The title alone should give you pause; neutrinos are no easy thing to wrangle. We build giant swimming pools of water underground in the dark to try to catch them.
"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."
Particle physicist here! Actually it's pretty easy to generate intense neutrino beams. You just have to accelerate protons and smash them into a lead wall. This produces all kinds of particles, including for instance muons. Since muons are charged, you can filter and focus them into a beam using magnets, and then they rapidly decay in flight, producing a beam of neutrinos going in the same direction.
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.
> Actually it's pretty easy to generate intense neutrino beams. You just have to accelerate protons and smash them into a lead wall. This produces all kinds of particles, including for instance muons. Since muons are charged, you can filter and focus them into a beam using magnets, and then they rapidly decay in flight, producing a beam of neutrinos going in the same direction.
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?
By selecting the energy of the proton beam correctly, you can prevent much besides the muons from being produced. Whatever other particles do show up - if not guided by carefully set up electromagnetic fields - will quickly smash into the walls of the device, generating heat as they scatter and decay. Some of this heat can be used to boil a coolant and regenerate energy, but for the most part it is just an inefficiency. The lead wall and some of the material around it will become radioactive waste as some long lived isotopes are produced, but they could potentially have many years of service life.
Lead is not named for the element lead nor is it pronounced the same. It's pronounced like leader (without the er, of course) and named for a mining term[0].
The fun part is there is actually a Leeds, ND (pronounced the same but spelled different) which is named for a place in England which was a bit common in North Dakota even with the large Nordic immigrations. Of course, anything that the Natives put "Spirit" into got renamed "Devil".
D'oh you are correct. I'm always getting my Dakotas mixed up. I should have also added that this is not my specialty (I work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in Switzerland).
Happens all the time, the NY Times confuse which state has what Senator and ESPN's stock footage for "North Dakota" is a bison with the I90 Highway sign in the background (I90 is SD, I94 is ND).
Can you modulate and detect the beam fast enough for this to be useful for transmitting low-latency info for high-frequency trading? That could pay for the experiment if you had a detector near NYC.
Fascinating idea. The neutrinos travel at effectively the speed of light and can be sent directly through the earth, providing a minimum-distance "line of sight" between any two points on earth. However, the same property that allows the neutrinos to pass through the earth is also the reason they're so hard to detect. You would probably only be able to be able to detect modulation frequencies on the order of weeks or months. The bandwidth would be very low to say the least!
There are research where they've done short haul (~1km i think) neutrino comms at about 0.1bit/s.
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.
Fortunately, Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for figuring out how to build a neutrino beam, which is much easier than detecting them. Basically, slam a proton beam into a few feet of something big and heavy. The big heavy stuff will absorb everything else, and leave just a beam of neutrinos, which don't care if you have miles of armor rather than feet.
>This implies that no singlecountry will be able to affordthe construction of this machine and also the operation timemust be strictly restricted.
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.
Kind of interesting when I was thinking about neutrinos was thinking about communication that can go through the Earth but this article is talking about hitting a target to affect the plutonium hmm.
Not sure triggering every nuclear bomb on the planet is a great outcome. I suppose if nations knew this was coming, they'd either dismantle their weapons or try to destroy the 1000km accelerator.
Not really, this is more akin to using a laser to destroy something at a distance. The neutrinos would interact with soil near the weapon, some of these reactions would produce neutrons which would go on to induce fission in the weapon, destroying it.
The idea that solar neutrinos impact decay rates generally assumes that neutrinos are directly interacting with radioactive isotopes (usually through some unknown physics).
The US sent 3 carriers towards Asia last week to deter China and other countries from thinking that the corona pandemic and US riots was a good time to escalate.
The idea is kind of cool, but doesn't sound very practical. The beam width is my concern. If it's really narrow, then we have to know exactly where every nuclear warhead is to hit it. If it's really wide, then the power draw will be that much more immense, plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or otherwise, that happens to get in the path of the beam.
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
> plus a huge risk of collateral damage to any life, human or otherwise, that happens to get in the path of the beam.
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.
My reading of the paper shows they already factored that into the equation. So at the target, in the 1m² cross-section, 1,000 W of energy is being delivered. It takes about 50,000,000,000 W at the beam generator to achieve that.
