Note to people who haven't read the paper: This isn't seriously about building a nuclear bomb destroying super-ray. The authors even admit that this is waaaay beyond our current technology. The whole paper feels like a con attempt by the authors to talk governments into building smaller muon colliders as an intermediate step. Of course these smaller colliders could also be used to study concepts of a higher energy collider that could produce anti-nuke rays. But for the most part, these smaller colliders would be incredible physics discovery machines. Muon colliders are basically the holy grail of experimental particle physics. They offer higher energy collisions than electron colliders because muons are much heavier, but they also offer higher precision than proton colliders because muons are elementary particles. The difficulty is sourcing and accelerating them. This is insanely complicated, which is why noone has done it yet. But if you can talk some government knobheads into building it to study forced nuclear disarmament or whatever, the reason why they do it doesn't really matter.

In some sense the authors were already successfuly by triggering all this discussion here on HN about the purely theoretical implications on geopolitics (rather than the very real, down-to-earth implications for modern particle physics).