48 Sentences With "fission bombs" | Random Sentence Generator

Hydrogen bombs therefore create far larger explosions than fission bombs.

The most powerful fission bombs ever built can produce explosions equal to 500,000 tons of TNT.

As with all new nuclear weapons possessors, North Korea first developed fission bombs, which are based on the process of heavy nuclei (such as uranium and plutonium) splitting into fragments, releasing large amounts of energy.

The first fission bomb, codenamed "The Gadget", was detonated during the Trinity Test in the desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Two other fission bombs, codenamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", were used in combat against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. Even the first fission bombs were thousands of times more explosive than a comparable mass of chemical explosive.

Depleted uranium can be used as a tamper, or neutron reflector, in fission bombs. A high density tamper like DU makes for a longer-lasting, more energetic, and more efficient explosion.

Tritium is an important component in nuclear weapons. It is used to enhance the efficiency and yield of fission bombs and the fission stages of hydrogen bombs in a process known as "boosting" as well as in external neutron initiators for such weapons.

Subsequently, India established computer simulation capability to predict the yields of nuclear explosives whose designs are related to the designs of explosives used in this test. Pokhran-II consisted of five detonations, the first of which was a fusion bomb while the remaining four were fission bombs. The tests were initiated on 11 May 1998, under the assigned code name Operation Shakti, with the detonation of one fusion and two fission bombs. On 13 May 1998, two additional fission devices were detonated, and the Indian government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee shortly convened a press conference to declare India a full-fledged nuclear state.

The influence of the Treasury on weapons procurement should not be underestimated: it reaches even into weapons design. Clearly, there were economic benefits in building large and dirty U-235 fission bombs, rather than cleaner, but more expensive plutonium weapons, especially given the shortage of plutonium.

These very large and dirty fission bombs were the largest pure-fission bombs deployed by any state, and unlike their predecessors, Blue Danube and Red Beard, they used HEU as a fissile material rather than plutonium, the reason being primarily economic. The cost of HEU to the Royal Air Force was (at 1958-9 prices) £19,200 per kg, with plutonium priced at £143,000 per kg. Although a HEU weapon needed more fissile material for a given yield than a plutonium weapon,Charles S.Grace, Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Effects and Survivability. Published: Royal College of Military Science, Shrivenham, Wilts, and Brasseys, 1994. a saving per weapon was of the order of £22.7M at 2006 prices. Thirty-seven Green Grass warheads were built (twelve as Violet Club) saving the Treasury £840M.

With only fission bombs, nuclear war was something that possibly could be limited. Dropped by planes and only able to destroy the most built up areas of major cities, it was possible for many to look at fission bombs as a technological extension of large-scale conventional bombing—such as the extensive firebombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II. Proponents brushed aside as grave exaggeration claims that such weapons could lead to worldwide death or harm. Even in the decades before fission weapons, there had been speculation about the possibility for human beings to end all life on the planet, either by accident or purposeful maliciousness—but technology had not provided the capacity for such action. The great power of hydrogen bombs made worldwide annihilation possible.

There is a clear distinction between first- and second-generation nuclear weapons, i.e. atomic and hydrogen bombs. However, virtually all second generation bombs use a few grams of deuterium-tritium gas to ensure the reliability and safety of the nuclear fission-explosives. They can then be used on their own as boosted fission bombs or as primaries of two-stage thermonuclear (hydrogen) weapons.

The latter approach, the "implosion" method, is more sophisticated than the former. A major challenge in all nuclear weapon designs is to ensure that a significant fraction of the fuel is consumed before the weapon destroys itself. The amount of energy released by fission bombs can range from the equivalent of just under a ton to upwards of 500,000 tons (500 kilotons) of TNT ().Hansen, Chuck.

It was a mounted weapons system, which means that it would be set up, aimed, and fired as a crew-served weapon. Taylor also designed fission bombs smaller than Davy Crockett, which were developed after he left Los Alamos. He designed a nuclear bomb so small that it weighed only 20 pounds, but it was never developed and tested. Taylor designed the Super Oralloy Bomb, also known as the "SOB".

Jeremy Bernstein, "John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs: an Unlikely Collaboration", Physics in Perspective 12, no. 1 (March 2010), 36-50. In 1951, Stanislaw Ulam had the idea to use hydrodynamic shock of a fission weapon to compress more fissionable material to incredible densities in order to make megaton-range, two-stage fission bombs. He then realized that this approach might be useful for starting a thermonuclear reaction.

