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isomer, August 4, 2006

A review from the Village Voice:

Sharon Weinberger's Imaginary Weapons is another tale of military technology?one more disturbing than Halter's. It's a fascinating investigation into the investment in the hafnium bomb, a device that entranced the military because salesmen promised a weapon with the bang of an atomic bomb in the size of a golf ball. As with Halter's book, one defining feature of the story is the military's enthusiastic pursuit of the dubious. In Imaginary Weapons, this is tied to the philosophy that the U.S. cannot afford to be taken by "technological surprise" by any adversary. This idea has fostered blind unreason and a penchant for pursuing any and all weapons projects, no matter how irrational.

In any case, "hafnium isomer" is a radioactive material that barely exists. It is expensive and difficult to make in even microscopic amounts, yet scientists receiving Pentagon funding became convinced it could be a wonder weapon in the war on terror. The hafnium bomb would be useful for sterilizing biological terror weapons hidden in underground bunkers. Another motivation was the logic?straight out of Dr. Strangelove?that America must not fall behind in a hafnium bomb gap to terrorists or rival nations. That there was no proof of any of this did not matter.

Even though reputable and independent teams of the nation's top physicists declared repeatedly that the science of the hafnium bomb was rubbish and the project impossible, outside oversight and common sense failed. The culprits in this were the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Tony Tether and the scientists from Texas who were the hafnium bomb's main adherents. Tether, like the self-confident boffins in Halter's book, is immune to poor reviews. It takes respected scientists chipping away at him for years to bring down the Pentagon's hafnium dreams, at which point he begins to flee from the reporter of Imaginary Weapons. In a better world, Tether would have been fired years ago.

The sense of outrage that Imaginary Weapons inspires isn't from the idea of a hafnium bomb, no matter how horrific it may have sounded. It could no more have been made than sand can be transformed into gasoline. But it suggests a systemic illness in the military, one in which people who deliver pipe dreams based on nonsense?gadgets that train rather than entertain, a golf ball than can demolish a city?are sought after as long as they can continue to make them.

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