Meson bomb
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The meson bomb was a proposed nuclear weapon that would derive its destructive force from meson interactions with fissionable material like uranium.[1] The idea behind the bomb was rejected by most scientists, but during the Cold War, American intelligence managed to trick the Soviet Union into conducting research on this topic, which resulted in several years of wasted labor by one of the Soviet nuclear weapon research bureaus.[citation needed]
Mesons (hadronic subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by the strong interaction) were proposed to form a nuclear weapon as early as the 1940s. Early speculation suggested that the resulting bomb would be the most powerful nuclear weapon yet to have been developed.[1][2] American physicist Ernest Lawrence used the potential military applications of mesons to obtain funding for its 184-inch (4,700 mm) synchrocyclotron built between 1940 and 1946 at the University of California, Berkeley.[3] Soon, however, the scientific consensus was that construction of such a bomb would be impossible; and in 1968 physicist M. Stanley Livingston wrote that "no responsible scientists would attempt to justify support in this field with predictions of an 'anti-matter engine,' or a super 'meson bomb,' or a 'hyper-drive' for spaceships."[4]