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

A uranium or plutonium fission bomb is the only way to get the energy required to start fusion in a size that is transportable.

[The NIF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility?wprov=sfla1), where they just achieved breakeven, uses lasers for fusion. The length the laser light has to travel is over 1500 meters long. There is no way to make this even remotely transportable as a complete package.

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