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183 Sentences With "thermonuclear weapon"

How to use thermonuclear weapon in a sentence? Find typical usage patterns (collocations)/phrases/context for "thermonuclear weapon" and check conjugation/comparative form for "thermonuclear weapon". Mastering all the usages of "thermonuclear weapon" from sentence examples published by news publications.

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The first thermonuclear weapon was tested by the US in 1952.
A modern thermonuclear weapon is going to be roughly one hundred kilotons.
That was when it tested its first thermonuclear weapon fueled by the isotope.
"A thermonuclear weapon does more damage," he continued, using another name for a hydrogen bomb.
The North claimed the device it tested was a thermonuclear weapon — commonly called an H-bomb.
Meet the Nuclear Weapons NerdsCastle Bravo, the first high-yield thermonuclear weapon U.S. design test at at Bikini Atoll.
North Korea claimed its latest nuclear test was a detonation of a thermonuclear weapon built for its developmental intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If the North Koreans really have mastered the engineering of a thermonuclear weapon, it would marginally increase the severity of that threat.
North Korea and its intention to develop a thermonuclear weapon topped the agenda, said Kerry at a joint press conference with Wang.
North Korea conducted what it claimed was its second test of a thermonuclear weapon in 2017, upping the lethality of its force.
The seismic wave left by the explosion was smaller than what most experts would expect from the detonation of a true thermonuclear weapon.
The scope of Mao's ambition — to develop a thermonuclear weapon that could hit the United States — did not match American preconceptions of China.
North Korea claims it now has the capability of mounting a thermonuclear weapon on a long-range missile capable of striking the United States.
You can kill a fly with a thermonuclear weapon, with a Moab, with a cruise missile, with a machine gun, or with a fly swatter.
A full, staged thermonuclear weapon incorporates smaller devices and is prized for its ability to generate a gigantic blast capable of flattening an entire city.
"North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat, to the world, and it has stated its intention to develop a thermonuclear weapon," he said.
Pyongyang has conducted six nuclear tests, including its largest ever in September 2017 that was likely a thermonuclear weapon, commonly referred to as a hydrogen bomb.
North Korea claimed it set off a thermonuclear weapon during that test, but experts said the data showed it was more likely a boosted fission weapon.
A. When Kim Jong-un, the North's leader, announced in December that his country had finally developed the technology to build a thermonuclear weapon, experts were skeptical.
IN JANUARY North Korea detonated a nuclear device underground, its fourth such test and the first, it claimed, to show that it could build a thermonuclear weapon.
Wellerstein: In 1954, the United States set off a very large thermonuclear weapon in the Marshall Islands, and it contaminated a lot of fish in the area.
In his New Year's Day speech he hinted that by nuclear testing could stop now that North Korea has the rudiments of an ICBM and a thermonuclear weapon.
Another new nuclear warhead, called the 87-1, a redesign of a 40-year-old thermonuclear weapon made for ground-based missiles, would not begin production until 2030.
American intelligence officials, and their South Korean and Japanese counterparts, are debating whether the next blasts will mark major steps down the road to a true thermonuclear weapon.
The 2017 nuclear test, which North Korea said was a thermonuclear weapon, appeared to be several times larger than previous blasts, according to monitoring organizations at the time.
But so far, there is nothing to suggest that it has yet tested a fusion or thermonuclear weapon despite claims by its leader, Kim Jong Un, that it has.
It exploded over the remote Tunguska region of Siberia with the force of a thermonuclear weapon, flattening trees in an area nearly twice the size of New York City.
In the first year of Donald Trump's administration, while he and Kim Jong-un traded taunts, the North Koreans successfully tested increasingly powerful ballistic missiles and a thermonuclear weapon.
They'll go straight to a missile-deliverable nuclear weapon, and then they'll follow that with a thermonuclear weapon, and it will happen so fast it will make our heads spin.
North Korean state media claimed it detonated a hydrogen bomb, also known as a thermonuclear weapon, which could be fitted atop a long-range missile capable of striking the United States.
On top of this, on January 214, 211, North Korean authorities claimed to have successfully set off a powerful thermonuclear weapon—a hydrogen bomb—in their fourth atomic test since 22016.
The test followed North Korea saying on Sunday that it had developed a more advanced thermonuclear weapon of "great destructive power," which it would load onto an intercontinental ballistic missile, Reuters reported.
There was the Great Smog of 5003 and the Soviet Union's testing of a thermonuclear weapon in Season 1, and the Suez Crisis and the Duke of Windsor's Nazi associations in season 2.
The potential nuclear test followed North Korea saying on Sunday that it had developed a more advanced thermonuclear weapon of "great destructive power," which it would load onto an intercontinental ballistic missile, Reuters reported.
For example, if Pyongyang were to target New York City's population centers, it wouldn't matter whether the missile hit Manhattan or the waters near Staten Island: a thermonuclear weapon would obliterate the city either way.
Seoul has hardened its stance against Pyongyang after its torrent of weapons tests, the latest a detonation Sunday of what North Korea said was a thermonuclear weapon built for missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
Kim declared his nuclear force was complete after the torrent of weapons tests in 2017, including the detonation of a purported thermonuclear weapon and three test-flights of intercontinental ballistic missiles potentially capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
The country's state-run media announced the test of the "two stage thermonuclear weapon," saying that it was a "complete success," and has gone on to report that the bomb can be loaded onto an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Boosting is key to miniaturizing a thermonuclear weapon, and Pyongyang must master miniaturization in order to build a warhead small enough to fit atop a ballistic missile that can reach the United States or other distant targets, experts said.
Should the North conduct its sixth nuclear test, it would move closer to having a hydrogen bomb, or a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, Mr. Hecker said, with up to a thousand times more power than the Hiroshima-style weapons Mr. Kim has detonated so far.
In recent weeks, Mr. Kim, believed to be in his early 30s and determined to accelerate the nuclear weapons program that his grandfather and his father promoted to give the broken country leverage and influence, boasted that North Korea had finally developed the technology to build a thermonuclear weapon.
According to Pyongyang: The H-Bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons, is a multi-functional thermonuclear weapon with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack according to strategic goals.
A U.S. official who studies North Korea's military and politics said it was too early to determine if a test supported the North's claim that it has succeeded in developing a thermonuclear weapon, "much less one that could be mounted on an ICBM and re-enter Earth's atmosphere without burning up".
It listed several grim developments: North Korea had made rapid progress in developing a thermonuclear weapon capable of reaching the United States; relations between the United States and Russia had deteriorated, with no high-level arms-control negotiations; and nations around the world were moving to modernize and enhance their nuclear arsenals.
In recent weeks, the North's aggressive young leader, Kim Jong-un, has boasted that the country has finally developed the technology to build a thermonuclear weapon — far more powerful than the low-yield devices tested first in 2006, then in different configurations months after President Obama took office in 2009 and again in 2013.
Unsurprisingly the rumble was met with anguish elsewhere, although most agreed that the North's claim of a hydrogen bomb—far more powerful and much more difficult to build than the atomic sort—was far-fetched: both the estimated explosion yield (six kilotons) and the magnitude of the earthquake that followed the blast (5.1) were much too small for a thermonuclear weapon.
The shape shows a marked difference from pictures of the ball-shaped device North Korea released in March last year, and appears to indicate the appearance of a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, or a hydrogen bomb, said Lee Choon-geun, senior research fellow at state-run Science and Technology Policy Institute KCNA said North Korea "recently succeeded" in making a more advanced hydrogen bomb.
ET.317 was a thermonuclear weapon of the British Royal Navy, developed for the UK version of the UGM-27 Polaris missile.
The British Operation Grapple thermonuclear weapon tests at Christmas Island in 1957-58 were the end of evolution. There were no more wholly home-grown designs. Britain never deployed a true thermonuclear weapon of wholly home- grown design. All the weapons tested at Operation Grapple were abandoned, because AWRE no longer needed them, although some of their features were undoubtedly incorporated into later weapons.
The B-41 was the only three-stage thermonuclear weapon fielded by the U.S."The B-41 (Mk-41) Bomb" Nuclear Weapon Archive. (accessed April 8, 2015).
Soon the two were locked in a massive stockpiling of nuclear weapons. The United States began a crash program to develop the first hydrogen bomb in 1950, and detonated its first thermonuclear weapon in 1952. This new weapon was alone over 400 times as powerful as the weapons used against Japan. The Soviet Union detonated a primitive thermonuclear weapon in 1953 and a full-fledged one in 1955.
The 3 September 2017 test, like their January 2016 test, is claimed to be a hydrogen bomb (but may only be a boosted fission weapon rather than an actual staged Teller–Ulam thermonuclear weapon).
In 1953, shortly after the Americans tested a thermonuclear weapon in 1952, followed by the Soviets with Joe 4, and before the UK government took a decision in July 1954 to develop a thermonuclear weapon, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston was asked about the possibilities for a very large pure fission bomb with a yield of one megaton. This studyPublic Record Office, London. AIR 2/13759 E8A. (PRO) referred to the Zodiak Mk.3 bomb, but progressed no further than a rudimentary study.
On 24 August 1968 France detonated its first thermonuclear weapon—codenamed Canopus—over Fangataufa. A fission device ignited a lithium-6 deuteride secondary inside a jacket of highly enriched uranium to create a 2.6 megaton blast.
