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In effect each bomb would be a nuclear shaped charge. A bomb with a cylinder of reaction mass expands into a flat, disk-shaped wave of plasma when it explodes. A bomb with a disk-shaped reaction mass expands into a far more efficient cigar-shaped wave of plasma debris. The cigar shape focuses much of the plasma to impinge onto the pusher-plate ...
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.
RDS-6s (Russian: РДС-6с, from the Soviet codename for their atomic bombs Russian: Реактивный Двигатель Специальный, lit. 'special jet engine'; American codename: Joe 4) was the first Soviet attempted test of a thermonuclear weapon that occurred on August 12, 1953, that detonated with a force equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT.
In the ensuing fifty years, no one has come up with a more efficient way to build a thermonuclear bomb. It is the design of choice for the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, China, and France, the five thermonuclear powers. On 3 September 2017 North Korea carried out what it reported as its first "two-stage thermo-nuclear weapon" test. [31]
Though nuclear fusion was technically achieved, it did not have the scaling property of a staged weapon, and their first hydrogen bomb test, Joe 4, is considered a hybrid fission/fusion device more similar to a large boosted fission weapon than a Teller–Ulam weapon (though using an order of magnitude more fusion fuel than a boosted weapon).
The remaining bomb casings are located at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum in Sarov and the Museum of Nuclear Weapons, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics, in Snezhinsk. Tsar Bomba was a modification of an earlier project, RN202, which used a ballistic case of the same size but a very different internal mechanism. [ 16 ]
Weapon No. 1, a Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear weapon, as found by the explosive ordnance disposal team after the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash. On January 24, 1961, two Mark 39 Mod 2 nuclear bombs that were carried by a B-52 Stratofortress which broke up in the air and crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina. The bombs were flung from the aircraft in ...
The "dirty" variant used a depleted uranium or U-238 tamper-pusher which would undergo fission during the second stage fusion burn, doubling the weapon yield. Chuck Hansen wrote in Swords of Armageddon (1995) that Mark 36 nuclear bomb was produced in two yield versions, clean and dirty. He stated that a clean version of a Mark 36 had a yield of ...