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Nuclear Concept | A hydrogen bomb is a thermonuclear weapon deriving its explosive force from nuclear fusion reactions triggered by a fission primary, making it orders of magnitude more powerful than a fission bomb alone. | 1952 | Eniwetok Atoll |
A hydrogen bomb, also known as a fusion device, is a nuclear weapon that derives its explosive energy from nuclear fusion reactions. It is far more powerful than a fission weapon. The development of the hydrogen bomb, code-named "Super," involved solving two central problems: how to ignite the fusion material and how to make it burn efficiently. Scientists at Los Alamos developed a two-stage device, where a fission bomb is triggered (the first stage) inside the warhead, and the radiation from this fission device then compresses and ignites a special thermonuclear fuel (the second stage). Deuterium or lithium deuteride can be used as the thermonuclear fuel.1
The first successful test of a thermonuclear device took place in 1952 at Eniwetok, an atoll in the western Pacific, producing a crater over a mile in diameter and 164 feet deep. This device was 650 times as powerful as the primitive device dropped at Hiroshima. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first two-stage hydrogen bomb in 1955, and in 1961, detonated the largest known hydrogen bomb with an explosive force of fifty-eight megatons.1 In 1980, according to Ari Ben-Menashe, Mordechai Tsippori, director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, gave the go-ahead for Israel to develop a hydrogen bomb for testing.2