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DAILY NEWS 13 August 2003
Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race
By David Hambling

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 revolutionise all aspects of warfare.”

Scientists have known for many years that the nuclei of some elements, such as hafnium, can exist in a high-energy state, or nuclear isomer, that slowly decays to a low-energy state by emitting gamma rays. For example, hafnium-178m2, the excited, isomeric form of hafnium-178, has a half-life of 31 years.

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The possibility that this process could be explosive was discovered when Carl Collins and colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas demonstrated that they could artificially trigger the decay of the hafnium isomer by bombarding it with low-energy X-rays (New Scientist print edition, 3 July 1999). The experiment released 60 times as much energy as was put in, and in theory a much greater energy release could be achieved.

Energy pump
Before hafnium can be used as an explosive, energy has to be “pumped” into its nuclei. Just as the electrons in atoms can be excited when the atom absorbs a photon, hafnium nuclei can become excited by absorbing high-energy photons. The nuclei later return to their lowest energy states by emitting a gamma-ray photon.

Nuclear isomers were originally seen as a means of storing energy, but the possibility that the decay could be accelerated fired the interest of the Department of Defense, which is also investigating several other candidate materials such as thorium and niobium.

For the moment, the production method involves bombarding tantalum with protons, causing it to decay into hafnium-178m2. This requires a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator, and only tiny amounts can be made.

Currently, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland, New Mexico, which is studying the phenomenon, gets its hafnium-178m2 from SRS Technologies, a research and development company in Huntsville, Alabama, which refines the hafnium from nuclear material left over from other experiments. The company is under contract to produce experimental sources of hafnium-178m2, but only in amounts less than one ten-thousandth of a gram.

Extremely powerful
But in future there may be cheaper ways to create the hafnium isomer – by bombarding ordinary hafnium with high-energy photons, for example. Hill Roberts, chief scientist at SRS, believes that technology to produce gram quantities will exist within five years.

The price is likely to be high – similar to enriched uranium, which costs thousands of dollars per kilogram – but unlike uranium it can be used in any quantity, as it does not require a critical mass to maintain the nuclear reaction.

The hafnium explosive could be extremely powerful. One gram of fully charged hafnium isomer could store more energy than 50 kilograms of TNT. Miniature missiles could be made with warheads that are far more powerful than existing conventional weapons, giving massively enhanced firepower to the armed forces using them.

The effect of a nuclear-isomer explosion would be to release high-energy gamma rays capable of killing any living thing in the immediate area. It would cause little fallout compared to a fission explosion, but any undetonated isomer would be dispersed as small radioactive particles, making it a somewhat “dirty” bomb. This material could cause long-term health problems for anybody who breathed it in.

Political fallout
There would also be political fallout. In the 1950s, the US backed away from developing nuclear mini-weapons such as the “Davy Crockett” nuclear bazooka that delivered an explosive punch of 18 tonnes of TNT. These weapons blurred the divide between the explosive power of nuclear and conventional weapons, and the government feared that military commanders would be more likely to use nuclear weapons that had a similar effect on the battlefield to conventional weapons.

By ensuring that the explosive power of a nuclear weapon was always far greater, it hoped that they could only be used in exceptional circumstance when a dramatic escalation of force was deemed necessary.

Then in 1994, the US confirmed this policy with the Spratt-Furse law, which prevents US military from developing mini-nukes of less than five kilotons. But the development of a new weapon that spans the gap between the explosive power of nuclear and conventional weapons would remove this restraint, giving commanders a way of increasing the amount of force they can use in a series of small steps. Nuclear-isomer weapons could be a major advantage to armies possessing them, leading to the possibility of an arms race.

André Gsponer, director of the Independent Scientific Research Institute in Geneva, believes that a nation without such weapons would not be able to fight one that possesses them. As a result, he says, “many countries which will not have access to these weapons will produce nuclear weapons as a deterrent”, leading to a new cycle of proliferation.

The Department of Defense notes that there are serious technical issues to be overcome and that useful applications may be decades away. But its Militarily Critical Technologies List also says: “We should remember that less than six years intervened between the first scientific publication characterising the phenomenon of fission and the first use of a nuclear weapon in 1945.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Note:

SGR 1900+14, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. After a long period of low emissions (significant bursts only in 1979 and 1993) it became active in May–August 1998, and a burst detected on August 27, 1998 was of sufficient power to force NEAR Shoemaker to shut down to prevent damage and to saturate instruments on BeppoSAX, WIND and RXTE. On May 29, 2008, NASA's Spitzer telescope discovered a ring of matter around this magnetar. It is thought that this ring formed in the 1998 burst.[19]

Tantalum is considered a conflict resource. Coltan, the industrial name for a columbite–tantalite mineral from which columbium (i.e. niobium) and tantalum are extracted,[42] can also be found in Central Africa, which is why tantalum is being linked to warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). According to an October 23, 2003 United Nations report,[43] the smuggling and exportation of coltan has helped fuel the war in the Congo, a crisis that has resulted in approximately 5.4 million deaths since 1998[44] – making it the world’s deadliest documented conflict since World War II. Ethical questions have been raised about responsible corporate behavior, human rights, and endangering wildlife, due to the exploitation of resources such as coltan in the armed conflict regions of the Congo Basin.[45][46][47][48] However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world's tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008.[37]

The stated aim of the Solutions for Hope Tantalum Project is to "source conflict-free tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo"[49]

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Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second—and might therefore be turned into weapons. Some scientists claim—although these claims are contentious—that they can form deadly isomers with simple X-rays and that hafnium can multiply the power of these X-rays to an astounding degree, converting them into gamma rays up to 250 times more potent than the X-rays. (These claims were published in peer-reviewed journals, but other scientists think the experiments were flawed.)