If it's just 50 gigawatts it is potentially viable, considering the stakes of nuclear warfare. The precise locations of most stationary nuclear weapons systems are already known, though this would run into some trouble finding nukes on submarines unless they were detected by submerged drones or subullites. I'd look into it.
Well I don't think anyone in charge is really happy about how nuclear weapons are handled these days, but generally speaking I'd say that most people don't want to use them, but they're forced into over-worrying about attack vectors because that's the nature of MAD. Even so, there are so many ways of doing so much damage to an adversary right now I doubt if a major nuclear power would actually deploy[0] offensive neutrino weapons outside of an actual war.
[0] There is a difference between use and deploy in military terminology.
Which part of the paper? I don't know why they would quote power per unit area for a beam that is clearly depositing it proportional to volume. What is the assumed depth?
The assumed depth is the diameter of Earth. That's where the 10^-7 figure comes in. Look at eq. (1). It's dividing the initial energy (1,000 TeV, or 10^15) by the diameter of Earth (10^-7) The beam energy of 1000TeV is chosen to "have approximately single interaction before the neutrino beam hits the bomb". The mechanism is for a neutrino to interact with the Earth a few meters before the bomb, creating a hadron shower that does the real work.
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."
Furthermore, assuming it becomes feasible to develop multiple neutrino beam machines, you could use a technique similar to "Gamma Knife" to reduce the radiation exposure along the beam paths (and to make it harder to detect/track) [0].
I don't know that much about the physics of neutrino radiation, or the fine details of bomb design. I do have a hard time believing that such a beam can dump enough neutron radiation into a subcritical bomb core to trigger a meltdown or fizzle detonation without also giving a dangerous exposure to any human who is in the way of that beam.
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 could imagine a wider “targeting” beam, fired so that a satellite overhead of the target site could catch neutrino scatter from the warhead. I don’t know what ridiculous engineering would be required to get sufficient neutrino collection for that to work, on a satellite, but if the budget covered a 50GW neutrino beam it might stretch to that, too.
>I do have a hard time believing that such a beam can dump enough neutron radiation into a subcritical bomb core to trigger a meltdown or fizzle detonation without also giving a dangerous exposure to any human who is in the way of that beam.
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).
In many ways, I'm glad this is so impractical. If it weren't, the prime candidate for actually doing this is one of the nuclear powers. They'd just "forget" to target their own nukes.
Not sure this would work for the nukes that are constantly moving around on submarines. Would have to know the exact position of the sub to aim the beam.
The invention of a "fission blanket" (aka "weak force intermodulation projector") that renders fission impossible, at a distance, is also part of the backstory for a scifi novel 'Emprise', by Michael P. Kube-McDowell.
I used to work with a guy from LLNL who was involved with some of the X-Ray laser stuff and the like. There were some systems that, in theory, weren't that attenuated by the atmosphere...
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]).
> 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
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.
No, this was ICBMs, including SS-19 and SS-20 in their hardened silos. Pre-boost.
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.
It feels like it would be much easier to modify the nuclear weapons to be immune to this device than to actually build it.
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.
Sorry, this wouldn't work at all. I don't have time and desire to verify their neutrino beam / neutron shower calculation, but they want to detonate bombs by raising the core temperature to 300C, assumed ignition temperature of surrounding explosives.
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.
They assume 3% fizzle yield. It wouldn't work anyway (there will be exactly zero yield), the core will remain intact, ready for insertion into another physics package.
I don’t know the details of how durable a uranium warhead core is (and I suspect it’s very highly classified) but they’re pretty precisely machined bits of metal. Even a 3%-yield fizzle should be more than enough to de-rate one. At that point the uranium could be recycled to build a new core, but that’s about it.
I know some details. (It is plutonium, not uranium). Any yield, even fizzle yield, is impossible by simply igniting the explosives around the core. Again, it is not in pre-critical configuration yet at this point. Arming the device, i.e. assembling the initial configuration, is an incredibly complicated and precise process. It is so beautiful from the engineering point of view.
