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The first test, Green Granite, was a prototype fusion bomb that failed to produce equivalent yields compared to the U.S. and Soviets, achieving only approximately 300 kt (1,300 TJ). The second test Orange Herald was the modified fission bomb and produced 720 kt (3,000 TJ)—making it the largest fission explosion ever. At the time almost ...
Nuclear fission separates or splits heavier atoms to form lighter atoms. Nuclear fusion combines lighter atoms to form heavier atoms. Both reactions generate roughly a million times more energy than comparable chemical reactions, making nuclear bombs a million times more powerful than non-nuclear bombs, which a French patent claimed in May 1939.
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 ...
There are other types of nuclear weapons as well. For example, a boosted fission weapon is a fission bomb that increases its explosive yield through a small number of fusion reactions, but it is not a fusion bomb. In the boosted bomb, the neutrons produced by the fusion reactions serve primarily to increase the efficiency of the fission bomb.
In the mid-1970s, Project PACER, carried out at LANL explored the possibility of exploding small hydrogen bombs (fusion bombs) inside an underground cavity. [48]:25 As an energy source, the system was the only system that could work using the technology of the time. It required a large, continuous supply of nuclear bombs, however, with ...
Fission vs. fusion. Nuclear fission is the opposite of nuclear fusion in that the former unleashes energy by splitting heavy atoms apart. While fission and fusion both produce clean energy in ...
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.
RDS-7, a backup for the RDS-6, the RDS-7 was a 500 kiloton all fission bomb comparable to the US Mk-18, development dropped after success of the RDS-6S; RDS-27, 250 kiloton bomb, a 'boosted' fission bomb tested 6 November 1955. RDS-37, 3 megaton bomb, the first Soviet two-stage hydrogen bomb, tested 22 November 1955