Air Force developing anti-matter weapons?

Apparently the U.S. Air Force announced publicly that it was pursuing reaserch involving Anti-Matter weapons.
Then the Air Force shut everyone up after the San Fransisco Chronicle began investigating the story...after it was discovered that they were being probed about the research the Air Force forbade its employees from publicly discussing the antimatter program.

As of Oct 5, this subject appeared in no less than 3 seperate online newspaper articles and at least one other online forum.
The San Fransisco Chronicle: sfgate.com.../c/a/2004/10/04/MNGM393GPK1.DTL
South Mississippi's Sun Herald: www.sunherald.com...
...And the questionable "The Inquirer": www.theinquirer.net...
Digital Silence online forum: www.d-silence.com...

I'm sure that this info was 'leaked', then the likely reality is that that level of technology is already developed...the true current level of tech under development is probrably much beyond antimatter weapons by now.

T.S.

The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons "is 10 billion times ... that of high explosive," Kenneth Edwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, noted in an address to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). 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."


www.defensetech.org...

imagine the force and purity of an explosion....no radioactive material on the ground. Looks like they have found a solution to the NK problem

e=mc^2... mass lost x speed of light (3 x 10 ^ 8) ^2 = energy given out
this holds true for annihilations..
a gram of antimatter being annihilated with a gram of matter is enough to produce 20-25kilotons of energy

However, main problem, is storage.
Note
When large numbers of positrons and antielectrons collide A positron is an anti-electron..
Technically, it's when a positron and electron collide.. They give out photons..

Storage hasnt really been solved yet.. .They can store some quantities (producing a generator to produce anti-hydrogen at the moment), but it requires them being wizzed around in circles.. We cant keep things stationary..
It'll take a few years, at the very least

Not viable, yet.

Originally posted by WindWalker
imagine the force and purity of an explosion....no radioactive material on the ground. Looks like they have found a solution to the NK problem

Aint that the truth.

The question is will this be a good or bad step. On the positive side, there is no nuclear fall out, no radiation lingering for years afterwords.

On the negative side, would this make the use of such a powerfull weapon easy to to reconcile because there would not be as much of a moral choice?

Hey, let's start thinking about the science side.!
A few ounces of anti-matter is more than enough to power the world for years..
One gram of anti-matter is the same as around 10 kilograms of refined uranium
or 25,000,000 lbs of TNT..

How civilised the human race is.
People starve whilst billions is spent on finding new ways to kill ever greater numbers

I find it kinda funny with all the talk about terrorist threats from nuclear devices and bio weapons. And just who the hell developed that stuff in the first place? The very people the supposed terrorists are meant to be targeting. Aint life just a bitch sometimes

Antimatter was 'postulated' and probed for several reasons, all of them non-war.
1) Looking into super symmetry of the universe
2) Future energy sources (more efficient, more energy per kg)
3) Potentially space travel (Think.. Star Trek, just not quite as scientifically incorrect, at least, we hope)
4) A desire to know more about our universe..
The scientists who create these technologies dont intend them for harmful purposes. Einstein didnt plan to kill hundreds of thousands of people when he endorsed the Manhattan Project.
It's the politicians who hear about the capabilities of these technologies that kill people

Pretty difficult project because you need to suround the antimatter in a gravity fiel because if it touches any matter it make a big boom. But im all for it, it'll establish the US as by far the most militarly powerful nation in the world. if u figh we'll blow you up. quite simple eh???

Originally posted by Britguy

People starve whilst billions is spent on finding new ways to kill ever greater numbers

This is something that is going to remain true for many years to come. However this thing about antimatter, its very interesting. The capiablities would be brilliants, shame about all the distructive purposes it contains as well.

CERN have already produced anti-matter.. and the first anti-matter dedicated production plant should be coming online in no more than 10 years to produce quantities of anti-hydrogen..
There's no issue of the us being the 'first' to develop it, cuz it's basically already there.. the only thing would be the containment, and that'll -probably- be developed at CERN

Interesting idea, but the actually manfacture of anti-matter is far from efficient. It would take tremendous amounts of energy to form only a small amount of anti-matter and the conversion would ofcourse be less than 100%. However, if we are able to tap the sea of energy, the quantum fluctuations that surround us, we may be able to convert it into anti-matter, as a quick source of enormous energy potential.

POWER.
That's what it's about.
Power is just energy/time, How do you CONTROL power when one is an internally-orientated object such as a human being. Therin lies the crux. Anti-matter, hmmmmm, I'd like to see it happen but not for humans just yet unfortunatly. Not smart enough to control themselves yet.

Which leads us to the possibilities that sort of technology may have been responsible for the strange collapsing of the WTC North and South towers on 9-11-01. I previously stated on another thread that it almost looked like a scene from the movie "Independence Day" when the alien mother ship pulverized the Empire State Bldg with a particle beam except without all the colorful lighting effects.

...
If someone was capable of keeping anti-matter in a non-motion requirement state, then trust me, the world would know.
There is nothing STRANGE about how the towers collapsed.. It's what happens when gravity acts.
And. The particle beam in Independance Day is not anti-matter, or at least, the 'anti-matter' used in that is highly inconsistent with modern knowledge of antimatter.
The plausibilty of anti-matter causing the World Trade centre..
well.. It's probably less than the chance that someone who had won the lottery on the same day, been in the WTC (and survived, after being dug out of the rubble [FYI, only one person was recorded to have been dug out alive], AND THEN gone home to flip a coin and get 'heads' over 3000 times in a row)..
So, no, Anti-matter, for anyone who has any intelligence scientifically and common sense, did not cause the WTC collapses.

It's wet-the-bed scary, sure. But don't get out the rubber sheets, yet. Right now, only about 84 billionths of a gram of antiprotons are made worldwide, according to Los Alamos physicist Steve Howe, who is studying antimatter-driven trips to Alpha Centauri for NIAC.

"With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion," according to the Chron.


It seems that AM use in weapons is in the distant future. Then again when the first gram of plutonium was produced, scientists could hardly imagine that there would be hundreds of tons of the stuff in just 50 years.

Originally posted by SmokeyTheBear
Pretty difficult project because you need to suround the antimatter in a gravity fiel because if it touches any matter it make a big boom. But im all for it, it'll establish the US as by far the most militarly powerful nation in the world. if u figh we'll blow you up. quite simple eh???

US already is.

The government being able to produce anti-matter weapons, when just a few years ago, it was impractical, extremely expensive and required a massive apparatus to manufacture.(ATHENA produces 50,000 atoms of anti-matter) and now it already can, and very possibly already has AM weapons, lends further credence to the ET technology theory.

I don't think AM is anything to be proud of, all we have on our hands now, is an even more destructive weapon that will eventually be pointed at us. The more WMD's we built, the greater the threat of extinction to our species.
Those who are saying, "scientists build it for peaceful purposes" you've been watching too much tv.

I assume they would use magnetic containment to sepreate AM from matter. Remove the field and wammo.

Antimatter is considered one of the main resources for the future for renewable energy.. Actually.

The more WMD's we built, the greater the threat of extinction to our species. I dont think so because when its in the hands of sane countries such as the united states it will probably never be used in huge quantities within a small enough period to destroy the world. Then you ask what about terrorists. The more technologically adavanced our weapons get the harder it wil be for terrorist to reproduce it.