The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions by Milo D. Nordyke. Science & Global Security, 1998, Volume 7, pp. 1–117 Others include the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba at 97% fusion,4.5 Thermonuclear Weapon Designs and Later Subsections . Nuclearweaponarchive.org.
Group Captain Kenneth Gilbert Hubbard (26 February 1920 – 21 January 2004) was the pilot of an RAF Vickers Valiant bomber which dropped Britain's first live thermonuclear weapon (H-Bomb) in Operation Grapple in the Central Pacific Ocean in May 1957.
In 1952, he received a degree in Physical and Mathematical Sciences with a thesis on kinetic processes of neutrons. This work on neutrons and efficiency continued, along with calculations on nuclear reaction kinetics and energy release of the Soviet Union's first thermonuclear weapon, the RDS-6, tested in 1953; for this he was awarded the Stalin Prize, the first of several awards. He was a leading developer of the RDS-37 - the first Soviet two-stage thermonuclear weapon - most specifically concerned with the power output. Romanov transferred to the new Scientific Research Institute-1011 as head of the theoretical department in 1955.
Craig views this scene as implying that supposedly "dumb" servants, can have a capacity of learning the secrets of their masters . The final scenes, with the mushroom cloud of the nuclear explosion, use stock footage from the blast of a thermonuclear weapon ("hydrogen bomb").
Violet Club was a nuclear weapon deployed by the United Kingdom during the Cold War. It was Britain's first operational "high yield" weapon, and was intended to provide an emergency capability until a thermonuclear weapon could be developed from the 1956–1958 Operation Grapple tests.
Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Castle. Detonated on March 1, 1954, the device was the most powerful nuclear device detonated by the United States and its first lithium deuteride fueled thermonuclear weapon. Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional reactions involving lithium-7, which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll. At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in history.
As a result, the concept of "overkill"—the idea that one can simply estimate the destruction and fallout created by a thermonuclear weapon of the size postulated by Leo Szilard's "cobalt bomb" thought experiment by extrapolating from the effects of thermonuclear weapons of smaller yields—is fallacious.
A thermonuclear weapon weighing little more than can release energy equal to more than .Specifically the 1970 to 1980 designed and deployed US B83 nuclear bomb, with a yield of up to 1.2 megatons. A nuclear device no larger than traditional bombs can devastate an entire city by blast, fire, and radiation.
The Tsar Bomba (Царь-бомба) was the largest, most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. It was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons.The yield of the test has been estimated between 50 and 57.23 megatons by different sources over time. Today all Russian sources use 50 megatons as the official figure.
In 1950 there was no practical design for a hydrogen bomb. Calculations by Stanisław Ulam and others showed that Teller's "Classical Super" would not work. Teller and Wheeler created a new design known as "Alarm Clock", but it was not a true thermonuclear weapon. Not until January 1951 did Ulam come up with a workable design.
The B43 nuclear bomb The B43 was a United States air-dropped variable yield thermonuclear weapon used by a wide variety of fighter bomber and bomber aircraft. The B43 was developed from 1956 by Los Alamos National Laboratory, entering production in 1959. It entered service in April 1961. Total production was 2,000 weapons, ending in 1965.
Regarding the possibility of the Soviet Union developing a thermonuclear weapon, the GAC felt that the United States could have an adequate stockpile of atomic weapons to retaliate against any thermonuclear attack. In that connection, Oppenheimer and the others were concerned about the opportunity costs that would be incurred if nuclear reactors were diverted from materials needed for atom bomb production, to the materials such as tritium needed for a thermonuclear weapon. A majority of the AEC subsequently endorsed the GAC recommendation – and Oppenheimer thought that the fight against the Super would triumph – but proponents of the weapon lobbied the White House vigorously. On January 31, 1950, President Truman, who was always predisposed to proceed with development of the weapon anyway, made the formal decision to do so.
A jacket of 75As, irradiated by the intense highenergy neutron flux from an exploding thermonuclear weapon, would transmute into the radioactive isotope 76As with a half-life of 1.0778 days and produce approximately 1.13 MeV gamma radiation, significantly increasing the radioactivity of the weapon's fallout for several hours. Such a weapon is not known to have ever been built, tested, or used.
The casing of a B-41 thermonuclear bomb. Mark 41 thermonuclear bomb casing at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. The B-41 (also known as Mk-41) was a thermonuclear weapon deployed by the United States Strategic Air Command in the early 1960s. It was the most powerful nuclear bomb ever developed by the United States, with a maximum yield of 25 megatons.
Although the first British designed thermonuclear weapon to be deployed, Yellow Sun was not the first to be deployed with the RAF. US Mk-28 and Mk-43 thermonuclear bombs and others had been supplied to the RAF for use in V bombers prior to the deployment of Yellow Sun. Some bombers of the V-force only ever used American weapons supplied under dual-key arrangements.
According to the scientific data received and published by PAEC, the Corps of Engineers, and Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL), in May 1998, Pakistan carried out six underground nuclear tests in Chagai Hills and Kharan Desert in Balochistan Province (see the code-names of the tests, Chagai-I and Chagai-II). None of these boosted fission devices was the thermonuclear weapon design, according to KRL and PAEC.
Major-General George Brian Sinclair (21 July 192817 May 2020) was a British Army officer. After the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst Sinclair joined the Royal Engineers in 1948. He served in Korea during the aftermath of the Korean War and was quickly appointed adjutant of his regiment. Sinclair served as adjutant of the British garrison on Kiritimati for the Operation Grapple thermonuclear weapon tests.
The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions by Milo D. Nordyke. Science & Global Security, 1998, Volume 7, pp. 1-117 In comparison, the next three high fusion-yielding devices were all much too high in total explosive yield for oil and gas stimulation: the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba achieved a yield 97% derived from fusion,4.5 Thermonuclear Weapon Designs and Later Subsections. Nuclearweaponarchive.org. Retrieved on May 1, 2011.
"SAND8.8 – 1151 Nuclear Weapon Data – Sigma I", Sandia Laboratories, September 1988. The most detailed illustration of an interstage shows a British thermonuclear weapon with a cluster of items between its primary and a cylindrical secondary. They are labeled "end-cap and neutron focus lens", "reflector/neutron gun carriage", and "reflector wrap". The origin of the drawing, posted on the internet by Greenpeace, is uncertain, and there is no accompanying explanation.
This bomb was known as Violet Club. Only five were deployed before the Green Grass warhead was incorporated into a developed weapon as Yellow Sun Mk.1. The later Yellow Sun Mk 2, was fitted with Red Snow, a British-built variant of the U.S. W28 warhead. Yellow Sun Mk 2 was the first British thermonuclear weapon to be deployed, and was carried on both the Vulcan and Handley Page Victor.
Immediately after receiving his PhD, Bell came to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and joined the "T Division." At the time, this division was primarily occupied in the design of the first thermonuclear weapon. Bell contributed by solving problems of neutron transport. Such problems are also crucial in the design and analysis of nuclear reactors, so it was natural that Bell became a leading expert on the physics of reactors.
The tested design became the first air-droppable thermonuclear device, initially the "emergency capability" EC-17, of which only five were made. The first deployable staged radiation implosion Teller- Ulam thermonuclear weapon evolved into the Mark 17, of which 200 were made. Both of those were huge devices, weighing and respectively. As a result, only the B-36 was capable of carrying that first generation of thermonuclear bombs.
The five nuclear weapons on board were burned, including one 9-megaton thermonuclear weapon, causing radioactive contamination of the crash area. Beginning in 1970, a series of amendments to the state constitution were proposed. With adoption, the Indiana Court of Appeals was created and the procedure of appointing justices on the courts was adjusted. The 1973 oil crisis created a recession that hurt the automotive industry in Indiana.
The bombs would be detonated with a clockwork timer rather than a barometric switch. This meant that they had to be dropped from . Grapple was Britain's second airdrop of a nuclear bomb after the Operation Buffalo test at Maralinga on 11 October 1956, and the first of a thermonuclear weapon. The United States had not attempted this until the Operation Redwing Cherokee test on 21 May 1956, and the bomb had landed from the target.
The Trump administration sounded the alarm about the development by North Korea of nuclear weapons and missiles that could hit the United States. It tried to enlist support from Russia and China, as well as South Korea and Japan.Scott D. Sagan, "The Korean Missile Crisis: Why Deterrence Is Still the Best Option." Foreign Affairs 96#1 (2017): 72+ North Korea conducted a sixth nuclear test, the first of a thermonuclear weapon, on September 3, 2017.
The space between the uranium fusion tamper, and the case formed a radiation channel to conduct X-rays from the primary to the secondary assembly; the interstage. It is one of the most closely guarded secrets of a multistage thermonuclear weapon. Implosion of the secondary assembly is indirectly driven, and the techniques used in the interstage to smooth the spatial profile (i.e. reduce coherence and nonuniformities) of the primary's irradiance are of utmost importance.
The aircraft had earlier made the first supersonic transatlantic crossing between New York and Paris in less than 3 hours 20 minutes. On December 8, 1964, a B-58 carrying nuclear weapons slid off an icy runway on Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Bunker Hill, Indiana and caught fire during a training drill. The five nuclear weapons on board were burned, including one 9-megaton thermonuclear weapon, causing radioactive contamination of the crash area.
