The difference between an nuclear bomb and a hydrogen bomb.
In: Engineering
There are atomic (fission) bombs, that release energy through the splitting of heavy atoms. The bombs dropped on Japan were these, and had explosive outputs of around 15,000 tons of TNT. Their fuel is typically either uranium-235 or plutonium-239.
There are also hydrogen (thermonuclear/fusion) bombs, that release energy through both the splitting of heavy atoms _and_ the fusion of light atoms. They work by using the energy released from fission to ignite the fusion reactions, which then usually produce more fission reactions. The first hydrogen bombs, developed in the 1950s, had explosive outputs around 15,000,000 tons of TNT. But you can build them to have outputs more like 150,000 tons of TNT, which is what most modern nuclear weapons are like — small H-bombs, which are very efficient in terms of weight and size, and so you can put many of them on top of a single missile. The fusion fuel can be types of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium), or a type of lithium.
Both of these types of weapons go under the mutual heading of “nuclear weapons.” There are of course many little complexities (you can have fission bombs that use a little bit of fusion but aren’t really hydrogen bombs, because they aren’t using the energy from the fusion so much as just using the fusion to generate some neutrons; this is called “boosting”) not covered by these two categories.
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