What is the difference between nuclear and thermonuclear weapon?
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Nuclear bombs are made from uranium or plutonium. That’s the same kind of fuel we use for our nuclear plants. There’s also a regular explosive as the detonator that contributes close to nothing to the power. They can destroy a big city in one explosion, and have in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thermonuclear bombs are made from hydrogen. That’s the same kind of fuel that powers the sun, we are currently unable to use it to power plants. There’s also a regular *nuclear bomb* as the detonator that contributes close to nothing to the power. Let that sink in.
They can destroy an even bigger city even more thoroughly than nuclear bombs. Both are fucking abominations, but the thermonuclear one is an unnecessarily overkill abomination.
Thanks to how incredibly powerful they are, we can size them down, and put many of them on one missile. This allows one missile to obliterate a dozen different cities in one launch. So practical.
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.
A nuclear weapon is a bomb triggered by dynamite a thermonuclear weapon is a bomb triggered by nuclear weapons
They are both basically nuclear bombs.
A simple nuclear bomb is a “fission” bomb. This detonated by splitting apart huge, unstable atoms like types of Uranium or Plutonium. The heavy materials are hard to create, but the bomb itself If pretty simple.
A Thermonuclear Bomb is a “fusion” bomb. It creates energy by fusing together two smaller atoms, like hydrogen or helium. Those elements are super easy to create, but they require a lot of energy to create that fusion reaction.
To detonate a thermonuclear or “fusion” bomb, basically you need to start with a fission bomb as a primer to create the energy to start the chain reaction.
They are significant more complicated, but they yield a LOT more energy – like 1000x or more than a fission bomb.
Nuclear weapons split atoms apart (fission) go create the boom, usually uranium or plutonium.
Thermonuclear weapons fuse atoms together (fusion) to create the boom, usually hydrogen that fuse into helium this is why they’re sometimes called h-bombs. Because you need such an incredibly high temperature to achieve fusion thermonuclear bombs use a two stage design. They start with a fission explosion to get to a high enough temperature to set off the fusion explosion.
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