“Excuse me, General, but that sounds like doublespeak for a nuclear bomb to me,” the senator interjected. “Would you mind explaining what these things do and omit the soft-soaping?”
“What plasma-yield weapons are, Senator,” Marshall answered, “are the next generation of high-explosive weapons, designed to be small, lightweight, but very destructive warheads for antiballistic missiles, antiaircraft missiles, and cruise missiles. They are not ‘baby nukes,’ and I’m concerned that this characterization will deprive our arsenal of a very promising futuristic weapon. Although I’m not a physicist or engineer, I know enough about the process and the application of the device to explain it for the committee:
“Simply put, plasma is ionized gas — a cloud of charged particles, usually consisting of atoms that have had electrons stripped from them so their charge is unbalanced or dynamic. It is the most abundant form of matter in the universe — the physicists tell me that ninety-nine percent of all known matter is plasma. Because the gas is composed of charged particles called ions and not atoms or molecules as air and water are, plasma has unique properties. We don’t really know how to contain it, but we do know a lot about shaping it — in essence, plasma can be programmed. We can control its size, shape, mass, and what materials it interacts with.
“Plasma-yield weapons give us added flexibility by giving smaller weapons and delivery systems more punch, until we can improve our missiles’ accuracy enough to allow smaller conventional warheads,” Marshall explained. “The weapons use a small fission reaction, not to generate a thermonuclear yield, but to generate radiation…”
“A fission reaction — as in a nuclear explosion?” one senator asked, his tone incredulous.
“A rapid but controlled fission reaction more like a nuclear power plant, generating heat rather than an explosion,” Marshall responded. “We bring nuclear material together to start a fission reaction, but our goal is not to create the chain reaction that leads to an explosion. We’re only looking for the intense radioactivity to develop for a very short moment — milliseconds in fact — and then the reaction stops. The radioactivity is concentrated along a magnetic field and hits a pea-sized pellet of nuclear fuel. This forces ions — positively and negatively charged particles — to be stripped from atoms, producing a bubble of energy called plasma. Because there is no explosion per se, we can precisely control the diameter of the bubble, making it as small as a few hundred feet or as large as a city block.
“There are two noteworthy properties of a plasma-yield effect,” Marshall went on. “First, there is no large-scale release of radiation because the fission reaction is terminated gigaseconds after it starts. There is no nuclear chain reaction that produces the large explosion and release of nuclear particles and creates tremendous heat. The yield of this weapon is many times smaller than a thermonuclear detonation, and the levels of released radiation are far smaller than even the proportional size of the yield.
“The second property of this effect is that the plasma reaction cannot take place outside the field, or bubble, created by the explosion,” General Marshall went on. “This is called the Debye effect. The plasma field basically consumes itself as it is created; it dies at the same time as it is born. The size of the field can be precisely determined, which is why plasma is used in such commercial operations as making microchips and drawing images in a plasma TV set. Outside the plasma field, there is no overpressure and very little heat or radiation. There is no shock wave as the plasma field is formed. The field grows to whatever size it’s programmed to grow to, then stops. The weapon doesn’t even make that much noise when it goes off.”
“It doesn’t make noise?” one senator asked, sounding startled.
“Some, but not as much as you’d expect for a small nuclear device,” Marshall responded. “You see, the weapon doesn’t explode as we all commonly think of explosions. It doesn’t transform matter into energy and expanding gases, and it doesn’t compress the air around itself. It simply changes matter — solid, liquid, or gas — to plasma, which is just another form of matter. As you know, there’s no sound when ice turns to liquid or when liquid turns to gas.”
“But there’s got to be heat, light, flame, radiation, all that stuff,” one senator pointed out. “Isn’t that a pretty violent reaction? We’re concerned about what the international community and the American people will think about our military forces using these weapons on missiles and bombs. How do we explain it, General?”
“We do tend to think of something changing properties as a violent process, Senator,” Marshall explained, recognizing he was having difficulty getting his point across, “but in reality it’s not. When a pond freezes over, it’s not a violent thing. In physics, it’s merely a transfer of energy — the molecules of water release energy in lower temperatures and don’t bump around as much, forming a solid. Liquids boil when they turn to gas, but that’s not a violent thing either — it’s an atmospheric thing, the gases in the liquid flowing to a region of lower pressure when the absorption of energy separates water molecules. It’s the same with a plasma field. Matter is transformed to another form of matter by absorbing energy.”
“You make it sound so damned peaceful, so natural, like a flower blooming or a sunrise,” a senator said acidly. “We’re talking about a killer weapon here, General. Let’s not forget that.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “So what happens to the matter, the solids… oh, hell, you know, the buildings, the people, who get hit by this thing? What happens? Where do they… well, go?”
“They become plasma — that’s the simple answer,” Marshall responded. “The plasma field takes matter, absorbs energy, and converts it to ionized gas. The target is… well, the target’s just not there anymore, at least not in a form that our senses can detect.”
“You mean… vaporized,” said one of the senators.
For a moment, Marshall’s face was impassive. Then he nodded, looked the senator straight in the eye, and said, “Yes, sir. Vaporized. The target becomes a cloud of ionized gas, equal in mass to its original mass, but simply a collection of charged particles.”
The committee sat in stunned, horrified silence. The members did not even look at each other — they simply stared at Marshall and the other service chiefs in utter disbelief. Finally, the committee chairman said, “This is incredible, General, absolutely incredible. And you are proposing that we actually deploy this weapon? You are asking this committee to write an amendment to the new budget to allow the military services to put this… this plasma-yield weapon on a missile? It sounds incredibly dangerous.”
“One property that I didn’t mention, sir,” Marshall explained, “is that the plasma-yield weapon is more effective at high altitudes, because atmospheric pressure dilutes the plasma field. This makes it a good warhead to use in applications such as air defense, antiballistic missiles, and antisatellite weapons, and not as good with land-or sea-attack weapons. That’s another reason the Army and Navy are using it in their ground-and sea-based antiballistic missile systems. Because we get a bigger bang, they can afford to use tracking and intercept systems that aren’t quite as precise — or expensive.”
“This is simply unbelievable,” the chairman said, clearly shaken by what he had heard. “A weapon that can kill thousands silently, yet small enough to be put in a suitcase.” As he looked at the others on the subcommittee, he shook his head. “I for one don’t want to start traveling down this road without more facts. I think we should table this discussion until we review more scientific facts about this technology.”