Sharon-Weinberger-In.. - American Antigravity

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.
AAG: 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?
Weinberger: 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.
AAG: 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. Now from a
layman's perspective, my first thought is that a
nuclear hand-grenade has some immediately
obvious drawbacks to deployment, so how’d this
one make it that far up the chain of command?
Hafnium Grenade: A hand-grenade
claiming to deliver a 2-kiloton nuclear blast?
Weinberger: 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.
AAG: 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?
Weinberger: 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
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