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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While the fusion of Hydrogen into Helium releases more energy than it needs to start, fusion still requires a LOT of energy to even start. So much that it only naturally occurs in stars and supernovae. So for a fusion bomb to work, there has to be another massive burst of energy to get the fusion reaction going.
A lot of people have already answered this but I want to add that, in a way it works like any other bomb. With C4 for instance you can shoot it with a gun or light it on fire and it won’t explode. It needs a blasting cap to detonate. The nuclear fission is basically the blasting cap for the fusion bomb.
Every reaction, chemical or nuclear, has an activation energy. Basically, it’s the amount of energy needed to start the transformation from the reactants to the products. Once you hit that activation energy, the reaction can go and energy can be released. Fusion has an incredibly high activation energy but once you cross it, it releases a ton of energy.
Hydrogen starts to fuse at 100 Mil degrees. If you can get there without uranium, be my guest.
Because that’s the only way to initiate the fusion process in a device of a reasonable size and weight to be delivered as a weapon. It’s not really feasible to deliver a weapon that’s the size and weight of a stadium.
Hydrogen bombs use hydrogen fusion to achieve the boom boom. The problem with that is that you have to put the hydrogen under a ridiculous amount of pressure before you achieve fusion.
What scientists found is that the easiest way to achieve the pressures necessary to kick off the fusion reaction is to use a fission explosion, hence the uranium.
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