3 ms·

There's a fun paper on how you could use a particle accelerator to blow up nuclear weapons in their silos from the other side of the planet with a neutrino beam

There's a fun paper on how you could use a particle accelerator to blow up nuclear weapons in their silos from the other side of the planet with a neutrino beam. There would be no defense against this (highly fanciful) countermeasure. https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0305062.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0305062.pdf

andbot 6y ago
Good luck generating a 1000 TeV neutrino beam with that flux. Currently, humanity is at 6.5 TeV for protons, which are easily acceleratable because they're charged. Neutrinos have to be produced through a fixed target collision setup which translates only a small fraction of the original energy into neutrinos. So I dare to predict that by the time we can have such a beam we have wiped ourselves out with nuclear bombs.
- spacemark 6y ago
  Not to mention you'd have to know where to aim your neutrino beam...
ISL 6y ago
Wow. I've never seen a paper like it. At the surface level -- if you kick a core hard enough with enough neutrinos, sure, it'll probably initiate -- the argument seems plausible. My expertise doesn't let me go deeper than that. The moral implications of such a device are fraught. To use it is to detonate the very weapons that one should not detonate.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  There is probably a lot more scientific research like this buried away in the vaults of the superpowers. Even more if you include the "scientific" research done by programs like MK-ULTRA (most files where successfully destroyed AFAIK). For example, when Project Orion was being seriously considered the scientists had to find ways of making large quantities of fairly powerful nuclear weapons cheaply and quickly. Based on something Freeman Dyson said, I think they succeeded to some extent, but that secret now has died with the scientists who worked on it. There has to be a lot of writing squirrelled away somewhere, because there are restrictions like "You agree to obtain a validated export license when exporting if this product is incorporated into the design, development, production, or other activities related to chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or ballistic missiles." but no available literature on how these packages may actually be used in this context. (https://welsim.com/download https://welsim.com/download) One of the reasons Nuclear Testing is now very uncommon is because computers and software are now advanced enough to simulate them accurately. And yet, despite that, there is no "Nuclear Weapons design: A modern approach" available for public consumption. These are worked on by physicists so someone must be wasting time by writing books somewhere.

andbot 6y ago

Good luck generating a 1000 TeV neutrino beam with that flux. Currently, humanity is at 6.5 TeV for protons, which are easily acceleratable because they're charged. Neutrinos have to be produced through a fixed target collision setup which translates only a small fraction of the original energy into neutrinos. So I dare to predict that by the time we can have such a beam we have wiped ourselves out with nuclear bombs.

spacemark 6y ago
Not to mention you'd have to know where to aim your neutrino beam...

ISL 6y ago

Wow. I've never seen a paper like it. At the surface level -- if you kick a core hard enough with enough neutrinos, sure, it'll probably initiate -- the argument seems plausible. My expertise doesn't let me go deeper than that. The moral implications of such a device are fraught. To use it is to detonate the very weapons that one should not detonate.

mhh__ 6y ago
There is probably a lot more scientific research like this buried away in the vaults of the superpowers. Even more if you include the "scientific" research done by programs like MK-ULTRA (most files where successfully destroyed AFAIK). For example, when Project Orion was being seriously considered the scientists had to find ways of making large quantities of fairly powerful nuclear weapons cheaply and quickly. Based on something Freeman Dyson said, I think they succeeded to some extent, but that secret now has died with the scientists who worked on it. There has to be a lot of writing squirrelled away somewhere, because there are restrictions like "You agree to obtain a validated export license when exporting if this product is incorporated into the design, development, production, or other activities related to chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or ballistic missiles." but no available literature on how these packages may actually be used in this context. (https://welsim.com/download https://welsim.com/download) One of the reasons Nuclear Testing is now very uncommon is because computers and software are now advanced enough to simulate them accurately. And yet, despite that, there is no "Nuclear Weapons design: A modern approach" available for public consumption. These are worked on by physicists so someone must be wasting time by writing books somewhere.