Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld

Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld

Times of the old suit case bombs are pretty much over.
Why carry a suitcase, when only 1 grenade will
level an entire city block, buildings and all with lil to
NO radiation aftereffects.

Yes, that is the topic of discussion in Sharon Weinberger's
book entitled "Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the
Pentagon's Scientific Underworld"

www.amazon.com...

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new Hafnium Isomer Grenade Bomb.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/facc15852416.jpg[/atsimg]

First, what is an isomer bomb? It’s also been called the ’nuclear grenade’ or the ultimate ’dirty bomb’, and with good reasons. A single molecule of hafnium isomer (hafnium, like plutonium, being the metal, and isomer being, more-or-less, its charged-up or radioactive state), stores, according to Ms. Weinberger, about two and a half million electron volts of energy. That’s compared to a single molecule of dynamite — which stores just one electron volt.

And unlike an atomic (that is, conventional nuclear) bomb, an isomer bomb would release almost all of its energy in the form of deadly gamma-ray radiation, capable of penetrating concrete and steel. Radioactive hafnium (Hafnium-178m2), produced at an estimated cost of $30 billion per thirty grams, has a half-life of thirty-one years. Don’t stand too close to ground zero! According to one scientist, the isomer bomb would turn you into glue. Half a teaspoon of pure Hf-178-m2 contains about the same amount of potential energy as one ton of TNT

www.bewilderingstories.com...

Yes, there have been threads on this device at ATS, however this one differs from those
as before there had been no way to activate the isomer reaction. Well now there is.

given the difficulty of triggering the simultaneous decay of most nuclei in a large sample of Hf* (assuming that stimulated decay exists), some have speculated that it may be possible to achieve release of the energy stored in the whole sample by means of a chain reaction initiated by triggering a small fraction of such a sample. In contrast to a neutron chain reaction in fissile materials, where the neutrons are not lost as they travel from their place of birth to where they induce a fission reaction, the gamma ray photons emitted by any nucleus have a very high probability of quickly disappearing by knocking electrons out of atoms. In addition, a chain reaction would require each isomer decay cascade to promptly emit, on average, more than one photon in the energy band required by the triggering mechanism.

www.ucsusa.org...

So now we have an Isotope capable of great destruction like a nuke
and a triggering mechanism and it all fits into a nice lil package the
size of a hand grenade.

You ask where did this technology come from?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/be595f68d8ba.jpg[/atsimg]

Meet Carl Collins, the lead scientist who had the first successful
test of the Hafnium Isomer.

In the latter half of 1998, a small clutch of researchers and students at the University of Texas embarked upon a groundbreaking experiment. Within a large outbuilding marked with a slapdash sign reading “Center for Quantum Electronics”, the team powered up a makeshift x-ray emitter and directed its radiation beam at an overturned disposable coffee cup. Atop the improvised styrofoam platform was a tiny smear of one of the most expensive materials on Earth: a variation of the chemical element hafnium known as Hf-178-m2.

The researchers’ contraption– cobbled together from a scavenged dental x-ray machine and an audio amplifier– bombarded the sample with radiation for several days as monitoring equipment quietly collected data. When the experiment ended and the measurements were scrutinized, the project leader Dr. Carl B. Collins declared unambiguous success. Collins and his colleagues may have found the key to developing fist-sized bombs which can deliver destruction equivalent to a dozen tons of conventional explosives. the US Department of Defense has since spent millions of dollars probing the physicist’s findings.

www.damninteresting.com...

Please note this date as it was 3 years before the events of 9/11 in 2001.
They had this technology on 9/11. This is how you can get buildings
to fall at free fall speed without rigging the whole building with explosives.

How much would it cost to make one of these Grenade Bombs.
Roughly $1B each !!!! And Rumsfeld wondered what happened
to those missing funds at the Pentagon? That's a no-brainer.

Would the Pentagon be interested in this? You betcha, no matter
what the cost.