The unresolved status of the field didn't stop the U.S. government from pursuing a hafnium bomb, however. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, reportedly spent $30 million in 2004 and 2005 on the feasibility of hafnium bombs. (It also considered unmanned aerial drones powered by hafnium.) The experiments were pretty hush-hush, and many scientists remain skeptical they produced anything worthwhile. (Indeed, other government scientists published a report to debunk the science behind hafnium bombs. Some went so far as to lump hafnium triggering with cold fusion.)

What really has some observers worried is that hafnium weapons, if possible, might not technically violate current nuclear nonproliferation treaties. Those treaties cover the movement and use of elements like uranium or plutonium, not elements like hafnium, and they focus on fission and fusion, not novel processes like exciting isomers. Any hafnium bombs would probably take decades to create, but at least one other country, Russia, has an active isomer-weapon research program. And unless DARPA and the scientists supporting hafnium isomer research back off their claims, Element 72 will continue to provoke controversy. As one physicist put it, hafnium studies "have aroused a public debate whose acrimony [goes] far beyond the interesting but normally staid physics of nuclear isomers."

The specter of cobalt bombs in the 1960s—the first "doomsday devices"—scared many people, and works like the movie Dr. Strangelove and the novel Canticle for Leibowitz, made cobalt a villain. But if anyone ever remakes Strangelove or adapts Canticle for the big screen, Hollywood may very well substitute hafnium for cobalt as the periodic table bad guy. From the rain of the hafnium, O Lord, deliver us ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_laser#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A gamma-ray laser, or graser,[1] would produce coherent gamma rays, just as an ordinary laser produces coherent photon beams. It would be powered by nuclear transitions from a nuclear isomer. To construct a gamma ray laser, one must identify a suitable isomer, purify it, create a crystal from the purified material, and assemble a configuration that leads to the emission of a coherent gamma-ray beam. Because the wave length of gamma rays are shorter than that of x-rays, such a device, which has yet to be realized, would potentially be very useful in applications such as high-resolution imaging, surgery, and communications, as well as high-intensity applications.[2]

Research to solve the difficulties inherent in the construction of a practical gamma-ray laser continues. In his 2003 Nobel lecture, Vitaly Ginzburg cited the gamma-ray laser as one of the thirty most important problems in physics.[3]

The search for a gamma-ray laser is interdisciplinary, including quantum mechanics, nuclear and optical spectroscopy, chemistry, solid-state physics, metallurgy, as well as the generation, moderation, and interaction of neutrons, and involves specialized knowledge and research in all these fields. The subject involves both basic science and engineering technology.[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrmann_effect#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


The Borrmann effect (or Borrmann–Campbell effect after Gerhard Borrmann and Herbert N. Campbell) is the anomalous increase in the intensity of X-rays transmitted through a crystal when it is being set up for Bragg reflection.

The Borrmann effect—a dramatic increase in transparency to X-ray beams—is observed when X-rays satisfying Bragg's law diffract through a perfect crystal. The minimization of absorption seen in the Borrmann effect has been explained by noting that the electric field of the X-ray beam approaches zero amplitude at the crystal planes, thus avoiding the atoms.

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Eight years ago today—on Dec. 27, 2004—the Earth was rocked by a cosmic blast so epic its scale is nearly impossible to exaggerate.

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The flood of gamma and X-rays that washed over the Earth was detected by several satellites designed to observe the high-energy skies. RHESSI, which observes the Sun, saw this blast. INTEGRAL, used to look for gamma rays from monster black holes, saw this blast. The newly-launched Swift satellite, which was designed and built to detect bursts of gamma-ray from across the Universe, not only saw this blast but was so flooded with energy its detectors completely saturated—think of it as trying to fill a drinking glass with a fire hose. Even more amazingly, Swift wasn’t even pointed anywhere near the direction of the burst: In other words, this flood of energy passed right through the body of the spacecraft itself and was still so strong it totally overwhelmed the cameras.

It gets worse. This enormous wave of fierce energy was so powerful it actually partially ionized the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and it made the Earth’s magnetic field ring like a bell. Several satellites were actually blinded by the event. Whatever this event was, it came from deep space and still was able to physically affect the Earth itself!

So what was this thing? What could do this kind of damage?

Artwork of a magentar and its powerful magnetic field.
Artwork of a magentar and its ridiculously powerful magnetic field.
Image credit: NASA

Astronomers discovered quickly just what this was, though when they figured it out they could scarcely believe it. On that day, eight years ago, the wrath of the magnetar SGR 1806-20 was visited upon the Earth.

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Magnetars are neutron stars, the incredibly dense remnants of a supernovae explosions. They can have masses up to twice that of the Sun, but are so compact they may be less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) across. A single cubic centimeter of neutron star material would have a mass of 1014 grams: 100 million tons. That’s very roughly the combined mass of every single car on the United States, squeezed down into the size of a sugar cube. The surface gravity of a neutron star is therefore unimaginably strong, tens or even hundreds of billion times that of the Earth.

Yikes.

There’s more. What makes a neutron star a magnetar is its magnetic field: it may be a quadrillion (a 1 followed by 15 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000) times stronger than that of the Earth! That makes the magnetic field of a magnetar as big a player as the gravity. In a magnetar, the magnetic field and the crust of the star are coupled together so strongly that a change in one affects the other drastically. What happened that fateful day on SGR 1806-20 was most likely a star quake, a crack in the crust. This shook the magnetic field of the star violently, and caused an eruption of energy.