressure.

The pressure will be quite high. This leads to what we call "an explosion of devastating proportions".

Sublimation, by the way, is something that only happens at a fast rate when the "solid" part of the phase diagram meets the "gaseous" part of a phase diagram with no "liquid" in the way. Otherwise, you may GET sublimation in a technical way at or below the "liquid" point, but it is going to be slower than watching paint dry. This is, in fact, what happens when your ice cubes become malformed and small if you leave them in the freezer for a while. They are sublimating. But it doesn't happen very quickly, because there's a liquid phase in between the solid and gaseous states.

10) Yes, hardened concrete has water in it primarily in the form of alite and belite hydrates. However, it's not available to "boil out", as if you could heat it to 100 degrees C and the water comes off as steam. To remove the water from it, you're going to have to heat it to about 1,400 degrees C. Then it still takes time. In the meantime, in your scenario, you're liberating quite a bit of water vapor. That won't stop absorbing or moderating neutrons. At all. It will continue to superheat and - what? Yes, that's right. Expand, and exert pressure.

I believe on the other thread you said something about the silica vaporizing as well - there are a LOT of moles of silica in that building. And silica boils at quite a temperature - the silica gas is going to peg Mr Boyles' meter for both "n" and T, with the "v" part held still, the "P" is going to be astronomical.

Okie dokie. Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Sorry, but the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction is not a simultaneous process. Neither in theory nor in practice. Once the reaction begins somewhere within the medium and the ‘bomb’ can be held together long enough before it flies apart, whatever deuterium-tritium has fused after coming in contact with antimatter annihilation energy will generate ‘plenty of heat’ to ignite the rest of the fuel.

Of course antimatter isn’t selective! Antimatter reacts violently with matter, any matter. No ifs, ands or buts.

Perhaps looking at e=mc2 will help. Matter can be converted into energy. One gram of any substance, be it uranium, water or dog pooh contains the energy equivalent of 700,000 gallons of gasoline. The tricky part of course is getting that mass of one gram to ‘disappear’ and converting it into energy.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

Originally posted by Wizard_In_The_Woods
Okie dokie. Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Sorry, but the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction is not a simultaneous process. Neither in theory nor in practice. Once the reaction begins somewhere within the medium and the ‘bomb’ can be held together long enough before it flies apart, whatever deuterium-tritium has fused after coming in contact with antimatter annihilation energy will generate ‘plenty of heat’ to ignite the rest of the fuel.

You couldn't be more wrong, but you don't have the requisite understanding to discuss it. I'll leave you with the burning question as to why every "successful" fusion experiment outside a nuclear weapon produces a very minor amount of energy, nowhere near breakeven, and does not "ignite the rest of the fuel".

Of course antimatter isn’t selective! Antimatter reacts violently with matter, any matter. No ifs, ands or buts.

Again, you don't have the requisite background to understand, apparently, although any number of well-written sources would clue you in. A fundamental particle will only annihilate with its antiparticle.

The only partial exception to this that I know of is that you can get partial annihilations between neutrons and anti-protons, since in a quirky way you can look at a neutron (Neon Haze is going to swoop in here and smack me for this one) as a proton and an electron sort of glued together.

That's not exactly true in a way that a particle physics guy would admit to. But outside a nucleus, that's what a neutron will turn into in short order: a proton and an electron. Anyway, if you happened to smack a neutron with an anti-proton, what happens is that the proton-like aspect of the neutron will annihilate with the anti-proton and leave you with an electron left over. However, this almost never happens in 'real life' because being electrically neutral, a neutron has no electrostatic attraction to an anti-proton.

Along the same lines, you can probably get partial annihilation of a neutron with a positron in which the product is a proton. But I don't see it in the literature, so it may be one of those reactions that can only happen if you absorb an anti-neutrino at the same time or something to conserve momentum or parity, and so never happens in real life. I'm too lazy to work through it.

(late edit: on second thought, this one is really screwy and I'm pretty sure it can't happen, ever)

The reason why you have to pair up particles and anti-particles include various laws of conservation. A particle and its antiparticle annihilating ALWAYS meet them all, and so can happen. However, a positron (anti-electron) can't annihilate a proton, because to do so would result in a net loss of two positive charges. Can't happen in an antimatter annihilation. Sorry.

A good starting point for you here would be to look at Dirac's Hadron theory, Dirac's Fermion theory, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the laws of conservation of charge, spin and momentum, and probably a quick once-over on quantum chromo-dynamics.