The ICAN-II also, in a sense, utilizes nuclear "bombs" for thrust. However, instead of regular fission bombs like the Orion would utilize, ICAN-II uses what are, essentially, many tiny hydrogen bombs, set off by a stream of anti-protons. Ecological concerns would probably require that ICAN-II be assembled in space. The radiation from ICAN-II's ACMF engine would be intercepted by a 4-meter radius silicon carbide shell.

Teller proposed scheme after scheme, but Bethe rejected each one. The fusion idea was set aside to concentrate on producing fission bombs. Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei, but Bethe calculated that this could not happen, and a report co-authored with Teller showed that "no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started".

At the time of Vanunu's kidnapping, The Times reported that Israel had material for approximately 20 hydrogen bombs and 200 fission bombs by 1986. In the spring of 2004, Vanunu was released from prison, and placed under several strict restrictions, such as the denial of a passport, freedom of movement limitations and restrictions on communications with the press. Since his release, he has been rearrested and charged multiple times for violations of the terms of his release.

Maralinga was the scene of UK nuclear testing and was contaminated with radioactive waste in the 1950s and early 1960s. Maralinga was surveyed by Len Beadell in the early 1950s, and followed the survey of Emu Field, which was further north and where the first two tests were conducted. On 27 September 1956, Operation Buffalo commenced at Maralinga, as Emu Field was found to be too remote a site. The operation consisted of the testing of four fission bombs.

At the start of World War II in 1939, Seymour travelled to Kenya where he enlisted in the Kenya Regiment, and was posted to the King's African Rifles. He fought against Italian troops in the Abyssinian Campaign in Ethiopia. The regiment was then posted to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) and afterwards to Burma, where allied forces were fighting against Japan. For Seymour the war ended on a low note; he expressed his disgust when the Allies used fission bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The energy released by the fusion of the 5 g of fusion fuel itself is only 1.73% of the energy released by the fission of 1,338 g of plutonium. Larger total yields and higher efficiency are possible, since the chain reaction can continue beyond the second generation after fusion boosting. Fusion-boosted fission bombs can also be made immune to neutron radiation from nearby nuclear explosions, which can cause other designs to predetonate, blowing themselves apart without achieving a high yield.

However, the Seers have meanwhile captured Herrick and give him what he thinks are the two race banks to take back to his ship. Jackson, Orfe and Tala are overjoyed, little realising that their friend has actually brought fission bombs back to the R1C. The Doctor has meanwhile made it to the core of the Citadel and confronted the Oracle. He succeeds in locating and stealing the real race banks and then heads off with Leela and Idas to get back to the probe ship.

South Korea's defense ministry said the event reading indicated a blast of six to seven kilotons. However, there are some experts who estimate the yield to be up to 15 kt, since the test site's geology is not well understood. In comparison, the atomic (fission) bombs dropped by the Enola Gay on Hiroshima (Little Boy, a "gun-type" atomic bomb) and on Nagasaki by Bockscar (Fat Man, an "implosion-type" atomic bomb) had blast yields of the equivalents of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT, respectively.

The German Empire was the first state suspected of having a program to develop fission bombs. Prominent scientists, such as Albert Einstein, disappeared from public view and papers on nuclear fission vanished after the equivalent of the Otto Hahn experiment on fission. The United States' nuclear program was based at the Hanford site in Washington state (In Turtledove's Worldwar series, Hanford was proposed as an alternative site to the Denver one. The Denver program was commanded by Leslie Groves, who commanded the Manhattan Project, but he is not mentioned in this timeline).

In 1949, the Soviets exploded their first fission bomb, and in 1950 U.S. President Harry S. Truman ended the H-bomb debate by ordering the Los Alamos designers to build one. In 1952, the 10.4-megaton Ivy Mike explosion was announced as the first hydrogen bomb test, reinforcing the idea that hydrogen bombs are a thousand times more powerful than fission bombs. In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer was labeled a hydrogen bomb opponent. The public did not know there were two kinds of hydrogen bomb (neither of which is accurately described as a hydrogen bomb).

On May 23, when his security clearance was revoked, item three of the four public findings against him was "his conduct in the hydrogen bomb program." In 1949, Oppenheimer had supported single-stage fusion-boosted fission bombs, to maximize the explosive power of the arsenal given the trade-off between plutonium and tritium production. He opposed two- stage thermonuclear bombs until 1951, when radiation implosion, which he called "technically sweet", first made them practical. The complexity of his position was not revealed to the public until 1976, nine years after his death.

