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

No one knows how to make a practical pure fusion weapon yet (or if they do they’re not publicizing the fact). The problem is that it takes a ton of energy to trigger fusion. If you don’t particular care about how big your setup is you can use things like lasers to do this, which is what the guys “achieving fusion all the time” tend to do. Nuclear weapons however are designed to fit onto places where here space and weight are at a real premium, like missiles. As a result if you want to make a worthwhile fusion bomb you need to come up with something that is very small but capable of creating the intense conditions needed to trigger fusion. We don’t really have options besides nuclear fission at the moment.

As an aside, if you give up practicality, supposedly there are some designs out there for “pure fusion” systems, but when you factor in the weight of everything involved they don’t have an advantage over a similar mass of high explosives (unless you consider bathing everything within a few hundred meters of your multi-ton ‘bomb’ in a sea of radiation to be an advantage).

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