Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam (2003)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Not to mention that the prospect of detonating every nuke in the world, even at only 3% or so of normal yield, sounds pretty destructive too. If we're gonna get rid of some nukes, how about Megatons to Megawatts instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
They'll have a lot of solar power to play with too.
And it's much neater than throwing rocks too. And faster.
Why? This doesn't actually deposit that much energy directly in any given volume. The beam is about a meter wide and the power is about a kilowatt (1000 joules per second). The authors say
> This is equivalent to about 1 Sv/sec. We note that this value of the radiation dose is very large, compared with the U.S. Federal off-site limit of 1 mSv/year.
but that seems wrong. Up to a dimensionless factor Q that adjusts for biological details, a sievert (Sv) is 1 joule of radiation energy deposited per kilogram. But that neutrino beam has a mean-free-path of the diameter of the Earth! That means it is roughly distributing the kilowatt of energy over 1 m^2 * 13,000 km ~= 1e7 m^3. At the density of water, that's 1e10 kg, so the deposited power is about a 1e-7 watts per kilogram, or roughly 100 nano sieverts per second. You'd have to point the beam at someone for 3 hours straight to exceed the (conservative) federal limit.
Sounds really perilous. If even one is missed isn’t its risk of usage now astronomically higher?
[0] There is a difference between use and deploy in military terminology.
If you look at the equations, they're sub-scripting "E" with "dep", meaning deposited. The figure is arrived at after accounting for the 1/10^7 probability that a given neutrino in the beam actually interacts in the right zone of soil.
> The range of the neutrino is 10^7 meters and the effective neutrino interaction is restricted within a few meters away from the bomb because of the interaction range of the hadrons.
Which I'm reading as: "we're going to lose the vast majority of this energy in the Earth itself, so we need to choose an initial power level so that, by the time the beam is interacting with the dirt just under the bomb, it's delivering ≈ 1kW of power."
I'm also suspicious of the difficult of aiming a beam that's a meter wide at the target distance to hit a nuclear warhead core reliably halfway across the world. If you miss, how do you tell what direction you missed in and correct?
Particle beams act in surprising ways. For example, proton beams are used to treat tumors because they end up dumping most of their energy in a small volume when fired into matter. This allows you to do things like delivering very high doses of radiation into a brain tumor while the tissue along the path of the beam receives a very low dose.
This occurs because at high enough energies, the protons are essentially traveling fast enough that they don't have time to really interact with anything in their way. But as they lose energy they begin to interact more, which causes them to lose more energy, making them interact even more, etc.
The difference is that protons are charged particles while neutrinos are not, but I don't find it surprising that a neutrino beam would act in a similar fashion.
The tech in the book was no less fictitious but sounded kinda cool: a neutron resonator, with a beam being targeted on the Moon and being reflected to the Earth, widening sufficiently to cover the whole planet (no idea how or why it would affect warheads on the other side).
Throwing them on the accelerator may even be the less damaging option.
To do that, you can point a lower intensity neutrino beam for years at a nuke or a group of nukes. The adversary won't even know the nukes are compromised.
Given the size of the pit that would probably literally melt the pit right out of the warhead.
1. They'd know who to launch it at
2. You can't just launch 1 nuke - it's all or nothing. And for the most part, it's probably nothing: countries besides the US and Russia just don't have very deep nuclear stockpiles[1].
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1. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohasw...
Not really. "If we detect such an attack, we'll launch against you both. Make sure nobody on your side develops such a weapon".
It's called "MAD" for a reason.
"We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and thereason should be clear toall the accelerator experts. Actually, even the simplest prototype of our proposal, i.e. theneutrino factory of GeV range needs substantial R & D work. Wealso note that a 1000 TeVmachine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnetsof≃10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous. Only if we can invent a magnet which can reachalmost one order of magnitude higher field than the currentlyavailable magnet, the proposalcan approach the reality. Even if it becomes the reality, thecost of the construction is ofthe order of or more than 100 billion US$. Also we note that thepower required for theoperation of the machine may exceed 50 GW taking the efficiencyinto account. This is abovethe total power of Great Britain. This implies that no singlecountry will be able to affordthe construction of this machine and also the operation timemust be strictly restricted. Webelieve the only way this machine may be built is when all the countries on earth agree todo it by creating an organization which may be called the “World Government” for whichthis device becomes the means of enforcement."
As you say, they are quite difficult to detect once produced. This is exactly what the DUNE experiment will be doing. It's a large underground detector in North Dakota that will measure properties of neutrinos produced in a beam at Fermilab near Chicago.
The difficulties mentioned in the quote from the article have little to do with neutrinos. 1000 TeV is simply an insanely high energy for any particle beam.
That's pretty fascinating. When the protons hit the lead wall, are there any other "messy" particles created that are problematic? Filtering and focusing the muons might be relatively easy to handle, but what about the other kinds of particles that will be created?
I guess it is not a coincidence they are putting a neutrino detector in a place called that way.
Am I correct to assume there are old lead mines there?
Edit: there are mines, very deep mines, but not Lead mines in fact. And the detector is in one of them.
Slow but still cool, and yes if you could get high enough bitrate for less money than you could gain in HFT trade, it would probably already exist. Them HFT guys and girls do rather crazy stuff to get their nanosecond advantages.