In this he was thinking not of a thermonuclear weapon, but of a large fission one. The idea was not pursued at that time, because the RAF wanted more, not bigger, atomic bombs. Meeting in Bermuda in December 1953 with Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had replaced Truman as president earlier that year, Churchill told him that the RAF had reckoned that fission bombs would be sufficient for most targets, and therefore that Britain had no intention of developing hydrogen bombs. Lord Cherwell (foreground, in bowler hat) was scientific advisor to Winston Churchill (centre).

For these reasons, nuclear weapon design extensively utilizes D–T fusion 14.1 MeV neutrons to cause more fission. Fusion neutrons are able to cause fission in ordinarily non-fissile materials, such as depleted uranium (uranium-238), and these materials have been used in the jackets of thermonuclear weapons. Fusion neutrons also can cause fission in substances that are unsuitable or difficult to make into primary fission bombs, such as reactor grade plutonium. This physical fact thus causes ordinary non-weapons grade materials to become of concern in certain nuclear proliferation discussions and treaties.

Familiar examples of other such processes transforming energy from the Big Bang include nuclear decay, which releases energy that was originally "stored" in heavy isotopes, such as uranium and thorium. This energy was stored at the time of the nucleosynthesis of these elements. This process uses the gravitational potential energy released from the collapse of Type II supernovae to create these heavy elements before they are incorporated into star systems such as the Solar System and the Earth. The energy locked into uranium is released spontaneously during most types of radioactive decay, and can be suddenly released in nuclear fission bombs.

In large, megaton-range hydrogen bombs, about half of the yield comes from the final fissioning of depleted uranium. Virtually all thermonuclear weapons deployed today use the "two-stage" design described above, but it is possible to add additional fusion stages—each stage igniting a larger amount of fusion fuel in the next stage. This technique can be used to construct thermonuclear weapons of arbitrarily large yield, in contrast to fission bombs, which are limited in their explosive force. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba of the USSR, which released an energy equivalent of over , was a three-stage weapon.

Under normal circumstances, a critical or supercritical fission reaction (one that is self- sustaining in power or increasing in power) should only occur inside a safely shielded location, such as a reactor core or a suitable test environment. A criticality accident occurs if the same reaction is achieved unintentionally, for example in an unsafe environment or during reactor maintenance. Though dangerous and frequently lethal to humans within the immediate area, the critical mass formed would not be capable of producing a massive nuclear explosion of the type that fission bombs are designed to produce. This is because all the design features needed to make a nuclear warhead cannot arise by chance.

He returned to the program in 1954, and by 1956 he was famous for his work in small bomb development. Freeman Dyson is quoted as saying, "A great part of the small-bomb development of the last five years [at Los Alamos] was directly due to Ted." Although the majority of the brilliant minds at Los Alamos were focused on developing the fusion bomb, Taylor remained hard at work on improving fission bombs. His innovations in this area of study were so important that he was eventually given the freedom to choose whatever he wanted to study, instead of being confined to the narrow scope of direct orders.

Salted fission bombs can be made by replacing the neutron reflector between the fissionable core and the explosive layer with a metallic element. The energy yield from a salted weapon is usually lower than from an ordinary weapon of similar size as a consequence of these changes. The radioactive isotope used for the fallout material would be a high intensity gamma ray emitter, with a half-life long enough that it remains lethal for an extended period. It would also have to have a chemistry that causes it to return to earth as fallout, rather than stay in the atmosphere after being vaporized in the explosion.

58 Vanunu gave detailed descriptions of lithium-6 separation required for the production of tritium, an essential ingredient of fusion-boosted fission bombs. While both experts concluded that Israel might be making such single-stage boosted bombs, Vanunu, whose work experience was limited to material (not component) production, gave no specific evidence that Israel was making two-stage thermonuclear bombs, such as neutron bombs. Vanunu described the plutonium processing used, giving a production rate of about 30 kg per year, and stated that Israel used about 4 kg per weapon. From this information it was possible to estimate that Israel had sufficient plutonium for about 150 nuclear weapons.

In many ways NSWRs combine the advantages of fission reactors and fission bombs. Because they can harness the power of what is essentially a continuous nuclear fission explosion, NSWRs would have both very high thrust and very high exhaust velocity, meaning that the rocket would be able to accelerate quickly as well as be extremely efficient in terms of propellant usage. The combination of high thrust and high ISP is a very rare trait in the rocket world. One design would generate 13 meganewtons of thrust at 66 km/s exhaust velocity (compared to ~4.5 km/s exhaust velocity for the best chemical rockets of today).

