The First World tolerated pecuniary petroleum trespasses of the Middle East with the understanding that they would return the greenbacks as profligate consumerism. American citizens could not be trusted to purchase Buicks, but camel jockeys thought bloated bright red pimpmobiles were really swell. The "oil weapon" was unveiled in the 1970s and 1980s. It massively inflated US currency, massively reducing the value of Arabian hoarded dollars. 11 September 2001 hit, twice. Bankrupting retirees is everybody's laugh, but hurting real estate and its taxation is a call to war.
Bush the Elder was generously bought off 24 hours into Desert Storm. The American economy crunched thereafter and the Bush Presidency with it. Bush the Lesser has his dad's advisors and not the brains to be corrupted. We will vaporize, vitrify, and ballistically scatter 100 million ragheads, and then add five states to our flag so as not to make the stars uneven. The price of gasoline will return to an All-American $0.60/gallon.
In your dreams. Let us go back in time to paradise lost.
A missile submarine had 20 Peacekeepers each carrying "up to" 12 independently targetable 300 kilotonne W-87 warheads. 240 deliverable warheads promised 72 megatonnes of snap, crackle, and pop. Alas, thermonukes are quite dirty with fallout. Somebody in the wind footprint will complain - even if we only send a little one to nostalgically expunge Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (Incoming via cruise missile, visit 3° 9.5431' north, 101° 42.6585' east.)
A hollow ball of 1,3,5-trinitrotriaminobenzene high explosive was tessellated with initiators to obviate explosive lenses. In the good new days only two initiators are needed, one each at the ends of a hollow HE football. Ellipsoidal pusher plates are thus launched through vacuum to reshape spherical, impact, and uniformly initiate the HE central ball. Four tonnes of HE alone in Nagasaki's WWII "Fat Man" is now a couple of hundred pounds for the entire device.
Showtime! A Mach 25 spherical implosion wave eventually impacts a dense implosion tamper shell that inertially implodes a hollow gallium-stabilized delta-phase Pu-239 ball past critical mass. Its deuterium-tritum fill tremendously boosts yield. The device is thus a dial-a-yield for booster fill. Boosting allows a thin pit wall immune to fratricide by predetonation from stray neutrons when nearby buddies melt Muslims. A whole lot of precise engineering and physics is severely crunched to give an efficient fission burn. X-rays literally thick as molasses flood out of the fissioned plasma nightmare at lightspeed, outrunning the tortured crunch behind and imploding the fusion stage in turn, whose released hot neutrons fission the second stage U-238 pusher capsule and the U-238 warhead shell. One obtains 300 kilotonnes yield and about 200 pounds of violently radioactive stuff from a soccer ball.
It does not have to be that way, all complex and dirty with beryllium here and depleted uranium there, tritium, deuterium, Li-6, an impulse neutron generator, contoured x-ray mirrors, a U-235 oralloy fusion core spark plug... Polystyrene has been banned from gasoline (goodbye Napalm II). Can we in all good Enviro-whiner wisdom not ban it from thermonuclear warheads, too?
Imagine a land of dreams arbitrarily placed near 37°14'37" north and 115°49'00" west. Suppose our black ops gnomes store magnetized antimatter iron ball bearings individually levitated in ultrahard vacuum within small hollow yttrium barium copper oxide high temperature ceramic superconductor shells cooled in liquid nitrogen. The Meissner effect assures antimatter magnets never touched their superconducting matter shells. The balls are small, 1.19 cm in diameter and massing a mere 6.98 grams each. Combined with an equal quantity of matter they yield 300 kilotonnes nuclear yield by matter-antimatter annihilation. There are no fission products or pound/megatonne loose neutrons transmuting atmospheric nitrogen to radioactive carbon-14. Matter and antimatter cleanly disappear into each other. The products are photons and evanescent hadrons that rapidly decay (picoseconds at most) into stable matter and more photons.
Admittedly half the matter-antimatter annihalation energy output will exit as useless neutrinos. This is a government project and there are rules.
Let us simplify the arcane complexities of urban extirpation. The high explosive shell implodes a thick-walled hollow copper sphere. The relevant hydrodynamics are well-studied for commercial shaped charges. The copper sphere accelerates inward across some thermal superinsulation in vacuum and a layer of liquid nitrogen to implode the hollow cryogenic supercon levitator perhaps four inches across. Two inches of additional vacuum and six microseconds later, a wall of shock-densified copper traveling at orbital velocity meets seven grams of antimatter.
The world is mostly empty space held inflated by stacked electrons orbiting atomic nuclei and obeying Fermi statistics. Copper with bulk density 8.94 g/cm3 has a nuclear density of 2.3x1014 g/cm3. When the leading edge of electrons from matter meets antimatter's positrons they neutralize. The skin of reality's balloon disappears, and positive matter nuclei attract negative antimatter nuclei unimpeded - encouraged by a 5.9 million psi 4(pi)-steradian inward push of angry copper. As a mere 80 tonnes nuclear equivalent of 511 keV annihilation photons from positronium collapse warms things up, the 299.92 kilotonne main event goes full bore 0.6 microseconds later.
Typical compression time for a 20 kT fission core is 4 microseconds, followed by half-microsecond exponential fission growth during the microsecond before the mass starts to rebound. The warhead of our dreams will look like a textbook nuke going "boom," except it will have no fission products and no radioactive fallout. We may drop as many city busters as we like.
And we will. But we didn't. Because government is a jackass.
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