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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>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.
It is not useful energy that you get more out of than you put in with the recent laser-based fusion announcement from the National Ignition Facility. It is more energy released from fusion than laser energy. Lasers are not 100% efficient and you can convert 100% of the released energy to something useful like electricity. The electricity used to power the laser was more then the electricity that could be extracted from the heat the reaction created.
But even with a nuclear bomb, you do care about energy. Warheads need to be delivered to the target and be stored for a long time. If you need a hure amount of energy to initiate the fusion reaction directly where will it come from? And if it is not a lot less the fusion release why do fusion to begin with and not just release that energy directly?
The energy wet talks about in the National Ignition Facility experiment is 2.05 megajoules of laser energy and 3.15 megajoules of energy released. The lasers required vell over 400 megajoules of energy. So even if you could extract all the energy from the fusion that is still less the a hundred of what the lasers consumed.
The facility has a footprint of three football files, how to you deliver it to a target from a nuclear weapon? The weapon will need to be a ship that you use like a nuclear torpedo.
The is question how muse energy is 3.15 megajoules? 3.15 megajoules = 3,140,000 joules. A kilocalorie that is called just a calorie for food is 4,184 joules. so 1000 food calories is a bit over 4 megajoules.
The sugar we eat contains 17 MJ/kg usable for us. So 3.15 megajoules is the energy in a bit less than 200 grams of sugar.
TNT which is an explosive that is often used for comparison contains 4.184 megajoules per kg, the fusion reaction released less energy than 1 kg of explosives. Explosive contains less energy the sugar, and one reason it the need to release it quickly. Another is sugar cheats, the energy is from sugar and oxygen that is taken from the atmosphere.
A 105mm artillery shell, which is a smaller caliber used for howitzers today has around 2 Kg of explosives in it, the total projective weight is around 15 kg. A hand grande have around 0.2 kg of explosive so
So the ship-sized laser-initiated nuclear fusion weapons release less energy than quite a small artillery shell or five-hand grades.
So we do care about releasing energy for bombs and using nonfission triggered fusion reaction make conventional explosives look extremely efficient
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