Nuclear Weapon

Nuclear weapon
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The mushroom cloud of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, 1945, rose some 18
kilometers (11 mi) above the hypocenter
Nuclear weapons
History of nuclear weapons

Nuclear warfare
Nuclear arms race
Nuclear weapon design
Nuclear testing (Underground)
Effects of nuclear explosions
Delivery systems
Nuclear espionage
Proliferation / Arsenals
Nuclear-armed countries
United States - Russia -
United Kingdom - France - China
- India - Israel - Pakistan -
North Korea
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A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from the
nuclear reaction of fission or from a combination of fission and fusion. Both
reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter;
a modern thermonuclear weapon weighing little more than a ton can produce an
explosion comparable to the detonation of more than a billion kilograms of
conventional high explosive[1]. Even small nuclear devices with yields equivalent to
only a few thousand tons of TNT can devastate a city. Nuclear weapons are
considered weapons of mass destruction.
In the history of warfare, only two nuclear weapons have been detonated offensively,
both by the United States of America during the closing days of World War II. The
first was detonated on the morning of 6 August 1945, when the United States
dropped a (uranium) gun-type device code-named "Little Boy" on the Japanese city
of Hiroshima. The second was detonated three days later when the United States
dropped a plutonium implosion-type device code-named "Fat Man" on the city of
Nagasaki. These bombings resulted in the immediate deaths of around 120,000
people from injuries sustained from the explosion and acute radiation sickness, and
even more deaths over time from long-term effects of (ionising) radiation. The use of
these weapons was and remains controversial. (See Atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki for a full discussion.)
Since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nuclear weapons have been detonated
on over two thousand occasions for testing purposes and demonstration purposes.
The only countries known to have detonated nuclear weapons - and that
acknowledge possessing such weapons - are (chronologically) the United States, the
Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, the People's Republic of China, India,
Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel is also widely believed to possess nuclear
weapons, though it does not acknowledge having them. For more information on
these states' nuclear programs, as well as other states that formerly possessed
nuclear weapons or are suspected of seeking nuclear weapons, see List of states with
nuclear weapons.
Apart from their use as weapons, nuclear explosives have been tested and used for
various non-military uses. Synthetic elements, such as einsteinium and fermium,
created by neutron bombardment of uranium and plutonium during thermonuclear
explosions, were discovered in the aftermath of the first thermonuclear bomb test.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 History
• 2 Types of nuclear weapons
• 3 Nuclear strategy
• 4 Weapons delivery
• 5 Governance, control, and law
• 6 Media
• 7 See also
• 8 Notes
• 9 References
• 10 External links
History
Main article: History of nuclear weapons
The aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
The first nuclear weapons were created in the United States by an international
team, including many displaced scientists from central Europe, which included
Germany, with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada during World War
II as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. While the first weapons were
developed primarily out of fear that Nazi Germany would develop them first, they
were eventually used against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
first test was conducted on July 16, 1945 at a site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.[2]
The Soviet Union developed and tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949, based
partially on information obtained from Soviet espionage in the United States. Both
the U.S. and USSR would go on to develop weapons powered by nuclear fusion
(thermonuclear bombs) by the mid-1950s. With the invention of reliable rocketry
during the 1960s, it became possible for nuclear weapons to be delivered anywhere
in the world on a very short notice, and the two Cold War superpowers adopted a
strategy of deterrence to maintain a shaky peace.[3]
U.S. and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945-2005

Nuclear weapons were symbols of military and national power, and nuclear testing
often used both to test new designs as well as to send political messages. Other
nations also developed nuclear weapons during this time, including the United
Kingdom, France, and China. These five members of the "nuclear club" agreed to
attempt to limit the spread of nuclear proliferation to other nations, though four
other countries (India, South Africa, Pakistan, and Israel) developed or acquired
nuclear arms during this time.[4] At the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the
Russian Federation inherited the weapons of the former USSR, and along with the
U.S., pledged to reduce their stockpile for increased international safety. Nuclear
proliferation has continued, though, with Pakistan testing their first weapons in
1998, and North Korea performing a test in 2006. In 2004, Pakistani nuclear
national hero Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed to selling enrichment technology to
Iran, Libya, and North Korea, as well as a nuclear weapons design to Libya, in a
massive, international proliferation ring, that had been operating for about 20
years.[4] This was the largest proliferation scandal for decades. On October 9, 2006,
North Korea claimed it had conducted an underground nuclear test, though the
very small apparent yield of the blast has led many to conclude that it was not fully
successful (see 2006 North Korean nuclear test). Additionally, since 9/11 increased
attention has been given to the threat of nuclear terrorism, whereby non-state actors
manage to develop, purchase, or steal nuclear arms and detonate them against
civilians. Post-Cold War discussions of nuclear weapons have focused on the fact
that the "rationality" of nuclear deterrence, credited with the lack of use of nuclear
weapons during the Cold War, may not apply in a world with only one superpower,
or a world where the nuclear actors are stateless.[5]
There have been (at least) four major false alarms, the most recent in 1995, that
almost resulted in the U.S. or USSR/Russia launching its weapons in retaliation for a
supposed attack.[6] Additionally, during the Cold War the U.S. and USSR came close
to nuclear warfare several times, most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As
of 2006, there are estimated to be at least 27,000 nuclear weapons held by at least
eight countries, 96 percent of them in the possession of the United States and
Russia.[7]
Nuclear weapons have been at the heart of many national and international political
disputes, have played a major part in popular culture since their dramatic public
debut in the 1940s, and have usually symbolized the ultimate ability of mankind to
utilize the strength of nature for destruction. Dozens of movies, books, television
shows, plays, and other cultural productions have been made with nuclear weapons
as either the explicit subject or an implied leitmotiv.[8]
Types of nuclear weapons
Main article: Nuclear weapon design

The two basic fission weapon designs
There are two basic types of nuclear weapons. The first are weapons which produce
their explosive energy through nuclear fission reactions alone. These are called
fission bombs. They have also been referred to as atomic bombs (or A-bombs) since
their first use, though their energy comes specifically from the nucleus of the atom.
In fission weapons, a mass of fissile material (enriched uranium or plutonium) is

assembled into a supercritical mass—the amount of material needed to start an
exponentially growing nuclear chain reaction—either by shooting one piece of sub-
critical material into another (the "gun" method), or by compressing a sub-critical
sphere of material using chemical explosives to many times its original density (the
"implosion" method). The latter approach is considered more sophisticated than the
former, and only the latter approach can be used if plutonium is the fissile material.
A major challenge in all nuclear weapon designs is to ensure that a significant

fraction of the fuel is consumed before the weapon destroys itself. The amount of
energy released by fission bombs can range between the equivalent of less than a ton
of TNT upwards to around 500,000 tons (500 kilotons) of TNT.[9]
The second basic type of nuclear weapon produces a large amount of its energy
through nuclear fusion reactions. These weapons are called thermonuclear bombs.
Historically they have been called hydrogen bombs (or H-bombs), as they rely on
fusion reactions between isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium), though all
such weapons derive a significant—and sometimes a majority—of their energy from
fission reactions (including fission reactions stimulated by fusion reactions). Because
fusion material cannot go overcritical no matter the amount used, and because
fusion weapons can be staged, these kind of weapons may be made significantly
more powerful than fission bombs. Only six countries—United States, Russia,
United Kingdom, People's Republic of China, France and India—have detonated
hydrogen bombs. (Whether India has detonated a "true," multi-staged
thermonuclear weapon is controversial.)[10]
The basics of the Teller–Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb: a fission bomb uses
radiation to compress and heat a separate section of fusion fuel.
Thermonuclear bombs work by using the energy of a fission bomb in order to

