It’s a fundamentally different and riskier paradigm. Nuclear weapons at rest are inert, and can even be disarmed. If the lock falls off the gate at the compound, the nukes won’t spontaneously explode.
Antimatter is always “armed” and is only rendered safe by containment. If containment fails, it explodes. It’s more like keeping a massive stockpile of fluorine, but somehow worse and harder to contain.
Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?
Antimatter bombs are not a realistic technology. Aside from the unsolved technical issues - many, and fatal - no country has the GDP needed to make 1g of antimatter, which would make an explosion around 40kT.
We can't afford to blow up ourselves that way.
There are plenty of other ways we can afford, so antimatter isn't top of anyone's worries.
On the other hand the Air force is getting the workout of their lifetime. Which could come in handy. The low bodycount among US military so far makes the whole clusterfuck just and expensive training program.
Personally - I don't lose skills. I am just too lazy to apply them. I can dig and grep a codebase with the best of them. But Codex is just faster and easier.
One of the biggest drawbacks of intellectual work was not the thinking but the amount of context you had to keep in your head. Now we have the ultimate tool to build context.
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