The Hydrogen Bomb

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The Hydrogen Bomb

The hydrogen bomb is a nuclear weapon in which light atomic nuclei of hydrogen are joined together in an uncontrolled nuclear fusion reaction to release huge amounts of energy. The hydrogen bomb is about a thousand time more powerful than the atomic bomb, which produces a nuclear fission explosion almost a million times more powerful than that of a comparably sized bomb using conventional high explosives such as TNT.

The atomic bomb was an essential first step towards the development of the hydrogen bomb, before the atomic bomb w2as developed by the United States during World War 2, there was no way to produce the extreme amounts of heat needed to initiate the fusion reaction of the hydrogen bomb. Even afer World Waar 2, the hydrogen bomb faced many political and technical obstacles. The U.S. government gace priority to perfecting and stockpiling atomic bombs, and scientists discovered that initiating a fusion reaction was mmore tehn somply placing a container of hydrogen near a fusion trigger.

Tension to develop the hydrogen bomb increased in the United States after the Sovier Union set off ites first atomic bomb in August 1949. The military, the joint congressional committee on atomic energy, and several noted physicists, including Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence, called for creation of a so-called super-bomb, but the general advisory of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, in agreement recommended that the bomb should not be developed, because of the technical difficulties involved, the need to enlarge the atomic bomb reserve, and because of the moral considerations. A mojarity of the AEC suppor...

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...n created tritium on the spot, which then fused with the deuterium in the compound. This method made it needless to produce expensive tritium in reactors and made it podddible to build fusion weapons that could fit into an airplane. The United States exploded a 15-megaton super device using this principle in the Bravo test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954 and a Soviet test followed a year later.

In the following years, development efforts were directed toward perfecting hydrogen bombs of various sizes that could be delivered by aircraft, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Bombs ranged in size from small-yield tactical weapons to the 60-megaton bomb exploded by the USSR in 1961.

The 60-megaton Soviet bomb is believed to have consisted of the first two parts of a fission-fusion-fission bomb.

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