compress and heat fusion fuel. In the Teller-Ulam design, which accounts for all
multi-megaton yield hydrogen bombs, this is accomplished by placing a fission
bomb and fusion fuel (tritium, deuterium, or lithium deuteride) in proximity within
a special, radiation-reflecting container. When the fission bomb is detonated,
gamma and X-rays emitted at the speed of light first compress the fusion fuel, then
heat it to thermonuclear temperatures. The ensuing fusion reaction creates
enormous numbers of high-speed neutrons, which then can induce fission in
materials which normally are not prone to it, such as depleted uranium. Each of
these components is known as a "stage," with the fission bomb as the "primary"
and the fusion capsule as the "secondary." In large hydrogen bombs, about half of
the yield, and much of the resulting nuclear fallout, comes from the final fissioning
of depleted uranium. [9] By chaining together numerous stages with increasing
amounts of fusion fuel, thermonuclear weapons can be made to an almost arbitrary
yield; the largest ever detonated (the Tsar Bomba of the USSR) released an energy
equivalent to over 50 million tons (50 megatons) of TNT. Most thermonuclear
weapons are considerably smaller than this, due for instance to practical constraints
in fitting them into the space and weight requirements of missile warheads.[11]
There are many other types of nuclear weapons as well. For example, a boosted
fission weapon is a fission bomb which increases its explosive yield through a small
amount of fusion reactions, but it is not a fusion bomb. In the boosted bomb, the
neutrons produced by the fusion reactions serve primarily to increase the efficiency
of the fission bomb. Some 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 a 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 radioactive contamination.
Most variety in nuclear weapon design is in different yields of nuclear weapons for
different types of purposes, and in manipulating design elements to attempt to make
weapons extremely small.[9]
Nuclear strategy
Main article: Nuclear warfare
The United States' Peacekeeper missile was a MIRVed delivery system. Each missile
could contain up to ten nuclear warheads (shown in red), each of which could be
aimed at a different target. These were developed to make missile defense very
difficult for an enemy country
Nuclear warfare strategy is a way for either fighting or avoiding a nuclear war. The
policy of trying to ward off a potential attack by a nuclear weapon from another
country by threatening nuclear retaliation is known as the strategy of nuclear
deterrence. The goal in deterrence is to always maintain a second strike status (the
ability of a country to respond to a nuclear attack with one of its own) and
potentially to strive for first strike status (the ability to completely destroy an
enemy's nuclear forces before they could retaliate). During the Cold War, policy and
military theorists in nuclear-enabled countries worked out models of what sorts of
policies could prevent one from ever being attacked by a nuclear weapon.
Different forms of nuclear weapons delivery (see below) allow for different types of
nuclear strategy, primarily by making it difficult to defend against them and
difficult to launch a pre-emptive strike against them. Sometimes this has meant
keeping the weapon locations hidden, such as putting it on submarines or train cars
whose locations are very hard for an enemy to track, and other times this means
burying them in hardened bunkers. Other responses have included attempts to
make it seem likely that the country could survive a nuclear attack, by using missile
defense (to destroy the missiles before they land) or by means of civil defense (using
early warning systems to evacuate citizens to a safe area before an attack). Note that
weapons which are designed to threaten large populations or to generally deter
attacks are known as strategic weapons. Weapons which are designed to actually be
used on a battlefield in military situations are known as tactical weapons.
There are critics of the very idea of nuclear strategy for waging nuclear war who
have suggested that a nuclear war between two nuclear powers would result in
mutual annihilation. From this point of view, the significance of nuclear weapons is
purely to deter war because any nuclear war would immediately escalate out of
mutual distrust and fear, resulting in mutually assured destruction. This threat of
national, if not global, destruction has been a strong motivation for anti-nuclear
weapons activism.
Critics from the peace movement and within the military establishment have
questioned the usefulness of such weapons in the current military climate. The use
of (or threat of use of) such weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of
international law applicable in armed conflict, according to an advisory opinion
issued by the International Court of Justice in 1996.
Perhaps the most controversial idea in nuclear strategy is that nuclear proliferation
would be desirable. This view argues that, unlike conventional weapons, nuclear
weapons successfully deter all-out war between states, as they did during the Cold
War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Political scientist Kenneth Waltz is the
most prominent advocate of this argument.
It has been claimed that the threat of potentially suicidal terrorists possessing
nuclear weapons (a form of nuclear terrorism) complicates the decision process.
Mutually assured destruction may not be effective against an enemy who expects to
die in a confrontation, as they may feel they will be rewarded in a religious afterlife
as martyrs and would not therefore be deterred by a sense of self-preservation.
Further, if the initial act is from rogue groups of individuals instead of a nation,
there is no fixed nation or fixed military targets to retaliate against. It has been
argued, especially after the September 11, 2001 attacks, that this complication is the
sign of the next age of nuclear strategy, distinct from the relative stability of the
Cold War.[5]
Weapons delivery
Main article: Nuclear weapons delivery

The first nuclear weapons were gravity bombs, such as the "Fat Man" weapon
dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. These weapons were very large and could only be
delivered by a bomber aircraft
Nuclear weapons delivery—the technology and systems used to bring a nuclear

weapon to its target—is an important aspect of nuclear weapons relating both to
nuclear weapon design and nuclear strategy. Additionally, developing and
maintaining delivery options is among the most resource-intensive aspects of nuclear
weapons: according to one estimate, deployment of nuclear weapons accounted for
57% of the total financial resources spent by the United States in relation to nuclear
weapons since 1940.[12]
Historically the first method of delivery, and the method used in the two nuclear
weapons actually used in warfare, is as a gravity bomb, dropped from bomber
aircraft. This method is usually the first developed by countries as it does not place
many restrictions on the size of the weapon, and weapon miniaturization is
something which requires considerable weapons design knowledge. It does, however,
limit the range of attack, the response time to an impending attack, and the number
of weapons which can be fielded at any given time. Additionally, specialized delivery
systems are usually not necessary; especially with the advent of miniaturization,
nuclear bombs can be delivered by both strategic bombers and tactical fighter-
bombers, allowing an air force to use its current fleet with little or no modification.
This method may still be considered the primary means of nuclear weapons
delivery; the majority of U.S. nuclear warheads, for example, are represented in
free-fall gravity bombs, namely the B61.[9]
More preferable from a strategic point of view are nuclear weapons mounted onto a
missile, which can use a ballistic trajectory to deliver a warhead over the horizon.
While even short range missiles allow for a faster and less vulnerable attack, the
development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched
ballistic missiles (SLBMs) has allowed some nations to plausibly deliver missiles
anywhere on the globe with a high likelihood of success. More advanced systems,
such as multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) allow multiple
warheads to be launched at several targets from any one missile, reducing the
chance of any successful missile defense. Today, missiles are most common among
systems designed for delivery of nuclear weapons. Making a warhead small enough
to fit onto a missile, though, can be a difficult task.[9]
Tactical weapons (see above) have involved the most variety of delivery types,
including not only gravity bombs and missiles but also artillery shells, land mines,
and nuclear depth charges and torpedoes for anti-submarine warfare. An atomic
mortar was also tested at one time by the United States. Small, two-man portable
tactical weapons (somewhat misleadingly referred to as suitcase bombs), such as the
Special Atomic Demolition Munition, have been developed, although the difficulty to
combine sufficient yield with portability limits their military utility.[9]
Governance, control, and law
The International Atomic Energy Agency was created in 1957 in order to encourage
the peaceful development of nuclear technology while providing international
safeguards against nuclear proliferation
Because of the immense military power they can confer, the political control of
nuclear weapons has been a key issue for as long as they have existed; in most
countries the use of nuclear force can only be authorized by the head of
government.[13]
In the late 1940s, lack of mutual trust was preventing the United States and the
Soviet Union from making ground towards international arms control agreements,
but by the 1960s steps were being taken to limit both the proliferation of nuclear
weapons to other countries and the environmental effects of nuclear testing. The
Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) restricted all nuclear testing to underground nuclear
testing, to prevent contamination from nuclear fallout, while the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (1968) attempted to place restrictions on the types of activities
which signatories could participate in, with the goal of allowing the transference of
non-military nuclear technology to member countries without fear of proliferation.
In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established under the
mandate of the United Nations in order to encourage the development of the
peaceful applications of nuclear technology, provide international safeguards
against its misuse, and facilitate the application of safety measures in its use. In
1996, many nations signed and ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which
prohibits all testing of nuclear weapons, which would impose a significant hindrance
to their development by any complying country.[4]
Additional treaties have governed nuclear weapons stockpiles between individual

countries, such as the SALT I and START I treaties, which limited the numbers and
types of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Nuclear weapons have also been opposed by agreements between countries. Many
nations have been declared Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones, areas where nuclear
weapons production and deployment are prohibited, through the use of treaties. The
Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967) prohibited any production or deployment of nuclear
weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Treaty of Pelindaba (1964)
prohibits nuclear weapons in many African countries. As recently as 2006 a Central
Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone was established amongst the former Soviet
republics of Central Asia prohibiting nuclear weapons.
In the middle of 1996, the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the
United Nations, issued an Advisory Opinion concerned with the "Legality of the
Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons". The court ruled that the use or threat of use of
nuclear weapons would violate various articles of international law, including the
Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the UN Charter, and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
Additionally, there have been other, specific actions meant to discourage countries
from developing nuclear arms. In the wake of the tests by India and Pakistan in
1998, economic sanctions were (temporarily) levied against both countries, though
neither were signatories with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. One of the
stated casus belli for the initiation of the 2003 Iraq War was an accusation by the
United States that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear arms (though this was soon
discovered not to be the case). In 1981, Israel had bombed a nuclear reactor in
Osirak, Iraq, in an attempt to halt Iraq's previous nuclear arms ambitions.
The first nuclear weapons, though large, cumbersome and inefficient, provided the
basic design building blocks of all future weapons. Here the Gadget device is
prepared for the first nuclear test: Trinity.
Nuclear weapon designs are physical, chemical, and engineering arrangements that
cause the physics package[1] of a nuclear weapon to detonate. There are three basic
design types. In all three, the explosive energy is derived primarily from nuclear
fission, not fusion.
• Pure fission weapons were the first nuclear weapons built and the only type
ever used in warfare. The active material is fissile uranium (U-235) or
plutonium (Pu-239), explosively assembled into a chain-reacting critical mass
by one of two methods:
o Gun assembly, in which one piece of fissile uranium is fired down a
gun barrel to a fissile uranium target at the end of the barrel
(plutonium can be used in this design, but it has proven to be
impractical), or
o Implosion, in which a fissile mass of either material (U-235, Pu-239, or
a combination) is surrounded by high explosives that compress the
mass, resulting in criticality.
• Fusion-boosted fission weapons improve on the implosion design. The high

