Nuclear Antimatter Isomer Future Bomb Now - Russia Has It

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

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Russia's Isomer Bomb, Funded by Your Taxes
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Wired. com
By David Hambling
August 27, 2008

http://blog. wired. com/defense/2008/08/the-red-isomer. html

The research that could, perhaps, lead to nuclear isomer bombs one day remains contentious in America; the weight of the physics establishment says the science is unproven, even unlikely But what is the rest of the world doing? In particular, what about the Russians, who carried out some of the earliest work in this area?And what about the Chinese?

Shortly after first writing about the potential for an isomer bomb, I came across an article in the Russian paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. This was on 12th August 2003; for the 50th anniversary of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, they interviewed Viktor Mikhailov, scientific director of the Federal Nuclear Center.
(The original is in Russian, translation thanks to Babelfish)

Q: But what still are the possibilities in principle of using the nuclear effects?

A: We have the also very large field of work with the nuclear energy. Besides the isotopes of fissionable elements there are the so-called isomers. Isotopes differ from each other only in terms of number of neutrons in the nucleus. But isomers have the same number of electrons, and protons, and neutrons. The entire difference is in the fact that the isomer is in an excited state, but can convert to stable state. And this also releases nuclear energy. Any transition from one state to another occurs with the release of energy. The fission energy of nuclei exceeds chemical energy 10 million times.
But who says that a weapon this powerful is necessary these days? But the transition of isomers gives off thousands of times more energy than chemical reactions

Q: This is way to the creation of a new generation of nuclear weapons?

A: It is difficult to say, developments are still under way today.
I simply want to emphasize that nuclear energy is not only fission energy or fusion, but can be, for example, the transition energy of separate nucleons

So the Russians also have a theoretical interest, at least, in isomer weapons

In America, the most controversial research has involved trying to "trigger" -- get energy out of -- a Hafnium isomer. In Russia, there has been plenty of controversy over Hafnium, as well. A 2005 paper on induced decay of the nuclear isomer 178m2Hf and the 'isomeric bomb' written by E. V.
Tkalya, is deeply skeptical of the physics involved

However, I came across a more recent scientific paper, which puts a different light on hafnium triggering.
The work was carried out by a team of Russian and Chinese physicists in the area of "resonance conversion" as an efficient triggering technique and was published in the journal Chinese Physics Letters

Much of the argument about triggering energy release from Hafnium is about the size of the target. Imagine the Hafnium atom is a bomb, which you are trying to detonate by firing bullets at it.
One school of thought says the critical area you need to hit is tiny; controversial, Darpa-funded researcher Carl Collins and his colleagues say that (according to his disputed results) it’s a billion times bigger

The Russian and Chinese paper attempts to bridge the gap between these two, explaining how a resonance effect might make the target area tens of thousands of times larger than you would otherwise expect.
It doesn’t fully account for the difference, and it relies on some assumptions which have yet to be proven

It would be potentially alarming if the Russians and Chinese cracked the secret of isomer triggering and plunged while the scientific community dismissed it as physically impossible But the paper on resonance conversion had a surprising footnote:

Supported by the DTRA [the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency] under contract No DTRA 01-02-M-0534

DTRA is one of the U.S. military agencies pursuing isomer research.
In these international times, it is not so easy telling who is on which side



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Is the Pentagon Funding Isomer Bombs Again?
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Wired. com
By Sharon Weinberger
April 11, 2008

The Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency is funding work looking at releasing energy from nuclear isomers, an area of research that was once supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part an investigation into a new class of explosives.
Now, according to news reports, two research groups are getting funding from DTRA for work on nuclear isomers: Youngstown State University and the Naval Research Laboratory

DARPA for several years sponsored research into "triggering" hafnium-178m2 -- a program that was canceled after a slew of scientific objections were raised and Congress took away funding for it. That wasn't exactly the end of military interest. As I've written before, DTRA in 2006 held a series of conferences focusing on nuclear isomers, cold fusion, and antimatter, with an eye at looking at whether the agency should fund any of these areas.
[For those who want all the nitty gritty details on the very weird life and death of DARPA's isomer bomb, you can read my book, or for a shorter overview, you can read David Hambling's New Scientist article along with my Washington Post Magazine article]

Does that mean DTRA is funding an isomer bomb? Well, no, not really. Or maybe a little. It depends on how you look at it. One one hand, it's no secret that one of the main interests of DTRA, a successor to the Defense Nuclear Agency, is in things that go "boom." But Youngstown State University, which is getting $1 million of the DTRA funding, was part of a group that actually negated the results on which the original DARPA program was based (that's usually the time when you start looking for a new sponsor).
So, it's much more likely that the DTRA program is a basic science program, which the agency hopes might one day in the future pan out into applications, be it as an energy source or, less likely, some sort of weapon

As for the Naval Research Laboratory's involvement in nuclear isomers, well, who knows, but I'm guessing it's a very basic research effort. The lab investigates all sorts of things, including a semi-closeted cold fusion program.
At the very least, it will gives them all something to chat about over drinks on a Friday