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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A lot of people have already answered this but I want to add that, in a way it works like any other bomb. With C4 for instance you can shoot it with a gun or light it on fire and it won’t explode. It needs a blasting cap to detonate. The nuclear fission is basically the blasting cap for the fusion bomb.
Every reaction, chemical or nuclear, has an activation energy. Basically, it’s the amount of energy needed to start the transformation from the reactants to the products. Once you hit that activation energy, the reaction can go and energy can be released. Fusion has an incredibly high activation energy but once you cross it, it releases a ton of energy.
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