temperature and pressure environment at the center of an exploding fission
weapon compresses and heats a mixture of tritium and deuterium gas (heavy
isotopes of hydrogen). The hydrogen fuses to form helium and free neutrons.
The energy release from fusion reactions is relatively negligible, but each
neutron starts a new fission chain reaction, greatly reducing the amount of
fissile material that would otherwise be wasted. Boosting can more than
double the weapon's fission energy release.
• Two-stage thermonuclear weapons are essentially a daisy chain of fusion-
boosted fission weapons, with only two daisies, or stages, in the chain. The
second stage, called the "secondary," is imploded by x-ray energy from the
first stage, called the "primary." This radiation implosion is much more
effective than the high-explosive implosion of the primary. Consequently, the
secondary can be many times more powerful than the primary, without being
bigger. The secondary could be designed to maximize fusion energy release,
but in most designs fusion is employed only to drive or enhance fission, as it
is in the primary. More stages could be added, but the result would be a
multi-megaton weapon too powerful to be useful. (The United States briefly
deployed a three-stage 25-megaton bomb, the B41, starting in 1961. Also in
1961, the Soviet Union tested, but did not deploy, a three-stage 50-megaton
device, Tsar Bomba.)
Pure fission weapons historically have been the first type to be built by a nation
state, and, if such a thing should happen, would be the type built by a non-state
terrorist organization,[2]. Large industrial states with well-developed nuclear
arsenals have two-stage thermonuclear weapons, which are the most compact,
scalable, and cost effective option once the necessary industrial infrastructure is
built.
All innovations in nuclear weapon design originated in the United States; [3] the
following descriptions feature U.S. designs.
In early news accounts, pure fission weapons were called atomic bombs or A-bombs,
a misnomer since the energy comes only from the nucleus of the atom. Weapons
involving fusion were called hydrogen bombs or H-bombs, also a misnomer since
their destructive energy comes mostly from fission. Insiders favored the terms
nuclear and thermonuclear, respectively.
The term thermonuclear refers to the high temperatures required to initiate fusion.
It ignores the equally important factor of pressure, which was considered secret at
the time the term became current. Many nuclear weapon terms are similarly
inaccurate because of their origin in a classified environment. Some are nonsense
code words such as "alarm clock" (see below).
Nuclear weapons

Nuclear warfare
Nuclear arms race
Delivery systems
Nuclear espionage
United Kingdom - France - China
- India - Israel - Pakistan -
North Korea
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Nuclear reactions
o 1.1 Fission
o 1.2 Fusion
o 1.3 Tritium production
• 2 Pure fission weapons
o 2.1 Gun-type assembly weapon
o 2.2 Implosion type weapon
 2.2.1 Plutonium pit
o 2.3 Levitated-pit implosion
o 2.4 Two-point linear implosion
o 2.5 Two-point hollow-pit implosion
• 3 Fusion-boosted fission weapons
• 4 Two-stage thermonuclear weapons
o 4.1 Interstage
• 5 Specific designs
o 5.1 Hydrogen bombs
o 5.2 Alarm Clock/Sloika
o 5.3 Clean bombs
o 5.4 Cobalt bombs
o 5.5 Fission-fusion-fission bombs
o 5.6 Neutron bombs
o 5.7 Oralloy thermonuclear warheads
o 5.8 Reliable replacement warhead
• 6 The Weapon Design Laboratories
o 6.1 Berkeley
o 6.2 Los Alamos
o 6.3 Livermore
• 7 Explosive testing
o 7.1 Light pipes
o 7.2 Fallout analysis
o 7.3 Underground testing
• 8 Production facilities
• 9 Warhead design safety
• 10 References
o 10.1 Specific
o 10.2 General
[edit] Nuclear reactions
Nuclear fission splits the heaviest of atoms to form lighter atoms. Nuclear fusion
bonds together the lightest atoms to form heavier atoms. Both reactions generate
roughly a million times more energy than comparable chemical reactions, making
nuclear bombs a million times more powerful than non-nuclear bombs.
In some ways, fission and fusion are opposite and complementary reactions, but the
particulars are unique for each. To understand how nuclear weapons are designed,
it is useful to know the important similarities and differences between fission and
fusion. The following explanation uses rounded numbers and approximations.[4]
[edit] Fission
Fission can be self-sustaining because fission produces more neutrons of the speed
required to cause new fissions. When a free neutron hits the nucleus of a fissionable
atom like uranium-235 ( 235U), the uranium splits into two smaller atoms called
fission fragments, plus more neutrons.
The uranium atom can split any one of dozens of different ways, as long as the
atomic weights add up to 236 (uranium plus the extra neutron). The following
equation shows one possible split, namely into strontium-95 ( 95Sr), xenon-139 (
139
Xe), and two neutrons (n), plus energy:[5]
The immediate energy release per atom is 180 million electron volts (MeV), i.e. 74
TJ/kg, of which 90% is kinetic energy (or motion) of the fission fragments, flying
away from each other mutually repelled by the positive charge of their protons (38
for strontium, 54 for xenon). Thus their initial kinetic energy is 67 TJ/kg, hence their
initial speed is 12,000 kilometers per second, but their high electric charge causes
many inelastic collisions with nearby nuclei. The fragments remain trapped inside
the bomb's uranium pit until their motion is converted into x-ray heat, a process
which takes about a millionth of a second (a microsecond).
This x-ray energy produces the blast and fire which are the purpose of a nuclear
explosion.
After the fission products slow down, they remain radioactive. Being new elements
with too many neutrons, they eventually become stable by means of beta decay,
converting neutrons into protons by throwing off electrons and gamma rays. Each
fission product nucleus decays between one and six times, average three times,
producing radioactive elements with half-lives up to 200,000 years.[6] In reactors,
these products are the nuclear waste in spent fuel. In bombs, they become
radioactive fallout, both local and global.
Meanwhile, inside the exploding bomb, the free neutrons released by fission strike
nearby U-235 nuclei causing them to fission in an exponentially growing chain
reaction (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.). Starting from one, the number of fissions can
theoretically double a hundred times in a microsecond, which could consume all
uranium up to hundreds of tons by the hundredth link in the chain. In practice,
bombs do not contain that much uranium, and, anyway, just a few kilograms
undergo fission before the uranium blows itself apart.
Holding an exploding bomb together is the greatest challenge of fission weapon

design. The heat of fission rapidly expands the uranium pit, spreading apart the
target nuclei and making space for the neutrons to escape without being captured.
The chain reaction stops.
Materials which can sustain a chain reaction are called fissile. The two fissile
materials used in nuclear weapons are: U-235, also known as highly enriched
uranium (HEU), oralloy (Oy) meaning Oak Ridge Alloy, or 25 (the last digits of the
atomic number, which is 92 for uranium, and the atomic weight, here 235,
respectively); and Pu-239, also known as plutonium, or 49 (from 94 and 239).
Uranium's most common isotope, U-238, is fissionable but not fissile. Its aliases
include natural or unenriched uranium, depleted uranium (DU), tubealloy (Tu), and
28. It cannot sustain a chain reaction, because its own fission neutrons are not
powerful enough to cause more U-238 fission. However, the neutrons released by
fusion will fission U-238. This reaction produces most of the energy in a typical two-
stage thermonuclear weapon.
[edit] Fusion
Fusion cannot be self-sustaining because it does not produce the heat and pressure
necessary for more fusion. It produces neutrons which run away with the energy. In
weapons, the most important fusion reaction is called the D-T reaction. Using the
heat and pressure of fission, hydrogen-2, or deuterium ( 2D), fuses with hydrogen-3,
or tritium ( 3T), to form helium-4 ( 4He) plus one neutron (n) and energy:[7]
Notice that the total energy output, 17.6 MeV, is one tenth of that with fission, but
the ingredients are almost one-fiftieth as massive, so the energy output per kilo is
greater. However, in this fusion reaction 80% of the energy, or 14 MeV, is in the
motion of the neutron which, having no electric charge and being almost as massive
as the hydrogen nuclei that created it, can escape the scene without leaving its
energy behind to help sustain the reaction – or to generate x-rays for blast and fire.
The only practical way to capture most of the fusion energy is to trap the neutrons
inside a massive bottle of heavy material such as lead, uranium, or plutonium. If the
14 MeV neutron is captured by uranium (either type: 235 or 238) or plutonium, the
result is fission and the release of 180 MeV of fission energy, which will produce the
heat and pressure necessary to sustain fusion, in addition to multiplying the energy
output tenfold.
Fission is thus necessary to start fusion, to sustain fusion, and to optimize the
extraction of useful energy from fusion (by making more fission). In the case of a
neutron bomb, see below, the last-mentioned does not apply since the escape of
neutrons is the objective.
[edit] Tritium production
A third important nuclear reaction is the one that creates tritium, essential to the
type of fusion used in weapons and, incidentally, the most expensive ingredient in
any nuclear weapon. Tritium, or hydrogen-3, is made by bombarding lithium-6 (
6
Li) with a neutron (n) to produce helium-4 ( 4He) plus tritium ( 3T) and energy:[7]
A nuclear reactor is necessary to provide the neutrons. The industrial-scale

