'Imaginary Weapons'by Sharon Weinberger
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'Imaginary Weapons'by Sharon Weinberger
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But to start at the beginning... Hafnium is a naturally occurring element. It's not normally radioactive, but one of its isotopes, hafnium-178, can be made to be radioactive under certain circumstance - in this case by bombardment with a high energy beam. The constituents of the atomic nucleus end up differently positioned from their normal state, and give off energy as radiation as they drop back to their original state. The radioactive state of the nucleus is know as a nuclear isomer of the element. In this case the isomer of interest is known as the hafnium-178m2 isomer. The thing is that the hafnium-178m2 isomer contains a lot of energy - it normally has a radioactive half life of 31 years. But what if you could release all that energy at once? At something like the equivalent of a third of a ton of TNT, it would start to approach the force levels of small nuclear fission explosions. In 1998 a hitherto unknown physicist from Texas claimed to have triggered a release of some of this energy using a second hand dental X-Ray machine. Unfortunately, all attempts to replicate the experiment failed, and no one was able to explain theoretically how it could have happened. The story from then on is one of how gullible government bureaucrats pumped more and more money into trying to prove that it would work, while all of their scientific advisers warned them that the physics was junk. Even if the physics wasn't junk, and there was some kind of theoretical breakthrough that would explain how the energy could be released, hafnium-178m2 costs something like a $1 billion per gram to produce. Yes, that's a billion dollars to produce just a gram! Probably the most expensive explosive ever - assuming that anyone could get the stuff to explode... I really do encourage people to read this book - it shows how operations shrouded in secrecy can burn up massive amounts of public funding when just basic oversight would have made it clear that the program should have been terminated. But more than that it is also a classic case study of how junk science and national security can feed off one another and encourage the spending of public funds, even in situation where the main protagonists are perfect sincere, and not trying to take anyone for a ride. A well written narrative with just the right amount of technical explanation for the non-scientist to understand what is going on. Well worth a read. Recommended.
Imaginary Weapons by Sharon Weinberger |
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