An exotic kind of nuclear explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology could trigger the next arms race.

The explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from the nuclei of certain elements but does not involve nuclear fission or fusion. The energy, emitted as gamma radiation, is thousands of times greater than that from conventional chemical explosives.

The technology has already been included in the Department of Defense's Militarily Critical Technologies List, which says: "Such extraordinary energy density has the potential to revolutionize all aspects of warfare."

www.newscientist.com...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/121c4642274a.jpg[/atsimg]

Periodic Table Chart for Hafnium

periodictable.com...

Hafnium is a natural metal not easily found. No wonder
the Ore find in Afghan is so important. This mineral will
be put in these bombs.

Metals Shortages Threaten Developments in Solar Energy and Nuclear Power. Chile and Kazakhstan. Reserves of indium, used for solar cells and LCD's along with those of hafnium, an essential component of computer-chips and also employed as a thermal-neutron absorber in nuclear control-rods, may literally run-out within 10 years.

oilprice.com...

A lil about the author of this book: Sharon Weinberger

In the fall of 2003, defense industry reporter Sharon Weinberger was sitting through yet another Capitol Hill briefing on Pentagon weaponry, when a fellow in the back of the room mentioned something called a “hafnium bomb.” Weinberger had never heard of it. So she turned around and asked the guy what the hell a hafnium bomb was. The question started Weinberger on a two-year “journey through the Pentagon’s scientific underground.” By the time she was done, Weinberger had run into eavesdropping kittens, wormhole builders, antimatter rocketeers, psychic CIA agents, intelligent designists, and cold fusion true believers. But most importantly, she became deeply intertwined with a far-flung coalition of Defense Department-backed scientists who believed that they could construct nuclear hand grenades out of bits of the radioactive isotope hafnium-178

defensetech.org...

So what are the Russians and the Chinese doing about this development?

Shortly after first writing about the potential for an isomer bomb, I came across an article in the Russian paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. This was on 12th August 2003; for the 50th anniversary of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, they interviewed Viktor Mikhailov, scientific director of the Federal Nuclear Center. (The original is in Russian, translation thanks to Babelfish.)

Q: But what still are the possibilities in principle of using the nuclear effects?


A: We have the also very large field of work with the nuclear energy. Besides the isotopes of fissionable elements there are the so-called isomers. Isotopes differ from each other only in terms of number of neutrons in the nucleus. But isomers have the same number of electrons, and protons, and neutrons. The entire difference is in the fact that the isomer is in an excited state, but can convert to stable state. And this also releases nuclear energy. Any transition from one state to another occurs with the release of energy. The fission energy of nuclei exceeds chemical energy 10 million times. But who says that a weapon this powerful is necessary these days? But the transition of isomers gives off thousands of times more energy than chemical reactions.


Q: This is way to the creation of a new generation of nuclear weapons?


A: It is difficult to say, developments are still under way today. I simply want to emphasize that nuclear energy is not only fission energy or fusion, but can be, for example, the transition energy of separate nucleons.

So the Russians also have a theoretical interest, at least, in isomer weapons.

In America, the most controversial research has involved trying to
"trigger" — get energy out of — a Hafnium isomer. In Russia, there has been plenty of controversy over Hafnium, as well. A 2005 paper on induced decay of the nuclear isomer 178m2Hf and the ‘isomeric bomb’ written by E. V. Tkalya, is deeply skeptical of the physics involved.

However, I came across a more recent scientific paper, which puts a different light on hafnium triggering. The work was carried out by a team of Russian and Chinese physicists in the area of
"resonance conversion" as an efficient triggering technique and was published in the journal Chinese Physics Letters.

Much of the argument about triggering energy release from Hafnium is about the size of the target. Imagine the Hafnium atom is a bomb, which you are trying to detonate by firing bullets at it. One school of thought says the critical area you need to hit is tiny; controversial,
Darpa-funded researcher Carl Collins and his colleagues say that
(according to his disputed results) it’s a billion times bigger.