conversion of lithium-6 to tritium is very similar to the conversion of uranium-238
into plutonium-239. In both cases the feed material is placed inside a nuclear reactor
and removed for processing after a period of time. In the 1950s, when reactor
capacity was limited, for the production of every atom of tritium the production of
an atom of plutonium had to be dispensed with.
The fission of one plutonium atom releases ten times more total energy than the
fusion of one tritium atom, and it generates fifty times more blast and fire. For this
reason, tritium is included in nuclear weapon components only when it causes more
fission than its production sacrifices, namely in the case of fusion-boosted fission.
However, an exploding nuclear bomb is a nuclear reactor. The above reaction can
take place simultaneously throughout the secondary of a two-stage thermonuclear
weapon, producing tritium in place as the device explodes.
Of the three basic types of nuclear weapon, the first, pure fission, uses the first of the
three nuclear reactions above. The second, fusion-boosted fission, uses the first two.
The third, two-stage thermonuclear, uses all three.
[edit] Pure fission weapons
The first task of a nuclear weapon design is to rapidly assemble, at the time of
detonation, more than one critical mass of fissile uranium or plutonium. A critical
mass is one in which the percentage of fission-produced neutrons which are
captured and cause more fission is large enough to perpetuate the fission and
prevent it from dying out.
Once the critical mass is assembled, at maximum density, a burst of neutrons is
supplied to start as many chain reactions as possible. Early weapons used an
"urchin" inside the pit containing non-touching interior surfaces of polonium-210
and beryllium. Implosion of the pit crushed the urchin, bringing the two metals in
contact to produce free neutrons. In modern weapons, the neutron generator is a
high-voltage vacuum tube containing a particle accelerator which bombards a
deuterium/tritium-metal hydride target with deuterium and tritium ions. The
resulting small-scale fusion produces neutrons at a protected location outside the
physics package, from which they penetrate the pit. This method allows better
control of the timing of chain reaction initiation.
The critical mass of an uncompressed sphere of bare metal is 110 lb (50 kg) for
uranium-235 and 35 lb (16 kg) for delta-phase plutonium-239. In practical
applications, the amount of material required for critical mass is modified by shape,
purity, density, and the proximity to neutron-reflecting material, all of which affect
the escape or capture of neutrons.
To avoid a chain reaction during handling, the fissile material in the weapon must
be sub-critical before detonation. It may consist of one or more components
containing less than one uncompressed critical mass each. A thin hollow shell can
have more than the bare-sphere critical mass, as can a cylinder, which can be
arbitrarily long without ever reaching critical mass.
A tamper is an optional layer of dense material surrounding the fissile material. Due
to its inertia it delays the expansion of the reacting material, increasing the
efficiency of the weapon. Often the same layer serves both as tamper and as neutron
reflector.
[edit] Gun-type assembly weapon
Diagram of a gun-type fission weapon

Main article: Gun-type fission weapon
Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb, used 140 lb (64 kg) of Uranium with an average
enrichment of around 80%, or 112 lb (51 kg) of U-235, just about the bare-metal
critical mass. (See Little Boy article for a detailed drawing.) When assembled inside
its tamper/reflector of tungsten carbide, the 140 lb was more than twice critical
mass. Before detonation, it was separated into two sub-critical pieces, one of which
was later fired down a gun barrel at the other. About 1% of the uranium underwent
fission; the remainder, representing 98% of the entire wartime output of the giant
factories at Oak Ridge, scattered uselessly.[citation needed]
The inefficiency was caused by the speed with which the uncompressed fissioning
uranium expanded and became sub-critical by virtue of decreased density. Despite
its inefficiency, this design, because of its shape, was adapted for use in small-
diameter, cylindrical artillery shells (a gun-type warhead fired from the barrel of a
much larger gun). Such warheads were deployed by the U.S. until 1992, accounting
for a significant fraction of the U-235 in the arsenal.
[edit] Implosion type weapon
Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, used 13.6 lb (6.2 kg) of Pu-239, which is only 39% of
bare-metal critical mass. (See Fat Man article for a detailed drawing.) The U-238
reflected, 13.6 lb pit was sub-critical before detonation. During detonation,
criticality was achieved by implosion. The plutonium pit was squeezed to increase its
density by simultaneous detonation of conventional explosives placed uniformly
around the pit. The explosives were detonated by multiple exploding-bridgewire
detonators. It is estimated that only about 20% of the plutonium underwent fission,
the rest (about 11 lbs) was scattered.
An implosion shock wave might be of such short duration that only a fraction of the
pit is compressed at any instant as the wave passes through it. A pusher shell made
out of low density metal—such as aluminum, beryllium, or an alloy of the two
metals (aluminum being easier and safer to shape and beryllium for its high-
neutron-reflective capability) —may be needed. The pusher is located between the
explosive lens and the tamper. It works by reflecting some of the shock wave
backwards, thereby having the effect of lengthening its duration. Fat Man used an
aluminum pusher.
The key to Fat Man's greater efficiency was the inward momentum of the massive
U-238 tamper (which did not undergo fission). Once the chain reaction started in the
plutonium, the momentum of the implosion had to be reversed before expansion
could stop the fission. By holding everything together for a few hundred
nanoseconds more, the efficiency was increased.
[edit] Plutonium pit
The core of an implosion weapon – the fissile material and any reflector or tamper
bonded to it – is known as the pit. Some weapons tested during the 1950s used pits
made with U-235 alone, or in composite with plutonium,[8] but all-plutonium pits are
the smallest in diameter and have been the standard since the early 1960s.
Casting and then machining plutonium is difficult not only because of its toxicity,
but also because plutonium has many different metallic phases, also known as
allotropes. As plutonium cools, changes in phase result in distortion. This distortion
is normally overcome by alloying it with 3–3.5 molar% (0.9–1.0% by weight)
gallium which causes it to take up its delta phase over a wide temperature range.[9]
When cooling from molten it then suffers only a single phase change, from epsilon to
delta, instead of the four changes it would otherwise pass through. Other trivalent
metals would also work, but gallium has a small neutron absorption cross section
and helps protect the plutonium against corrosion. A drawback is that gallium
compounds themselves are corrosive and so if the plutonium is recovered from
dismantled weapons for conversion to plutonium dioxide for power reactors, there is
the difficulty of removing the gallium.
Because plutonium is chemically reactive and toxic if it enters the body by
inhalation or any other means, for protection of the assembler, it is common to plate
the completed pit with a thin layer of inert metal. In the first weapons, nickel was
used but gold is now preferred.[10]
[edit] Levitated-pit implosion
The first improvement on the Fat Man design was to put an air space between the
tamper and the pit to create a hammer-on-nail impact. The pit, sitting on a hollow
cone inside the tamper cavity, was said to be levitated. The three tests of Operation
Sandstone, in 1948, used Fat Man designs with levitated pits. The largest yield was
49 kilotons, more than twice the yield of the unlevitated Fat Man.[11]
It was immediately clear that implosion was the best design for a fission weapon. Its
only drawback seemed to be its diameter. Fat Man was 5 feet wide vs 2 feet for Little
Boy.
Eleven years later, implosion designs had advanced sufficiently that the 5 foot-
diameter sphere of Fat Man had been reduced to a 1 foot-diameter cylinder 2 feet
long, the Swan device.
The Pu-239 pit of Fat Man was only 3.6 inches in diameter, the size of a softball. The
bulk of Fat Man's girth was the implosion mechanism, namely concentric layers of
U-238, aluminum, and high explosives. The key to reducing that girth was the two-
point implosion design.
[edit] Two-point linear implosion
A very inefficient implosion design is one that simply reshapes an ovoid into a
sphere, with minimal compression. In linear implosion, an untamped, solid,
elongated mass of Pu-239, larger than critical mass in a sphere, is imbedded inside a
cylinder of high explosive with a detonator at each end.[12]
Detonation makes the pit critical by driving the ends inward, creating a spherical
shape. The shock may also change plutonium from delta to alpha phase, increasing
its density by 23%, but without the inward momentum of a true implosion. The lack
of compression makes it inefficient, but the simplicity and small diameter make it
suitable for use in artillery shells and atomic demolition munitions - ADMs - also
known as backpack or suitcase nukes.
All such low-yield battlefield weapons, whether gun-type U-235 designs or linear
implosion Pu-239 designs, pay a high price in fissile material in order to achieve
diameters between six and ten inches.
[edit] Two-point hollow-pit implosion
A more efficient two-point implosion system uses two high explosive lenses and a
hollow pit.
A hollow plutonium pit was the original plan for the 1945 Fat Man bomb, but there
was not enough time to develop and test the implosion system for it. A simpler solid-
pit design was considered more reliable, given the time restraint, but it required a
heavy U-238 tamper, a thick aluminum pusher, and three tons of high explosives.
After the war, interest in the hollow pit design was revived. Its obvious advantage is
that a hollow shell of plutonium, shock-deformed and driven inward toward its
empty center, would carry momentum into its violent assembly as a solid sphere. It
would be self-tamping, requiring a smaller U-238 tamper, no aluminum pusher, and
less high explosive. The hollow pit made levitation obsolete.
The Fat Man bomb had two concentric, spherical shells of high explosives, each
about 10 inches thick. The inner shell drove the implosion. The outer shell consisted
of a soccer-ball pattern of 32 high explosive lenses, each of which converted the
convex wave from its detonator into a concave wave matching the contour of the
outer surface of the inner shell. If these 32 lenses could be replaced with only two,
the high explosive sphere could become an ellipsoid (prolate spheroid) with a much
smaller diameter.
The best illustration of these two features is a 1956 drawing from the Swedish
nuclear bomb program. The program was terminated before it produced a test
explosion. The drawing shows the essential elements of the two-point hollow-pit
design.
There are similar drawings in the open literature that come from the post-war
German nuclear bomb program, which was also terminated, and from the French
program, which produced an arsenal.
The mechanism of the high explosive lens (diagram item #6) is not shown in the
Swedish drawing, but a standard lens made of fast and slow high explosives, as in
Fat Man, would be much longer than the shape depicted. For a single high explosive
lens to generate a concave wave that envelops an entire hemisphere, it must either
be very long or the part of the wave on a direct line from the detonator to the pit
must be slowed dramatically.
A slow high explosive is too fast, but the flying plate of an "air lens" is not. A metal
plate, shock-deformed, and pushed across an empty space can be designed to move
slowly enough.[13][14] A two-point implosion system using air lens technology can have
a length no more than twice its diameter, as in the Swedish diagram above.
[edit] Fusion-boosted fission weapons
Main article: Boosted fission weapon
The next step in miniaturization was to speed up the fissioning of the pit to reduce
the amount of time inertial confinement needed. The hollow pit provided an ideal
location to introduce fusion for the boosting of fission. A 50-50 mixture of tritium
and deuterium gas, pumped into the pit during arming, will fuse into helium and
release free neutrons soon after fission begins. The neutrons will start a large
number of new chain reactions while the pit is still critical.
Once the hollow pit is perfected, there is little reason not to boost.
The concept of fusion-boosted fission was first tested on May 25, 1951, in the Item
shot of Operation Greenhouse, Eniwetok, yield 45.5 kilotons.
Boosting reduces diameter in three ways, all the result of faster fission:
• Since the compressed pit does not need to be held together as long, the
massive U-238 tamper can be replaced by a light-weight beryllium shell (to
reflect escaping neutrons back into the pit). The diameter is reduced.
• The mass of the pit can be reduced by half, without reducing yield. Diameter
is reduced again.
• Since the mass of the metal being imploded (tamper plus pit) is reduced, a
smaller charge of high explosive is needed, reducing diameter even further.
Since boosting is required to attain full design yield, any reduction in boosting
reduces yield. Boosted weapons are thus variable-yield weapons. Yield can be
reduced any time before detonation, simply by putting less than the full amount of
tritium into the pit during the arming procedure.
The first device whose dimensions suggest employment of all these features (two-
point, hollow-pit, fusion-boosted implosion) was the Swan device, tested June 22,
1956, as the Inca shot of Operation Redwing, at Eniwetok. Its yield was 15 kilotons,
about the same as Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb. It weighed 105 lb (47.6 kg) and
was cylindrical in shape, 11.6 inches (29.5 cm) in diameter and 22.9 inches (58 cm)
long. The above schematic illustrates what were probably its essential features.
Eleven days later, July 3, 1956, the Swan was test-fired again at Eniwetok, as the
Mohawk shot of Redwing. This time it served as the primary, or first stage, of a two-
stage thermonuclear device, a role it played in a dozen such tests during the 1950s.
Swan was the first off-the-shelf, multi-use primary, and the prototype for all that
followed.
After the success of Swan, 11 or 12 inches seemed to become the standard diameter
of boosted single-stage devices tested during the 1950s. Length was usually twice the
diameter, but one such device, which became the W54 warhead, was closer to a
sphere, only 15 inches long. It was tested two dozen times in the 1957-62 period
before being deployed. No other design had such a long string of test failures. Since
the longer devices tended to work correctly on the first try, there must have been
some difficulty in flattening the two high explosive lenses enough to achieve the
desired length-to-width ratio.
One of the applications of the W54 was the Davy Crockett XM-388 recoilless rifle
projectile, shown here in comparison to its Fat Man predecessor, dimensions in
inches.
Another benefit of boosting, in addition to making weapons smaller, lighter, and

