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?
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.