Micro Nukes - KERRBLAMMO or kerplunk?

I know this one must of come up a dozen times before, but I do not see any thing atm in the recent posts, so here is something to think on.

This is a good (albeit fairly lengthy) article with an impressive amount of information on the subject.

The factual evidence indicates that our government is using and has used 3rd or possibly 4th generation hydrogen bombs domestically and internationally. The evidence for international usage is not quite as strong as the domestic usage, but when domestic usage is considered, the international usage seems inescapable. The process of exclusion based on the known facts leaves only one viable option for the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings - a relatively pure hydrogen bomb.

In comparison to the devices used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, modern versions are a lot cleaner, and if they were to be used at a much lower yield then deionisation it not just a possibility, it seems, at least, that technology is very much there. And has been for some time.

Two billion pounds seemed like an extremely large amount of particulate matter from buildings whose total weight has been quoted at around 3 billion pounds. Debris removal has been quoted at 1.2 billion pounds. Based on these rough numbers 2/3rds of the building was indeed turned to dust or vaporized.

The Back Pack Nuke, designed with demolition in mind whilst understanding the need for stylish 3rd gen Thermo Nuclear device conveyance!

Certainly worth serious consideration.

Micro Nukes in London Worth some more consideration!

I've read that first link before, it's a lot of info, but most of it is a list of non-sequiturs like a lot of true believer sites.

Yes, this piece is true, yes that piece is true, no they don't relate. It always reminds me of that kid in Jerry Maguire "bees smell fear". Ok, but what does that have to do with anything?

In addition, the Vialls' articles are nonsense, most especially the Bali one.

If you'd had some sort of fusion "micro nuke", it would have put out a truly horrendous neutron flux. That's what fusion weapons do. You'd have people dead of neutron radiation everywhere in the vicinity, and it would have left all sorts of transmutation signatures.

That's not to say there aren't or at least weren't small packable nukes for strategic demolition, but they weren't "clean" in the sense that they left no residue.

Where did you get the photo?

photo - just stuck SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) in to google images. that took me here

As far as the fall out goes, a 'clean' 0.1-0.2kt bomb would supposedly be all but insignificant compared to the 13-16kt 'dirtier' bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 45.

I know the towers collapsed from the top, so I’m speaking purely hypothetically now - had a directed or well placed micro nuke brought down something of that mass, would that mass itself not seal in a great deal of any fall out in the 'rubble' (which due to the type of explosion, by its nature be very small, and would compact very very well - think underground tests) again hypothetically speaking.

The thing that interests me now though is the possibility of SADM's actually been used in various ways - in actions that have been passed off as conventional explosiveness. Not something I’ve given a great deal of thought to, gonna read up on it now tho!

The problem with the micro-fusion weapon theory is that without a DU casing, mostly what you get out of fusing Li6D is really energetic neutrons.

Had you set off some theoretical weapon that was fission-trigger free, and without a casing, you'd have got a bang but mostly from neutrons transferring energy to material in the area, because what you'd have is a neutron bomb.

That would reduce the apparent size of the explosion but the escaping neutrons would have heated everything in the area and killed everyone within reach. It would also have caused transmutation of susceptible materials with the result that you'd have gotten neutron activation of a lot of stuff in the area. The secondary radioactivity would have been noticeable, even if all the dead people weren't.

It's not so much a matter of fallout. Fallout happens when you suck debris through the fireball and neutron activate it. In this case, the direct neutron flux escaping the building would have instantly killed people as far as you could see. You've got far too many people within eyeshot of the building that didn't die for it to be that. Also setting off a neutron source inside all that stuff would make "instant fallout" as the building materials would catch the brunt of the neutron flux.

As far as SADMs go, one of the big Cold War uses for them was to plug the Fulda Gap. One particular set of unfortunates were supposed to go to the WSA, grab one of the packs you show in the photo, hop in a Hummer or get tossed out of a perfectly good plane and head for your personal appointment with destiny in the Gap. That particular system has no PAL. Just a key lock, a timer and an arming switch.

Edit: Thinking back on it, that one was a combination lock. MADM was a key.

[edit on 25-2-2007 by Tom Bedlam]

[edit on 25-2-2007 by Tom Bedlam]

2 really cheesey vids (comentator and background music) on SADM deployment here real player req'd)
Yeah see your point, 3000 people died, thats seriously bad, but more got out and yeah people didn't drop like flys in the streets - mind you I wasn't there, or at any other attack - gotta pay attention to the pixels (but can you trust em? :wow

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
The problem with the micro-fusion weapon theory is that without a DU casing, mostly what you get out of fusing Li6D is really energetic neutrons.

Hang on - DU casing? just gonna look for something, i read that

You want little bada-boom, they're working on it. But it's not a "micro fusion" weapon.

bada-boom? go on what? fuel/air allways good, old but effective (daisycutter)

Well, for FAE like work, there's SMAW-NE already off the shelf, but its successor(s) are already in testing.

The question i have is why did the EPL ask NASA to do a flyover of the WTC area with a plane equiped with the AVIRIS system. What were they looking for ?

aviris.jpl.nasa.gov...