with less fissile material for a given yield, is that it renders weapons immune to
radiation interference (RI). It was discovered in the mid-1950s that plutonium pits
would be particularly susceptible to partial pre-detonation if exposed to the intense
radiation of a nearby nuclear explosion (electronics might also be damaged, but this
was a separate issue). RI was a particular problem before effective early warning
radar systems because a first strike attack might make retaliatory weapons useless.
Boosting reduces the amount of plutonium needed in a weapon to below the
quantity which would be vulnerable to this effect.
[edit] Two-stage thermonuclear weapons
Main article: Teller-Ulam design
Pure fission or fusion-boosted fission weapons can be made to yield hundreds of

kilotons, at great expense in fissile material and tritium, but by far the most efficient
way to increase nuclear weapon yield beyond ten or so kilotons is to tack on a
second independent stage, called a secondary.
Ivy Mike, the first two-stage thermonuclear detonation, 10.4 megatons, November 1,
1952.
In the 1940s, bomb designers at Los Alamos thought the secondary would be a
canister of deuterium in liquified or hydride form. The fusion reaction would be D-
D, harder to achieve than D-T, but more affordable. A fission bomb at one end
would shock-compress and heat the near end, and fusion would propagate through
the canister to the far end. Mathematical simulations showed it wouldn't work, even
with large amounts of prohibitively expensive tritium added in.
The entire fusion fuel canister would need to be enveloped by fission energy, to both
compress and heat it, as with the booster charge in a boosted primary. The design
breakthrough came in January of 1951, when Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam
invented radiation implosion - for nearly three decades known publicly only as the
Teller-Ulam H-bomb secret.
The concept of radiation implosion was first tested on May 9, 1951, in the George
shot of Operation Greenhouse, Eniwetok, yield 225 kilotons. The first full test was
on November 1, 1952, the Mike shot of Operation Ivy, Eniwetok, yield 10.4
megatons.
In radiation implosion, the burst of x-ray energy coming from an exploding primary
is captured and contained within an opaque-walled radiation channel which
surrounds the nuclear energy components of the secondary. For a millionth of a
second, most of the energy of several kilotons of TNT is absorbed by a plasma
(superheated gas) generated from plastic foam in the radiation channel. With energy
going in and not coming out, the plasma rises to solar core temperatures and
expands with solar core pressures. Nearby objects which are still cool are crushed by
the temperature difference.
The cool nuclear materials surrounded by the radiation channel are imploded much
like the pit of the primary, except with vastly more force. This greater pressure
enables the secondary to be significantly more powerful than the primary, without
being much larger.
A. Warhead before firing; primary (fission bomb) at top, secondary (fusion fuel) at
bottom, all suspended in polystyrene foam. B. High-explosive fires in primary,
compressing plutonium core into supercriticality and beginning a fission reaction. C.
Fission primary emits X-rays which reflects along the inside of the casing,
irradiating the polystyrene foam. D. Polystyrene foam becomes plasma, compressing
secondary, and fissile uranium (U-235) sparkplug begins to fission. E. Compressed
and heated, lithium-6 deuteride fuel begins fusion reaction, neutron flux causes
tamper to fission. A fireball is starting to form...
For example, for the Redwing Mohawk test on July 3, 1956, a secondary called the
Flute was attached to the Swan primary. The Flute was 15 inches (38 cm) in
diameter and 23.4 inches (59 cm) long, about the size of the Swan. But it weighed ten
times as much and yielded 24 times as much energy (355 kilotons, vs 15 kilotons).
Equally important, the active ingredients in the Flute probably cost no more than
those in the Swan. Most of the fission came from cheap U-238, and the tritium was
manufactured in place during the explosion. Only the spark plug at the axis of the
secondary needed to be fissile.
A spherical secondary can achieve higher implosion densities than a cylindrical

secondary, because spherical implosion pushes in from all directions toward the
same spot. However, in warheads yielding more than one megaton, the diameter of a
spherical secondary would be too large for most applications. A cylindrical
secondary is necessary in such cases. The small, cone-shaped re-entry vehicles in
multiple-warhead ballistic missiles after 1970 tended to have warheads with
spherical secondaries, and yields of a few hundred kilotons.
As with boosting, the advantages of the two-stage thermonuclear design are so great
that there is little incentive not to use it, once a nation has mastered the technology.
In engineering terms, radiation implosion allows for the exploitation of several
known features of nuclear bomb materials which heretofore had eluded practical
application. For example:
• The best way to store deuterium in a reasonably dense state is to chemically

