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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.
After Truman ordered the crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb in January 1950, the Boston Daily Globe published a cutaway description of a hypothetical hydrogen bomb with the caption Artist's conception of how H-bomb might work using atomic bomb as a mere "trigger" to generate enough heat to set up the H-bomb's "thermonuclear fusion" process.
This casing, called the pusher, thus has three jobs: to keep the secondary cool; to hold it, inertially, in a highly compressed state; and, finally, to serve as the chief energy source for the entire bomb. The consumable pusher makes the bomb more a uranium fission bomb than a hydrogen fusion bomb. Insiders never used the term "hydrogen bomb". [29]
The hydrogen bomb primarily has 2 units: a nuclear bomb, which was the primary unit, and a secondary energy unit. The first stage of the hydrogen bomb resembled the layer-cake design, except the main difference is that the initiation is carried out by a nuclear device, rather than a conventional explosive. [ 10 ]
Using a combination of explosive wave-shaping and "gun-barrel" design, up to 5% of a small nuclear bomb could reportedly be converted into kinetic energy driving a beam of particles with a beam angle of 0.001 radians (0.057 degrees), far more concentrated than the earlier-proposed plasma jet, though this decreases to 1% efficiency at 50 ...
The hydrogen bomb, which carried the force of 50 million tons of conventional explosives, was detonated in a test in October 1961, 4,000 meters over the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago above the ...
MC3810 Mk5 Arming, Fuzing and Firing system used on the W88. The W88 is an American thermonuclear warhead, with an estimated yield of 475 kilotons of TNT (1,990 TJ), [2] and is small enough to fit on MIRVed missiles.
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