The Hafnium Bomb, Nuclear Grenade & the Pentagon’s Imaginary Weapons
It’s called a “hafnium bomb”, and it uses a new type of stimulated nuclear isomer technology so deadly that the Pentagon doesn’t want you to even know that it exists — and according to Sharon Weinberger, it doesn’t. In this interview, we join the former editor of Aviation Week’s Defense Technology International as she takes us on a journey through the Pentagon’s scientific underworld…
Sharon, let’s start with some background info: you’re an experienced defense-industry journalist & editor with a focus on military technology trends. In “Imaginary Weapons”, you put a different spin on things with a focus on overhyped vaporware defense technologies. Can you tell us a bit about your background & what inspired you to write this book?
I have some background in national security studies, but I really stumbled into defense reporting when I moved to Washington after graduate school. I was looking, like all newcomers to DC, to find work that didn’t involve toting someone else’s briefcase. I eventually ended up working for a small Beltway company doing research and analysis for the Pentagon. I worked with some incredibly intelligent and thoughtful people, and went from there into defense journalism.
One of the things I learned from that experience is that the defense industry is itself an “underworld” in many ways, and I try to give readers a feel for this is my book. I remember sitting in the office of the head of the defense company I was working at — the CEO started talking about the fallout shelter in his backyard, and lecturing me on how much dirt you need over your fallout shelter to protect against radiation, and what wind patterns mean for radioactive fallout. I suddenly realized how absolutely weird the conversation was, and yet not so weird for those in the defense industry. We were discussing fallout shelters the way other people discuss barbeques. When you reside in an “underworld,” it seems so normal, but if you step back and look at it as an outsider, then you’re struck by how perverse it all is.
It’s not the vaporware per se that makes this an underworld, but the very odd culture of technology and national security. I don’t draw a line between the perverse and the normal cultures of defense technology — the two are intertwined because we are all so insulated from the outside world. I was inspired to try to describe this underworld — and my experience being in it — to others.
My understanding is that while you examine several technologies in “Imaginary Weapons”, the core story really involves something called hafnium-bomb, which you first heard about in a defense-briefing on Capitol Hill in 1998. Can you give us a bit of detail about the scope of technologies that you focus on in the book, and what it was about the hafnium bomb in particular that made it so central to this story?
The book talks about some of the more controversial areas of science that have attracted military interest, including remote viewing (psychics), cold fusion and antimatter weapons. I do not list these areas with the idea of lumping them together as bad science, but rather, to point out how each of these subjects tends to attract support from the underworld.
At one point, I considered writing this book as a collection of stories about the scientific underworld, but the feedback I got was: “You need a narrative to carry the reader long.” In that sense, the hafnium bomb is a trope for a larger story I was trying to tell about technology and national security.
Speaking of the hafnium-bomb, I thought the idea sounded reasonable until I saw your website, which featured a “hafnium grenade” claimed to deliver a 2-kiloton yield. Obviously a nuclear hand-grenade has some obvious drawbacks to deployment — so how’d this one make it that far up the chain of command?
Lots of ideas sound reasonable until you look at the practical implications. To be fair, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in its official briefings to Congress about hafnium, described the power of a 2,000 pound bomb in the package of a 50 pound bomb. But even that is impractical, and, according to the experts, simply not feasible.
Now to turn the question around a bit, I’ve heard rumors that Los Alamos has been playing with laser-triggered nuclear isomers for years: at least in the context of a quasi-stable fuel-pellet for use in nuclear space propulsion. Is it possible that this particular idea made it past the screeners because of simple name-recognition and maybe just a lack of close-scrutiny on the proposed implementation, or is the entire nuclear-isomer thing just a fish-story?
Yes, Los Alamos has been a “hot bed” for nuclear isomer enthusiasts, although some of them may have retired by now. But it’s important to differentiate between interest in nuclear isomers, and the specific 1998 results that sparked the debate over the “hafnium bomb.” What is primarily at issue in my book is an experiment conducted in 1998 that led a scientist in Texas to claim he had “triggered” the hafnium isomer (hafnium-178m2) using photons from a dental X-ray machine. Those results could not be reproduced by independent researchers, and the initial claims violated some laws of physics. However, this does not cover the entire range of isomer physics, just the specific idea of a nuclear hand grenade based on the hafnium isomer.
In The Social Life of Information, Brown & Duguid describe stories like the hafnium-bomb as part of an oral-tradition in the engineering & defense culture. They believe that stories like this stick around because they contain inherent information value, but that like any metaphorical tale, the information is often seriously diluted & misinterpreted over time. Any thoughts on how this might affect these “cutting-edge” technologies as they filter up from the engineering to the administrative levels in industry & government?
I love that idea, truly. Oral traditions are a wonderful thing, and you may well be right about how those work. In a sense, the isomer bomb has been one of those stories: every few years nuclear weapons scientists would say, “Hey, wouldn’t isomers make for a great bomb?” Then the scientists would discuss it, realize the limitations, and (usually) move on.