bond it with lithium, as lithium deuteride. But the lithium-6 isotope is also
the raw material for tritium production, and an exploding bomb is a nuclear
reactor. Radiation implosion will hold everything together long enough to
permit the complete conversion of lithium-6 into tritium, while the bomb
explodes. So the bonding agent for deuterium permits use of the D-T fusion
reaction without any pre-manufactured tritium being stored in the
secondary. The tritium production constraint disappears.
The W87 warhead for the Minuteman III missile.
• For the secondary to be imploded by the hot, radiation-induced plasma

surrounding it, it must remain cool for the first microsecond, i.e., it must be
encased in a massive radiation (heat) shield. The shield's massiveness allows
it to double as a tamper, adding momentum and duration to the implosion.
No material is better suited for both of these jobs than ordinary, cheap
uranium-238, which happens, also, to undergo fission when struck by the
neutrons produced by D-T fusion. This casing, called the pusher, thus has
three jobs: to keep the secondary cool, to hold it, inertially, in a highly
compressed state, and, finally, to serve as the chief energy source for the
entire bomb. The consumable pusher makes the bomb more a uranium
fission bomb than a hydrogen fusion bomb. It is noteworthy that insiders
never used the term hydrogen bomb.
• Finally, the heat for fusion ignition comes not from the primary but from a
second fission bomb called the spark plug, imbedded in the heart of the
secondary. The implosion of the secondary implodes this spark plug,
detonating it and igniting fusion in the material around it, but the spark plug
then continues to fission in the neutron-rich environment until it is fully
consumed, adding significantly to the yield.[15]
The initial impetus behind the two-stage weapon was President Truman's 1950
promise to build a 10-megaton hydrogen superbomb as America's response to the
1949 test of the first Soviet fission bomb. But the resulting invention turned out to be
the cheapest and most compact way to build small nuclear bombs as well as large
ones, erasing any meaningful distinction between A-bombs and H-bombs, and
between boosters and supers. All the best techniques for fission and fusion
explosions are incorporated into one all-encompassing, fully-scalable design
principle. Even six-inch diameter nuclear artillery shells can be two-stage
thermonuclears.
In the ensuing fifty years, nobody has come up with a better way to build a nuclear
bomb. It is the design of choice for the U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China, the
five thermonuclear powers. The other nuclear-armed nations, Israel, India,
Pakistan, and North Korea, probably have single-stage weapons, possibly boosted.
[edit] Interstage
In a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, three types of energy emerge from the

primary to impact the secondary: the expanding hot gases from high explosive
charges which implode the primary, plus the electromagnetic radiation and the
neutrons from the primary's nuclear detonation. An essential energy transfer
modulator called the interstage, between the primary and the secondary, protects
the secondary from the hot gases and channels the electromagnetic radiation and
neutrons toward the right place at the right time.
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 recent graphic promoting the Reliable
Replacement Warhead Program. If built, this new design would replace "toxic,
brittle material" and "expensive 'special' material" in the interstage.[16] This
statement suggests the interstage may contain beryllium to moderate the flux of
neutrons from the primary, and perhaps something to absorb and re-radiate the x-
rays in a particular manner.[17]
The interstage and the secondary are encased together inside a stainless steel
membrane to form the canned subassembly (CSA), an arrangement which has never
been depicted in any open-source drawing.[18] 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.[19]
[edit] Specific designs
While every nuclear weapon design falls into one of the above categories, specific
designs have occasionally become the subject of news accounts and public
discussion, often with incorrect descriptions about how they work and what they do.
Examples:
[edit] Hydrogen bombs
All modern nuclear weapons make some use of D-T fusion. Even pure fission
weapons include neutron generators which are high-voltage vacuum tubes
containing trace amounts of tritium and deuterium.
However, in the public perception, hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs, are multi-

megaton devices a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima's Little Boy. Such
high-yield bombs are actually two-stage thermonuclears, scaled up to the desired
yield, with uranium fission, as usual, providing most of their destructive energy.
The idea of the hydrogen bomb first came to public attention in 1949, when
prominent scientists openly recommended against building nuclear bombs more
powerful than the standard pure-fission model, on both moral and practical
grounds. Their assumption was that critical mass considerations would limit the
potential size of fission explosions, but that a fusion explosion could be as large as its
supply of fuel, which has no critical mass limit. In 1949, the Russians exploded their
first fission bomb, and in 1950 President Truman ended the H-bomb debate by
ordering the Los Alamos designers to build one.
In 1952, the 10.4-megaton Ivy Mike explosion was announced as the first hydrogen
bomb test, reinforcing the idea that hydrogen bombs are a thousand times more
powerful than fission bombs.
In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer was labeled a hydrogen bomb opponent. The

public did not know there were two kinds of hydrogen bomb (neither of which is
accurately described as a hydrogen bomb). On May 23, when his security clearance
was revoked, item three of the four public findings against him was "his conduct in
the hydrogen bomb program." In 1949, Oppenheimer had supported single-stage
fusion-boosted fission bombs, to maximize the explosive power of the arsenal given
the trade-off between plutonium and tritium production. He opposed two-stage
thermonuclear bombs until 1951, when radiation implosion, which he called
"technically sweet," first made them practical. He no longer objected. The
complexity of his position was not revealed to the public until 1976, thirteen years
after his death.[20]
When ballistic missiles replaced bombers in the 1960s, most multi-megaton bombs
were replaced by missile warheads (also two-stage thermonuclears) scaled down to
one megaton or less.
[edit] Alarm Clock/Sloika
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.[21]
The U.S. name, Alarm Clock, was a nonsense code name. The Russian name for the
same design was more descriptive: Sloika, a layered pastry cake. A single-stage
Russian Sloika was tested on August 12, 1953. No single-stage U.S. version was
tested, but the Union shot of Operation Castle, April 26, 1954, was a two-stage
thermonuclear code-named Alarm Clock. Its yield, at Bikini, was 6.9 megatons.
Because the Russian Sloika test used dry lithium-6 deuteride eight months before
the first U.S. test to use it (Castle Bravo, March 1, 1954), it was sometimes claimed
that Russia won the H-bomb race. (The 1952 U.S. Ivy Mike test used cryogenically-
cooled liquid deuterium as the fusion fuel in the secondary, and employed the D-D
fusion reaction.) However, the first Russian test to use a radiation-imploded
secondary, the essential feature of a true H-bomb, was on November 23, 1955, three
years after Ivy Mike.
[edit] Clean bombs
Bassoon, the prototype for a 3.5-megaton clean bomb or a 25-megaton dirty bomb.
Dirty version shown here, before its 1956 test.
On March 1, 1954, America's largest-ever nuclear test explosion, the 15-megaton
Bravo shot of Operation Castle at Bikini, delivered a promptly lethal dose of fission-
product fallout to more than 6,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean surface.[22]
Radiation injuries to Marshall Islanders and Japanese fishermen made that fact
public and revealed the role of fission in hydrogen bombs.
In response to the public alarm over fallout, an effort was made to design a clean
multi-megaton weapon, relying almost entirely on fusion. Since the energy produced
by fission is essentially free, using the vital tamper as a source of extra energy the
clean bomb needed to be much larger for the same yield. For the first and only time,
a third stage, called the tertiary, was added, using the secondary as its primary. The
device was called Bassoon. It was tested as the Zuni shot of Operation Redwing, at
Bikini on May 28, 1956. With all the uranium in Bassoon replaced with a substitute
material such as lead, its yield was 3.5 megatons, 85% fusion and only 15% fission.
On July 19, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss said the clean bomb test "produced much
of importance . . . from a humanitarian aspect." However, two days later the dirty
version of Bassoon, with the uranium parts restored, was tested as the Tewa shot of
Redwing. Its 5-megaton yield, 87% fission, was deliberately suppressed to keep
fallout within a smaller area. This dirty version was later deployed as the three-
stage, 25-megaton Mark-41 bomb, which was carried by U.S. Air Force bombers,
but never tested at full yield.
As such, high-yield clean bombs were a public relations exercise. The actual
deployed weapons were the dirty version, which maximized yield for the same size
device.
[edit] Cobalt bombs
Main article: Cobalt bomb
A fictional doomsday bomb, made popular by Neville Shute's 1957 novel, and
subsequent 1959 movie, On the Beach, the cobalt bomb was a hydrogen bomb with a
jacket of cobalt metal. The neutron-activated cobalt would supposedly have
maximized the environmental damage from radioactive fallout. This bomb was
popularized as the 'Doomsday Device' in the 1964 film 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb' in the film the bomb brings about
the end of mankind by covering the planet in a radioactive shroud for 93 years. The
element added to the bombs is referred to in the film as 'cobalt-chlorium G'
Such "salted" weapons were requested by the U.S. Air Force and seriously
investigated, possibly built and tested, but not deployed. In the 1964 edition of the
DOD/AEC book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, a new section titled Radiological
Warfare clarified the issue.[23] 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 from 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. [24]
[edit] Fission-fusion-fission bombs
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 one exceptionally powerful weapon, the
tertiary. Each of these stages employs fission, fusion, and fission.
[edit] Neutron bombs
Main article: Neutron bomb
While high-yield clean bombs were never deployed, some low-yield clean bombs
were. Officially known as enhanced radiation weapons, ERWs, they are more
accurately described as suppressed yield weapons. When the yield of a nuclear
weapon is less than one kiloton, its lethal radius from blast, 700 m (2300 ft), is less
than that from its neutron radiation. However, the blast is more than potent enough
to destroy most structures, which are less resistant to blast effects than even
unprotected human beings. Blast pressures of upwards of 20 PSI are survivable,
whereas most buildings will collapse with a pressure of only 5 PSI.
ERWs were two-stage thermonuclears with all non-essential uranium removed to