In 1956, he originated further design improvements which helped lead to a new direction in Soviet nuclear weapons. He was part of the team which developed the RDS-220 thermonuclear weapon, the largest ever tested. With German Goncharov, he worked on the construction scheme of these types of weapons, and with Sakharov he analysed the efficiency of the theoretical model of the RDS-220. He received his PhD in Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1968.
The Soviets claimed that they too had a hydrogen bomb, but unlike the United States' first thermonuclear weapon, theirs was deployable by air. The United States didn't develop a deployable version of the hydrogen bomb until 1954. The first Soviet test of a "true" hydrogen bomb was on November 22, 1955 under the directive of Nikolai Bulganin (influenced by Nikita Khrushchev), code- named RDS-37. All were at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakh SSR.
Zinc has been proposed as a "salting" material for nuclear weapons. A jacket of isotopically enriched 64Zn, irradiated by the intense high-energy neutron flux from an exploding thermonuclear weapon, would transmute into the radioactive isotope 65Zn with a half-life of 244 days and produce approximately 1.115 MeV of gamma radiation, significantly increasing the radioactivity of the weapon's fallout for several years. Such a weapon is not known to have ever been built, tested, or used.
The following year he entered postgraduate study under Igor Tamm. On 10 June 1948, Tamm headed a new group of theorists which included Andrei Sakharov, Vitaly Ginzburg, S.Z. Belenky and Romanov. They followed up Sakharov's ideas for a new thermonuclear weapon and went to KB-11 (now the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics) in the closed city of Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod. He started as a junior researcher, then senior, then head of department.
At the panel's second meeting, in May 1952, the members agreed to form a proposal that the first test of a thermonuclear weapon be postponed.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, p. 92. That test, known as Ivy Mike, had been scheduled well in advance,Rhodes, Dark Sun, p. 487. and was set to take place on November 1, 1952, on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific (October 31, Washington time).Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, pp. 590–591.
Fission products are more deadly than neutron-activated cobalt in the first few weeks following detonation. After one to six months, the fission products from even a large-yield thermonuclear weapon decay to levels tolerable by humans. The large-yield two-stage (a fission trigger/primary with a fusion–fission secondary) thermonuclear weapon is thus automatically a weapon of radiological warfare, but its fallout decays much more rapidly than that of a cobalt bomb. A cobalt bomb's fallout on the other hand would render affected areas effectively stuck in this interim state for decades: habitable, but not safe for constant habitation. Initially, gamma radiation from the fission products of an equivalent size fission-fusion- fission bomb are much more intense than Co-60: 15,000 times more intense at 1 hour; 35 times more intense at 1 week; 5 times more intense at 1 month; and about equal at 6 months. Thereafter fission product fallout radiation levels drop off rapidly, so that Co-60 fallout is 8 times more intense than fission at 1 year and 150 times more intense at 5 years.
Tantalum has been proposed as a "salting" material for nuclear weapons (cobalt is another, better-known salting material). A jacket of 181Ta, irradiated by the intense high-energy neutron flux from an exploding thermonuclear weapon, would transmute into the radioactive isotope with a half-life of 114.43 days and produce approximately 1.12 MeV of gamma radiation, significantly increasing the radioactivity of the weapon's fallout for several months. Such a weapon is not known to have ever been built, tested, or used.
On August 5, 2017, China's paramount leader Xi Jinping called for Donald Trump to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue through a peaceful resolution based on mutual respect between the nations in the face of heightened military tensions. At the 2017 G20 summit the previous month, Xi reaffirmed discussion of the peninsula's peace settlement. On September 3, 2017, North Korea tested a thermonuclear weapon. The bomb was later estimated at 250 kilotons, based on a further study of seismic data.
In 1954, to explain the surprising amount of fission- product fallout produced by hydrogen bombs, Ralph Lapp coined the term fission-fusion-fission to describe a process inside what he called a three- stage thermonuclear weapon. His process explanation was correct, but his choice of terms caused confusion in the open literature. The stages of a nuclear weapon are not fission, fusion, and fission. They are the primary, the secondary, and, in a very few exceptional and powerful weapons no longer in service, the tertiary.
In turn, it would implode Harry, a thermonuclear tertiary. Henceforth, the British designers would refer to Tom, Dick and Harry rather than primary, secondary and tertiary. They still had only vague ideas about how a thermonuclear weapon would work, and whether one, two, or three stages would be required. Nor was there much more certainty about the boosted designs, with no agreement on whether the boosting thermonuclear fuel was best placed inside the hollow core, as in Orange Herald, or wrapped around it, as in Green Bamboo.
Mark 14 nuclear bomb. Castle Union was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of United States nuclear tests. It was the first test of the TX-14 thermonuclear weapon (initially the "emergency capability" EC-14), one of the first deployed U.S. thermonuclear bombs. An "Alarm Clock" device is a "dry" fusion bomb, using lithium deuteride fuel for the fusion stage of a "staged" fusion bomb, unlike the cryogenic liquid deuterium of the first-generation Ivy Mike fusion device.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the leadership of the Soviet Union feared the United States would use its nuclear superiority to its advantage, as from 1945 to 1948 the U.S. was the only state possessing nuclear weapons. The USSR countered by rapidly developing their own nuclear weapons, surprising the US with their first test in 1949. In turn, the U.S. countered by developing the vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapon, testing their first hydrogen bomb in 1952 at Ivy Mike, but the USSR quickly countered by testing their own thermonuclear weapons, with a test in 1953 of a semi-thermonuclear weapon of the Sloika design, and in 1956, with the testing of Sakharov's Third Idea – equivalent to the Castle Bravo device. Meanwhile, tensions between the two nations rose as 1956 saw the suppression of Hungary by the Soviets; the U.S. and European nations drew certain conclusions from that event, while in the U.S., a powerful social backlash was afoot, prompted by Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, U.S. citizens executed in 1953 after conviction of espionage.
Taylor concluded that Israel's thermonuclear weapon designs appeared to be "less complex than those of other nations," and as of 1986 "not capable of producing yields in the megaton or higher range." Nevertheless, "they may produce at least several times the yield of fission weapons with the same quantity of plutonium or highly enriched uranium." In other words, Israel could "boost" the yield of its nuclear fission weapons. According to Taylor, the uncertainties involved in the process of boosting required more than theoretical analysis for full confidence in the weapons' performance.
The first effort to exploit the symbiotic relationship between fission and fusion was a 1940s design that mixed fission and fusion fuel in alternating thin layers. As a single-stage device, it would have been a cumbersome application of boosted fission. It first became practical when incorporated into the secondary of a two-stage thermonuclear weapon."The 'Alarm Clock' ... became practical only by the inclusion of Li6 (in 1950) and its combination with the radiation implosion." Hans A. Bethe, Memorandum on the History of Thermonuclear Program , May 28, 1952.
Operation Castle test video Operation Castle was a United States series of high-yield (high-energy) nuclear tests by Joint Task Force 7 (JTF-7) at Bikini Atoll beginning in March 1954. It followed Operation Upshot–Knothole and preceded Operation Teapot. Conducted as a joint venture between the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Department of Defense (DoD), the ultimate objective of the operation was to test designs for an aircraft-deliverable thermonuclear weapon. All the devices tested, which ranged in weight from 6,520 to 39,600 pounds, were built to be dropped from aircraft.
The 1980-vintage RV was reportedly designed to be able to carry a BARC- developed, nuclear boosted fission weapon of 200 kt yield weighing 1,000 kg, also of 1980 vintage design. After making room for new and lighter Indian thermonuclear weapon payload, of 1995 vintage design, the MRV has room for about 200 kg (estimated) liquid fuel in pressurised vessels. Although for velocity correction, approximately 50 to 80 kg is estimated to be sufficient. At least one MRV variant type uses a set of solid fuelled cartridges for velocity trimming.
Most modern nuclear weapons utilize 238U as a "tamper" material (see nuclear weapon design). A tamper which surrounds a fissile core works to reflect neutrons and to add inertia to the compression of the 239Pu charge. As such, it increases the efficiency of the weapon and reduces the critical mass required. In the case of a thermonuclear weapon, 238U can be used to encase the fusion fuel, the high flux of very energetic neutrons from the resulting fusion reaction causes 238U nuclei to split and adds more energy to the "yield" of the weapon.
In addition, land-based ICBM silos can be hardened. No missile launch facility can really defend against a direct nuclear hit, but a sufficiently hardened silo could defend against a near miss, especially if the detonation is not from a multimegaton thermonuclear weapon. In addition, ICBMs can be placed on road or rail-mobile launchers (RT-23 Molodets, RT-2PM2 Topol-M, DF-31, Agni 5, Agni 6, MGM-134 Midgetman), which can then be moved around; as an enemy has nothing fixed to aim at, this increases their survivability.
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).
A Mark 39 bomb as discovered following the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash The Mark 39 nuclear bomb and W39 nuclear warhead were versions of an American thermonuclear weapon, which were in service from 1957 to 1966. The Mark 39 design was a thermonuclear bomb (see Teller-Ulam design) and had a yield of 3.8 megatons. The design is an improved Mark 15 nuclear bomb design (the TX-15-X3 design and Mark 39 Mod 0 were the same design). The Mark 15 was the first lightweight US thermonuclear bomb.