External content and link
Ok I was just surfing the net, and yes I have heard the nuke theories over and over but really never read any of them or looked seriously at that the possibility it could have been true...then boom, i stumble upon this pic of an old nuke test and in my mind i cant help but instantly think of the visions of the way the buildings exploded and imploded at WTC, if thats possible...

look

nuclearweaponarchive.org...
nuclearweaponarchive.org...

that is the link i found before really reading the nuke theories but this is one of the last non military use nuke tests.

Then i wanted to find a pic to compare and i found someone else already made this observation, that me the layman did.

www.arsenalofhypocrisy.com...

excuse me if i do not read every tidbit on this highly researched subject but now that i see this with my own eyes and try and make sense it keeps coming out that this is highly probable.







[edit on 20-8-2007 by phinubian]

Tom,

How much more likely do you think it is that a miniature fission weapon would be used over a fusion weapon, all things considered?

In all seriousness, it's damn near impossible to get a small fusion weapon, because you need a minimum sized fission nuke to set the thing off. You can't make the bomb smaller than the trigger.

Since you pretty much have to have the fission weapon anyway, it would make more sense to minimize that part and use it alone.

And as for using antimatter, it takes forever to make any, and again, if you've got enough for a trigger, you already have a pretty hefty bomb.

That said, I've seen some pretty small fission weapons. We had one type in a ruck back in the mid '80s in our WSA.

The new thing, maybe "the current thing", it's not that new now, is to design man-portable fractional ton munitions. Given that you can test that - it's small enough that no-one's the wiser - you can make great strides on it. They have a new metallic explosive that gets them past the compression turbulence problems and bulk issues.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
In all seriousness, it's damn near impossible to get a small fusion weapon, because you need a minimum sized fission nuke to set the thing off. You can't make the bomb smaller than the trigger.

You're telling me what I've already heard here, many times, but saying there's nothing else that works besides fission, as a trigger, is asserting a negative that you really can't prove. I know there may be nothing known that works as far as the public is aware, but there have been other theoretical triggers proposed by public scientists that haven't been tested (at least as far as we're aware), right? Or do they let you in on all kinds of things like that so you would actually know better by experience? Would it be that little of an intelligence concern if that many people were made aware of any such technological developments?

What I was wondering, is if it would be easier to develop very small fission bombs, or to develop very small fusion bombs, all things considered, but I guess the lack of good information prevents a reliable answer. If a pure fusion device has been developed, then we probably wouldn't have any idea how complicated the trigger would be or how it would work anyway. Same if a way to go that much less with fission was developed, I guess, right? I don't suppose you know exactly how they're going about making so much smaller fission bombs.

You asked my opinion, which is a somewhat informed one. I told you.

Feel free to ignore it. But the obstacle your magic trigger has to overcome is well known - the Coulombic force of repulsion between the nuclei being fused. This is calculable. You also have a statistical problem of getting enough nuclei to fuse before the holraum disassembles that you have a sufficient yield. The Teller-Ulam secondary uses external compression (an unbelievable amount of it) to increase the reactant density sufficient to solve the second problem, and a very small fission core inside the secondary to provide heat and neutrons to convert the Li6 to tritium and start the reaction.

If you want to use Li6 as your tritium source, you have to have a lot of neutrons up front, and any fusion reaction requires you to overcome the Coulomb repulsion. So, any other means of inducing fusion requires these things to happen if that's the fuel you're using. We have many a thermonuke that uses a T-U secondary in the arsenal.

There are other ways of causing fusion, but none of them can manage any sort of rate, the second problem. Many of the initiators now in use (not all) use a small fusion generator to produce a burst of neutrons. You can build a fusion generator yourself if you're handy and have a really well equipped workshop. You can do it with a bank of lasers using laser ablation. But in these cases, the rate is so low that no explosion occurs, and you can't really get it higher. Nowhere near high enough for a bomb.

You can use muons to tease the reactants closer. But they're not stable.

So, can I prove that you can't make a fusion weapon by having aliens stare at a bottle of DT, no. But I will tell you that in every case that I know of, it's a T-U secondary, which has a minimum size to it due to the primary and the nature of the weapon. That can be surprisingly small, physically, but in yield it's pretty large.

As far as the fission bombs go, there are a number of facets involved, and I am going to smack up against old NDAs. I will say that it can be done.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Many of the initiators now in use (not all) use a small fusion generator to produce a burst of neutrons. You can build a fusion generator yourself if you're handy and have a really well equipped workshop. You can do it with a bank of lasers using laser ablation. But in these cases, the rate is so low that no explosion occurs, and you can't really get it higher. Nowhere near high enough for a bomb.

You say lasers have a rate, even if low. That's just bombarding the material with photons pretty much, right? What could you do if you could bombard the material with electrons traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light?

As far as the fission bombs go, there are a number of facets involved, and I am going to smack up against old NDAs. I will say that it can be done.

See -- we still all have no idea how.