You don't seem to get it. The object of the exercise is not nuclear yield. BTW, you can physically damage fissile material that needs to be in a particular physical configuration with neutrons and/or x-rays. One is not trying to detonate the weapon, but rather render it in a state where it cannot reach the desired yield (preferably none at all, of course).
You are suggesting that just simple combustion of the HE lenses surrounding the core won't damage it at all? Even if the explosive just burns it would melt the physics package, there won't be any reinserting it anywhere. You could recover the fissile material I suppose.
"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"
It's a ring, so it should be thought of as something pi1000km in length, not pi(500km)^2 in area. The inside of the ring is not used for the structure. $32,000/meter sounds pretty generous.
That's a good reference point. Cost for infrastructure projects usually isn't linear. I've seen an exponent of .6 used to extrapolate costs.
(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.
It's not clear why they are aiming at exploding the nuclear bombs instead of simply degrading them. If you induce enough plutonium nuclei to split, the core won't reach criticality when the implosion happens, so no mushroom cloud.
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.
So it accelerates the decay of Pu or U-xxx inside the bomb. But this process is heat- and radiation-emitting, so I suspect if stockpile is monitored for either of these (probably both), something will be detected.
You are correct. I thought the heat would be negligible, but it's not. A modern plutonium pit is about 3kg [1]. If you want to induce a 5% decay, that's 150g. Each gram is equivalent with about 3 tons of coal [2] , so that's about 450 tons. If you do that over a period of 1 year, that's still about 1 ton of coal per day. That won't go unnoticed.
Which would pretty much be mission accomplished. Cleaning up a spill of pure plutonium would be an extremely lengthy process, months or maybe even years. It would contaminate the entire room/building/ship.
> Unless they noticed before it melted out, and launched the thing...
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].
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.
In terms of engineering, I can't see how steering this beam would be remotely viable: it appears you've got to line up the long axes of the 1000 km circumference muon ring to point exactly in the direction of the weapon to be targeted. So to have it steerable at all it appears necessary to make it space-based. Having done that, it seems the energy, reaction mass and and time required to steer the thing would be pretty crazy.
From a basic physics viewpoint this seems surprisingly within grasp though in terms of energy scales. Greatly entertaining!
Just absolutely amazing that so many short-sighted geeks feel the urgent need to chime in on this thread with: "duh, how could anyone pull this off without collateral damage and killing people???"
Guess what. It's okay to kill lots of people on the other side.
It's okay to kill the enemy. Furthermore, a nuclear exchange needs to be won. In fact the only thing that matters, is winning. It seems beyond the imagination of so-called "brilliant computer nerd hackers" that such a weapon might even be deployed in addition to, and as a complement of a nuclear first strike, to hamper or prevent retaliation.
Imagine worrying about killing people who would launch nuclear missiles at populated cities. If people die while we try to destroy a thermonuclear warhead before it can leave its silo or launch tube, all the better. Aggressors deserve it for their posture alone.
Not to be a snob but I have a problem with the quality of this paper. Take the following passage:
"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.
I really liked the candid tone, and I think it was appropriate given the highly theoretical topic of the paper.
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.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 59.5 ms ] threadhttps://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
"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.
[0]: https://www.britannica.com/place/Lead-South-Dakota
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
Throwing them on the accelerator may even be the less damaging option.
The idea that solar neutrinos impact decay rates generally assumes that neutrinos are directly interacting with radioactive isotopes (usually through some unknown physics).
Yep....
Hey, it's only a "3% fizzle reaction". How bad can that be?
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."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosurgery#Gamma_Knife
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).
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)
[2] https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html
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.
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!
Guess what. It's okay to kill lots of people on the other side.
It's okay to kill the enemy. Furthermore, a nuclear exchange needs to be won. In fact the only thing that matters, is winning. It seems beyond the imagination of so-called "brilliant computer nerd hackers" that such a weapon might even be deployed in addition to, and as a complement of a nuclear first strike, to hamper or prevent retaliation.
Imagine worrying about killing people who would launch nuclear missiles at populated cities. If people die while we try to destroy a thermonuclear warhead before it can leave its silo or launch tube, all the better. Aggressors deserve it for their posture alone.
"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.