Is building a nuclear weapon tougher than some people think?

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But how is physically possible to create a large electro-magnetic pulse, without an atomic explosion though? I thought it was physically impossible, unless there is still a small atomic explosion going off?

Plus if the EMP only bomb has existed for many years, how is this confirmed, if the no government as ever announced one? Sure they don't want to detonate one to show that they have it, but one has never been publicly seen even, so how do we know it even exists therefore?

No nuclear explosion necessary- just a lot of eletromagnetic energy being released in a short period of time. A nuke just happens to produce a very, very large EMP as a side-effect. So that's where the idea of using EMP as a weapon came from. Malfunctioning machinery can sometimes cause a small EMP by mistake. Your petrol generator blows a fuse and kills your phone several feet away, kind of thing. And probably the largest EMP in recorded history, the Carrington Event, was a solar storm that took out telegraph wires across half the planet in the 19th century.

I'd imagine any government that has a working EMP weapon is keeping quiet about it. Don't want to give your enemies any clues about how to do it.

Oh okay. How come criminals never use EMP devices though to commit crimes, or are they just too had for people to build, even if they are smart?

It takes immense power to make an EMP weapon. And what would a criminal use it for anyway? A nation could use it to disable another nation's communications, and civilian power grid, and etc, on the eve of their military invasion of the country. But how would an EMP weapon help you rob a bank?

what person in their right mind would want to do such a bloody thing?

You say that like the world hasn't got plenty of people not in their right mind.

Building and EMP weapon, I would imagine, would be a labor and capital intensive operation. Something for a government and not an individual. And you would have to be a combination of being out of your mind enough to wanna do it, but still in your mind enough to apply the know-how to do it.

The Unabomber had a unique combination of being in his mind, and out of his mind. But even he had to settle for conventional explosives for his letter bombs.

About the only criminal use I can think of for an EMP is to rob a building where you know the electronic locking system defults to "all doors unlocked" if it crashes. Seems a bit overkill though- making and powering the device would probably make the heist unprofitable! I can see why terrorists might use EMP- they could bring a city centre crashing to a halt and kill people on public transport and in hospitals with the push of a button. I don't know why, but (thankfully) terrorists have been slow to embrace advanced technology. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a successful terrorist "dirty bomb" (radioactive waste) or biological warefare attack. Even chemical attacks have been pretty rare.

@quantumchemist - good to see that you're working on countermeasures! Is the circuit material approach lower cost that piling on lots of shielding, or is it more an issue of space? Antimatter is pretty interesting. As I understand it, it's not a question of "woo woo, wierd alternative universe matter!" It's a question of "Why isn't there more of this stuff? It doesn't make sense!"

The main thing that would stand in the way of this would be obtaining the materials needed. Large amounts of mining produce a tiny amount of U 238 for example. And; it depends on the type of bomb you want to build. A fission bomb would be much easier, but if you wanted to create a fusion bomb, you would need to first create plutonium from a fission reaction to fuse the hydrogen atoms together.

If you had everything you need, it would be fairly simple to create a fission bomb. You need two chunks of uranium, of the correct mass, that you can smash together using some other explosive to create a critical mass which releases the excess energy that is no longer needed to keep the two masses held together separately.

I hope that makes sense. It's a simplification for sure, but that's the idea.

The shielding is a method of absorbing the electromagnetic energy before it can get to the sensitive parts of the circuit. Certain materials will absorb in specific regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, so they are used in the shielding. You could think of it as a version of a lightening rod that dissipates the energy before it can do the damage.

I have many hypothesis on what anti-matter really is and why it is rare to find outside of pair production and beta + decay. To explain it, I had to modify current string theory to adapt a momentum vector into the bands of electromagnetic energy that makes up the “strings” that make up both matter and anti-matter. In a nutshell, electromagnetic (ie. light) energy can be viewed as a vector that coils as it moves. If one looks at it sideways, it shows the traditional wave formation for light that is taught in textbooks. When this coiling light vector is bent towards the natural curvature, it can form a particle of matter if it links with itself to complete a loop. Going the opposite way is much harder to do and will result in a particle of anti-matter. That is part of the reason why anti-matter is rare in the universe. (Black holes convert anti-matter particles into neutrons at the center, so that is another reason why they do not exist in great numbers, even with pair production in play.)

Matter and it’s anti-matter particles have completely opposite charges, yet the same physical characteristics. What causes the difference in charge is the direction of the light momentum vector relative to the starting curvature of the coil it was made from. If they come into contact with each other, they undergo a process of annihilation. This converts the matter and anti-matter versions back into the electromagnetic energy that they were made from. All properties of particles come from the bending of the electromagnetic energy coil. Once it returns back to a coiled vector, those properties dissipate back into a photon form.

For example, if you use a cyclotron one can produce an electron and an positron (anti-matter electron) out of two 511 KeV photons if they exactly hit each other dead on. This is pair production and can be thought of as E -> mc^2 if you follow Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. During annihilation, it is reversed, so E <- mc^2 to make back the two 511 KeV photons.

Never heard of that before. Any antimatter becomes neutrons? And if I got that right, why neutrons?

At the center of a black hole, what some call the singularity, there potentially exists a neutron star. The catch is that it may not be of our dimensionality. My hypothesis is that shifts energy and matter outside of our dimension, causing it to be dark (as we cannot directly interact with it). That would also explain why black holes do not violate the second law of thermodynamics as the process would be going to a higher state of overall entropy. Any matter or anti-matter particles would be converted into light energy upon reaching the point that the gravitational field on one side becomes too great when compared to the other side (string breaks). It would reform matter at the center as the gravitational field forces it to compress itself (back into a string form).

Neutrons are the parent particles of matter. From them, protons, electrons and various neutrinos can be created. This can be seen when a “free” neutron (unbound to a proton in an atomic nucleus) decays into a proton and a W- boson. The W- boson will quickly decay into an electron and an anti-neutrino.

Most criminals don't wish to be supervillains, they'd rather stay discrete because if a supervillain really existed the state would have to focus on dealing with them and would always have enough resources to make victory possible. Look at Pablo Escobar, for example.

Attention is bad for the long-term viability of a criminal enterprise.