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Is this the WMD of the future?

The nuclear strong force holds together the nuclei of atoms. Imagine a weapon that consists of two beams, that when converged upon a target, disrupts this strong force, allowing the nucleus of each atom to "explode" under the coulombic repulsion between protons. If the beam was incident upon, say, 10^20 atoms (a relatively small area), imagine the destructive force produced by the combined synchronous explosion of atoms leading to intense heat, along with beta, neutron, and who knows what other kinds of radiation.

Is the nuclear strong force understood to a point as of yet that could lead to mankind's control over its influence? Should we all be worried?

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  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    Not a chance. You can't just turn off the strong force like that. If you could, you could make a perpetual motion machine, which is a good indicator that something is impossible.

  • 1 decade ago

    Lawrence LivermoreLabs in California already has one of these, and they are making a big publicity splash about it. The technology is crude, but they are using many hundreds of lasers to make up for it.

    Pretty soon, some bright bulb will realize that we can use a softer form of this technology to bombard nasty chemical. Instead of providing enough power to shread atomics, the array would concentrate enough energy to assure that the flow of toxic chemical through its focus will simply guarantee the reduction of all molecules to carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. We will haul the most dangerous chemical we create to a site in the desert, where they will be shreaded into fundamental elements, then immediately burned as fuel.

    Because we can control the harmonics of the lasers, the specific toxic chemicals may be most efficiently dissolved, held in dynamic stasis until their optimum conditions for combustion are met, then released to burn into carbon dioxide, water and nitric acids. If there are other elements (heavy metals, etc.) included, they can be harmonically directed to combine as a salt in a way we can easily extract later.

    Back to your question: the intermediate step described above bring us to the ultimate trash hauler. For many decades, nuclear waste has been stock-piled outside our nation's power reactors. Many thousands of tons of the universe's nastiest elements are present in this waste, and reprocessing through the usual means is too expensive. Enter your viewpoint.

    We can build your machine and run this material through the focus. Harmonics would cause some elements to fission, while others would not respond to the harmonics - we can make the lowly, by-products fission while the valuable materials do not. Then the final products, which are easier to extract from the uranium, radium and plutonium may be separated out.

    My point is, this technology you write about will be a wonderful thing which brings us into the second atomic age. It will be one of the greatest ecological advancements of this century...within three decades, all nuclear waste will be reprocessed in this manner until there remains only about one-tenth of one percent of today's stockpiles remaining to store for ten thousand years. This is a manageable amount, and within a hundred years, they will find a way to process that stuff as well. No more nuclear waste!

    One last thing: imagine putting just enough density of a fissionable material into a log that is about a kilometer long. Mechanically move this log's end slowly into your machine, and turn on the machine - controllable fission. Use tritium in a boron-enriched substrate and you get controlled fusion. Can you imagine an application for this? Say propulsion? Have to be a place in mind where the highly radioactive discharge cannot harm anyone...

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    The strong force is involved in fusion in thermonuclear bombs. You have an interesting concept, but I do not think that the strong force will be manipulated easily.

  • 1 decade ago

    no we should be far from worried noone truely understands ALL phisics in voled with the making of wmd but we still manage to make the but war does have ruels and one is that wmd shall not be used. it was decided after the first world war

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  • 1 decade ago

    No, this is not the WMD of the furture. The WMD of the future is a CCC: Chinese Credit Card.

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