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Antimatter munitions scare me personally because they're a fail-deadly weapon. If the positron trap fails it goes kaboom. If a thermonuclear bomb fails in any w

Antimatter munitions scare me personally because they're a fail-deadly weapon. If the positron trap fails it goes kaboom. If a thermonuclear bomb fails in any way except a precisely calculated implosion you at worst you get a fissle, at best a guy in Whateveristan in the year 2040 gets his roof collapsed by a slightly radioactive dud. I hope, the only thing these are being designed for is some gamma-ray laser for a new ground based Star Wars system and not as an actual munition of any sort. The complications are astronomical, especially given that gamma-rays are the EMP-producing portion of a nuclear reaction. An positron trap light enough to be contained in a weapon going off without a tamper to produce an explosion from the gamma-ray heating could be devastating for a modern society. I'd never call playing god with this shit, I call playing stupid.

arethuza 16y ago
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that if you did just dump a quantity of antimatter (e.g. by turning off the containment device) you wouldn't get a nice explosion - more a long drawn out messy fizzle. I would guess that a antimatter bomb would have to a similar design to fission or multi-stage devices where things are held together long enough by implosion for a significant proportion of the fuel to react.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  I've done the math, you get an explosion quite rapidly. In a matter of nanoseconds the reaction of air in contact with the surface of the anti-matter chunk will release enough energy to vaporize the anti-matter and transform it into a growing ball of hot gas/plasma thoroughly mixed with matter, annihilation of the anti-matter completes in a matter of micro-seconds after that. This is if the anti-matter is just sitting in the open air, if it comes into direct contact with solid matter the process would probably proceed faster.

arethuza 16y ago

I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that if you did just dump a quantity of antimatter (e.g. by turning off the containment device) you wouldn't get a nice explosion - more a long drawn out messy fizzle. I would guess that a antimatter bomb would have to a similar design to fission or multi-stage devices where things are held together long enough by implosion for a significant proportion of the fuel to react.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
I've done the math, you get an explosion quite rapidly. In a matter of nanoseconds the reaction of air in contact with the surface of the anti-matter chunk will release enough energy to vaporize the anti-matter and transform it into a growing ball of hot gas/plasma thoroughly mixed with matter, annihilation of the anti-matter completes in a matter of micro-seconds after that. This is if the anti-matter is just sitting in the open air, if it comes into direct contact with solid matter the process would probably proceed faster.