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

You need fission as a stage 1 to ignite your stage 2 fusion reaction. I didn’t read far but it seems like the goal is to have your fission and fusion reactions both happening at the same time, each one making the other more intense. Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

Perhaps another way to answer the question is that getting a fusion reaction to output more energy than you put in is very difficult and IIRC has only bearly been achieved in lab settings.

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