X Ray Bombs

[Foxbat]

When you read David Weber's Honor Harrington series, X Rays are often mentioned as a weapon used in ship to ship combat. Well it seems that this type of weapon could become a reality. The Pentagon wants to build X Ray bombs as a more efficient way of destroying chemical or biological weapons sites (and leave the building standing). The article says that conventional explosives would be used to compress aluminium to create the X Rays but I assume that something like Tungsten would also be involved. You get X Rays by firing (beta) particles at a dense (High Z) material so I think that maybe the compressed aluminium would be used to generate the beta particles although how this actually comes about from a conventional explosion, I don't know.

The US wants to build an X-ray bomb to destroy chemical weapons

 

[Venusian Broon]

You have to be careful with such titbits of information, as so much of it is either wish fulfilment by the military or the researchers that may or may not have done something!

I can't find much more that you've written Foxbat on the mechanism. My guess is that they believe they can trigger a much greater rate of beta decay that would then strike a compressed aluminium target which would then create a huge amount of Bremsstrahlung radiation. So that the beta particle - an electron of course - gets stopped dead by the aluminium and the energy lost gets converted into a X-ray.

Now in 1998, Carl Collins of the University of Texas at Dallas reported that they could trigger rapid energy releases via gamma-ray emission, basically 'forcing' a radioactive nuclei to stop emitting it's radiation randomly via it's natural half-life, but to trigger it as you wished instead. The Guardian reported on this as being a potential 'Gamma-ray bomb' or death ray here in 2003:

US military pioneers death ray bomb

However it appears - a bit like cold fusion - that no one has really been able to replicate the experiments. Hence this article in Wikipedia:

Hafnium controversy - Wikipedia

So....perhaps they still have a group of scientists who believe that such a mechanism could still work, but with radioactive materials that produce beta particles? Perhaps an aluminium shell with a core of said material and an explosive mechanism that both compresses these two elements and also initiate a surge in beta particle production that will be filtered through the compressing aluminium to produce X-rays? I guess that it would be 'cleaner' than a conventional nuke in that the amount of material used would likely be much less than even a small tactical bomb.

Anyway that's my initial guess on the bits and pieces reported on.

 

[Danny McG]

My take on it.....

So if you're near a crowd of people and one goes off you should, according to all I learned as a kid from Superman comics, be able to see loads of nekkid wimmin!

 

[-K2-]

So if you're near a crowd of people and one goes off you should, according to all I learned as a kid from Superman comics, be able to see loads of nekkid wimmin!

Don't risk your health! Get yourself a pair of these glasses instead. They're cheap!

K2

 

[Danny McG]

Of course we've just killed an educated and informed discussion with our daftness.
So it goes

 

[Foxbat]

An anecdote regarding Bremsstrahlung.
Many years ago, a colleague of mine surveyed an area of known very high gamma radiation levels prior to maintenance work commencing. He then directed a work crew to wrap lead shielding around certain areas to shield the radiation (this was done under a stop-watch, where each group of workers had a carefully timed work limit based on dose calculations).

My colleague was then surprised to find the doserates to be rising. It turned out to be Bremsstrahlung due to the unusual presence of highly energetic beta particles interacting with the lead. Our instruments do not discriminate between Gamma and X Rays (both are electromagnetic) and this was how he was able to measure the change. It took a layer of aluminium and then a layer of lead to control the doserates and is the only time I can remember when we encountered this phenomenon.