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?
In: 1
There’s roughly 3 things human can make that can trigger nuclear fusion.
1. A lot of extraordinarily powerful magnets.
2. A lot of extraordinarily powerful lasers.
3. A fission bomb
1 and 2 are with current technology are either the size of a large building and thus unsuitable to be launched by missile.
Or only capable of fusing tiny amounts of hydrogen at once.
A fission bomb, or even multiple fission bombs are small enough to launch in a missile, and capable of fusing absurd amounts of deuterium/tritium.
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