Castle Romeo was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of U.S. nuclear tests. It was the first test of the TX-17 thermonuclear weapon, the first deployed thermonuclear bomb. It was detonated on March 27, 1954, at Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands, on a barge moored in the middle of the crater from the Castle Bravo test. It was the first such barge-based test, a necessity that had come about because the powerful thermonuclear devices completely obliterated the small islands following detonation.
On Thermonuclear War is a book by Herman Kahn, a military strategist at the RAND Corporation, although it was written only a year before he left RAND to form the Hudson Institute. It is a controversial treatise on the nature and theory of war in the thermonuclear weapon age. In it, Kahn addresses the strategic doctrines of nuclear war and its effect on the international balance of power. Kahn introduced the Doomsday Machine as a rhetorical device to show the limits of John von Neumann's strategy of mutual assured destruction or MAD.
The bomb used a plutonium implosion design with a yield of 70 kilotons. The Reggane Oasis test site was used for three more atmospheric tests before testing activity moved to a second site, Ecker, to carry out a total of 13 underground tests into 1967. The French nuclear testing site was moved to the unpopulated French atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The first test conducted at these new sites was the "Canopus" test in the Fangataufa atoll in French Polynesia on 24 August 1968, the country's first multistage thermonuclear weapon test.
Davy Crockett artillery shell is the smallest known nuclear weapon developed by the US. Mk-17 was an early US thermonuclear weapon and weighed around 21 short tons (19,000 kg). Other delivery methods included artillery shells, mines such as the Medium Atomic Demolition Munition and the novel Blue Peacock, nuclear depth charges, and nuclear torpedoes. An 'Atomic Bazooka' was also fielded, designed to be used against large formations of tanks. In the 1950s the US developed small nuclear warheads for air defense use, such as the Nike Hercules.
MK-17 Thermonuclear Weapon during EWO (Emergency War Order) operations. Walker Front Gate, about 1960 Walker AFB Nike missile Defense Area The 6th Bombardment Wing, Medium was activated on 2 January 1951 at Walker AFB and was equipped with Boeing B-29 Superfortress. On 1 August 1951, the 307th Air Refueling Squadron was attached to the wing. It flew KB-29 tankers until inactivated 16 June 1952. The 6th, along with the 509th Bombardment Wing at Walker formed the SAC 47th Air Division until June 1958 with the reassignment of the 509th to Pease AFB.
Each explosion was accompanied by tsunamis estimated to have been over high in places. A large area of the Sunda Strait and places on the Sumatran coast were affected by pyroclastic flows from the volcano. The energy released from the explosion has been estimated to be equal to about , roughly four times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. At 10:41am, a landslide tore off half of Rakata volcano, along with the remainder of the island to the north of Rakata, causing the final explosion.
The Soviet RDS-220 hydrogen bomb (code name Ivan, Russian or Vanya), also known as Tsar Bomba (), was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. Tested on 30 October 1961 as an experimental verification of calculation principles and multi-stage thermonuclear weapon designs, it also remains the most powerful human-made explosive ever detonated. The bomb was detonated above the Sukhoy Nos ("Dry Nose") cape of Severny Island, Novaya Zemlya, from Mityushikha Bay, north of Matochkin Strait. The detonation was secret but was detected by United States intelligence agencies.
The device was detonated at Lop Nur Test Base, or often dubbed as Lop Nur Nuclear Weapon Test Base, in Malan, Xinjiang, on 17 June 1967. With successful testing of this three-stage thermonuclear device, China became the fourth country to have successfully developed a thermonuclear weapon after the United States, Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. It was dropped from a Hong-6 (Chinese manufactured Tu-16) and was parachute-retarded for an airburst at 2960 meters. The bomb was a three-stage device with a boosted U-235 primary and U-238 pusher.
This section was removed from later editions, but, according to Glasstone in 1978, not because it was inaccurate or because the weapons had changed. Fission products are as deadly as neutron-activated cobalt. The standard high-fission thermonuclear weapon is automatically a weapon of radiological warfare, as dirty as a cobalt bomb. Initially, gamma radiation from the fission products of an equivalent size fission-fusion- fission bomb are much more intense than Co-60: 15,000 times more intense at 1 hour; 35 times more intense at 1 week; 5 times more intense at 1 month; and about equal at 6 months.
After years of deliberation, Murrow and Fred Friendly aired an episode of See It Now on March 9, 1954 entitled "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy." It was a critical report featuring excerpts of McCarthy's own speeches. Downs ran nightly screenings of the broadcast at his home in Rome to packed houses, mostly consisting of Americans, including members of the State Department and military attachés. On November 2, 1952, Downs made a somber appearance with Edward R. Murrow on See It Now after the Ivy Mike operation, the first successful testing of a thermonuclear weapon.
The Bharat Rakshak website has extensive data and analysis that uses public domain data and ballistic calculations to show that the range is greatly influenced by use or non-use of thrusters on the RV (required for velocity trimming) for propulsion as a HAM (high-altitude motor). There seems to be room in the RV for about 200 kg fuel (solid or liquid) after allowing for a long but lightweight thermonuclear weapon. This RV integrated HAM is referred to as the half stage after the two solid fuelled stages. This stage provides a disproportional increase in range for a lighter RV payload.
A B83 casing. The B83 thermonuclear weapon is a variable-yield unguided bomb developed by the United States in the late 1970s, entering service in 1983. With a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons (5.0 PJ, 80 times the 15 kt yield of the atomic bomb "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945), it is the most powerful nuclear free-fall weapon currently in the United States arsenal. It was designed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the first underground test detonation of the production B83 took place on 15 December 1984 in Nevada at Area U19ac.
Early thermonuclear weapon designs such as the Joe-4, the Soviet "Layer Cake" ("Sloika", ), used large amounts of fusion to induce fission in the uranium-238 atoms that make up depleted uranium. These weapons had a fissile core surrounded by a layer of lithium-6 deuteride, in turn surrounded by a layer of depleted uranium. Some designs (including the layer cake) had several alternate layers of these materials. The Soviet Layer Cake was similar to the American Alarm Clock design, which was never built, and the British Green Bamboo design, which was built but never tested.
Gold has been proposed as a material for creating a salted nuclear weapon (cobalt is another, better-known salting material). A jacket of natural 197Au, irradiated by the intense high-energy neutron flux from an exploding thermonuclear weapon, would transmute into the radioactive isotope 198Au with a half-life of 2.697 days and produce approximately 0.411 MeV of gamma radiation, significantly increasing the radioactivity of the weapon's fallout for several days. Such a weapon is not known to have ever been built, tested, or used. Gold has been used in thermonuclear weapons as radiation mirrors within the secondary assembly.
The first test of the series was Grapple 1, of Short Granite. This bomb was dropped from a height of by a Vickers Valiant bomber of No. 49 Squadron RAF piloted by Wing Commander Kenneth Hubbard, off the shore of Malden Island at 11:38 local time on 15 May 1957. It was Britain's second airdrop of a nuclear bomb after the Operation Buffalo test at Maralinga on 11 October 1956, and the first of a thermonuclear weapon. The United States had not attempted an airdrop of a hydrogen bomb until the Operation Redwing Cherokee test on 21 May 1956.
Marshall Glecker Holloway (November 23, 1912 – June 18, 1991) was an American physicist who worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory during and after World War II. He was its representative, and the deputy scientific director, at the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in July 1946. Holloway became the head of the Laboratory's W Division, responsible for new weapons development. In September 1952 he was charged with designing, building and testing a thermonuclear weapon, popularly known as a hydrogen bomb. This culminated in the Ivy Mike test in November of that year.
Using the computers in the new compound, they discover what these installations were originally constructed to create a thermonuclear weapon to mimic the radiation signature of a solar flare to use against the citizens of Centauri III ("Project Icarus"). Watching the video, the team also discovers that the bugs they have been battling are the descendants of stowaway Earth bugs that evolved under the solar activity of this planet. Upon this discovery, Asta's memory completely returns. She remembers the attack on her planet as a child and the military Colonel Bishop who found her and left her there to die in the radiation.
The reaction of of antimatter with of matter would produce (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass–energy equivalence formula, ), or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT – slightly less than the yield of the 27,000 kg Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. Not all of that energy can be utilized by any realistic propulsion technology because of the nature of the annihilation products. While electron–positron reactions result in gamma ray photons, these are difficult to direct and use for thrust. In reactions between protons and antiprotons, their energy is converted largely into relativistic neutral and charged pions.
Yankee was originally intended to be a test of a TX-16/EC-16, a weaponized version of the large and complex Ivy Mike device. A small number of emergency capability EC-16s were produced, without being tested, to provide a stop-gap thermonuclear weapon capability in response to the Russian nuclear weapons program. The test device, code-named Jughead, had been prepared as a backup in case the non-cryogenic Castle Bravo Shrimp device failed to work. The test of Jughead was cancelled when the Bravo test was successful, and the cryogenic EC-16s were withdrawn and dismantled.
