perfidy

The New Scientist is reporting that a new kind of explosive is being developed by the DoD. This miracle explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from an excited isomer of Hafnium. By shooting some xrays at this highly energized form of matter, the nucleus is convinced to emit a large number of gamma rays. Early tests showed a release of energy 60 times that put in, and theoretically this could go much higher.

A shell with one gram of explosive Hafnium-178m2 (the excited, isomer of regular Hafnium) could store the energy of over 50kg of TNT. This means you could potentially have grenade sized shells with the explosive power of a WWII blockbuster bomb. Needless to say, the military has a hard on for this stuff. For the foreseeable future, making energized Hafnium will be expensive - it requires a partical accelerator and other expensive apparatus to pump regular Hafnium with the energy it needs. Costs would be thousands of dollars per kg even in full production, on the order of those for enriched Uranium.

The downside is that this reaction is a "nuclear" reaction. It doesn't involve fission or fusion, it's an isomer decay reaction; but some of the unexploded Hafnium would remain after the weapon detonates, leaving small amounts of radioactive Hafnium behind. When you combine the words "nuclear" and "radioactive" this causes certain elements to salivate. And then to scream bloody murder.

Some will fear that this will erode the barrier between conventional and nuclear weapons. The administration has already authorized studies (not production) of low yield nuclear weapons for use as bunker busters, and to attack bio and chemical stores without danger of spreading those agents by the blast. (Of course, the blast would spread fallout - which kind of defeats the purpose in my book.) The Hafnium explosives, at least from what the article states, would be exceedingly high energy with very little radioactive residue. Most of the danger from conventional nukes is from the Alpha and Beta decay, not the gamma decay which seems to be the sole form of energy that this explosive releases.

This would be useful, then, as a bunker buster. But if these weapons are developed, the potential is enormous, especially if the xray trigger could be sufficiently miniaturized, and the Hafnium residue minimized. How about conventional machine gun rounds with a quarter gram of Hafnium explosive - each bullet explodes with the force of a tank round. Imagine a soldier with a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle, which has an extreme range of two miles. A couple grams of Hafnium explosive in the bullet would have a remarkable effect. Or imagine an Air Force plane dropping a cluster munition, like the CBU-87. Instead of 202 grenade like bomblets, each bomblet has the explosive force of a daisy cutter.

I don't know that this stuff will ever be in the hands of the individual soldier, but integrated into missiles, bombs and artillery shells, its impact would be enormous. One of the biggest problems with explosives is not accuracy but weight. They are difficult to move around. Considering how the average soldier likes to bomb the hell out of the enemy, you can go through stocks of munitions at a frightful rate. If we perfect this technology, there are a couple uses for very large hafnium bombs. But the greatest use would be to create much smaller bombs with the same spread of explosive power as the ones we have now. This would greatly ease the logistical strain of keeping the artillery, air force and navy well stocked with things that go boom. And further, storing the bombs could be significantly safer if an xray trigger is required to detonate them. Just don't put them near hospitals, I guess.

[Side note] The trend for the US Military is toward two things - ever more integrated communications and intelligence, and more and more firepower. This fits right in with that. Winds of Change's Trent Telenko has a very good article up on the communications side of that equation.