On the lasers, yes, but. The trick with laser ablation is to hit a pellet of fuel *with* (edit: typo) some sort of hugely compressed laser pulse. The "rind" of the pellet is ablated and causes the pellet to be compressed and heated, until ignition occurs, or the pellet develops some unfortunate asymmetry and fails. They use D-T or D-D in the pellet, requires a cryo plant to keep it solid.

Same trick with any other thing you try to compress it with, be it heavy ions, electrons or whatnot. In one sense it's harder to do with charged particles because they want to spread away from each other, and the more dense the beam the more they want to spread. Electrons, being quite light, spread and scatter the most. A lot of people are looking at heavy ions. The equipment fills several large buildings. Not useful for a bomb.

And on top of it all, it still can't do enough fuel to be a bomb, back to the rate issue.

Now, if you had a really "cheap" way of making muons, cheap in terms of power requirements, and it was compact, you could make a very nice fusion weapon or power plant out of it. But you'd have to be able to make a ton of muons in just a few nanoseconds or you're rate limited again. There would be a lot of other issues, but the first one would be getting enough muons really quickly. They have a mean lifetime of about 2.2 microseconds, and require 105 MEV to produce in the lab. Each. Not pretty. But it's in the class of wild-assed possibilities, however unlikely.


[edit on 22-8-2007 by Tom Bedlam]

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
The trick with laser ablation is to hit a pellet of fuel which is some sort of with a hugely compressed laser pulse. The "rind" of the pellet is ablated and causes the pellet to be compressed and heated, until ignition occurs, or the pellet develops some unfortunate asymmetry and fails. They use D-T or D-D in the pellet, requires a cryo plant to keep it solid.

Ok, so this is all photon energy? Is that correct? I know you've already said it wasn't enough energy, but this is just using photons?

Electrons, being quite light, spread and scatter the most. A lot of people are looking at heavy ions. The equipment fills several large buildings. Not useful for a bomb.

Here's the thing. I've seen from several sources that Nikola Tesla developed a particle gun within the last century that was capable of creating a beam of electrons with insane kinetic energy, a significant fraction of the speed of light. It utilized massive electrical compression in a vacuum, like a lot (most/almost all?) of Tesla's work did, and the destruction it caused was from the kinetic energy of the electrons. He divided up the plans for it and sent them to various countries, out of humanitarian interest.

The energy from fission reactions is not actually from nuclear forces but from electrical forces, forcing newly-split atoms away from each other, also at insane speeds. Right? Except for the nuclear radiation, I'm guessing. So this is what I really wonder about. If photons can do something, I mean it goes without saying that electrons are going to be packing a lot more energy if you can harness them. Orders of magnitude.

[edit on 22-8-2007 by bsbray11]

Originally posted by bsbray11
Ok, so this is all photon energy? Is that correct? I know you've already said it wasn't enough energy, but this is just using photons?

Yes - they essentially heat a very thin layer of the outside of the pellet as close to instantaneously as they can manage. It takes an insane amount of peak power to get the job done. Go google around for ICF (inertial confinement fusion), there's all sorts of research.

As far as that goes, you can slap a nice little Farnsworth machine together for 5-10K if you're handy and good at scrounging, it will sustain a nice D-D fusion reaction, although not at a usable (or explosive) rate.

I've seen from several sources that Nikola Tesla developed a particle gun within the last century ...he divided up the plans for it and sent them to various countries, out of humanitarian interest.

Yeah, I read a lot of stuff he wrote, and pretty much everything I could get my hands on that was written about him - and what I got out of it was that while he talked a good game, he was somewhat - demented - by that stage of his life. The particle beam weapon was never built as far as I've ever been able to tell, and from what plans he left it's said it would not have worked.

At the time he announced his weapon, he had also recently come off a big failure using electron beams to "melt and de-gasify" copper, wherein he discovered that he had greatly overestimated the effects of his copper melting beam - it never managed to melt the copper target although he thought it would liquefy nearly instantly.

By this time in his life he had apparently lost the gift for visualizing things as well, as he had started keeping books with prototype drawings in them.

However, I'll be the last to say he never came up with anything interesting.

The energy from fission reactions is not actually from nuclear forces but from electrical forces, forcing newly-split atoms away from each other, also at insane speeds. Right?

Well, the energy comes from mass defects.

If you look at the masses of a fissionable material, and its fission by-products, you'll find that they are of lower mass. The net energy yield is exactly equivalent to the energetic equivalence of the missing mass. So mass is actually being converted to energy. The same thing happens in fusion reactions - the mass of the product is less than that of the reactants.

This difference is called the "mass defect" or "binding energy". The curve of binding energy peaks at iron - you can gain energy by fusing lighter nuclei, or fissioning heavier nuclei. Iron is at the bottom of the heap, energy wise.

If photons can do something, I mean it goes without saying that electrons are going to be packing a lot more energy if you can harness them. Orders of magnitude.

You'd think, but as I say, it's tough to keep very high current electron beams collimated. It's also tough to put as much power into a particle beam as you can a laser - with a pulse laser you can build up a huge population inversion and then lase it out all at once.

I don't know that you can't fire a pellet with electrons, but I don't recall having heard it done - ion beams and high energy photons seem to be the current champions.