The Russian and Chinese paper attempts to bridge the gap between these two, explaining how a resonance effect might make the target area tens of thousands of times larger than you would otherwise expect. It doesn’t fully account for the difference, and it relies on some assumptions which have yet to be proven.

It would be potentially alarming if the Russians and Chinese cracked the secret of isomer triggering and plunged while the scientific community dismissed it as physically impossible. But the paper on resonance conversion had a surprising footnote:

Supported by the DTRA [the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency] under contract No DTRA 01-02-M-0534

DTRA is one of the U.S. military agencies pursuing isomer research. In these international times, it is not so easy telling who is on which side.

www.wired.com...

Videos from the writer of the book Imaginary Weapons: Sharon Weinberger



Part 1 of 5. You can find the rest of the series
from the youtube link without me having to post
all 5 videos.

Now .... your thoughts on all this???

All I have to say is; You'd better be able to throw that Grenade reeeeal hard. That's a large kill range.

Fascinating.
It makes the case for a false flag in the future. Nuke a city block and blame it on "terrorists" (also known as Iranians).

I haven't yet read through all the articles, but is the Hafnium traceable?

Originally posted by Mactire
All I have to say is; You'd better be able to throw that Grenade reeeeal hard. That's a large kill range.

lol, not really
toss it out of a helicopter or a plane
and haul buggy

or

if you wanted to be secret about it

rig it up to explode when a door is opened.

Something of this size could have been brought into
each WTC tower in a briefcase and only 1 person
to carry it. Or send it as a package bomb.
The possibilities are endless.

Originally posted by The Baby Seal Club
Fascinating.
It makes the case for a false flag in the future. Nuke a city block and blame it on "terrorists" (also known as Iranians).

I haven't yet read through all the articles, but is the Hafnium traceable?

actually they could blame it anybody they wanted
and I have no clue if Hafnium is traceable.
That didn't come up in the research I did.

Yeah I was just joking. While these are terrifying new weapons, I think very soon there is going to be a biological attack. Its makes more sense and is untraceable. Here's a scenario; You get a fanatic, terrorist, anyone willing to die for their cause (they don't necessarily have to be willing either, just ignorant of their own circumstances), infect this person with some terrible airborne pathogen, and then send them on a vacation, destination a heavily populated, highly tourist filled area (some place within 1 days travel). Tomorrow, there's a pandemic.
Its terrifying because it can't be traced, and even more terrifying because airports aren't equipped to scan people medically. It would just happen.

reply to post by Mactire

speaking of your biological attack scenario.
just think what damage could be done with
these grenade bombs if put in the hands
of a suicide bomber???
or multiple suicide bombers???
I would hope their high cost would
deter 3rd world countries from
having such devices as this.

reply to post by boondock-saint


I think it would be something that would hit the black market at an affordable price. While attacks are useful in shepherding people into certain trains of thought, or to manipulate the global economy, if you want population control, which is "the goal" for the world's leaders right now, an airborne pathogen is the way to go.

Interesting Find!

however I wish people would stop trying to tie 9/11 to exotic weaponry or nukes. Its is 100% obvious that a nuke did NOT bring down the towers. I would also say its very likely that these grenades didnt. I think people would notice the difference between one big explosion and a bunch of smaller one.

Interesting. Chilling, but interesting.
I have nothing to add really, except it's nice to see a well thought out thread on the board.
Thank you for the rather unsettling information for me to store in my little house of horrors.

A few subsequent experiments have indicated that hafnium triggering may actually be possible. An x-ray test at Louisiana State University appeared to corroborate Collins’ results, and an independent team at DARPA called TRiggering Isomer Proof (TRIP) reported their experiment as “successful.” Some non-bomb weapons concepts are also under investigation, including a device which could funnel the deadly gamma radiation into a coherent death ray: a gamma-ray laser.

www.damninteresting.com...

