
Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam (2003) - monort
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062
======
ufmace
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program)

~~~
jessriedel
> 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.

~~~
function_seven
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.

~~~
3pt14159
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.

~~~
CSSer
> most

Sounds really perilous. If even one is missed isn’t its risk of usage now
astronomically higher?

~~~
3pt14159
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.

------
nordsieck
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.

------
fnord77
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.

~~~
aerostable_slug
I'd put my money on the latter. Perhaps with the former.

~~~
marcosdumay
Both will destroy the nukes with similar collateral effects.

Throwing them on the accelerator may even be the less damaging option.

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opwieurposiu
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.

------
credit_guy
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.

~~~
tandr
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.

~~~
credit_guy
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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_\(nuclear_weapon\))

[2]
[https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html](https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/14/1.html)

~~~
MertsA
>That won't go unnoticed.

Given the size of the pit that would probably literally melt the pit right out
of the warhead.

~~~
titzer
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.

~~~
gpm
Unless they noticed before it melted out, and launched the thing...

~~~
nordsieck
> 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].

___

1\.
[https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohasw...](https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat)

~~~
rbanffy
> 1\. They'd know who to launch it at

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.

------
CalRobert
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.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/](https://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."

~~~
cshimmin
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.

~~~
protomyth
Sanford Underground Research Laboratory is in Lead, _South_ Dakota.

~~~
gpderetta
> Lead

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.

~~~
zedpm
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].

[0]: [https://www.britannica.com/place/Lead-South-
Dakota](https://www.britannica.com/place/Lead-South-Dakota)

~~~
gpderetta
yes, I did check the wiki page after posting my comment, hence my edit :)

~~~
protomyth
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".

------
rshnotsecure
This would explain two recent secretive projects.

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.

~~~
frumiousirc
> DUNE

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.

~~~
rshnotsecure
Lol look I'm not spouting HAARP weather control conspiracy theories over here.
Also the distance from Fermi Lab to Lead, South Dakota is 800 miles no?

------
ChrisFoster
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!

------
e0m
From the introduction of the Paper:

"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"

~~~
bufferoverflow
$100 billion for a high-tech structure of 1000km in size? I think you're
severely underestimating.

~~~
mdturnerphys
It's a ring, so it should be thought of as something pi _1000km 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.

~~~
bufferoverflow
LHC is 27km long and cost $4.75 billion.

Which is around $175,900 per meter.

~~~
mdturnerphys
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.

------
emeraldd
The concept reminds me a lot of device described in
[https://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Machine-James-P-Hogan-
aud...](https://www.amazon.com/The-Genesis-Machine-James-P-Hogan-
audiobook/dp/B00BJ3P91C) I wonder if the authors have read it ...

------
mr_gibbins
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.

~~~
civilian
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.

------
seiferteric
Is this similar to the idea that solar neutrinos might affect nuclear decay
rates on earth? And if so, I thought this was very speculative still.

~~~
dr_dshiv
It makes no sense to me that half-lives can't be affected by anything. Do you
have a source for a discussion of this?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3754.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3754.pdf)

------
tener
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.

------
atemerev
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.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
The paper seems to be talking about merely destroying bombs, rather than
getting a nuclear yield.

~~~
atemerev
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.

~~~
maxander
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.

~~~
atemerev
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.

~~~
aerostable_slug
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).

------
roywiggins
Reads like something out of Vernor Vinge's Peace War.

~~~
gojomo
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.

------
bcatanzaro
What about all the nuclear material in the earth itself. Isn’t the dynamo core
hot due to radioactivity? We don’t want to affect that...

------
dreamcompiler
Star Trek needs this.

"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."

~~~
aerostable_slug
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]).

~~~
DuskStar
> 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.

~~~
aerostable_slug
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.

------
caffed
2020: 1\. Covid 2\. Polic Brutality 3\. Cicadas 4\. Global Thermal Nuclear war

Yep....

Hey, it's only a "3% fizzle reaction". How bad can that be?

~~~
redis_mlc
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.

