Would the first antimatter weapons be tested?

[Dartz]

Assuming military scientists figure away to create antimatter in enough quantity to be useful, and figure out how to control it, do you expect we'd see tests similar to the nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War?

[smjjames]

I think by the time we even get to that capability, we'll be around other planets in the solar system, so they could feaseably test it somewhere that isn't an inhabited planet.

Seriously though, I hope we don't develop antimatter weapons because M.A.D.

[Hellpotatoe]

Mega
.
Antimatter
.
Destroyer

kolkolkol
Well, I hope than we dont get these before 4.000 ...

[Darvince]

MAD
=
Mutually
Assured
Destruction

[vh]

MAD is the doctrine that keeps everyone from blowing everyone up so it is a good thing. Although, unless a large deposit of antimatter is found it space, i do not believe they will be developed.

[blotz]

i remember a book where they got a pint of antimatter
it was writtin by dan brown

[vh]

i also remember a book where a group of organisms or robots or sentient objects acquired a specified quantity of a substance known commonly as 'antimatter'.

it was written by someone.

in fact i remember a lot of those books.


yes there are a lot of books containing antimatter in their fictional universes

[blotz]

no srsly they flew the antimatter up into the air at the end, and jumped out of the helicopter when it exploded. it was real exciting

[vh]

yes there are a lot of books containing antimatter in their fictional universes, that's not the point

[valentin123]

i think an antimatter weapon is like a RPG that fires rockets that inverts the explosion so the result of Explosion would be negative,instead of exploding everything it would anti-explode the result of it would be catastrophic it would destroy all the matter of the universe(cause its anti-matter

[gabriel.dac]

What if instead of an hydrogen bomb you create an antihydrogen bomb, which will also cause a nuclear explosion just like the hydrogen bombs we have. The explosion will spread antihelium (plus, leftovers of antihydrogen) everywhere and cause more explosions? That would be rad

[Darvince]

antiuranium.

[Bla]

i think an antimatter weapon is like a RPG that fires rockets that inverts the explosion so the result of Explosion would be negative,instead of exploding everything it would anti-explode the result of it would be catastrophic it would destroy all the matter of the universe(cause its anti-matter

Hmm - an antimatter weapon wouldn't destroy all of the matter in the universe, for example if you drop an 1 kg antimatter bomb on a planet, it would annihilate with 1 kg of matter and release 1.8 * 10¹⁷ J of energy (2000 times the energy of the Fat Man bomb that hit Hiroshima). That would do a huge amount of damage to the planet, but definitely would not destroy all the matter in the universe. Assuming all mass in the universe is matter and if you by destroy mean matter-antimatter-annihilation, you would need an equal amount of antimatter plus you would need it to reach all the matter in the universe. I don't see any realistic way you could possibly make such a weapon, even in science fiction it wouldn't make any sense to me for such a thing to exist.

[blotz]

i can imagine russian satellites having antimatter farming machines

[vh]

some nuclear weapons approached the yield of 1 kg worth of antimatter. the tsar bomba was the equivalent of about 2500 fat men.

[FiahOwl]

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[Darvince]

Wait so is a 100000 ton bomb more like 2.1 times as powerful as a 50000 ton bomb?

[Bla]

What do you mean Darvince? It depends completely on how the two bombs work.

Assuming they're antimatter:

100000 tons bomb annihilates with 100000 ton matter. E = mc² = 2 * 10⁸ kg * (3 * 10⁸ m/s)² = 1.8 * 10²⁵ J released

50000 tons bomb annihilates with 50000 tons matter. E = mc² = 10⁸ kg * (3 * 10⁸ m/s)² = 0.9 * 10²⁵ J released

Ratio 2:1

[Darvince]

I mean uranium nuclear

[vh]

a bomb's yield in tons is the equivalent in tnt. so 5 mt would be 5 million tons of tnt worth of explosions.

[blotz]

but is there something that antimatter does that the tsar bomb doesn't?
like they both explode but any like weird things antimatter does

[Bla]

"Weird" is subjective, whether they both do weird things or neither do weird things would be up to you to decide.

The Tsar Bomba worked by a fission bomb (like one of the early bombs dropped over Japan or the process that is used in nuclear power plants) initiating a fusion bomb (fusion is the same process that happens in the Sun), overall the energy released is to due a tiny fraction of the original mass being turned into energy, and both processes (especially fission) aren't very "efficient" compared to antimatter (most of the original mass/atoms just become different atoms). As in 100+ times less efficient if I remember correctly.

Antimatter would be the theoretically most efficient way to produce energy (whether in bombs or in power plants), because all the mass is turned into energy.

[Darvince]

a bomb's yield in tons is the equivalent in tnt. so 5 mt would be 5 million tons of tnt worth of explosions.

TIL it isn't literally weight

[valentin123]

the contact of anti-matter with matter its catastrophic,so,the material of the weapon should be anti-matter too

[Bla]

Then I assume the spaceship or whatever transports the weapon should also be antimatter? :b
In space I don't know how well that would work when it's not a perfect vacuum, inside the atmosphere of a planet, it would annihilate with the atmosphere.

For an antimatter weapon on a planet, I think you would need to make a shell of matter to protect the antimatter inside from the atmosphere, with a vacuum inside the shell, and magnetic fields could keep the antimatter in place in the vacuum. Then destroying the shell or turning off some electromagnets to keep the antimatter stable should activate the bomb.

[blotz]

what if the antimatter is not magnetic? i know there's a way to hold this i think but can't remember how

[Bla]

Just like there are electrically charged matter particles (like protons and electrons), there are electrically charged antimatter particles (like antiprotons and positrons) that could be kept in place with magnetic fields.
They repel each other, so they would be hard to store densely.

For electrically neutral particles I think you could use optical traps (lasers).