I forgot to mention a critical factor. Heat stimulation of cold fusion reactions seems to occur remarkably slowly. Fleischmann and Biberian both told me they used a heat pulse to trigger the boil off reaction. It worked something like this:
Turn up electrolysis power for 3 minutes. The temperature starts to rise. Turn the power back down again. Temperature stabilizes, starts to fall . . . Wait for it . . . Wait for it . . . Minutes later the cell starts to self-heat, as positive feedback kicks in. It ramps up slowly, over several minutes, and finally reaches the "climax" boil off (as Biberian calls it). It is more like lighting a pile of firewood than a pile of gunpowder. Maybe this slow build up reaction is function of bulk Pd and would not happen with nanoparticles, but I do not know of any evidence for that. To summarize, if I am right and the only way one cold fusion reaction can trigger another is by raising the temperature, and if this trigger acts in an oddly slow manner, then you cannot make a runaway chain reaction style bomb. Clearly you can make some kind of bomb, because bombs have been made by accident. They have released more energy than a chemical bomb of the same mass can, although nobody knows how quickly the reaction took place. In the future, there may be some nasty little compact cold fusion bombs that fit into fake cell phones and cause a lot more damage than a chemical bomb of the same dimensions. But it seems unlikely they will destroy entire cities. As a WMD, it seems unpromising, although I will grant the reaction is not yet understood or controlled, so who knows. Other, conventional WMD such as sarin or anthrax seem better . . . er, more promising . . . uh, more practical. Horace Heffner says his theory predicts I am wrong. That may be, but theory does not count. I have to see experimental evidence showing that I am wrong. If someone can show a trigger that works very rapidly with a huge amount of NEA, or what appears to be a very rapid chain reaction by some mechanism I have not heard of, then I am wrong. - Jed