Considering the idea of the fission bomb theoretically settled—at least until more experimental data was available—the 1942 Berkeley conference then turned in a different direction. Edward Teller pushed for discussion of a more powerful bomb: the "super", now usually referred to as a "hydrogen bomb", which would use the explosive force of a detonating fission bomb to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction in deuterium and tritium.. Teller proposed scheme after scheme, but Bethe refused each one. The fusion idea was put aside to concentrate on producing fission bombs. Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei.

Project PACER, carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the mid-1970s, explored the possibility of a fusion power system that would involve exploding small hydrogen bombs (fusion bombs)—or, as stated in a later proposal, fission bombs—inside an underground cavity. As an energy source, the system is the only fusion power system that could be demonstrated to work using existing technology. It would also require a continuous supply of nuclear bombs and contemporary economics studies demonstrated that these could not be produced at a competitive price compared to conventional energy sources. The earliest references to the use of nuclear explosions for power generation date to a meeting called by Edward Teller in 1957.

While overheating of a reactor can lead to, and has led to, meltdown and steam explosions, the much lower uranium enrichment makes it impossible for a nuclear reactor to explode with the same destructive power as a nuclear weapon. It is also difficult to extract useful power from a nuclear bomb, although at least one rocket propulsion system, Project Orion, was intended to work by exploding fission bombs behind a massively padded and shielded spacecraft. The strategic importance of nuclear weapons is a major reason why the technology of nuclear fission is politically sensitive. Viable fission bomb designs are, arguably, within the capabilities of many, being relatively simple from an engineering viewpoint.

The problem of opacity in the bomb was based on a concern that low opacity will allow radiation to escape rapidly giving the bomb less energy and a slower buildup of pressure during the explosion. This, "low opacity" would mean a more efficient bomb. While this did not greatly matter in fission bombs, it was very important in connection with hydrogen bombs where the transfer of energy between the fission and fusion devises is important. Teller presented the idea that the absorption of radiation was different at high and low frequencies, at high frequencies all frequencies are absorbed, but at lower frequencies absorption occurs more specifically at specific lines and allows more energy transfer, and Mayer carried out many of the related calculations.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy had decried the use of the atomic bombs as adopting "an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages", but in October 1947, he reported a military requirement for 400 bombs. The American monopoly on nuclear weapons lasted four years before the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in September 1949. The United States responded with the development of the hydrogen bomb, a nuclear weapon a thousand times as powerful as the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ordinary fission bombs would henceforth be regarded as small tactical nuclear weapons. By 1986, the United States had 23,317 nuclear weapons, while the Soviet Union had 40,159.

One was an increase in efficiency and power, and within only a few years fission bombs were developed that were many times more powerful than the ones created during World War II. The other was a program of miniaturization, reducing the size of the nuclear weapons. Smaller bombs meant that bombers could carry more of them, and also that they could be carried on the new generation of rockets in development in the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. rocket science received a large boost in the postwar years, largely with the help of engineers acquired from the Nazi rocketry program. These included scientists such as Wernher von Braun, who had helped design the V-2 rockets the Nazis launched across the English Channel.

During the later stages of World War II, the entire Cold War, and to a lesser extent afterwards, uranium-235 has been used as the fissile explosive material to produce nuclear weapons. Initially, two major types of fission bombs were built: a relatively simple device that uses uranium-235 and a more complicated mechanism that uses plutonium-239 derived from uranium-238. Later, a much more complicated and far more powerful type of fission/fusion bomb (thermonuclear weapon) was built, that uses a plutonium-based device to cause a mixture of tritium and deuterium to undergo nuclear fusion. Such bombs are jacketed in a non-fissile (unenriched) uranium case, and they derive more than half their power from the fission of this material by fast neutrons from the nuclear fusion process.

Top secret British documents obtained by BBC Newsnight show that Britain made hundreds of secret shipments of restricted materials to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. These included specialist chemicals for reprocessing and samples of fissile material—uranium-235 in 1959, and plutonium in 1966, as well as highly enriched lithium-6, which is used to boost fission bombs and fuel hydrogen bombs.Secret sale of UK plutonium to Israel, BBC, March 10, 2006 The investigation also showed that Britain shipped 20 tons of heavy water directly to Israel in 1959 and 1960 to start up the Dimona reactor.. The transaction was made through a Norwegian front company called Noratom, which took a 2% commission on the transaction. Britain was challenged about the heavy water deal at the International Atomic Energy Agency after it was exposed on Newsnight in 2005.

The Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys, queried Cook on the imperative to persist with thermonuclear designs, given that Orange Herald satisfied most military requirements, and the tests were very expensive. Cook replied that megaton-range fission bombs represented an uneconomical use of expensive fissile material, that they could not be built to produce yields of more than a megaton, and that they could not be made small enough to be carried by aircraft smaller than the V-bombers, or on missiles. Sandys was not convinced, but he authorised further tests, as did the Prime Minister, now Harold Macmillan following Eden's resignation in the wake of the Suez crisis. The earliest possible date was November 1957 unless the Operation Antler tests were cancelled, but the Foreign Office warned that a moratorium on nuclear testing might come into effect in late October.

Though it deals not with fission bombs, but rather with a radioisotope dust weapon, "Solution Unsatisfactory" accurately predicted many aspects of the development of nuclear arms and the dilemmas they pose, a year before President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project led by General Leslie Groves. Scientific advisors wrote a 1943 memo to Groves entitled "Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military WeaponJames B. Conant, A. H. Compton, and H. C. Urey, Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon , 30 October 1943": While not part of Heinlein's Future History, the story also marks the first appearance of a "Patrol" in Heinlein's works. The concept of a distinct order of pilots totally dedicated to preserving the peace reappears in Heinlein's later works, including the short story "The Long Watch". The juvenile Space Cadet describes the training and indoctrination of Patrol cadets.

Energy transformations in the universe over time are characterized by various kinds of potential energy that has been available since the Big Bang later being "released" (transformed to more active types of energy such as kinetic or radiant energy) when a triggering mechanism is available. Familiar examples of such processes include nuclear decay, in which energy is released that was originally "stored" in heavy isotopes (such as uranium and thorium), by nucleosynthesis, a process ultimately using the gravitational potential energy released from the gravitational collapse of supernovae, to store energy in the creation of these heavy elements before they were incorporated into the solar system and the Earth. This energy is triggered and released in nuclear fission bombs or in civil nuclear power generation. Similarly, in the case of a chemical explosion, chemical potential energy is transformed to kinetic energy and thermal energy in a very short time.

The fast fission of the secondary jacket in fission-fusion-fission bombs is sometimes referred to as a "third stage" in the bomb, but it should not be confused with the obsolete true three-stage thermonuclear design, in which there existed another complete tertiary fusion stage. In the era of open-air atomic testing, the fission jacket was sometimes omitted, in order to create so-called "clean bombs" (see above), or to reduce the amount of radioactive fallout from fission products in very large multi-megaton blasts. This was done most often in the testing of very large tertiary bomb designs, such as the Tsar Bomba and the Zuni test shot of Operation Redwing, as discussed above. In the testing of such weapons, it was assumed (and sometimes shown operationally) that a jacket of natural uranium or enriched uranium could always be added to a given unjacketed bomb, if desired, to increase the yield from two to five times.

The mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945, rose over above the bomb's hypocenter. An estimated 39,000 people were killed by the atomic bomb,The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. atomicarchive.com of whom 23,145–28,113 were Japanese factory workers, 2,000 were Korean slave laborers, and 150 were Japanese combatants. One class of nuclear weapon, a fission bomb (not to be confused with the fusion bomb), otherwise known as an atomic bomb or atom bomb, is a fission reactor designed to liberate as much energy as possible as rapidly as possible, before the released energy causes the reactor to explode (and the chain reaction to stop). Development of nuclear weapons was the motivation behind early research into nuclear fission which the Manhattan Project during World War II (September 1, 1939 – September 2, 1945) carried out most of the early scientific work on fission chain reactions, culminating in the three events involving fission bombs that occurred during the war.

So-called neutron bombs (enhanced radiation weapons) have been constructed which release a larger fraction of their energy as ionizing radiation (specifically, neutrons), but these are all thermonuclear devices which rely on the nuclear fusion stage to produce the extra radiation. The energy dynamics of pure fission bombs always remain at about 6% yield of the total in radiation, as a prompt result of fission. The total prompt fission energy amounts to about 181 MeV, or ~ 89% of the total energy which is eventually released by fission over time. The remaining ~ 11% is released in beta decays which have various half-lives, but begin as a process in the fission products immediately; and in delayed gamma emissions associated with these beta decays. For example, in uranium-235 this delayed energy is divided into about 6.5 MeV in betas, 8.8 MeV in antineutrinos (released at the same time as the betas), and finally, an additional 6.3 MeV in delayed gamma emission from the excited beta-decay products (for a mean total of ~10 gamma ray emissions per fission, in all).