Over at CMNS I wrote a longish message about this. The question arises: Can cold fusion be used to generate large explosions? In my book, chapter 12, p. 103, I reported that most experts did not think explosions are possible. I listed the reasons. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf In Chapter 11 I described how cold fusion can enhance ordinary weapons. This is analogous to the way steam engines enhanced existing weapons in the 19th century. Steam engines themselves are not a weapon, but they enhanced battleships by allowing much heavier, faster, ironclad ships. You could not power such heavy ships with sails alone. I digress . . . Anyway, Fleischmann thought that it might be possible to use cold fusion for large explosions. I do not know how big, but he described them as "enhanced." I think he meant that a cold fusion shell or bomb might produce dangerous radiation. Maybe he also had in mind that a shell could create an explosion much hotter or larger than a chemical explosive of the same mass? Even if it was not a kiloton or megaton scale explosion. I don't know what he thought, but you can find out. See the letters I uploaded recently: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanlettersfroa.pdf See, for example, letter 20011-01-11. Look for references to "D.U." (depleted uranium) and "Bridgman." (Also look for that name spelled wrong, as "Bridgeman." See, for example, this this comment in his abstract "BACKGROUND TO COLD FUSION: THE GENESIS OF A CONCEPT," which I included in the letters: . . . One was the observation of “cold explosions” by Bridgeman in the 1930’s (intense compression of lattices can lead to their fragmentation into small particles in which the high energy of the initial system is contained in the kinetic energy of the fragments; surely a process which can only be explained by Q.E.D.?); p. 395 That is the abstract. I think he or I spelled the name "Bridgeman" wrong in this file. Yup: Percy Williams Bridgman. The paper by that title is here: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanbackground.pdf See p. 6: By 1983 we had reached a position where it seemed logical to ask the next question posed in Fig. 1: suppose the division of solid phases into coherent and incoherent structures was also true for Nuclear Physics. If that was so, then would we be able to use the perturbations at the 1 eV level (characteristic of chemical changes) to create coherent structures at the GEV level? Furthermore, would we be able to observe nuclear processes in such structures? Of course, in posing these questions we were also influenced byother relevant work such as the interpretation of Mossbauer spectra, see (1) and, especially, the observations of “Cold Explosions” by Bridgman in the 1930’s (7) . . . Note that Mel sent me several more pages of letters. I have prepared them in a new document 200 pages long. I will add these letters to the original document, inserting them in chronological order, and upload a new version. I plan to do that soon. If anyone would like assist me by proofreading the latest batch, please contact me. There are only a few additional comments about D.U. and weapons in the new set of letters. The comments look pretty much the same as the previous ones. So, you can read all about this now, in the two papers I linked to above. - Jed