Meh, $100 billion? The US has spent more than that on it's own defense initiative ($200 billion from the sources I found). [1] And as for the power usage, 1 of the two reactors on the new class of aircraft carriers would provide 125MW (or 700MW of thermal energy, granted I'm not a physicist, but the thermal power is probably what they're after here?) [2], so I don't think it'd be out of the realm of possibilities to either build more reactors for the project, or do a combination of hooking up to existing naval reactors and new reactors to run.
If the Cold War was going on, I'd be shocked if this wasn't something the U.S military looked into doing. No one is thrilled with MAD approach, it's more of just no one has found a better way to deal with nuclear weapons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor
First is the various attempts by China to build underground "neutrino detectors" in various parts of the country. Before all of the Chinese Academy of Science websites were taken down, you could see pictures of it. They were tunneling quite deep. 100 miles at around average depth of 4,000 feet.
Of course no one does nuclear like the Americans. The Department of Energy's secretive DUNE project...Deep Underground Nuetrino [E] is well under way across Illinois and will eventually extend the accelerator at Fermilab to over 800 miles underground.
This technology is, to use an overused term, the Manhattan Project of the 21st century.
Give me a break. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is not secretive. Why do you and so many people make up BS like this?
No accelerator is extended at all, let alone beyond FNAL border and certainly not 800 miles.
From a basic physics viewpoint this seems surprisingly within grasp though in terms of energy scales. Greatly entertaining!
"We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and the reason should be clear to all the accelerator experts... We also note that a 1000 TeV machine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnets of ≃ 10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous... Even if it becomes the reality, the cost of the construction is of the order of or more than 100 billion US$... the power required for the operation of the machine may exceed 50 GW"
Which is around $175,900 per meter.
(3140km/27km)^.6 * $4.75B = $82B. Adjusting for inflation gives you something a bit over the $100B. They probably came up with the number in a similar fashion.
Do you know if your number includes the detectors? They would have contributed significantly to the total cost.
"Actually, even the simplest prototype of our proposal, i.e. the neutrino factory of GeV range needs substantial R & D work. We also note that a 1000 TeV machine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnets of ≃ 10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous."
Assigning such value-laden language as 'totally ridiculous' could be explained away as simply an artefact of translation, but it continues...
"Even if it becomes the reality, the cost of the construction is of the order of or more than 100 billion US$."
According to whom?
"Also we note that the power required for the operation of the machine may exceed 50 GW"
Again - reference?
"... taking the efficiency into account. This is above the total power of Great Britain. This implies that no single country will be able to afford the construction of this machine..."
Does it? How does GB power production imply that one of the superpowers could not build such a device? Might as well say that the power required is 100x the power output of the DRC, or that it is equivalent to the acoustic energy of 40 million duck quacks, or 1/5 the energy emitted by the Sun in 200 milliseconds. These comparisons add nothing to the paper.
"... and also the operation time must be strictly restricted. We believe the only way this machine may be built is when all the countries on earth agree to do it by creating an organization which may be called the “World Government” for which this device becomes the means of enforcement."
World government??? Since when was this a political paper? We already have many multinational organisations - NATO, WHO, some for atomic energy.
I've no doubt the paper was written in good faith but this really, really needed an editor and some peer review. Something that arxiv.org, as much as I support its core aims, sorely lacks.
And of course they're saying "some World Government", they don't want to make predictions about whether it'd be NATO or the UN, just some world collaboration.
The idea that solar neutrinos impact decay rates generally assumes that neutrinos are directly interacting with radioactive isotopes (usually through some unknown physics).
OTOH it may be easier to build than authors assume: what if it is build in orbit so it doesn't have shoot the beam across the Earth? I know we don't do accelerators in space, but it may be easier than reaching 1000 TeV.
This doesn't work, because: 1) you cannot detonate explosives there by simple ignition, 2) you need a very precise timing for simultaneous activation of all detonators, to achieve the smooth shockwave front, and 3) even if all this somehow happened, you just can't explode the bomb just lying around AT ALL, as it is not in pre-critical configuration yet. There are many things that need to happen simultaneously, in exact order and with nanosecond precision. There are PAL devices that provide encrypted timing differences to the detonation controller by loading external codes — without these codes, it is physically impossible to achieve nuclear explosion, even if you somehow activated all other things from pre-detonation checklist. Etc etc.
Not to mention that in the real bomb, there is much less plutonium than 10 kg they have mentioned.
I assume the rest of the paper is of similar quality.
"Mr Saru, destroy all the Klingon relay stations on the surface."
"But Captain, some of them are on the other side of the planet."
"Use the neutrino beam."
"Aye Captain."
And that's where I learned the phrase: "Pre-Boost Phase" — hit them in the silos. None of those systems appears to have borne fruit (or have they? oooo-eeeee [x-files music]).
Other than ICBMs, of course. IIRC it took quite a few years for ICBMs to become robust and responsive enough to launch in response to an attack and have enough time to escape the kill radius of the incoming nukes. If it took 15 minutes to fuel, target and launch, and you have 10 minutes warning... Well, you'd better hope your bunkers and silos held up.
Of course, the only way that works is if you use your devices preemptively. Hence you get the oh-shit realization that a technically sweet solution is politically destabilizing (given that any preemptive capability encourages the enemy to strike first). The same thing happened with some other systems, like a long-ranged stealthy cruise missle: it caused more problems than it would solve. At the end of the day, the problem is avoiding nuclear war, not winning it.
Yep....
Hey, it's only a "3% fizzle reaction". How bad can that be?