minimize fission yield. Fusion provided the neutrons. Developed in the 1950s, they
were first deployed in the 1970s, by U.S.
forces in Europe. The last ones were
retired in the 1990s. Energy distribution of weapon
Standard Enhanced
Samuel Cohen in 1958 investigated a low-
yield 'clean' nuclear weapon and Blast 50% 40%
discovered that the 'clean' bomb case Thermal energy 35% 25%
thickness scales as the cube-root of yield.
Instant radiation 5% 30%
So a larger percentage of neutrons escapes
from a small detonation, due to the thinner Residual radiation 10% 5%
case required to reflect back X-rays during
the secondary stage ignition. For example,
a 1-kiloton bomb only needs a case 1/10th the thickness of that required for 1-
megaton.
So although most neutrons are absorbed by the casing in a 1-megaton bomb, in a 1-

kiloton bomb they would mostly escape. A neutron bomb is only feasible if the yield
is sufficiently high that efficient fusion stage ignition is possible, and if the yield is
low enough that the case thickness will not absorb too many neutrons. This means
that neutron bombs have a yield range of 1-10 kilotons, with fission proportion
varying from 50% at 1-kiloton to 25% at 10-kilotons (all of which comes from the
primary stage). The neutron output per kiloton is then 10-15 times greater than for
a pure fission implosion weapon or for a strategic warhead like a W87 or W88. [25]
[edit] Oralloy thermonuclear warheads
In 1999, nuclear weapon design was in the news again, for the first time in decades.
In January, the U.S. House of Representatives released the Cox Report (Christopher
Cox R-CA) which alleged that China had somehow acquired classified information
about the U.S. W88 warhead. Nine months later, Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese
immigrant working at Los Alamos, was publicly accused of spying, arrested, and
served nine months in pre-trial detention, before the case against him was dismissed.
It is not clear that there was, in fact, any espionage.
In the course of eighteen months of news coverage, the W88 warhead was described
in unusual detail. The New York Times printed a schematic diagram on its front
page.[26] The most detailed drawing appeared in A Convenient Spy, the 2001 book on
the Wen Ho Lee case by Dan Stober and Ian Hoffman, adapted and shown here with
permission.
Designed for use on Trident II (D-5) submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the W88
entered service in 1990 and was the last warhead designed for the U.S. arsenal. It
has been described as the most advanced, although open literature accounts do not
indicate any major design features that were not available to U.S. designers in 1958.
The above diagram shows all the standard features of ballistic missile warheads
since the 1960s, with two exceptions that give it a higher yield for its size.
• The outer layer of the secondary, called the "pusher," which serves three
functions: heat shield, tamper, and fission fuel, is made of U-235 instead of U-
238, hence the name Oralloy (U-235) Thermonuclear. Being fissile, rather
than merely fissionable, allows the pusher to fission faster and more
completely, increasing yield. This feature is available only to nations with a
great wealth of fissile uranium. The U.S. is estimated to have 500 tons.
• The secondary is located in the wide end of the re-entry cone, where it can be
larger, and thus more powerful. The usual arrangement is to put the heavier,
denser secondary in the narrow end for greater aerodynamic stability during
re-entry from outer space, and to allow more room for a bulky primary in
the wider part of the cone. (The W87 warhead drawing in the previous
section shows the usual arrangement.) Because of this new geometry, the
W88 primary uses compact conventional high explosives (CHE) to save
space,[27] rather than the more usual, and bulky but safer, insensitive high
explosives (IHE). The re-entry cone probably has ballast in the nose for
aerodynamic stability.[28]
Notice that the alternating layers of fission and fusion material in the secondary are
an application of the Alarm Clock/Sloika principle.
[edit] Reliable replacement warhead
Main article: Reliable Replacement Warhead
The United States has not produced any nuclear warheads since 1989, when the
Rocky Flats pit production plant, near Boulder, Colorado, was shut down for
environmental reasons. With the end of the Cold War two years later, the
production line was idled except for inspection and maintenance functions.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, the latest successor for nuclear
weapons to the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy, has
proposed building a new pit facility and starting the production line for a new
warhead called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).[29] Two advertised safety
improvements of the RRW would be a return to the use of "insensitive high
explosives which are far less susceptible to accidental detonation," and the
elimination of "certain hazardous materials, such as beryllium, that are harmful to
people and the environment."[30] Since the new warhead would not require any
nuclear testing, it could not use a new design with untested concepts.
[edit] The Weapon Design Laboratories

[edit] Berkeley
Main article: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The first systematic exploration of nuclear weapon design concepts took place in the
summer of 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. Important early
discoveries had been made at the adjacent Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, such as
the 1940 production and isolation of plutonium. A Berkeley professor, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, had just been hired to run the nation's secret bomb design effort. His
first act was to convene the 1942 summer conference.
By the time he moved his operation to the new secret town of Los Alamos, New
Mexico, in the spring of 1943, the accumulated wisdom on nuclear weapon design
consisted of five lectures by Berkeley professor Robert Serber, transcribed and
distributed as the Los Alamos Primer. The Primer addressed fission energy, neutron
production and capture, nuclear chain reactions, critical mass, tampers,
predetonation, and three methods of assembling a bomb: gun assembly, implosion,
and "autocatalytic methods," the one approach that turned out to be a dead end.
[edit] Los Alamos
Main article: Los Alamos National Laboratory
At Los Alamos, it was found in April 1944 by Emilio G. Segrè that the proposed
Thin Man Gun assembly type bomb would not work for plutonium because of
predetonation problems caused by Pu-240 impurities. So Fat Man the Implosion
type bomb was given high priority as the only option for plutonium. The Berkeley
discussions had generated theoretical estimates of critical mass, but nothing precise.
The main wartime job at Los Alamos was the experimental determination of critical
mass, which had to wait until sufficient amounts of fissile material arrived from the
production plants: uranium from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and plutonium from the
Hanford site in Washington.
In 1945, using the results of critical mass experiments, Los Alamos technicians
fabricated and assembled components for four bombs: the Trinity Gadget, Little
Boy, Fat Man, and an unused spare Fat Man. After the war, those who could,
including Oppenheimer, returned to university teaching positions. Those who
remained worked on levitated and hollow pits and conducted weapon effects tests
such as Crossroads Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
All of the essential ideas for incorporating fusion into nuclear weapons originated at
Los Alamos between 1946 and 1952. After the Teller-Ulam radiation implosion
breakthrough of 1951, the technical implications and possibilities were fully
explored, but ideas not directly relevant to making the largest possible bombs for
long-range Air Force bombers were shelved.
Because of Oppenheimer's initial position in the H-bomb debate, in opposition to

large thermonuclear weapons, and the assumption that he still had influence over
Los Alamos despite his departure, political allies of Edward Teller decided he
needed his own laboratory in order to pursue H-bombs. By the time it was opened in
1952, in Livermore, California, Los Alamos had finished the job Livermore was
designed to do.
[edit] Livermore
Main article: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
With its original mission no longer available, the Livermore lab tried radical new
designs, that failed. Its first three nuclear tests were fizzles: in 1953, two single-stage
fission devices with uranium hydride pits, and in 1954, a two-stage thermonuclear
device in which the secondary heated up prematurely, too fast for radiation
implosion to work properly.
Shifting gears, Livermore settled for taking ideas Los Alamos had shelved and
developing them for the Army and Navy. This led Livermore to specialize in small-
diameter tactical weapons, particularly ones using two-point implosion systems,
such as the Swan. Small-diameter tactical weapons became primaries for small-
diameter secondaries. Around 1960, when the superpower arms race became a
ballistic missile race, Livermore warheads were more useful than the large, heavy
Los Alamos warheads. Los Alamos warheads were used on the first intermediate-
range ballistic missiles, IRBMs, but smaller Livermore warheads were used on the
first intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic
missiles, SLBMs, as well as on the first multiple warhead systems on such missiles.[31]
In 1957 and 1958 both labs built and tested as many designs as possible, in
anticipation that a planned 1958 test ban might become permanent. By the time
testing resumed in 1961 the two labs had become duplicates of each other, and
design jobs were assigned more on workload considerations than lab specialty. Some
designs were horse-traded. For example, the W38 warhead for the Titan I missile
started out as a Livermore project, was given to Los Alamos when it became the
Atlas missile warhead, and in 1959 was given back to Livermore, in trade for the
W54 Davy Crockett warhead, which went from Livermore to Los Alamos.
The period of real innovation was ending by then, anyway. Warhead designs after
1960 took on the character of model changes, with every new missile getting a new
warhead for marketing reasons. The chief substantive change involved packing
more fissile uranium into the secondary, as it became available with continued
uranium enrichment and the dismantlement of the large high-yield bombs.
[edit] Explosive testing

