Especially in terms of the Tsar Bomber – a relatively large weapon – which caused the biggest nuclear explosion ever. If nukes deal with atom sized particles, why does a bigger sized weapon = bigger explosion?
Unsure if correct flair but when dealing with nuclear weapons a few could apply
In: Engineering
All else being equal in the design of the weapon, more reactive mass means more reaction, which means a bigger boom, up to a point. But the actual design of the weapon plays a much larger part.
Little Boy (Hiroshima) was a gun-type bomb, shot some uranium at other uranium. This is very inefficient, little of the mass reacts. Fat Man (Nagasaki) was implosion, a bunch of explosives focused around a core of uranium, which caused a higher percentage of the uranium to fission.
But other things can change yield. With the Tsar Bomba they left out a fusion tamper, a sheath around the fusion core that not only promotes the fusion reaction, making it more efficient, but itself fissions to add to the yield of the bomb. Had they included the fusion tamper, the yield may have been almost double at about 100 megatons, and the bomb wouldn’t have been much bigger.
Our Castle Bravo nuclear fusion test of the 1950s expected a 6 megaton yield, but we got 15 because they thought a type of lithium they used would be effectively inert, but it instead contributed to the reaction. Same size, bigger yield because of design.
But like everything else in tech, things have just gotten smaller. In a modern bomb, the electronics are smaller, the high-speed detonators are smaller. At the time precisely focusing explosives to achieve reaction was a new concept, and the [soccer ball](https://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/default/files/03_nuclearweapons_02_implosion_03.jpg) was relatively large and crude. Today we’ve gotten much better at that, and can use much less explosives and fissile material to achieve the same result.
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