The nuclear bomb thing. There are several countermeasures.
Firstly that machine is big and complicated, and could be sabotaged in many ways, both physical and cyber.
Also it’s needs to be something bigger than the LHC which can be angled in any direction. The paper contains plans which build it into the side of a conveniently conical mountain, but this would leave spots on earth that couldn’t be targetted. And it will have a hard job rapidly changing targets. Oh and throw quite a bit of high energy neutrino radiation out in all directions.
If this was uniform on a sphere, 1Sv/sec to 1mSv/year= 31536000000. Divide by which is the surface area of a 50km radius sphere. But of course, the radiation will only come out evenly if the machine has extra degrees of freedom in it’s rotation, beyond those needed to aim it, and keeps rotating. If the machine is pointed in a fixed direction, then that radiation is spread out in a circle. 31536000000/(2 pi)= 5 billion meters. Further than the moon. Now these are long exposure safety guidelines, and have a fair margin of safety. Basically, it’s impossible to use this machine without mildly irradiating lots of people.
(Even if you looked at maps, and sent evacuation orders to a line of people around the earth, well that would take time and be obvious, and the nukes can easily be moved)
Now if you are using a couple of short pulses, this wouldn’t be too bad. But there are various tricks the nuke makers can use to force this machine to keep running.
One of the countermeasures is keeping the nuke moving in unpredictable patterns to make it harder to track. The beam needs to keep on the target for 100 seconds. So you can absolutely load a nuke into a truck in an empty field, and rig the truck with a radiation detector and some electronics so that it drives in a random erratic pattern if a spike in radiation is detected.
The nuclear material can be dispersed. The beam covers around 1 square meter. 1 gram of enriched uranium/plutonium placed every 2 meters in an empty field would mean that 100kg of fissile material would be spread across 100,000 small pieces, taking up 0.4 km^2. And the beam must spend 100 seconds on each peace. Taking 10,000,000 seconds or 116 days continuous operation to disable one nuke.
(Storing material like this would probably take some time to reassemble, depending on how it was done)
They also mention using neutrino detectors to detect the nukes. This will probably be much harder if the neutrino detectors are themselves being targeted with neutrino beams to dazzle/mislead them.
The mechanism of the way they disturb the nuke is that neutrinos interact with the ground, creating showers of particles that then hit the nuke. This means that the effectiveness can be significantly reduced by simply burying an empty pipe in the ground with one end pointed at the nuke, and the other pointed towards the machine.
Coating your nuke in a boron rich plastic and then placing it on top of a pool of water would also be effective. The water acts as a neutron moderator and then the boron absorbs the slow neutrons. This would make attaching the nuke to the bottom of a submarine a rather good plan. Its hard to locate, constantly moving, and with a little bit of borated plastic, rather well shielded.
All of these countermeasures are fairly reasonable and can probably be afforded by anyone who can afford nukes.
If the nuke makers are allowed a serious budget for countermeasures, the nukes can be in space.
TLDR: This machine is highly impractical and rather circumventable.
The nuclear bomb thing. There are several countermeasures.
Firstly that machine is big and complicated, and could be sabotaged in many ways, both physical and cyber.
Also it’s needs to be something bigger than the LHC which can be angled in any direction. The paper contains plans which build it into the side of a conveniently conical mountain, but this would leave spots on earth that couldn’t be targetted. And it will have a hard job rapidly changing targets. Oh and throw quite a bit of high energy neutrino radiation out in all directions.
If this was uniform on a sphere, 1Sv/sec to 1mSv/year= 31536000000. Divide by which is the surface area of a 50km radius sphere. But of course, the radiation will only come out evenly if the machine has extra degrees of freedom in it’s rotation, beyond those needed to aim it, and keeps rotating. If the machine is pointed in a fixed direction, then that radiation is spread out in a circle. 31536000000/(2 pi)= 5 billion meters. Further than the moon. Now these are long exposure safety guidelines, and have a fair margin of safety. Basically, it’s impossible to use this machine without mildly irradiating lots of people.
(Even if you looked at maps, and sent evacuation orders to a line of people around the earth, well that would take time and be obvious, and the nukes can easily be moved)
Now if you are using a couple of short pulses, this wouldn’t be too bad. But there are various tricks the nuke makers can use to force this machine to keep running.
One of the countermeasures is keeping the nuke moving in unpredictable patterns to make it harder to track. The beam needs to keep on the target for 100 seconds. So you can absolutely load a nuke into a truck in an empty field, and rig the truck with a radiation detector and some electronics so that it drives in a random erratic pattern if a spike in radiation is detected.
The nuclear material can be dispersed. The beam covers around 1 square meter. 1 gram of enriched uranium/plutonium placed every 2 meters in an empty field would mean that 100kg of fissile material would be spread across 100,000 small pieces, taking up 0.4 km^2. And the beam must spend 100 seconds on each peace. Taking 10,000,000 seconds or 116 days continuous operation to disable one nuke.
(Storing material like this would probably take some time to reassemble, depending on how it was done)
They also mention using neutrino detectors to detect the nukes. This will probably be much harder if the neutrino detectors are themselves being targeted with neutrino beams to dazzle/mislead them.
The mechanism of the way they disturb the nuke is that neutrinos interact with the ground, creating showers of particles that then hit the nuke. This means that the effectiveness can be significantly reduced by simply burying an empty pipe in the ground with one end pointed at the nuke, and the other pointed towards the machine.
Coating your nuke in a boron rich plastic and then placing it on top of a pool of water would also be effective. The water acts as a neutron moderator and then the boron absorbs the slow neutrons. This would make attaching the nuke to the bottom of a submarine a rather good plan. Its hard to locate, constantly moving, and with a little bit of borated plastic, rather well shielded.
All of these countermeasures are fairly reasonable and can probably be afforded by anyone who can afford nukes.
If the nuke makers are allowed a serious budget for countermeasures, the nukes can be in space.
TLDR: This machine is highly impractical and rather circumventable.