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A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lower mass, or a combination of these benefits.
A pure fusion weapon is a hypothetical hydrogen bomb design that does not need a fission "primary" explosive to ignite the fusion of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen used in fission-fusion thermonuclear weapons.
[14] [15] The cryogenic deuterium provided the fuel for the "secondary" stage of the explosion. [9]: 43 At one end of the cylindrical Dewar flask was a TX-5 [16]: 66 regular fission bomb (not boosted [16]: 43 ). The TX-5 bomb was used to create the conditions needed to initiate the fusion reaction.
The first stage of the bomb was a uranium charge with a capacity of 1.5 Mt, [36] which produced a large amount of radioactive fallout, but more than 97% of the explosion power was provided by a thermonuclear fusion reaction, which does not create a significant amount of radioactive contamination.
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
A nuclear weapon [a] is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter.
The first Soviet fusion design, developed by Andrei Sakharov and Vitaly Ginzburg in 1949 (before the Soviet Union had a working fission bomb), was dubbed the Sloika, after a Russian layered puff pastry, and was not of the Teller–Ulam configuration, but rather used alternating layers of fissile material and lithium deuteride fusion fuel spiked ...
The radiation from the exploding fission primary brought the fuel in the fusion secondary to critical density and pressure, setting off thermonuclear (fusion) chain reactions, which in turn set off a tertiary fissioning of the bomb's 238 U fusion tamper and casing. Consequently, this type of bomb is also known as a "fission-fusion-fission" device.