Re: How can metallic hydrogen be used as a weapon?

Simon,
I read the entire article at whyfiles.org and found it interesting. The bit about the metallic hydrogen is amusing to me.

The part about it being 35 times more powerful than TNT is rather amusing as there were several very stable explosives that are significantly more powerful than that, widely available since the 1940's. They also existed at room temperature and pressure, not a million atmospheres.

Also, note the date for that report was 1977. Having been through a lot of funding wars, my spin on this topic is this. At that time, the Cold War was in full swing. A lot of things that looked promising from a research standpoint were touted as having an application in weapons. Why? The main job of every principal investigator is to get funding for his/her work. If the DOD or DOE picked up (funded) a project, certain aspects of the research might not be classified so you got to publish your work that you were interested in doing in the first place and if there is a military application, then you helped out your country, and all was well. This is how a lot of things got done. This still happens, but not quite to the extent it did during the Cold War. This paragraph may seem really silly or strange to you, but, all the time I was growing up, everything was about beating the commies [communists] and spreading democracy. Assuming that you are between 15 and 18 years old (grades 10--12), you never really saw the Russians as a serious enemy that could bring about the end of the world at any time and the Berlin Wall was something you probably learned about in a history book or on TV. In case I'm being too jaded, let's switch to physics/weapons mode for a bit.

If I were trying to come up with an explanation for how to make a weapon out of this, I would guess that a super compact form of hydrogen should be easier to ignite fusion in than hydrogen in a gas or plasma form. If you could do this on a small scale with only high explosives as the trigger (and not a fission nuke), you might be able to make a nuke that has a very high explosive yield and is very small (large suitcase sized) as opposed to a "typical" nuke that weighs nearly a ton to get the same power. It is a useful thing to know that there have been portable nukes in the US and Russian inventories for a very long time. The Russians had a few that could be lugged around in a large "suitcase" and the ones that the US has are "backpack" sized. The yield was very small for a nuke. Effectively, it is a portable, non-launchable, version of the "Davy Crockett" shown in the article. The Davy Crockett was developed to deal with human wave attacks by the Chinese if we ever got into a ground war with them. Thankfully we have not. The other strategic purpose of this "backpack" would be to put one soldier into hostile territory with it, put it inside a building and that building would "go away" at a designated time. This was in the days before total air superiority was the way of the military. The same thing can now be accomplished late at night with one high-altitude bomber and one or two conventional bombs, no nukes required. The primary difference being that the pure fusion mini-nuke might have the ability to make a sizeable chunk of a city "go away," not just one building. I expect that this is not particularly feasible in a portable sense. In a lab with a few hundred million dollars worth of lasers in a super controlled environment, maybe in several years if there is funding (don't count on that either). If you get a chance, the National Atomic Museum is a really interesting place to visit.

Should you be worried? Nah. An old joke from my college days: Controllable fusion has only been 20 years away since the 1960's, and it still is today. The physics of this is really ugly [difficult] and will take a very long time to crack, but never say never.

What is interesting is the application of hydrogen as a superconductor. LLNL has been doing superconductor research for a very long time, yes for strategic purposes, but they publish a lot in the public domain, too. A cheap (at least in a materials sense) superconductor would have a tremendous number of applications and not just military. Maybe something to look into, no?

Good luck and be glad you didn't grow up when I did.

Scott Kniffin
Sr. Engineer
Radiation Effects and Analysis Group
Code 561.4
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center