If the western particle physics community goes along with that it would be pretty disappointing.
> But Cheng asked that scientists worldwide don’t just allow the machine to be built and use it without exercising their political power to help address the country’s issues. “International scientists have leverage and power,” that they can wield without being complicit. She also said that Chinese scientists should be more aware about their potential complicity.
More realistically, we got lucky and barely dodged the armageddon bullet on a number of occasions.
Then there is the obvious problem of technology transfer. A lot of detector technology can also be used for high resolution surveillance and missile guidance, I’ve met at least one person who did his doctorate in physics at our institute, worked for Raytheon and now owns a company in the defense sector that contributes parts to the successor of the Hubble telescope.
In case you didn’t know there exist 7 nearly identical copies of the Hubble space telescope with different sensors (he worked on those), https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/nasa-gets-two-unneed.... The same will be true for the next generation version of the telescope and is also one of the reasons for the “cost overruns”.
In Dan Brown novels, maybe. The fact that you need an LHC-sized machine to just barely manage to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, and that it has failed to see anything at all beyond the Standard Model, should tell you something.
In short, the requirements for a physical phenomenon to be technologically useful are stronger than the requirements for it to be at all observable. Basic conditions like "needs to interact with ordinary matter and have a decent half-life" are sufficient to rule out the existence of still undiscovered particles with technological potential. If they existed, we would already have found them.
Yeah, it looks like there is no new physics there which could make devilish new weapons, and frankly the state of modern physics is such I don't know as anyone would notice if there was, but nobody knew this in, say, the 1960s. Serious people thought, for example, one might be able to build a weak field ray gun which causes matter to decay into subatomic particles (source 'towards the year 2018' by the Foreign Policy Association).
I'd worry about that, long before I'll worry about some magical unicorn particle gun being discovered.
Kepler was a dedicated design also while Swift was built on top of a generic LEO sattlite bus.