Perhaps looking at e=mc2 will help. Matter can be converted into energy. One gram of any substance, be it uranium, water or dog pooh contains the energy equivalent of 700,000 gallons of gasoline. The tricky part of course is getting that mass of one gram to ‘disappear’ and converting it into energy.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

Too bad it's not that simple. If you really like this sort of thing, you really should read something informative.

We don't have a lot of dead-basic stuff in the library here, but I'd recommend Isaac Asimov's "Inside the Atom" or "Atom: Journey across the Subatomic Cosmos" as nice chatty starting points.

[edit on 28-6-2007 by Tom Bedlam]

[edit on 28-6-2007 by Tom Bedlam]

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Too bad it's not that simple. If you really like this sort of thing, you really should read something informative.

I had a feeling you didn’t understand e=mc2. Before delving into ‘details’ one must comprehend the fundamentals.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

In fusion and fission, very little of the mass is actually converted to energy.

Exactly. And this goes to show how enormous the potential energy quantities are enclosed in the mass of any object. The smallest amount of mass reduction/loss translates into huge releases of power.

What we saw at the WTC’s on 9-11 was no thermobarics micky-mouse.

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

A dissertation in the wings...

Originally posted by Wizard_In_The_Woods
I had a feeling you didn’t understand e=mc2. Before delving into ‘details’ one must comprehend the fundamentals.

Perhaps you'd care to enlighten us?

I could clear some space for you in the Science Forum.

Let me know.

Originally posted by Mirthful Me
A dissertation in the wings...

Perhaps you'd care to enlighten us?

Sure. What exactly would you specifically like to know?

Greetings,
The Wizard In The Woods

Originally posted by Mirthful Me
A dissertation in the wings...

Originally posted by Wizard_In_The_Woods
I had a feeling you didn’t understand e=mc2. Before delving into ‘details’ one must comprehend the fundamentals.

Perhaps you'd care to enlighten us?

I could clear some space for you in the Science Forum.

Let me know.

Hey, there's a chance for some groundbreaking physics here. WITW's got a method to freely violate most particle conservation laws. His quark transmogrifier antimatter eliminates all other matter, regardless.

Who cares about the little stuff like spin and charge?

Well if we just take a step back here for a moment and forget about our physics debates I think we can all generally agree whatever was used to level those buildings was pretty damn powerful and I think something like a 'micro nuke' would be a close approximation if anything to the sort of destructive yields unleashed. If only used as a descriptive term. Tremendous heats too, steel beams exposed to temperatures as hot as the inner earth. What sort of bomb does that? The nearest thing anyone of us could approximate it to is a small nuclear bomb.

[edit on 29-6-2007 by VicRH]

Before we spin off even further into a debate over "Magical Physics", I'd like to risk going just slightly off topic here.


WITW, could you please explain how it is possible to have a "Nuclear" explosion (and by that, I mean ANY sort of Fission/Fusion/Antimatter based detonation) that meets the following observed criteria:

-It generates some form of "radiation" sufficiently powerful enough to "disintegrate" metal and/or concrete; but NOT sufficiently powerfull enough to kill, or even maim, people in the immediate vicinity.

How does one create "selective" neutrons that destroy concrete and metal, but leave people unscathed? Are such neutrons somehow, sentient?

-That the "radiation" created by such a device as you imagine DOES NOT generate vast amounts of heat upon its interaction with said materials, thus forestalling the explosive production of superheated air and radiologically destroyed material, which would have resulted in the explosive spread of macroscopic debris far beyond the obeserved footprint.

-Additionally, since there was no report of EMP-induced phenomena, are we to conclude that the detonation effects of your imagined device did NOT cause even a localized EMP effect? Remember that electrical AND electronic devices WERE operational throughout the event.

-And finally, IF such a device WERE to have been developed, of what practical value would it be in the larger scheme of things? The cost of developing such a specialized device with such a limited field of application, must have been enormous! Why would any government bother? Chemical explosives are far cheaper and better understood.


And now to stray.

Tom.

As I alluded to previously, if the WTC was not brought down by twenty or so terrorists using nothing more than a couple of jumbo jets; as seems increasingly unlikely in my view. And if we can safely rule out exotic, if fevered, "pipe dreams" (I will not speculate as to what might be in those pipes!) of nukes, "mini-" or otherwise, and/or particle weapons. That leaves us with one other possibility: controlled demolition. Correct?


Even if accomplished using rather exotic demolition explosives, you must agree that such an operation would have required far more "operatives" than just the twenty or so fingered as the hijackers.

