Why are there no nuclear bombs that only use hydrogen without any uranium?

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As far as I know, access to uranium is tightly controlled for obvious reasons, but hydrogen is everywhere, and even getting access to deuterium shouldn’t be too hard.

There is also the fact that most modern thermonuclear bombs “only” use the fission bomb to trigger the hydrogen bomb.

People demonstrate achieving fusion all the time. The problem is getting useful energy out of it. When building a bomb, we don’t really care about useful energy; we just want to release a lot of it.

So why aren’t people building purely fusion based thermonuclear weapons left and right?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Because that’s the only way to initiate the fusion process in a device of a reasonable size and weight to be delivered as a weapon. It’s not really feasible to deliver a weapon that’s the size and weight of a stadium.

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