And it appears that funds to DARPA for this research were cut off
in 2004. However that does not preclude the notion that the research
did not go black ops after 2004.

Originally posted by VonDoomen
Interesting Find!

however I wish people would stop trying to tie 9/11 to exotic weaponry or nukes. Its is 100% obvious that a nuke did NOT bring down the towers. I would also say its very likely that these grenades didnt. I think people would notice the difference between one big explosion and a bunch of smaller one.

however you did read the part that this tech was found in 1998
a full 3 years before the towers fell. So the possibility cannot be
eliminated in the timeline.

Originally posted by ladyinwaiting
Interesting. Chilling, but interesting.
I have nothing to add really, except it's nice to see a well thought out thread on the board.
Thank you for the rather unsettling information for me to store in my little house of horrors.

sorry hun, don't blame me
blame these people who come
up with all this crap.
I'm just the messenger
of bad news
And thanks for reading

Originally posted by Mactire
Yeah I was just joking. While these are terrifying new weapons, I think very soon there is going to be a biological attack. Its makes more sense and is untraceable. Here's a scenario; You get a fanatic, terrorist, anyone willing to die for their cause (they don't necessarily have to be willing either, just ignorant of their own circumstances), infect this person with some terrible airborne pathogen, and then send them on a vacation, destination a heavily populated, highly tourist filled area (some place within 1 days travel). Tomorrow, there's a pandemic.
Its terrifying because it can't be traced, and even more terrifying because airports aren't equipped to scan people medically. It would just happen.

Thank you for mentioning it.

Do you remember an excellent movie back in 1995 by name of 12 monkeys..?


en.wikipedia.org...


The idea of the biological weapons and how to spread it still scares the hell out of me.

Originally posted by amkia

Originally posted by Mactire
Yeah I was just joking. While these are terrifying new weapons, I think very soon there is going to be a biological attack. Its makes more sense and is untraceable. Here's a scenario; You get a fanatic, terrorist, anyone willing to die for their cause (they don't necessarily have to be willing either, just ignorant of their own circumstances), infect this person with some terrible airborne pathogen, and then send them on a vacation, destination a heavily populated, highly tourist filled area (some place within 1 days travel). Tomorrow, there's a pandemic.
Its terrifying because it can't be traced, and even more terrifying because airports aren't equipped to scan people medically. It would just happen.

Thank you for mentioning it.

Do you remember an excellent movie back in 1995 by name of 12 monkeys..?


en.wikipedia.org...


The idea of the biological weapons and how to spread it still scares the hell out of me.

Yes. An movie, and one of the scariest scenarios ever created. Like I said; it would impossible to police.

pardon me, maybe I posted in the
wrong thread. I thought this OP
was about Hafnium Grenade
Bombs. How did we get to
biological weapons
off-topic?

So this is basically a suicide grenade? I'll throw one..... Out of a helicopter. Seriously, the US isn't into making suicide weapons... So what would the implementation of this device look like?

reply to post by TheResurection

and how many movies have we seen where
somebody leaves a booby trap and in it is
a string tied to the pull pin of a grenade?
Set it to blow and the operative leaves
safely. Open the door and BOOM!
It's applications are endless
however the astonishing part
is it's size. a mini nuke that can be held
or carried in your hand.
Or even in your coat pocket.
You could basically get it into any
building in the world undetected.

Seriously not cool.

At all.

Hafnium grenade bombs seem plausible... But why are posters assuming they will resemble conventional hand grenades? I think the developers would be smart enough to build a device that can be planted and remotely detonated, or simply released by a missile. I think the "grenade bomb" concept is more along the lines of a compacted yet high intensity yeild, kind've like Davy Crockitts in the 60s.

Also this weapon turns organic material into glue while maintain non-organic structures? Sounds an awful lot like an advancement of neutron bomb development, of which US, China, and Russia all had research in.