Roughly parallel to the development of naval aviation was the development of submarines to attack underneath the surface. At first, the ships were capable of only short dives, but they eventually developed the capability to spend weeks or months underwater powered by nuclear reactors. In both world wars, submarines (U-boats in Germany) primarily exerted their power by using torpedoes to sink merchant ships and other warships. In the 1950s, the Cold War inspired the development of ballistic missile submarines, each loaded with dozens of thermonuclear weapon-armed SLBMs and with orders to launch them from sea if the other nation attacked.
Some nuclear weapons are designed for special purposes; a neutron bomb is a thermonuclear weapon that yields a relatively small explosion but a relatively large amount of neutron radiation; such a device could theoretically be used to cause massive casualties while leaving infrastructure mostly intact and creating a minimal amount of fallout. The detonation of any nuclear weapon is accompanied by a blast of neutron radiation. Surrounding a nuclear weapon with suitable materials (such as cobalt or gold) creates a weapon known as a salted bomb. This device can produce exceptionally large quantities of long-lived radioactive contamination.
Along with Stanislaw Ulam, he calculated that not only would the amount of tritium needed for Teller's model of a thermonuclear weapon be prohibitive, but a fusion reaction could still not be assured to propagate even with this large quantity of tritium. Fermi was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the Oppenheimer security hearing in 1954 that resulted in denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance. In his later years, Fermi continued teaching at the University of Chicago. His PhD students in the postwar period included Owen Chamberlain, Geoffrey Chew, Jerome Friedman, Marvin Goldberger, Tsung-Dao Lee, Arthur Rosenfeld and Sam Treiman.
Royal Engineers constructing a runway at Kiritimati, November 1956 In 1956 Sinclair was appointed a staff officer to Major-General John Woollett, the chief engineer of Operation Grapple, the first attempted detonation of a British-made thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb). In this role he developed the British facilities on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Sinclair supervised construction of a modern airfield and air-conditioned buildings to be used to construct and store the bombs. The first series of tests in May and June failed to reach the key megaton threshold and subsequent tests were relocated north to Kiritimati.
In 1945, he transferred to Los Alamos, and was involved with the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear device, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Turkevich was one of several scientists who estimated the amount of energy released in the explosion. He then transferred to Edward Teller's theory group to study nuclear fusion and establish whether producing a thermonuclear weapon was feasible, one of many challenges faced by scientists at Los Alamos that led to the development and use of the Monte Carlo method. He worked with Nicholas Metropolis and Stanley Frankel using the ENIAC computer.
China had received extensive technical help from the Soviet Union to jump-start their nuclear program, but by 1960, the rift between the Soviet Union and China had become so great that the Soviet Union ceased all assistance to China and refused to help the Chinese government with their nuclear program. The goal of China was to produce a thermonuclear device of at least a megaton in yield that could be dropped by an aircraft or carried by a ballistic missile. Several explosions to test thermonuclear weapon designs, characteristics and yield boosting preceded the thermonuclear test.
After the war, fearing that Britain would lose its great power status, the British government resumed the atomic bomb development effort, now codenamed High Explosive Research. The successful test of an atomic bomb in Operation Hurricane in October 1952 represented an extraordinary scientific and technological achievement, but Britain was still several years behind the United States in nuclear weapons technology. In July 1954, the Cabinet decided to develop the hydrogen bomb. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston produced three designs: Orange Herald, a large boosted fission weapon; Green Bamboo, an interim thermonuclear design; and Green Granite, a true thermonuclear weapon.
The second book, Under the Yoke, shows Europe under Draka rule. The Draka, having applied modern science to the practice of slavery, ruthlessly crush resistance and obliterate old institutions, including the use of a thermonuclear weapon on the rebelling city of Barcelona. The third book, The Stone Dogs, depicts the cold war between the Draka and the Alliance, fought mostly on interplanetary colonies throughout the inner solar system, and Alliance efforts to recruit Draka defectors. In the 1970s, the exposure of an Alliance covert operation against a Hindu nationalist party leads to India seceding from the Alliance, after which it is conquered and enslaved by the Draka.
In 1954, a hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll exposed the 23-man crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon 5 to radioactive fallout. The incident is known as Castle Bravo, the largest thermonuclear device ever detonated by the United States and the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests. In 1967 the oil tanker ran aground off the coast of Cornwall, and in 1969 oil spilled from an offshore well in California's Santa Barbara Channel. In 1971, the conclusion of a lawsuit in Japan drew international attention to the effects of decades of mercury poisoning on the people of Minamata.
Despite his disagreement with Oppenheimer over the need for a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb, he testified on the latter's behalf at the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing, at which he asserted that Oppenheimer was loyal, and praised him for his helpfulness once the program went ahead. Shortly before his death from cancer, von Neumann headed the United States government's top secret ICBM committee, which would sometimes meet in his home. Its purpose was to decide on the feasibility of building an ICBM large enough to carry a thermonuclear weapon. Von Neumann had long argued that while the technical obstacles were sizable, they could be overcome in time.
In two years, he was promoted to head of the Capenhurst laboratories, and then in 1958 he succeeded Leonard Rotherham as director of research and development of the industrial group of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. In 1952, Britain committed itself to the development of a thermonuclear weapon. Kronberger's work on the separation of lithium isotopes was essential to the construction of the first warheads, which were tested at Christmas Island in 1957. A series of promotions within the UKAEA followed; he became Scientist in Chief of the Reactor Group in 1962 and the Member for Reactor Development of the UKAEA in 1969.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) conducted its sixth (and most recent to date) nuclear test on 3 September 2017, stating it had tested a thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb). The United States Geological Survey reported an earthquake of 6.3-magnitude not far from North Korea's Punggye-ri nuclear test site. South Korean authorities said the earthquake seemed to be artificial, consistent with an underground nuclear test. The USGS, as well as China Earthquake Networks Center, reported that the initial event was followed by a second, smaller, earthquake at the site, several minutes later, which was characterized as a collapse of the cavity formed by the initial detonation.
Renshaw defeats the final commando, only to find it has armed a thermonuclear weapon that then explodes and kills him. At several points during the televised episode, the killer Zuni fetish doll from the "Amelia" segment of the 1975 television movie Trilogy of Terror can be spotted as part of Renshaw's trophy collection. This is an homage to Richard Matheson, the father of Richard Christian Matheson and the author of Trilogy of Terror. The episode also has a similar plot and structure to Richard Matheson's classic 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, "The Invaders" which presents a similar sort of battle between a silent protagonist and miniature attackers.
The volume of LiD fuel used was approximately 60% the volume of the fusion fuel filling used in the wet SAUSAGE and dry RUNT I and II devices, or about , corresponding to about 400 kg of lithium deuteride (as LiD has a density of 0.78201 g/cm3). The mixture cost about 4.54 USD/g at that time. The fusion burn efficiency was close to 25.1%, the highest attained efficiency of the first thermonuclear weapon generation. This efficiency is well within the figures given in a November 1956 statement, when a DOD official disclosed that thermonuclear devices with efficiencies ranging from 15% to up about 40% had been tested.
Information about the W88 has implied that it is a variation of the standard Teller–Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons. In a thermonuclear weapon such as the W88, nuclear fission in the primary part causes nuclear fusion in the secondary part, which results in the main explosion. Although the weapon employs fusion in the secondary, most of the explosive yield comes from fission of nuclear material in the primary, secondary, and casing. In 1999, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the W88 had an egg-shaped primary and a spherical secondary, which were together inside a radiation case known as the "peanut" for its shape.
The Mk/B53 was a high-yield bunker buster thermonuclear weapon developed by the United States during the Cold War. Deployed on Strategic Air Command bombers, the B53, with a yield of 9 megatons, was the most powerful weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal after the last B41 nuclear bombs were retired in 1976. The B53 was the basis of the W-53 warhead carried by the Titan II Missile, which was decommissioned in 1987. Although not in active service for many years before 2010, fifty B53s were retained during that time as part of the "hedge" portion of the Enduring Stockpile until its complete dismantling in 2011.
The warhead of the Atlas D was originally the G.E. Mk 2 "heat sink" re-entry vehicle (RV) with a W49 thermonuclear weapon, combined weight and yield of 1.44 megatons (Mt). The W49 was later placed in a Mk 3 ablative RV, combined weight . The Atlas E and F had an AVCO Mk 4 RV containing a W38 thermonuclear bomb with a yield of 3.75 Mt which was fuzed for either air burst or contact burst. The Mk 4 RV also deployed penetration aids in the form of mylar balloons which replicated the radar signature of the Mk 4 RV. The Mk 4 plus W-38 had a combined weight of .
According to an article in New Scientist, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was also hoping to convince the US to change the McMahon Act, which prohibited sharing information even with the British, by demonstrating that the UK had the technology to make a thermonuclear weapon (an H-bomb), and he put Penney in charge of developing this bomb. The Orange Herald bomb was developed and was passed off as a thermonuclear bomb, when in fact it was a boosted fission weapon in which little of the energy came from fusion. The test of this weapon was successful in convincing the Americans to allow information sharing with the British.
A limited r-process-like series of neutron captures occurs to a minor extent in thermonuclear weapon explosions. These led to the discovery of the elements einsteinium (element 99) and fermium (element 100) in nuclear weapon fallout. The r-process contrasts with the s-process, the other predominant mechanism for the production of heavy elements, which is nucleosynthesis by means of slow captures of neutrons. The s-process primarily occurs within ordinary stars, particularly AGB stars, where the neutron flux is sufficient to cause neutron captures to recur every 10–100 years, much too slow for the r-process, which requires 100 captures per second.
