Dear Sirs/Ma'ams,

This note consists of two parts. The first part describes the possibility of a technology that can render radioactive materials inert over time. The second part is the text of a response I recieved from an internet physics newsgroup moderator (m.a.p.), which addresses the feasability of the concept described in the first section.

I think you will find this information well worth you time. It is my hope that your organization will be able to forward it to individuals qualified to assess it in detail.

Thank you,
Todd Murphy
Researching Behavioral Neuroscientist.

1)

Nuclear Disarmament Technology

This note is intended to tell as much as I know about a suppressed piece of research that has the potential to end the nuclear threat to our world and our natural environment.

Some years ago, I had an interest in physics. I struck up a friendship with a Harvard postgraduate student in theoretical physics. His specialty was in that obscure branch of physics that attempts to explain certain physical forces in terms of hypothetical multidimentional geometries, known as Kaluza-Klein theory. Its a perfectly legitimate, although obscure sub-discipline of both general relativistic physics, and of quantum mechanics.

One day he came to me and told me that he had discovered something potentially very important. He said that he thought it might be possible to disarm nuclear-weapons by a taking apart their fissionable materials, atom by atom. He came on the idea, he said, while attempting to derive a multidimensional model of a De Brogli wave.

The basic principle, as best as I can recall, relied on creating and broadcasting wave forms whose characteristics would be functions of the atomic structure of specific isotopes used in specific weapons, exploiting the inherant instability of fissionable materials. To disarm a given nuclear weapon, he said, a wave form would be constructed that would excite it's payload's nuclei. Exposure to such a wave form would cause the nucleus to become unstable, but not so unstable as to initiate a chain reaction. Instead, according to the calculations, it would only shed particles. I do not know if he was concieving of this exitation as inducing a vibration in the nucleus, or as something else. More likely, he was imagining the mechanism in a way that only a few of his colleagues could follow, woven out of the rareified insights of differential calculus. He was quite good at calculus, and it was his primary tool.

A nuclei that loses particles lowers its atomic weight. The amount of a fissionable material needed to produce a chain reaction is a direct function of its atomic weight. The higher the atomic weight, the less of a material will be needed to create a chain reaction. Over fairly brief periods of time, he said, the atomic weights could be lowered to the point where the mass of the payload would no longer be sufficient for a chain reaction. Nuclear warheads exposed to the signal would effectively be disarmed.

I must be on my guard here. There is nothing in our normal experience that can provide adequate metaphors for subatomic processes. There are only two ways to describe the mechanism that will reduce the atomic weight of heavy elements. The first will be by a rigorous, mathmatical, treatment. The second will be by analogy. I don't have the nessessary qualifications for the first, and the second will be misleading.

Interestingly, my friend said that he was treating De Broglie waves as 'waves of information', and that they would 'tell' the fissionable nuclei to shed particles at a much faster rate than they do normally. Perhaps these comments will provide a clue that a qualified physicist will recognize.

Of course, each specific nuclear isotope would require its own specific wave form.

There are many variables in a description of a wave form. I don't know which of them my friend was looking at to produce the effects he described, and I probably wouldn't have understood even if he'd told me. If a qualified researcher were to look at the problem seriously, I would encourage them to recall that my friend was handling De Brogli waves when he hit on the idea. His rather recondite specialty (multidimentional theory) required him to have an almost instinctive grasp of the mathmatical 'personalities' of the fundamental physical forces.

He said is that there were several media that might serve as carriers for these waves. Both electromagnetic waves and pulsed magnetic fields seemed to be contenders. That was 20 years ago. Today, I feel is safest to assume that improvements in the the shielding of nuclear warheads might now rule out many types of radiation as viable carriers for these signals. Nevertheless, complex magnetic signals remain an excellent contender because of their ability to penetrate most materials, and to propagate long distances without appreciable attenuation.

Each variable associated with each carrier would have to be looked at separtely. For EM radiation, there is wavelength, amplitude, etc. For magnetic signals, there is charge, pulsed vs. contunuous, and the durations of each value within the wave form. All of this is further complicated by the possibility that the optimal wave form might involve anisotropisms, or complex patterns, or that it might need to be broadcast intermittantly in order to be effective. There is also the possibility that multidimentional models of both particles and waves will need to be used. That means that breakthroughs in fundamental physical theory might even be needed. Add to this the further complication that two or more signals, broadcast simultanteously (slightly out of phase with each other), could produce interference patterns which will also have the potential to carry information.

