MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons

The US Air Force has forbidden its employees from publicly discussing a new antimatter research program. However, details on the program have come to light in numerous Air Force documents distributed over the Internet prior to the ban.
These include an outline of a March 2004 speech by an Air Force official who, in effect, spilled the beans about the Air Force's high hopes for antimatter weapons.
Kenneth Edwards, director of the 'revolutionary munitions' team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida was keynote speaker at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) conference in Arlington, Va. In that talk, Edwards discussed the potential uses of a type of antimatter called positrons.

With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion, according to an estimate by scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and elsewhere, who hope to launch antimatter-fueled spaceships.