Another reason the panel gave for not conducting a U.S. test of a thermonuclear weapon was that such a test would produce radioactive debris, the capture and analysis of which would give Soviet scientists clues about the nature of the U.S. design and thus help them in their own efforts to develop a weapon.Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 311–312. Scholars have disagreed on whether in fact the Soviets did gain any useful information from the Ivy Mike test when it occurred, but on balance it seems that Soviet detection and analysis equipment was insufficient to the task.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, pp.
The very hot and dense conditions encountered during an Inertial Confinement Fusion experiment are similar to those created in a thermonuclear weapon, and have applications to the nuclear weapons program. ICF experiments might be used, for example, to help determine how warhead performance will degrade as it ages, or as part of a program of designing new weapons. Retaining knowledge and corporate expertise in the nuclear weapons program is another motivation for pursuing ICF.Richard Garwin, Arms Control Today, 1997 Funding for the NIF in the United States is sourced from the 'Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Stewardship' program, and the goals of the program are oriented accordingly.
The primary stage of a modern thermonuclear weapon may use a lightweight beryllium reflector, which is also transparent to X-rays when ionized, allowing the primary's energy output to escape quickly to be used in compressing the secondary stage. While the effect of a tamper is to increase efficiency, both by reflecting neutrons and by delaying the expansion of the bomb, the effect on the critical mass is not as great. The reason for this is that the process of reflection is time-consuming. By the time reflected neutrons make it back into the core, several generations of the chain reaction have passed, meaning the contribution from the older generation is a tiny fraction of the neutron population.
In a two-stage thermonuclear weapon the energy from the primary impacts the secondary. An essential energy transfer modulator called the interstage, between the primary and the secondary, protects the secondary's fusion fuel from heating too quickly, which could cause it to explode in a conventional (and small) heat explosion before the fusion and fission reactions get a chance to start. W76 Neutron Tubes in a Gun Carriage Style Fixture There is very little information in the open literature about the mechanism of the interstage. Its first mention in a U.S. government document formally released to the public appears to be a caption in a graphic promoting the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program in 2007.
The Bassoon Prime produced a 5-megaton yield, of which 87% came from fission. Data obtained from this test, and others, culminated in the eventual deployment of the highest yielding US nuclear weapon known, and the highest yield-to-weight weapon ever made, a three-stage thermonuclear weapon with a maximum "dirty" yield of 25 megatons, designated as the B41 nuclear bomb, which was to be carried by U.S. Air Force bombers until it was decommissioned; this weapon was never fully tested. As such, high-yield clean bombs appear to have been of little value from a military standpoint. The actual deployed weapons were the dirty versions, which maximized yield for the same size device.
Quick deployment of the Agni- II was possible, by building on the earlier Agni-TD program that provided proven critical technologies and designs required for long-range ballistic missiles. Thus when the decision was made to build the Agni weapon system, some quick optimisation and ruggedisation was done to the basic '1980 vintage' design, including a solid fuelled second stage. The re-entry vehicle (RV) and avionics were brought up to state-of-the-art levels. The Pokhran-II nuclear test proved a family of more powerful and lighter nuclear weapons; the 200 kt thermonuclear weapon is far lighter compared to 1,000 kg earlier budgeted for the 200 kt nuclear boosted fission weapon.
There was reasonable confidence in knowing the size of the Soviet fission bomb inventory, but much less confidence about estimates of the biological and chemical warfare capabilities. The report observed, however, that a good deal of information could be derived from knowledge of Soviet science in disciplines that supported biological and chemical warfare. Concern was expressed about knowledge of their progress of their thermonuclear weapon development program Joe-4, their first test, took place in August of the same year and their rate of uranium 235 production. While the CIA was confident on its knowledge of Soviet electronic warfare capabilities, there were gaps in the knowledge about the electronic order of battle in the Soviet air defense network.
In volleyball, Karch Kiraly is the only person to have won Olympic gold medals (or indeed medals of any color) in both indoor and beach volleyball. Jewish physicist Edward Teller acquired the title of "the father of the hydrogen bomb," for his concept of a thermonuclear weapon that uses the energy of nuclear fusion. But he also worked in the Manhattan Project along with other Hungarian physicists like Eugene Wigner (who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for his work on the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles of elementary particles) and Leó Szilárd. It was Szilárd who persuaded Albert Einstein to write his infamous letter to Franklin Roosevelt concerning atomic warfare.
Iskander is a tactical missile system designed to be used in theater level conflicts. It is intended to use conventional or thermonuclear weapon warheads for the engagement of small and area targets (both moving and stationary), such as hostile fire weapons, air and anti-missile defenses, command posts and communications nodes and troops in concentration areas, among others. The system can therefore destroy both active military units and targets to degrade the enemy's capability to wage war. In 2007, a new missile for the system (and launcher) was test fired, the cruise missile,Iskander Missile System Retrieved on 11-18-08 with a range of applications up to 2000 km or more.
Holloway remained at Los Alamos after the war ended in 1945. He was its representative, and the deputy scientific director, at the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in July 1946, when atomic bombs were tested against an array of warships. Holloway became the head of the Laboratory's W Division, responsible for new weapons development. The Los Alamos National Laboratory had continued research into fusion weapons for many years after Holloway's work in 1942 and 1943, and in 1951 the Atomic Energy Commission, which had replaced the Manhattan Project in 1947, ordered the Laboratory to proceed with designing, building and testing a thermonuclear weapon, popularly known as a hydrogen bomb.
The standard high-fission thermonuclear weapon is automatically a weapon of radiological warfare, as dirty as a cobalt bomb. Initially, gamma radiation from the fission products of an equivalent size fission-fusion-fission bomb are much more intense than Co-60: 15,000 times more intense at 1 hour; 35 times more intense at 1 week; 5 times more intense at 1 month; and about equal at 6 months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly so that Co-60 fallout is 8 times more intense than fission at 1 year and 150 times more intense at 5 years. The very long-lived isotopes produced by fission would overtake the 60Co again after about 75 years.
North Korea claimed to have tested its miniaturised thermonuclear bomb on 6 January 2016. North Korea's first three nuclear tests (2006, 2009 and 2013) were relatively low yield and do not appear to have been of a thermonuclear weapon design. In 2013, the South Korean Defense Ministry speculated that North Korea may be trying to develop a "hydrogen bomb" and such a device may be North Korea's next weapons test. In January 2016, North Korea claimed to have successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, although only a magnitude 5.1 seismic event was detected at the time of the test, a similar magnitude to the 2013 test of a 6–9 kt atomic bomb.
The warhead of the Atlas D was originally the G.E. Mk 2 "heat sink" re-entry vehicle (RV) with a W49 thermonuclear weapon, combined weight and yield of 1.44 megatons (Mt). The W-49 was later placed in a Mk 3 ablative RV, combined weight The Atlas E and F had an AVCO Mk 4 RV containing a W-38 thermonuclear bomb with a yield of 3.75 Mt which was fuzed for either air burst or contact burst. The Mk 4 RV also deployed penetration aids in the form of mylar balloons which replicated the radar signature of the Mk 4 RV. The Mk 4 plus W-38 had a combined weight of .
The spark plug has not yet been compressed, and, thus, remains subcritical, so no significant fission or fusion takes place as a result. If enough neutrons arrive before implosion of the secondary is complete, though, the crucial temperature differential between the outer and inner parts of the secondary can be degraded, potentially causing the secondary to fail to ignite. The first Livermore-designed thermonuclear weapon, the Morgenstern device, failed in this manner when it was tested as Castle Koon on April 7, 1954. The primary ignited, but the secondary, preheated by the primary's neutron wave, suffered what was termed as an inefficient detonation; thus, a weapon with a predicted one-megaton yield produced only 110 kilotons, of which merely 10 kt were attributed to fusion.
Despite his training and experience as a hitman, Renshaw finds himself outnumbered and outgunned, and he cedes control of the living room to the toy soldiers, taking cover in the bathroom. The soldiers pass a piece of paper under the door, demanding his surrender, but Renshaw writes "NUTS!" on the paper and sends it back, prompting a barrage of rocket fire which destroys most of the door. Renshaw eventually plots to destroy the soldiers with a Molotov cocktail constructed from a bottle of lighter fluid, but before the cocktail detonates, a massive blast destroys the entire apartment. Outside in a park below, a couple finds Renshaw's bloody T-shirt, and the other contents of the footlocker are revealed, including one made-to-scale thermonuclear weapon.
Of course, the successful and promising work from both the United States and the Soviet Union only spurred each country to push for stronger weapons, as the floodgates of thermonuclear weapon potential had been opened. This was, of course, entirely the norm at the time considering that the Cold War was in full swing. It was a significant boost to Soviet morale knowing that the Soviet Union's physicists, engineers, scientist, and great minds were able to not only compete with the Americans, but also able to outperform them in some key areas of weapon and technological development. The RDS program gave rise to the genius of Andrei Sakharov, who undoubtedly was the driving force behind the Soviet thermonuclear weapons development program.
