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Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Castle. Detonated on 1 March 1954, the device remains the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States and the first lithium deuteride -fueled ...
Comparative fireball radii for a selection of nuclear weapons. [citation needed] Contrary to the image, which may depict the initial fireball radius, the maximum average fireball radius of Castle Bravo, a 15-megatonne yield surface burst, is 3.3 to 3.7 km (2.1 to 2.3 mi), [6] [7] and not the 1.42 km displayed in the image.
Operation Castle was an unqualified success for the implementation of dry fuel devices. The Bravo design was quickly weaponized and is suspected to be the progenitor of the Mk-21 gravity bomb. The Mk-21 design project began on 26 March 1954 (just three weeks after Bravo), with production of 275 weapons beginning in late 1955.
But as was discovered in the first test of this type of device, Castle Bravo, when lithium-7 is present, one also has some amounts of the following two net reactions: 7 Li + 1 n → 3 T + 4 He + 1 n 7 Li + 2 H → 2 4 He + 1 n + 15.123 MeV. Most lithium is 7 Li, and this gave Castle Bravo a yield 2.5 times larger than expected. [16]
The second series of tests in 1954 was codenamed Operation Castle. The first detonation was Castle Bravo, which tested a new design utilizing a dry-fuel thermonuclear bomb. It was detonated at dawn on March 1, 1954. Scientists miscalculated: the 15 Mt of TNT nuclear explosion far exceeded the expected yield of 4–8 Mt of TNT (6 predicted). [6]
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In other words, the capture of a neutron by lithium-7 causes it to split into an energetic helium nucleus (alpha particle), a hydrogen-3 nucleus and a free neutron. The Castle Bravo accident, in which the thermonuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1954 exploded with 2.5 times the expected yield, was caused by the unexpectedly high probability ...
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