ELI5. Why do you need to use heavy hydrogen to start a fusion reaction?

Question

I am pretty sure the sun fuses just standard one proton hydrogen. So why do we need to use deuterium and tritium for our bombs?

In: Physics

Answer 1

It skips a step. The way the Sun fuses actually does involve making heavy hydrogen on the way to making helium, so by starting at heavy hydrogen we skip a step and can save a ton of energy by noting having to fuse it.