how the nucleus of an atom is actually split to create an atomic bomb?
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Imagine a marble. You shoot a glass fragment at it so hard that the marble shatters, mostly into 2 pieces. Some of the glass fragments from the marble shattering go on to split other marbles, and those split to send out more shards to split more marbles, and soon you have a growing cloud of speeding glass shards. Once everything’s done shattering, you have tiny glass particles floating in the air, and the marble halves are on the ground, making it hard to walk without cutting yourself
Only instead of marbles, you have an atomic nucleus made of protons and neutrons. The neutrons are the glass shards. They hit the nucleus and disrupt the balance, leaving radioactive isotopes (the marble halves) and speeding neutrons (glass shards) that go to hit other atoms in a chain reaction.
This is how a fission bomb works. Fusion bombs are kinda the opposite. The glass halves fuse together and create light and heat, which makes the right environment for more fusion
With scissors, it’s a very tedious process but when it comes time someone’s gotta do it. I assume it’s some sort of punishment in the military to be the guy that splits it. Probably a pretty severe one and that explains why only a couple have gone off.
Fission. The isotopes uranium-235 and plutonium-239 were selected by the atomic scientists because they readily undergo fission. Fission occurs when a neutron strikes the nucleus of either isotope, splitting the nucleus into fragments and releasing a tremendous amount of energy.
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