People totally forget about this: if you simply look at where the accelerator physics funding comes from in the US, that ought to tell the story. Dept of Energy used to be the atomic energy commission, and is still in charge of bomb research. Heck it wasn't that long ago that plain old particle accelerators were contenders for directed energy systems.
Yeah, it looks like there is no new physics there which could make devilish new weapons, and frankly the state of modern physics is such I don't know as anyone would notice if there was, but nobody knew this in, say, the 1960s. Serious people thought, for example, one might be able to build a weak field ray gun which causes matter to decay into subatomic particles (source 'towards the year 2018' by the Foreign Policy Association).
