The pre-print, which is from 2003 but went viral today, proposes a massive simultaneous disarming of all nuclear weapons on earth at once.
This question will resolve yes if even a single nuclear weapon is confirmed to have been disarmed/destroyed by a neutrino beam before 2034 as described in the pre-print. A successful test would still count.
Resolution will be based on a consensus of reliable media reports. Question may resolve to "no" early if the entire concept is definitively debunked as being literally physically impossible due to some flaw in the science. As judgment of any such debunking is subjective, I will not trade in this market.
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Okay, the paper is kind of hilarious:
We emphasize that the whole technology is futuristic and the reason should be clear to all the accelerator experts. Actually, even the simplest prototype of our proposal, i.e. the neutrino factory of GeV range needs substantial R & D work. We also note that a 1000 TeV machine requires the accelerator circumference of the order of 1000 km with the magnets of ≃ 10 Tesla which is totally ridiculous. Only if we can invent a magnet which can reach almost one order of magnitude higher field than the currently available magnet, the proposal can approach the reality. Even if it becomes the reality, the cost of the construction is of the order of or more than 100 billion US$. Also we note that the power required for the operation of the machine may exceed 50 GW taking the efficiency into account. This is above the total power of Great Britain. This implies that no single country will be able to afford the construction of this machine and also the operation time must be strictly restricted. We believe the only way this machine may be built is when all the countries on earth agree to do it by creating an organization which may be called the “World Government” for which this device becomes the means of enforcement.
At least the authors acknowledge how ridiculous the idea is.
@PlasmaBallin The Superconducting Supercollider, which never got built because it was too expensive, would have had an energy of 20 TeV. So even that would be 50 times less than what's needed here.
@PlasmaBallin Too expensive if you just want to do science, but if you could disable nuclear bombs, suddenly the price tag is worth it.
@Odoacre Maybe the price tag for the SSC would have been worth it, but the price tag for the device proposed in the paper would be so astronomically huge that no country could pay for it. As the paper mentioned, with current technology it would require a 1000 km circumference accelerator and more power than what all of Great Britain uses.
@Odoacre I doubt that the cost scales linearly with the energy of the beam. It may be "only" 50 times more powerful, but I'd bet everything I've got that it would cost WAY more than 50 times as much. If it were possible. The SSC wasn't a neutrino beam after all.
@Pykess I was not implying the costs would scale linearly. Just saying almost any price would be worth it, as long as it's actually feasible to build it (and it actually works).
Nuclear existential threat distorts all policy since it's existential.
How much would you pay for a pill that makes you immune from cancer?