[ExI] Power sats as weapons

[John Clark]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2012  Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Accelerating sand to where it reaches GEO is not cheap.


Cheaper than accelerating power satellites and gargantuan lasers to GEO.

> Given the lower limits of how light you can make a nuke,.
>

The critical mass for Plutonium is 10 pounds, less if you're clever and can
compress it to greater than standard density. I figure the smallest
complete bomb would weigh about 100 pounds and be equal to one or two
thousand tons of TNT.

> there are not too many FedEx packages that need to go through the neutron
> scanner. Think in terms of a shipping container.
>

Unfortunately we spend many orders of magnitude more money on pork-barrel
anti ballistic missile systems than we do on things that might actually
save lives, like neutron detectors and examining shipping containers.

> If the driving force behind terrorism is poor economic prospects


I don't believe it is. Saudi Arabia is not a poor country and yet almost
all the 911 hijackers came from there, and all were middle class. Whenever
you dig into terrorism you will usually find religion festering there
someplace.

  John K Clark
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