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Rope trick effects visible from one of Operation Tumbler–Snapper's tower-mounted test shots in 1952, taken with a rapatronic camera. The adjacent photograph shows two unusual phenomena: bright spikes projecting from the bottom of the fireball, and the peculiar mottling of the expanding fireball surface.
Some nuclear bombers had the underside of the fuselage painted anti-flash white with the upper surfaces painted light silver-gray. This was true for the specially fitted, single Soviet Tu-95V bomber that test-deployed the most powerful bomb of any kind – the 50+ MT-rating Tsar Bomba on 30 October 1961 – as it had the anti-flash white on all ...
Sand will fuse into glass if it is close enough to the nuclear fireball to be drawn into it, and is thus heated to the necessary temperatures to do so; this is known as trinitite. [39] At the explosion of nuclear bombs lightning discharges sometimes occur. [40] Smoke trails are often seen in photographs of nuclear explosions.
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 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.
The amount is nominal, usually 1 or 2 percent, sometimes a bit more, of the intrinsic value to the owner of the thing salved. But the thing salved off Palomares was a thermonuclear bomb, the same bomb valued by no less an authority than the Secretary of Defense at $2 billion—each percent of which is, of course, $20 million.
In a standard thermonuclear design, a small fission bomb is placed close to a larger mass of thermonuclear fuel, usually lithium deuteride. The two components are then placed within a thick radiation case, usually made from uranium, lead, or steel. The case traps the energy from the fission bomb for a brief period, allowing it to heat and ...
A nuclear close call is an incident that might have led to at least one unintended nuclear detonation or explosion, but did not. These incidents typically involve a perceived imminent threat to a nuclear-armed country which could lead to retaliatory strikes against the perceived aggressor.