I do not know if you have speculated regarding just how many people it would have taken to plant the demolition charges necessary. I imagine the the number would vary according to the type and sophistication of the explosives used, which would impact the number of charges used; or whether the charges were emplaced before or after the planes struck.

Pre-emplacement would have required less manpower, but far more time and logistical support for a longer period. Post-strike emplacement would have required far greater manpower due to the limited time available to complete the mission.


Either way, the implications are vast.


If the device(s) were positioned prior to the plane strikes, the operatives had to be able to conduct their activities "in full view" as it were, over a period of time, without raising any suspicions and without risking any inspection of their handiwork until the deed was executed!

If the device(s) was/were planted after the planes struck, the "demo" teams had to know precisely where to plant their bombs and had to be able to access those locations (or suitable alternatives) despite the possiblity of unpreditcable circumstances resulting from the plane strikes.

How does one know which column, if blown, would bring down the house, given the stresses resulting from the impact? And which column would merely serve as evidence of your crime if its rupture is later discovered?

Were the planes supposed to bring down the towers on their own, so that the demo teams were merely "Plan B"? Or were the plane strikes merely "window dressing"; was the true intent was always to use the demo charges?

Consider the complicated timing, planning and logistics of each scenario.

Could this have been the work of a group of fanatics whose most sophisticated attacks previously centered around car bombs?

And did the perpetrators of this catastrophy actually believe that the questions above would never be raised? And having been raised, that they themselves would not be sought out and brought to justice?

How could they be so confident?

Well Tom,

Your past few posts are really exemplary and quite fascinating, hats off, truly. You've been patient, expansive, and quite detailed and it's very much appreciated here.

As you can see by the last posts, apparently people are pretty well convinced the anomalies don't line up with nukes in the ways initially believed. Ages ago, I posted that list--I don't even know anymore if it was on this thread or not--enumerating all the weirdness observed.

Well, we still have all that. As I ponder it all--and I believe that's what you've got everybody here who's following the nuke threads doing right now--the mechanisms of destruction seem as mysterious as ever.

Yes, advanced conventional explosives and thermate would do the job as observed--hell, maybe they even did--but you've still got the fantastically lingering hotspots, the concrete--and virtually everything inside the towers but the steel itself--turned to superfine particulate, the heated blast wave melting firefighters' coats and socks and spontaneously setting cars on fire, the paper, the spewing steel members falling like charcoal briquettes spewing smoke, the wildcard of WTC 7 dropping in CD but also having the hotspots, the off-the-scale tritium/tritiated water samplings and the conveniently unsampled deuterium, etc.

Maybe it is all within the realm of conventional. Maybe Steven Jones has been right all along and thermate is the source of the fabled rivers of steel. When you consider what amount was needed to take out the cores, that alone could account for those lakes.

But still you have Bali and OKC and those same-day reports of dumbfounded FBI bomb-squad personnel removing several of our unexploded grapefruit-sized boogie-men from the remaining section of the Murrah bldg. Same MO of patsies meeting the same "al Quaeda masterminds" in the Philippines, same leaks causing insiders to stay away on the day of the event.

The NYC firemen and police, though still gagged, have made it abundantly clear that bombs were exploding throughout the buildings from impact through to collapse. Major detonations occurred in the sub-basements that were timed with the plane impacts.

This was a carefully orchestrated show; the towers were "softened up" and structurally undermined to prepare them to drop. Three areas were targeted and jive with FDNY witness testimony--the upper and lower skylobbies and the basements, the most reinforced and resilient areas of the structure.

The actual collapse was done in four stages in a twenty-second+ time frame. First, the coup-de-grace wallop in the sub-basements, felt all the way up at Columbia Univ's seismographs. Ten seconds later, the core as taken out at the impact area, initiating collapse. Almost immediately after, the upper structure was shattered to insure it didn't crash to earth in a single mass. Then the cascading race to the ground, beating the first debris ejected above.

The owners of CDI, who got the consolation prize of clean-up (after OKC too, btw), were a bit too jealous, and in an unguarded moment the son stated that they even could have made the towers dance before they fell. Well well.

Various whistleblowers have come out and together their claims indicate that this was in the works at least from the late '80s. The '93 bombing was a prelude, to put us all on notice, the psy-op starting. (And that was no ordinary truck bomb either.) The towers were in any event fundamentally compromised by a ripening time bomb inherent in their design; unforeseen galvanization effects of the aluminum cladding would have required the towers to have been completely stripped and refaced at a mind-boggling cost. "Terror" meets redevelopment, the most cynical of bedpartners.

Anyway, back to nukes...

[edit on 29-6-2007 by gottago]