how the nucleus of an atom is actually split to create an atomic bomb?
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Imagine having a giant pile of slightly sticky/magnetic marbles.
Imagine throwing another marble at the pile, very fast. What happens?
The pile will break apart, scattering. A few marbles will end up shooting off on their own, and then you’ll get a few smaller piles of marbles.
The marbles are “happier” in smaller piles because while each marble wants to be close to other marbles, they also want to be close to the floor (because gravity). And if you have two smaller piles, the average marble will be closer to the floor than if you had one big pile.
In energy terms, this means the marbles have less energy, on average, in the smaller piles than they did in the big pile.
If the new state has less energy, that energy must have come out somewhere; and it will have come out in the energy of those few marbles that went shooting off, along with a bunch of noise and heat from all the marbles crashing down.
A nuclear *fission* bomb works this way. You take a large, unstable nucleus (uranium, plutonium – something like that), you smash it with something, and it breaks apart into a bunch of smaller nuclei. You get a few random neutrons flung out … which then hit the neighbouring nuclei, breaking them apart. Which throw out more neutrons, hitting more nuclei and so on – a chain reaction, that goes “supercritical” and increases until you run out of big nuclei. The equivalent of all the “noise and heat” from above is what causes the explosion; there is a little bit of extra energy that comes out in the form of photons – bundles of energy – which smash into everything anywhere near the bomb. And you get an explosion. You don’t get a huge amount of energy from each individual nucleus, but you have a whole load of nuclei.
Nuclear *fusion* bombs work slightly differently. With fusion it is more like taking a few of these magnetic marbles, holding them near each other, and letting them smash into each other. You get a bunch of energy out (the noise and heat from the smash), and that is where the explosion comes from.
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