Usually atomic bombs are composed of Uranium-235, Uranium-238, and Plutonium (if I am wrong, please correct me), all of which have an alpha decay. However, if alpha particles have the least penetrating power, and can be stopped through something a thin as a piece of paper, how is it so dangerous?
edit: Sorry for the confusion, I meant how is the radiation from it dangerous, not the initial explosion. However it seems my question has been answered on both accounts. Thank you to everyone who answered! I have a better understanding of it now.
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Because when they’re a bomb, they aren’t doing alpha decay.
It turns out, if you can force enough neutrons into the system, you can have some of those neutrons hit your fuel. Then that fuel breaks apart into 2 much smaller atoms, usually krypton, iodine, and other things around that size, in addition to 2 more neutrons. (And also in addition, it releases 1,000,000x the energy of a conventional explosion’s base reaction)
Now we started this with one neutron, hitting your fuel, and now you have 2 neutrons, each of which can hit another atom, which doubles the number of neutrons again, and this repeats in a chain reaction, doubling the number of neutrons, and doubling the released energy. After like a quarter second of this chain reaction, you’ll have “fissioned” quite a bit of your original fuel. And each fission reaction is more potent than any chemical reaction, so it’s not hard to make it be a very big bomb.
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