The device detonated for the test was named "Shrimp" and was the same basic configuration as the experimental Ivy Mike device, except with a different type of fusion fuel. (Warning: serious science/physics content.)Ĭastle Bravo was the code name given to the first United States test of a dry fuel hydrogen bomb would require more background material than I care to type.)Īs to how to create a "clean" (minimal fallout) weapon, see sections 4.5.2 ("Dirty" and "Clean" Weapons) and 4.5.4 (Minimum Residual Radiation (MRR or "Clean") Designs) of the Nuclear Weapons FAQ. (There does exist a middle configuration between pure fission and Teller-Ulam thermonuclears, the boosted fission configuration, but explaining that. The solution to that problem was the staged Teller-Ulam configuration. Even a thermonuclear weapon doesn't generally generate enough heat to force fusion in an uncompressed fuel mass. What you describe won't actually work - in order to fuse, the fusion fuel has to be compressed. This was not done because they were scared of potential fallout (that would be roughly the same) but because the full 100MT design yield would make it impossible for the dropping aircraft to escape the blast and because the scientists weren't sure they could guarantee the safety of the observation vessels and aircraft (which carried some rather high ranking military and party officials, not guys you wanted to blow up in the 1950s USSR and expect to get away with it by saying "oops"). The Czar bomba was deliberately scaled down from the design yield by about 50% through the replacement of a Uranium tamper with a Lead tamper. But for many strategic purposes those concerns tend to overlap to a large degree.Ītmospheric explosions cause the shock and thermal pulse to hit a larger area with overpressure, thus increasing the efficiency of the weapon (unless you're hitting a seriously hardened point target), and making the weapon more efficient reduces its size and weight for the same yield, thus allowing you to use a smaller delivery vehicle and/or increase range or number of weapons per delivery vehicle. In strategic military applications of course limiting fallout is not the main concern when designing weapons and deployment profiles, maximising destructive power for the amount of money and bomb size/weight is what matters. The main methods of controlling fallout are bomb design (both materials chosen and fission efficiency (iow, making sure there's as little as possible nuclear material that doesn't undergo fission, which also increases yield, thus more bang for your buck), and deployment profile (higher atmospheric bursts cause less material to be sucked into the fireball and become coated in radioactive debris, thus reducing the amount of fallout produced). Other materials may undergo state changes and even fission when bombarded with high energy particles released during the nuclear explosion, adding both mass and volume AND becquerels to the amount of fallout resulting. Dust blown up by the blast and heat wave gets coated by that residual bomb material, increasing the total amount of radioactive material that needs cleaning up in many bombs (in volume and mass, not in becquerels or radioactivity obviously). Fallout is radioactive material from the bomb indeed, but there's more to it. Your understanding of what fallout is is also flawed. So instead of scaling up a standard nuclear warhead and dropping that, would it work if you just used a normal fission device and encased it in tons more hydrogen than usual, since the heat of the fusion would spread throughout the entire shell and ignite it all? Would that work, and if so, would it be a more environmentally safe option? And if it does work, is there actually any limit to the strength of a thermonuclear warhead, since you could just keep packing on hydrogen? But from what I know, radioactive fallout is just spent fuel from the fission reaction that has been spread out by the blast. I was reading a little about the Tsar Bomba and how the fission device was so huge, yadda yadda yadda, and there was a lot of concern about the environmental impact the fallout would cause. As far as I know, a great deal of the bomb’s destructive power comes from the fission at the core, and the energy of fusion is just a way of boosting it. When the fission device is ignited, the adjacent deuterium has so much energy dumped into it that it actually undergoes fusion, which generates a huge amount of energy as well. My understanding is that at the core of the warhead is a nuclear fission device, surrounded by a shell of deuterium. So I’m not particularly learned on the topic of nuclear physics, but I do know basically how thermonuclear warheads work.
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