What is the difference between nuclear and thermonuclear weapon?
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The first nuclear weapons worked by splitting atoms of uranium or plutonium. This was done by shooting a neutron at those uranium or plutonium atoms. This process is called fission. The bombs dropped in Japan during World War 2 worked like that. We called them fission bombs.
However, you can release even more energy (and therefore have even more powerful bombs) if instead of splitting uranium or plutonium atoms, you fuse atoms of hydrogen together. But it takes crazy high temperatures to fuse hydrogen atoms. Like the temperatures you find inside of the Sun or other stars. So in order to accomplish that in a weapon, you detonate a small fission bomb around the hydrogen you want to fuse. That small fission bomb creates a hot enough temperature to fuse the hydrogen atoms, causing an ever bigger and more powerful explosion. We call those thermonuclear weapons or fusion weapons.
So a thermonuclear weapon are two nuclear weapons into one: A small fission bomb serves as the trigger to the fusion bomb.
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