Omnidirectional field generators can be built to emit either magnetic or EM fields, broadcasting the signal all over the world. An array of such generators, each broadcasting a signal designed to degrade to a specific isotope, could eventually render all fissionable nuclear materials on earth inert. Further, other signals might be derived that would target the most common nuclear wastes on the planet, both residues from nuclear explosions and waste from nuclear power plants, removing the threat they pose to our environment.

While he was working all of this out, my friend came to me, quite shaken, and told me that he had received a visit from some employees of the U.S. Federal Government. They were physically violent with him, and although he sustained no serious injuries, they took his notes and warned him that he must not, under any circumstances whatever, continue this research. They were especially interested to know whom he had told. He had only told two people. One was myself, and the other was his professor, a researcher in theoretical physics at Harvard university, and a former member of the Manhattan project. My friend felt sure that is professor would support him in his efforts to end of the "nuclear nightmare".

As it turned out he was very much mistaken. His professor was a believer in the necessity for maintaining a a nuclear "balance of power". This professor, whose name I will not use here, lost no time in contacting some friends in the federal government. My friend and former tutor was afraid for me because he had told them that I also knew. However, being something of an absent-minded intellectual, he mis-remembered my last name, and I never received the warning to be silent. Further, if my friend's research has been classified as top-secret or as a matter of "national security", I have never been informed of it.

Perhaps, 20 years ago, there was some justification for suppressing this research, but things are very different now. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall have both fallen.

We had a nuclear weapons as a part of our military strategy for so many years because we thought that it was necessary in order to prevent the spread of communism. Now we realize that the half-life of a dangerous ideology is far shorter than the half-life of dangerous radioactive materials. To say "better to live free on a dead earth than under communism on a living one", seems incredibly stupid now.

So, I offer this information to qualified physicists, or their students, hoping that one among them might be able to figure out what my friend was on to, and be able to pick up his research where he left off. It any are able to do so, I strongly urge them not to disclose their work to any senior, "respected" physicists, and only to discuss this with physicists who are vocally anti-nuclear.

I am willing to provide the names of the principles in this story to those who are actually qualified to use the information, or under court order (of course).

It is my hope that, using the Internet, which didn't exist 20 years ago, I can spread this information so widely that it cannot be suppressed again. If the researchers employed by the companies who design and produce nuclear weapons wish to oppose the development of this technology, as they probably will, no doubt they will find physicists to give good reasons why it's impossible. However, there are many approaches that will have to be investigated before such a conclution will be justified.

Making this device work, or proving that it won't, is going to require extensive efforts. I would be somewhat sceptical of any offhand 'proofs' that it's not possible. There are just too many approaches to be looked at for any one researcher to claim the expertise needed to pass judgement on the hypothesis implied by this note.

A truly nuclear-free planet may have to be kept in mind by many people, for quite some time, before it becomes a reality. Perhaps a kind of Manhattan project might one day begin; where top physicists work round the clock to clean up the planet.

Happy New Year To You All.

Please send responses to durga@jps.net

2) Response:

The following is recalled from 20 years ago, but, energy-wise it would seem possible. For a radioactive element, the nucleus is in a shallow potential energy well (which can be tunneled through) at the top of a PE mountain. With spontaneous decay, a random quantum fluctuation is enough to help it through the "wall" and results in either a fission or some other particle emission. But if the nucleus has a permissible quantum state at a higher energy level that a neutron can fill, allowing neutron absorption, and that state is energetic enough to allow fission, then it could be usable as fuel for a chain reaction. If this or some other characteristic energy level transition could be somehow induced in the nucleus, it would affect the decay rate and the types of particles emitted. It might be possible to "guide" the nucleus through a relatively controlled decay sequence that would render it non-fissionable.

The big question is transmitting the necessary energy into the nucleus. If it had an electric or magnetic dipole moment, (PU239 has both) an EM field of the right frequency might be just the ticket.