Joe 4 (warhead name: RDS-6s (Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Specialnyi; Special Jet Engine)) was an American nickname for the first Soviet test of a thermonuclear weapon on August 12, 1953, that detonated with a force equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT. Scholars dispute the authenticity of RDS-6 as a thermonuclear device as it did not manage to produce a yield consistent with a true hydrogen bomb. It utilized a scheme in which fission and fusion fuel (lithium-6 deuteride) were "layered", a design known as the Sloika (, named after a type of layered puff pastry) model in the Soviet Union. A ten-fold increase in explosive power was achieved by a combination of fusion energy and neutron- initiated ("boosted") fission.
In 1949, at the test-site in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, Shchelkin supervised the placement of the first Soviet nuclear device on the tower, put the detonating cap on the sphere of plutonium himself (and supervised the later ones). For this success, he received the Hero of Socialist Labour award; several others followed in ensuing years, including for work on the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon. Remaining on good terms with Igor Kurchatov, Shchelkin's knowledge, experience, managerial and business sense led to his recommendation as the first scientific director and chief designer of the new "second installation" for development of nuclear weapons at NII-1011 (also becoming known as Chelyabinsk-70 (now the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Technical Physics (VNIITF)), where research and development began in 1955. He was also overall scientific director Yulii Khariton's deputy.
This 14 MeV neutron then strikes an atom of uranium-238, causing fission: without this fusion stage, the original 1 MeV neutron hitting an atom of uranium-238 would probably have just been absorbed. This fission then releases energy and also neutrons, which then create more tritium from the remaining lithium-6, and so on, in a continuous cycle. Energy from fission of uranium-238 is useful in weapons: both because depleted uranium is much cheaper than highly enriched uranium and because it cannot go critical and is therefore less likely to be involved in a catastrophic accident. This kind of thermonuclear weapon can produce up to 20% of its yield from fusion, with the rest coming from fission, and is limited in yield to less than one megaton of TNT (4 PJ) equivalent.
In total, Taylor was responsible for the development of eight bombs: the Super Oralloy Bomb, Davey Crockett, Scorpion, Hamlet, Bee, Hornet, Viper, and the Puny Plutonium bomb. The latter was the first-ever dud in the history of U.S. nuclear tests. He produced the bomb called Hamlet after receiving direct orders from military officials to pursue a project in bomb efficiency; it ended up being the most efficient bomb in the history of the U.S. Apart from bombs, Taylor also explored concepts of producing large amounts of nuclear fuel in an expedited manner. His plans, known as MICE (Megaton Ice Contained Explosions), essentially sought to plant a thermonuclear weapon deep in the ice and detonate it, resulting in a giant underground pool of radioactive materials that could then be retrieved.
Samuel T. Cohen, the "father of the neutron bomb", claimed for a long time that red mercury is a powerful explosive-like chemical known as a ballotechnic. The energy released during its reaction is allegedly enough to directly compress the secondary without the need for a fission primary in a thermonuclear weapon. He claimed that he learned that the Soviet scientists perfected the use of red mercury and used it to produce a number of softball-sized pure fusion bombs weighing as little as , which he claimed were made in large numbers. He went on to claim that the reason this is not more widely known is that elements within the US power structure are deliberately keeping it "under wraps" due to the frightening implications such a weapon would have on nuclear proliferation.
He entered the Soviet weapons programme as one of its youngest scientists, a senior laboratory assistant in Andrei Sakharov's group at Arzamas-16 (also known as KB-11), now known as All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF), in Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod region. In 1953, he received the Stalin Prize for his part in the work to develop the Soviet union's first thermonuclear weapon, the RDS-6 which was detonated in 1953; this was the first of several state awards for his work advancing nuclear weapons. With fellow physicist Yuri Trutnev, he proposed a new design in 1955 for a two- stage thermonuclear device with much-improved features, followed by theoretical development and finally completion in 1958. He frequently took part in testing weapons he had helped to develop.
Uranium-238, for example, has a near-zero fission cross section for neutrons of less than one MeV energy. If no additional energy is supplied by any other mechanism, the nucleus will not fission, but will merely absorb the neutron, as happens when U-238 absorbs slow and even some fraction of fast neutrons, to become U-239. The remaining energy to initiate fission can be supplied by two other mechanisms: one of these is more kinetic energy of the incoming neutron, which is increasingly able to fission a fissionable heavy nucleus as it exceeds a kinetic energy of one MeV or more (so-called fast neutrons). Such high energy neutrons are able to fission U-238 directly (see thermonuclear weapon for application, where the fast neutrons are supplied by nuclear fusion).
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.
She takes the holo with her, which she is sure is counterfeit, on a visit to the La Solana compound in New Mexico, where Leisha Camden once lived. There she leaves a message for Miranda Sharifi, as have thousands of supplicants before her, pouring out her heart and soul, her views on self, her views on pain and its necessity as proof of life, her views on the red syringes-- And, at the news of these syringes, Miranda Sharifi opens a comlink. The speed of their conversation proves that they are not at Selene, but rather right here at La Solana. She agrees to take action about the red syringes, and also explains why they discontinued the Change syringes: As Theresa departs in her chartered plane, La Solana is destroyed by a thermonuclear weapon.
Upshot–Knothole Simon was a nuclear detonation conducted as part of the U.S. Operation Upshot–Knothole nuclear testing program. Simon was conducted on 25 April 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, and tested the TX-17/24 thermonuclear weapon design which had a yield of 43 kilotons. :Test: Simon :Time: 12:30 25 April 1953 (GMT) :04:30 25 April 1953 (local) :Location: Nevada Test Site, Area 1 :Test Height and Type: 300 Foot Tower :Yield: 43 kt The mass of radioactive material in the mushroom cloud did not disperse as expected, but stayed in a small volume of atmosphere as it traveled eastward. Finally, a couple of days later it became entrained in a severe thunderstorm over New York's Capital District, and most of the radioactive material washed out over a fairly small region (Washington and Rensselaer counties).
Due to its physical size and use of cryogenic liquid deuterium, it was not suitable for use as a deliverable weapon, but the Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 used a much smaller device with solid lithium deuteride. Boosted by the nuclear fusion reaction in lithium-7, the yield of was more than twice what had been expected, and indeed was the largest detonation the Americans would ever carry out. This resulted in widespread radioactive fallout that affected 236 Marshall Islanders, 28 Americans, and the 23 crewmen of a Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5). Meanwhile, the Soviet Union tested Joe 4, a boosted fission weapon with a yield of on 12 August 1953. This was followed by Joe 19, a true two-stage thermonuclear weapon on 20 November 1954.
Sometime in the late 1980s, an American traditionalist Catholic named Gary Giuffre began to expound the belief that Siri was the true pope, and that he was being held against his will in Rome. According to Giuffre and supporters of the theory, the white smoke that was seen on 26 October 1958 did indeed mean that a pope had been elected, and that pope was Siri, but he was forced to surrender the papacy in the face of dire threats from outside the conclave. Giuffre speculates the main threat was that Rome would be destroyed with a thermonuclear weapon, effectively wiping out the entire hierarchy of the Church in one blow. With the electors unsure of how to proceed, Roncalli, who they claim was a Freemason, supposedly offered himself as a compromise with the promise that he would call a synod soon after his election to regularize the unusual situation.
According to Arai, he does not view the daguerreotype as a piece of nostalgia used to harken back to the days of a classical method. He has taken the daguerrotype on as his own personal medium, saying that he finds it "a reliable device for storing memory that is far better for recording and transmitting interactions with his subjects than modern photography." Beginning in 2010, when he first became interested in nuclear issues, Arai has used the daguerreotype technique to create individual records—micro- monuments—of his encounters with people, objects, and places that had been through or affected by nuclear events. The first of these events was the Daigo Fukuryū Maru fishing boat, a vessel that was affected by nuclear fallout from the US’s thermonuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll in 1954. Called Castle Bravo, the thermonuclear weapons test occurred on March 1, 1954.
His claim was refused partly on the grounds that it was within the scope of his duties. The report also rejected Dolphin's claim that the Red Beard device became the trigger for the British thermonuclear bomb, and stated that the original Red Beard Mk.1 warhead design that had failed to fully trigger the British thermonuclear test devices at Christmas Island in 1957, was considerably modified using American information made available after signing of the Anglo-US Bilateral Treaty of 1958. Production examples of the Red Beard tactical nuclear weapon never used Dolphin's ideas, and after the 1958 Treaty no British thermonuclear weapon ever used Red Beard as the primary or trigger. Red Beard used a barium-based HE composition (baratol) at a time when British nuclear scientists had not yet understood fully that the primary ignition mechanism of a fusion device was by X-rays.
Bush unsuccessfully argued in 1952 that the US pursue a test ban agreement with the Soviet Union before testing its first thermonuclear weapon, but his interest in international controls was echoed in the 1946 Acheson–Lilienthal Report, which had been commissioned by President Harry S. Truman to help construct US nuclear weapons policy. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, exerted significant influence over the report, particularly in its recommendation of an international body that would control production of and research on the world's supply of uranium and thorium. A version of the Acheson-Lilienthal plan was presented to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission as the Baruch Plan in June 1946. The Baruch Plan proposed that an International Atomic Development Authority would control all research on and material and equipment involved in the production of atomic energy.
