why splitting a tiny particle can cause such a devastating blast
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I don’t see much in responses to this post covering the strong nuclear force, so I’ll take a stab at that.
When the atom is split, it releases a large amount of energy (in relation to the size of the atom). Where does that energy come from?
As you may remember from high school science, atomic nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons. The protons are positively charged. Did it ever occur to you to wonder what’s holding them together? Positively charged particles repel each other, after all.
The force is called the strong nuclear force, or the strong interaction. When the (uranium) atom is split, some of the energy behind this force is released, along with a few neutrons. Those neutrons are so highly energetic that they can split other uranium atoms in the vicinity, thereby increasing the energy release exponentially.
So now you can use the numbers referred to elsewhere about how many atoms there in some amount of Uranium or Plutonium or whatever, and marvel at what E=mc^2 really means. Some of the mass that used to be part of the original atom is being converted to energy; the amount of energy is the amount of mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Einstein’s revelations gave rise to the theories that an atomic bomb was possible, and the rest was just a series of massive engineering projects.
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