Recent news that China intents to spend billions to build a new particle collider facility at twice the size and with much greater energy density of the Large Hadron Collider, might leave some scratching their heads. The LHC cost an estimated $13.25B US to build and run during the first experimental phase, across a twenty year development cycle.

And China, as noted previously, plans their own super-collider entirely financed by the government internally, not a cheap task. Debate about the LHC's excessive cost has been ongoing for years, and building that was an international collaboration. China will build this on their own. And now the LHC is slated to restart that collider with a new set of experiments at much higher energy densities, along with a new round of funding. There's even been talk of restarting the old US based Superconducting Super Collider project abandoned in the 1990s.

Why would governments spend such huge sums just to explore some minor academic question about physics? Whether this or that particle is generated at expected energies, thus confirming or challenging a standard model of physics that's held mostly true for nearly fifty years. It’s not like these results have application in the real world. They’re more suited to resolving academic questions posed by university professors scribbling on lecture hall chalkboards. Right?

Unless the possibility for a military purpose exists. Then the money spigot would be turned on high with cash flowing out at best speed.

One of the core missions of the LHC is production of anti-matter . This is presented as a mere pure science research project. Contrary to fiction, such as Dan Brown's , Angels and Demons, where in his story magnetic bottles containing anti-matter were stolen from CERN's LHC and hidden throughout the Vatican for a terrorism campaign, the amount of anti-matter real facilities are able to produce is minuscule. So it's unlikely development of a pure anti-matter weapon is possible in the near future. Production of stable anti-matter is on the order of hundreds to thousands of atoms per run. Magnetic storage remains difficult and expensive with larger volumes. And the energy cost associated with production - you can't get something for nothing - is excessive.

But that doesn't mean anti-matter production at such facilities isn't weaponizable. For small amounts of anti-matter could be used as a catalyst in shaped charges for generating the confined heat and pressures necessary to induce deuterium-tritium fusion. Just like in a thermonuclear bomb. This is called a " Pure Fusion Weapon ".

Some researchers have examined the use of antimatter as an alternative fusion trigger, mainly in the context of antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion.[2] Such a system, in a weapons context, would have many of the desired properties of a pure fusion weapon. However, the technical barriers to producing and containing the required quantities of antimatter appear formidable, well beyond present capabilities. Induced gamma emission is another approach that is currently being researched. Very high energy-density chemicals such as the mythical red mercury, various ballotechnics and others have also been suggested as a means of triggering a pure fusion weapon.

So there's reason governments might want to develop anti-matter generation facilities for a weapons program. And that might be as a means to develop a new generation of fusion bombs. So-called "4th Generation" nuclear weapon, where the energy density and pressures required for fusion is obtained not by a fission bomb - as has been done since the 1950s - but instead by a shaped anti-matter annihilation charge. And there’s some evidence that theoretical advances in the 1970s and 1980s paved the way for justifying the building : of these huge and expensive particle accelerators:

For such a military use to be realistic, a technology capable of producing enough antiprotons for at least one antimatter trigger per day is needed. This corresponds to a minimum production rate of 10^13 antiprotons per second, six orders of magnitude higher than that at CERN today (107 antiprotons per second). But, in theory, there exist numerous ways to increase this rate [9]. What we were unaware of, was that since the summer of 1983, the RAND Corporation had been carrying out a study for the U.S. Air Force, "examining the possibilities for exploiting the high energy release from matter-antimatter annihilation" [10]. Similar concerns had equally sprouted-up in the Soviet Union [11]. The RAND study was completed in 1984. The version published in 1985 constitutes a serious evaluation of the development possibilities of such an undertaking, in view of military applications.

According to this document, a definitive evaluation of the possibility to produce and manipulate 10^13 antiprotons per second, and the construction of transportable antiproton reservoirs, should be realized within the next five to seven years; many important technological problems being able to be studied with ordinary particles instead of antiprotons. This same report mentions four main categories of applications: 'propulsion' (fuel for ultra-fast anti-missile rockets), 'power generators' (light and ultra-compact for military platforms in orbit), 'directed energy weapons' (antihydrogen beams or pumped lasers relying on very short duration energy release) and '"classified additional special weapons roles"' (various bombs triggered by antimatter).

If this is the case, it might well explain world governments' increasing willingness to spend big money for facilities on what would seem to benefit only a tiny physics community. For the payoff wouldn't be mere publications and academic accolades. But the realization of entirely new nuclear weapons designs.

Such a weapon might have many advantages over traditional nuclear weapons. For one, they wouldn't contaminate an area with significant long term radiation. Yet on detonation, neutron flux would be lethal for anyone within a few hundred meters much like neutron bomb designs today. For another, they could be made quite small, both in explosive yield and in physical size. Imagine a hand grenade sized nuclear bomb with the explosive capacity of 10 tons of TNT.

That's in comparison to the Hiroshima fission weapon that exploded with 16,000 tons of TNT equivalent that was so large it had to be carried as a single payload on a huge B29 bomber. And though modern day nuclear weapons are much smaller, some even having been reduced to the size of a large mortar round (see: Davy Crockett , and archive film of a Davy Crockett nuclear test and the Soviets apparently made a series of suitcase style nukes ), these devices are heavy and unwieldy for an individual soldier to field into combat. A pure fusion device could be much smaller. Handheld even. With the explosive capacity to destroy a large building or bridge.

See this informative Youtube video on the subject:

Such a weapon could finally make nuclear war feasible. Crossing that Rubicon of acceptance where nuclear war is no longer a deterrent based on Mutually Assured Destruction but an accepted element of deployable weapons on the battlefield. An escalation in the controllable use of force that could tip the global power balance between nations.

edit: fixed a link