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

> People demonstrate achieving fusion all the time.

I mean, not *all* the time. It takes a lot of equipment and power to create fusion, much less get a net energy gain out of it. If you aren’t in a massive test reactor you aren’t going to be demonstrating fusion.

> When building a bomb, we don’t really care about useful energy; we just want to release a lot of it.

We actually do care about useful energy since the aim is to make the fusion reaction release more energy than it took to start. Otherwise we would just use whatever we used to start the reaction alone as the explosive.

And therein lies the problem: Starting fusion is hard. It requires immense temperatures and pressures which you aren’t going to get out of conventional explosives. You can’t just have a fuse leading to deuterium and while hydrogen will burn violently when exposed to oxygen it isn’t nearly as powerful as conventional chemical explosives. Even carefully shaped charges using our most powerful conventional chemical explosives aren’t going to fuse the material of a warhead. Instead what we need is the power of a fission bomb to provide the heat and pressure to make the fusion fuel actually fuse and release even more energy.

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