Since tritium undergoes radioactive decay, and is also difficult to confine physically, the much larger secondary charge of heavy hydrogen isotopes needed in a true hydrogen bomb uses solid lithium deuteride as its source of deuterium and tritium, producing the tritium in situ during secondary ignition. During the detonation of the primary fission bomb stage in a thermonuclear weapon (Teller-Ullam staging), the sparkplug, a cylinder of 235U/239Pu at the center of the fusion stage(s), begins to fission in a chain reaction, from excess neutrons channeled from the primary. The neutrons released from the fission of the sparkplug split lithium-6 into tritium and helium-4, while lithium-7 is split into helium-4, tritium, and one neutron. As these reactions occur, the fusion stage is compressed by photons from the primary and fission of the 238U or 238U/235U jacket surrounding the fusion stage.
It was thought at the time that a fission weapon would be quite simple to develop and that perhaps work on a hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear weapon) would be possible to complete before the end of the Second World War. However, in reality the problem of a regular atomic bomb was large enough to preoccupy the scientists for the next few years, much less the more speculative "Super" bomb. Only Teller continued working on the project—against the will of project leaders Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe. The Joe-1 atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union that took place in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with development of the far more powerful Super.Young and Schilling, Super Bomb, pp. 1–2.
Following the Mike blast by less than a year, Joe-4 seemed to validate claims that the bombs were inevitable and vindicate those who had supported the development of the fusion program. Coming during the height of McCarthyism, the effect was pronounced on the security hearings in early 1954, which revoked former Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance on the grounds that he was unreliable, had not supported the American hydrogen bomb program, and had made long-standing left-wing ties in the 1930s. Edward Teller participated in the hearing as the only major scientist to testify against Oppenheimer, resulting in his virtual expulsion from the physics community. On March 1, 1954, the U.S. detonated its first practical thermonuclear weapon (which used isotopes of lithium as its fusion fuel), known as the "Shrimp" device of the Castle Bravo test, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands.
All viewers were forced to fall down on their faces with their feet pointed toward the explosion to help avoid injury from flying debris. After the shock wave passed, all the viewers stood up and started cheering their success, the Soviet Union became the first to successfully air deliver a two-stage thermonuclear weapon. The measured energy yield of the initiation was equivalent to that of 1.6 megatons of TNT. After the testing of the RDS-37, the commission noted three things during the meeting on 24 November 1955, "the design of the hydrogen bomb, based on a novel principle, has been successfully tested; it is necessary to continue detailed studies of the processes proceeding in explosions of bombs of this type; further development of hydrogen bombs should be conducted on the basis of a broad application of the principles chosen as the foundation of the RDS-37 bomb".
At this time studies were also startedPRO AIR 2/13759 E18B that ultimately led to a decision in 1954 to develop a thermonuclear weapon, and the design studies were split into two tracks because the British at that time had not yet discovered the Teller-Ulam technique necessary to initiate fusion. One track led to an intermediate design, the so-called Type A thermonuclear design, similar to the 'Alarm Clock' and layer cake hybrid designs of other nuclear powers; although these designs are now regarded as large boosted fission weapons, and no longer regarded as thermonuclear weapons that derive a very large part of their energy from a fusion reaction, designated by the British as Type B, but as hybrids. The British hybrid weapon was known as Green Bamboo, weighed approx 4,500 lb (2,045 kg) and its spherical shape measured approx 45 inches diameter with a 72-point implosion system.PRO. AVIA 65/1193 E10A.
Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the effectiveness, yield, and explosive capability of nuclear weapons. Testing nuclear weapons offers practical information about how the weapons function, as well as how detonations are affected by different conditions; and how personnel, structures, and equipment are affected when subjected to nuclear explosions. However, nuclear testing has often been used as an indicator of scientific and military strength, and many tests have been overtly political in their intention; most nuclear weapons states publicly declared their nuclear status by means of a nuclear test. The first nuclear device was detonated as a test by the United States at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945, with a yield approximately equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. The first thermonuclear weapon technology test of an engineered device, codenamed "Ivy Mike", was tested at the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952 (local date), also by the United States.
Thus, they tended to disperse large amounts of unused fissile material, and the fission products, which are on average much more dangerous, in the form of nuclear fallout. During the 1950s, there was considerable debate over whether "clean" bombs could be produced and these were often contrasted with "dirty" bombs. "Clean" bombs were often a stated goal and scientists and administrators said that high-efficiency nuclear weapon design could create explosions which generated almost all of their energy in the form of nuclear fusion, which does not create harmful fission products. But the Castle Bravo accident of 1954, in which a thermonuclear weapon produced a large amount of fallout which was dispersed among human populations, suggested that this was not what was actually being used in modern thermonuclear weapons, which derive around half of their yield from a final fission stage of the fast fissioning of the uranium tamper of the secondary.
In addition to being created for political, propagandistic use and as a response to the nuclear deterrence capabilities then possessed by the United States, the Tsar Bomba was created as part of the strategic nuclear forces concept of the USSR, adopted during the rule of Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev. The aim was to achieve – without pursuing a quantitative parity with the US in terms of nuclear weapons and means of delivery – sufficient "guaranteed retaliation with an unacceptable level of damage to the enemy" in the event of a nuclear strike on the USSR via qualitatively superior nuclear power. The Tsar Bomba was not designed as a weapon, but as a proof-of-concept that larger warheads were possible and to exert psychological pressure on the United States. Research had also shown that the ammunition size of a thermonuclear weapon could be increased with minimal cost increases of 60 cents (in 1950s USD) per kiloton of TNT-equivalent explosive power.
Feodoritov became lost on one such trip and - fearful for his future - was aided in his return by locals (who were well aware of the function of Sarov), later finding from his boss (Andrei Sakharov) that the KGB had been informed and had organised a search party. He worked in this secret institution until the end of his life, starting as a senior laboratory assistant and progressing through to engineer, researcher, head of the research group, senior research fellow and chief of laboratory. He took part in the testing of nuclear weapons and was the scientific lead in a number of tests. Along with his project lead, Yevgeny Zababakhin, and in addition to his work on the RDS-37, he worked on calculations for the core part of the RDS-6s bomb, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon, and also worked on a design which became the first Soviet serial tactical nuclear weapon, RDS-4.
The RDS-6s was tested on August 12, 1953 (Joe 4). The measured yield was 400 kilotons, 10% from fission of the Uranium-235 core, 15-20% from fusion and 70 - 75% from fission of the Uranium-238 layers. After the successful test Sakharov proposed a more powerful version of the RDS-6s, code named RDS-6sD. Attempts to increase the yield of the RDS-6s however proved unfeasible. In December 1953 all research on the RDS-6t was also stopped after it was proven that thermonuclear ignition was not possible in the RDS-6t. Both the RDS-6s and the RDS-6t were dead ends and research focused again on a two-stage thermonuclear weapon. A variant of the RDS-6s was developed later, code named RDS-27. The difference between the RDS-6s and the RDS-27 was that the RDS-27 did not use tritium. This improved the operational usefulness of the RDS-27, but reduced the yield from 400 kilotons to 250 kilotons.
From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded. As Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to influence policy away from a heated arms race. The first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and over the next several months there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with development of the far more powerful, nuclear fusion-based hydrogen bomb, then known as "the Super". Oppenheimer had been aware of the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon since the days of the Manhattan Project, and had allocated a limited amount of theoretical research work toward the possibility at the time but nothing more than that given the pressing need to develop a fission weapon.
Since the 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test demonstrated the feasibility of making arbitrarily large nuclear devices which could cover vast areas with radioactive fallout by rendering anything around them intensely radioactive, nuclear weapons theorists such as Leo Szilard conceived of a doomsday machine, a massive thermonuclear device surrounded by hundreds of tons of cobalt which, when detonated, would create massive amounts of Cobalt-60, rendering most of the Earth too radioactive to support life. RAND strategist Herman Kahn postulated that Soviet or US nuclear decision makers might choose to build a doomsday machine that would consist of a computer linked to a stockpile of hydrogen bombs, programmed to detonate them all and bathe the planet in nuclear fallout at the signal of an impending nuclear attack from another nation. The doomsday device's theoretical ability to deter a nuclear attack is that it would go off automatically without human aid and despite human intervention. Kahn conceded that some planners might see "doomsday machines" as providing a highly credible threat that would dissuade attackers and avoid the dangerous game of brinkmanship caused by the massive retaliation concept which governed US-Soviet nuclear relations in the mid-1950s.
After the war Weir served as Senior Officer-in- Charge Administration (SOA) at AHQ Malta from 3 Dec 1949, and in the Air Ministry from 1955 to 1955, when he became commander of the Central Gunnery School at RAF Leconfield. He was received a King's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air on 9 June 1949, and was promoted to group captain on 1 January 1951, and air commodore on 1 January 1957. He was task force commander for the Operation Buffalo British nuclear tests at Maralinga in Australia in 1956, which saw the first air drop of a live British nuclear weapon, and was air task group commander for the Operation Grapple nuclear tests at Christmas Island in 1957, the first test of a British thermonuclear weapon, for which he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1958 New Year Honours. Afterwards, Weir attended the Joint Services Staff College. He became the Senior Air Staff Officer (SASO) at HQ Middle East Air Force on 12 May 1958, and became Deputy Commander in Chief of the Middle East Air Force on 23 April 1959.

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