Reply To: DREAD Weapon System: Devastating, Jam proof, silent

[Aeronaut]

Do any of the people who are actual physicists here take it seriously? Does it have civilian value or is it just a testbed for nuclear weapons without the weapons?

Big science= big budgets= secure careers for government physicists, staffs, and vendors. It may well turn out to be the Cold War without the obvious weapons focus. I’m not a physicist, or even an engineer. At least not today, and not that I can show the sheepskins to prove. I see NIF, ITER, et al as being potentially useful… in the (unspecified future) as basic materials science research.

The gotcha is the phrase ‘in the unspecified future’, which also serves a second purpose of supporting the status quo by conditioning the general population to consider fusion as something that even the gov a mint, wit all the time and money and talent they’ve been throwing at the problem, can’t do it, it can’t be done.

Only a tiny percentage of the public reads beyond the top 3 results of a search, let alone past the first page or two. And SEO is designed to favor dot gov and dot edu domains, especially when they have thousands of pages about fusion research and related keywords. [end rant]