Posted on 03/29/2004 5:04:19 PM PST by vannrox
A super-powered neutrino generator could in theory be used to instantly destroy nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet, according to a team of Japanese scientists.
If it was ever built, a state could use the device to obliterate the nuclear arsenal of its enemy by firing a beam of neutrinos straight through the Earth. But the generator would need to be more than a hundred times more powerful than any existing particle accelerator and over 1000 kilometres wide.
"It is really quite futuristic," Alfons Weber, a neutrino scientist at Oxford University, UK, told New Scientist. "But the maths and physics seems to be right."
John Cobb, another researcher at Oxford University, cautions: "It might be technically feasible, given massive investment, but there are still unsolved problems."
Ghostly particles
Neutrinos are elementary particles with no electric charge and virtually no mass. They are produced in the nuclear reactions within stars and pass through the Earth in their thousands every day. As they pass through ordinary matter, neutrinos scatter atomic nuclei.
By scattering neutrons in uranium or plutonium, a sufficiently high-powered beam of neutrinos would destabilise a nuclear bomb. According to Hiroyuki Hagura and Toshiya Sanami at Japan's KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Hirotaka Sugawara at the University of Hawaii this would cause the weapon to "melt down" without triggering the chain reaction needed for it to fully detonate.
But the "muon storage ring" generator needed to propose the neutrino beam would need to be 1000 kilometres wide. It would also require 50 gigaWatts of power to operate - the same as used by the entire UK - and would cost an estimated $100 billion to construct.
Weber says the first stage of a generator might be feasible within 10 to 20 years, but he reckons the main problem is that the neutrino beam produced would be just a few metres wide. This means a target would need to be very precisely located beforehand. He adds that the beam would produce dangerous alpha and neutron radiation in any living thing in its path.
Sluts.
Just how would one steer such a beam towards the desired target?
The problem is you would have to either build, test, deploy, and execute it in secret or negotiate with all targets first for an agreeable team effort. Otherwise you run the risk of a desperation first strike.
Sounds like somebody learned a hard lesson 50 or so years ago. Getting nuked sucks, but in the long run the nukees might benefit to the point where they send their best and brightest to US universities to learn something, rather than strapping a bomb on such promising individuals.
Saudi Arabia might take a lesson from this.
Hope this guy knows more about physics than he does about English.
The MAIN problem would be the unilateral disarmament and appeasement crowd who would cry that this destablizes the world, that it isn't fair that the US would be able to DEFEND itself against other nations.
The same arguments the left made against ballistic missle defense would apply to this.
Unfortunately, this weapon could easily be defeated by the old "shell game" of moving warheads around in secret. If the beam is only a few meters in diameter, it wouldn't be hard to elude. Of course, it would be impossible to "neutralize" nuclear ballistic missile submarines, which have traditionally been the most effective deterrent.
Furthermore, it would be virtually impossible to target "backpack" bombs, and would probably do nothing against dirty bombs. Since these are the more likely threats of the future (rather than ICBMs), I propose another use for the neutrino beam weapon: use it to take out the dangerous leadership in threat countries. Imagine beaming this through the earth and taking out the seat of government in Tehran or the subterranean terrorist stronghold in Afghanistan.
Very carefully, it would appear.
Just how would one steer such a beam towards the desired target?
Tons of cleaning fluid?
any living thing in its path.
Doesn't sound good, even for the yeast!
Saudi and other countries have done just what you've suggested, although not as you intended. Many of the scientists who were working on the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in Iraq were university educated in the US, UK, or other western countries. The same can be said for weapons scientists in many other threatening countries.
And let's not forget the "promising" Saudi citizens who came to the US to learn how to fly commercial airliners...
With what? Neutrinos are electromagnetically neutral particles. Magnetic fields won't deflect them. They can pass right though miles of lead.
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