why splitting a tiny particle can cause such a devastating blast
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You know how the Sun mostly fuses Hydrogen into Helium? Well, much bigger and hotter stars can fuse the Helium into bigger atoms, and those into even bigger ones, and so on, up to iron. When stars get to iron, they can’t fuse it any more, because fusing iron requires more energy than it creates. Any atoms heavier than iron have to be made in supernovas. It just takes an unbelievable amount of energy to make big atoms, and supernovas are the only thing that can provide that much energy. (Some were probably created in the Big Bang, but that’s not happening any more.)
Some of those big atoms are stable, like gold. (If you have a gold ring, almost all of that gold was probably formed in a supernova a very, very long time ago.) Some of those atoms are not stable, like Uranium. Uranium wants to decay, which is why it’s radioactive. Usually it just slowly splits itself into Thorium, then Radium, and a long chain of other stuff, and eventually into lead, which is stable. That process gives off energy, but it takes a long time (billions of years), so it’s not a big deal.
However, if you put the proper kinds of atoms together in the proper way, one that decays can give off particles that hit others and split them, and those give off particles that split others, and so on, and they all release a bunch of energy in a really short amount of time (a matter of microseconds.) That’s what causes the devastating blast from an atomic bomb.
And, if you put the right kind of Hydrogen (usually Deuterium and Tritium) into exactly the right place in the bomb, at exactly the right time, you can cause it to fuse into Helium, just like in the sun. That’s how a Hydrogen bomb works. It actually uses a “regular” atomic bomb as a trigger to create a *really small, really quick* star.
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