AAWSAP DIRD, Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space Missions, March 2010

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document is dated 11 March 2010. It was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office as part of the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It is a technical paper arguing that spacecraft driven by deuterium thermonuclear reactions could be built with current science and could reach the outer solar system. It covers magnetic insulation, ignition by proton beams, a Super Marx generator and conjectured chemical superexplosives. It does not discuss any UFO sightings.

From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/11/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines advanced nuclear propulsion for crewed deep-space travel and argues that human missions beyond the Moon would require propulsion systems with both very high thrust and very high specific impulse, which the author contends are difficult to achieve with conventional chemical, nuclear-thermal, and nuclear-electric systems. The report focuses on concepts derived from Project Orion, the discontinued General Atomics nuclear pulse propulsion study sponsored first by ARPA and later by the U.S. Air Force between 1958 and 1965, in which a spacecraft would be driven by repeated nuclear explosions. In this case, the DIRD emphasizes small non-fission-triggered fusion explosions using deuterium, magnetic mirrors, and other unconventional ignition concepts intended to avoid the inefficiencies associated with small fission devices. It presents these ideas as a possible pathway to crewed missions across the solar system, while also linking them to broader visions of long-range human expansion into space. The document is exploratory in character and depends on several unproven ignition methods, enabling technologies, and engineering assumptions. Overall, it is a theoretical examination of fusion-based pulse propulsion concepts rather than as a documentary account of a technology nearing practical realization.

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gold, in the two foci of an ellipsoidal cavity. The radiation released by the exploding
fission bomb, by ablating the gold, launches a convergent shock wave into the liq uid
deuterium. With the temperature in the shock wave approximately rising as 1/r , where
r is the distance of the shock wave from the center of the deuterium sphere, the
ignition temperature is reached at some distance from the center. But only if this
distance is larger than the stopping length of the DD fusion reaction products, typically
a few cm, is a radia lly outward-moving detonation wave ig nited. This configuration is
essentially the same kind of "hohlraum" (cavity) configuration used in the indirect drive
mode of laser fusion for a small DT sphere.
A configuration of this kind can still be used to burn deuterium if t he DT microexplosion
is used to trigger a larger deuterium explosion. For a starship that will depend on
deuterium as its only rocket fuel, this possibility is excluded.
But another possibility arises if the ignition is done with a 107 -ampere gigaelectronvolt
(GeV) proton (or deuterium) beam. If focused onto one end of a slender, cylindrical
deuterium rod, the beam not only can be made powerful enough to ignite the
deuterium, but its strong azimuthal magnetic field entraps the charged DD reaction
fusion products within the deuterium cylinder, launching a deuterium detonation wave
propagating with supersonic speed down the cylinder (Reference 13). There the fusion
gain and yield can in principle be made arbitrarily large, depending only on the length
of the deuterium rod.
The range of the charged fusion products is determined by their Larmor radius
a
r, = (12)
B
where
C (2MAE/ 12
Q - ----- (13)
e Z
In equation (13), c, e are the velocity of light and the electron charge, M the hydrogen
mass, A the atomic weight, and Z the atomic number. Eis the kinetic energy of t he
fusion products.
If the magnetic field is produced by the proton beam current I, one has at the surface
of the deuterium cylinder the azimuthal magnetic field
(14)
Combining equation (12) with equation (14) and requiring that r, < r, one finds that
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