But the hafnium bomb should not be equated with all isomer research. That would be unfortunate. The idea is not to discourage truly forward thinking ideas, but to ensure that the ideas we do fund are grounded in reality (and science). I do hope the hafnium bomb becomes a reminder of why you don’t want to go off the deep end.
What role does general fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about enemy capabilities play in pushing through technologies like this? It seems like some of these initiatives are really sold on the idea that “somebody might beat us to it”, which seems to play into a culture of generalized anxiety in the defense industry. Any thoughts on this?
That’s a huge, huge driving factor in a lot of what the Pentagon does. Just about every defense technology official you’ll meet will say, “My job is to prevent technological surprise.” And then they’ll talk about Sputnik, Japanese torpedoes, Soviet subs, etc. All those things that “surprised us” in one way or another. But when you look at the things that surprised us, you have to think about why they surprised us.
It wasn’t typically things that we thought violated the laws of physics, but rather technological advances that competitors had made and where our intelligence wasn’t very good. So, when we speak about the hafnium bomb and competitors, we have to ask: is this an intelligence problem or a physics problem?
Now you’ve said that the hafnium-bomb wasn’t supported by scientific evidence, and I’d like to use that to touch on the idea of subjectivism & politics in scientific review. In a political environment, when funding is at stake, how should the military involve scientific review for various ideas — especially when the supposedly impartial scientific review panels seem to be so politically driven themselves?
There is no perfect model, and peer review doesn’t work for everything. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, gave a really eloquent interview some time back describing how he first tried a model for Wikipedia using peer review by experts, and it failed dismally. Now look at the success of Wikipedia, with no experts and no peer review, but rather, a community of users who constantly improve upon the entries. I think it would be beautiful if somehow science evolved to this sort of “community of users” model, I just don’t know how it would be done.
Certainly the Internet is helping us move to an open model for science in some areas, by allowing scientists in frontier (or “fringe”) science to publish on the web without the need for peer review. In another arena, such as mass media, anyone now can create a blog, or a news site. The access to entry is low, and so it opens up the field. Some people in the media view this as a threat, but I think it’s just wonderful.
Now, when it comes to funding of science, that’s another story. I just don’t know if there is a better model than peer review. It’s possible that peer review can promote group think, or that good ideas are quashed because they are competitive with those of the reviewers. There are elements of truth in these claims, I’m sure. But what’s the alternative?
I think there could be a better model for government funding of truly far-reaching science. One method may be the old Advanced Energy Projects division of the Department of Energy. That office funded a lot of high-risk research using peer review at particular points to determine if a project could go forward, but it allowed some discretion by the director. That office is now gone, but I think reestablishing something along those lines makes a lot of sense, particularly with the current concerns about energy. And, of course, wouldn’t we all love to have the old industrial labs, like GE? But that, I’m afraid, is a thing of the past.
What happens to these programs after they disappear? Does the technology get reabsorbed into other projects, or do they literally crate up the research and stick in next to the Ark of the Covenant in that big warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones?
I like the Ark of the Covenant idea. I like to say that no bad idea ever dies at the Pentagon, it just ends up in another agency. These proposals lie dormant, and then are rediscovered and repackaged.
I guess this is inevitable to some degree. I have no doubt that hafnium will rise like a phoenix from the ashes at some point — but when it does, I hope people say, “Remember the dental X-ray and the nuclear hand grenade?”
Let’s close on a personal note: can you tell us a bit about the projects that you’re currently pursuing, and what your takeaway lessons are from this experience?
Right now, I’m in the middle of investigating another “fringe science” area the Pentagon has been involved in. I’d prefer not to discuss it too much right now, but it has important societal implications (particularly if it works).
And that, by the way, is my final note: we should never, ever dismiss any idea out of hand as being fringe. Rather, we should investigate and study these ideas. We should challenge orthodoxy and encourage free thinking. But when all is said and done, we must make our judgments based on the evidence we have in hand, and we should expect the agencies responsible for national security to do the same. For me, that was the lesson of Iraq and WMD’s, as well as of the hafnium bomb…
About Our Guest
Sharon Weinberger is the executive editor for news at Foreign Policy and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the the author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld (2006), and co-author of A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (2008).
Previously, she was the National Security Editor at The Intercept, where she directed the publication’s defense and intelligence coverage. She has also worked as a senior editor at Aviation Week and a co-founding writer and editor for Wired’s national security blog, Danger Room, and her writing has appeared in Nature, Discover, BBC.com, Slate, Wired, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the Financial Times, among other publications.
Sharon was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard in 2015–2016, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2008–2009. She has also been an International Reporting Project Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, an Alicia Patterson Fellow, a Carnegie Fellow at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, a Nation Institute Investigative Fellow, and a Carnegie Newhouse Legal Reporting Fellow.
Sharon received her B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, and holds an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University. Learn more about Sharon’s background & work on her website at http://sharonweinberger.com/
