Here is a fascinating article about DARPA’s "high risk, high payoff" quest to develop an exotic new Hafnium bomb — a new kind of weapon that emits huge amounts of gamma rays from a very small package. This thing packs the bang of a conventional nuke in a package as small as a hand grenade — and the gamma ray burst that results can penetrate deep into bunkers and through thick materials. Of course, it would really be a bad idea to toss a Hafnium grenade unless you could run incredibly fast. But that said, Hafnium weapons may be a big part of our future (or who knows, maybe they’re already part of our present?). Beyond military applications, it seems this technology could offer a very promising new non-fossil fuel energy source, if it weren’t so expensive to produce.
Social tagging: Alternative Science > Defense and Intelligence > Government > Intelligence Technology > Military > New Energy Sources > Physics > The Future
Hafnium Bombs: WMDs of the Future?
Last week we profiled Project Pluto, a super-weapon prototype from the 1950s. Now comes word of a new generation of high-tech WMDs. These nuclear bombs would use the isotope hafnium-178, a material so volatile that its explosive force is potentially …