What is the difference between nuclear and thermonuclear weapon?
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Lithium Deuteride.
No, really. You take an ordinary uranium or plutonium implosion bomb, and you put in the bomb. Back in 1954, this was discovered by accident in the [Castle Bravo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo), the most spectacular nuclear accident in American history.
They expected the yeild of the bomb was supposed to be 6 megatons, it turned out to be 15. What happens inside the reaction is that the lithium is struck by a neutron released by the fission of uranium or plutonium, and breaks into hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, which are then fused, and that fusion produces enormous energy. The reason the yeild was so unexpectedly large is that the designers of the device thought that only 40% of the lithium deuteride was going to produce fusion isotopes, and it turned out that all of it did.
Boom.
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