Nuclear weapons are in large part designed by trial and error. The trial often
involves exploding a prototype.
In a nuclear explosion, a large number of discrete events, with various probabilities,

aggregate into short-lived, chaotic energy flows inside the device casing. Complex
mathematical models are required to approximate the processes, and in the 1950s
there were no computers powerful enough to run them properly. Even today's
computers and their codes are not fully adequate.[32]
It was easy enough to design reliable weapons for the stockpile. If the prototype
worked, it could be weaponized and mass produced.
It was much more difficult to understand how it worked or why it failed. Designers
gathered as much data as possible during the explosion, before the device destroyed
itself, and used the data to calibrate their models, often by inserting fudge factors
into equations to make the simulations match experimental results. They also
analyzed the weapon debris in fallout to see how much of a potential nuclear
reaction had taken place.
[edit] Light pipes
An important tool for test analysis was the diagnostic light pipe. A probe inside a
test device could transmit information by heating a plate of metal to incandescence,
an event that could be recorded at the far end of a long, very straight pipe.
The picture below shows the Shrimp device, detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini,
as the Castle Bravo test. Its 15-megaton explosion was the largest ever by the United
States. The silhouette of a man is shown for scale. The device is supported from
below, at the ends. The pipes going into the shot cab ceiling, which appear to be
supports, are diagnostic light pipes. The eight pipes at the right end (1) sent
information about the detonation of the primary. Two in the middle (2) marked the
time when x-radiation from the primary reached the radiation channel around the
secondary. The last two pipes (3) noted the time radiation reached the far end of the
radiation channel, the difference between (2) and (3) being the radiation transit time
for the channel.[33]
From the shot cab, the pipes turned horizontal and traveled 7500 ft (2.3 km), along a
causeway built on the Bikini reef, to a remote-controlled data collection bunker on
Namu Island.
While x-rays would normally travel at the speed of light through a low density
material like the plastic foam channel filler between (2) and (3), the intensity of
radiation from the exploding primary created a relatively opaque radiation front in
the channel filler which acted like a slow-moving logjam to retard the passage of
radiant energy. Behind this moving front was a fully-ionized, low-z (low atomic
number) plasma heated to 20,000°C, soaking up energy like a black box, and
eventually driving the implosion of the secondary.[34]
The radiation transit time, on the order of half a microsecond, is the time it takes
the entire radiation channel to reach thermal equilibrium as the radiation front
moves down its length. The implosion of the secondary is based on the temperature
difference between the hot channel and the cool interior of the secondary. Its timing
is important because the interior of the secondary is subject to neutron preheat.
While the radiation channel is heating and starting the implosion, neutrons from the
primary catch up with the x-rays, penetrate into the secondary and start breeding
tritium with the third reaction noted in the first section above. This Li-6 + n reaction
is exothermic, producing 5 Mev per event. The spark plug is not yet compressed and
thus is not critical, so there won't be significant fission or fusion. But if enough
neutrons arrive before implosion of the secondary is complete, the crucial
temperature difference will be degraded. This is the reported cause of failure for
Livermore's first thermonuclear design, the Morgenstern device, tested as Castle
Koon, April 7, 1954.
These timing issues are measured by light-pipe data. The mathematical simulations
which they calibrate are called radiation flow hydrodynamics codes, or channel
codes. They are used to predict the effect of future design modifications.
It is not clear from the public record how successful the Shrimp light pipes were.
The data bunker was far enough back to remain outside the mile-wide crater, but
the 15-megaton blast, two and a half times greater than expected, breached the
bunker by blowing its 20-ton door off the hinges and across the inside of the bunker.
(The nearest people were twenty miles farther away, in a bunker that survived
intact.)[35]
[edit] Fallout analysis
The most interesting data from Castle Bravo came from radio-chemical analysis of
weapon debris in fallout. Because of a shortage of enriched lithium-6, 60% of the
lithium in the Shrimp secondary was ordinary lithium-7, which doesn't breed
tritium as easily as lithium-6 does. But it does breed lithium-6 as the product of an
"n, 2n" reaction (one neutron in, two neutrons out), a known fact, but with
unknown probability. The probability turned out to be high.
Fallout analysis revealed to designers that, with the n, 2n reaction, the Shrimp
secondary effectively had two and half times as much lithium-6 as expected. The
tritium, the fusion yield, the neutrons, and the fission yield were all increased
accordingly.[36]
As noted above, Bravo's fallout analysis also told the outside world, for the first
time, that thermonuclear bombs are more fission devices than fusion devices. A
Japanese fishing boat named the Lucky Dragon sailed home with enough fallout on
its decks to allow scientists in Japan and elsewhere to determine, and announce, that
most of the fallout had come from the fission of U-238 by fusion-produced 14 MeV
neutrons.
[edit] Underground testing
Subsidence Craters at Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site.
The global alarm over radioactive fallout, which began with the Castle Bravo event,
eventually drove nuclear testing underground. The last U.S. above-ground test took
place at Johnston Island on November 4, 1962. During the next three decades, until
September 23, 1992, the U.S. conducted an average of 2.4 underground nuclear
explosions per month, all but a few at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) northwest of Las
Vegas.
The Yucca Flat section of the NTS is covered with subsidence craters resulting from
the collapse of terrain over intensely radioactive underground caverns created by
nuclear explosions (see photo).
After the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), which limited underground
explosions to 150 kilotons or less, warheads like the half-megaton W88 had to be
tested at less than full yield. Since the primary must be detonated at full yield in
order to generate data about the implosion of the secondary, the reduction in yield
had to come from the secondary. Replacing much of the lithium-6 deuteride fusion
fuel with lithium-7 hydride limited the deuterium available for fusion, and thus the
overall yield, without changing the dynamics of the implosion. The functioning of
the device could be evaluated using light pipes, other sensing devices, and analysis of
trapped weapon debris. The full yield of the stockpiled weapon could be calculated
by extrapolation.
[edit] Production facilities

When two-stage weapons became standard in the early 1950s, weapon design
determined the layout of America's new, widely dispersed production facilities, and
vice versa.
Because primaries tend to be bulky, especially in diameter, plutonium is the fissile

material of choice for pits, with beryllium reflectors. It has a smaller critical mass
than uranium. The Rocky Flats plant in Boulder, Colorado, was built in 1952 for pit
production and consequently became the plutonium and beryllium fabrication
facility.
The Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where mass spectrometers called Calutrons
had enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project, was redesigned to make
secondaries. Fissile U-235 makes the best spark plugs because its critical mass is
larger, especially in the cylindrical shape of early thermonuclear secondaries. Early
experiments used the two fissile materials in combination, as composite Pu-Oy pits
and spark plugs, but for mass production, it was easier to let the factories specialize:
plutonium pits in primaries, uranium spark plugs and pushers in secondaries.
Y-12 made lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel and U-238 parts, the other two
ingredients of secondaries.
The Savannah River plant in Aiken, South Carolina, also built in 1952, operated
nuclear reactors which converted U-238 into Pu-239 for pits, and lithium-6
(produced at Y-12) into tritium for booster gas. Since its reactors were moderated
with heavy water, deuterium oxide, it also made deuterium for booster gas and for
Y-12 to use in making lithium-6 deuteride.
[edit] Warhead design safety

• Gun-type weapons
It is inherently dangerous to have a weapon containing a quantity and shape of

fissile material which can form a critical mass through a relatively simple accident.
Because of this danger, the high explosives in Little Boy (four bags of Cordite
powder) were inserted into the bomb in flight, shortly after takeoff on August 6,
1945. It was the first time a gun-type nuclear weapon had ever been fully assembled.
Also, if the weapon falls into water, the moderating effect of the water can also cause
a criticality accident, even without the weapon being physically damaged.
Gun-type weapons have always been inherently unsafe.
• In-flight pit insertion
Neither of these effects is likely with implosion weapons since there is normally
insufficient fissile material to form a critical mass without the correct detonation of
the lenses. However, the earliest implosion weapons had pits so close to criticality
that accidental detonation with some nuclear yield was a concern.
On August 9, 1945, Fat Man was loaded onto its airplane fully assembled, but later,
when levitated pits made a space between the pit and the tamper, it was feasible to
utilize in-flight pit insertion. The bomber would take off with no fissile material in
the bomb. Some older implosion-type weapons, such as the US Mark 4 and Mark 5,
used this system.
In-flight pit insertion will not work with a hollow pit in contact with its tamper.
• Steel ball safety method
A diagram of the Green Grass warhead's steel ball-bearing safety device, shown left,
filled (safe) and right, empty (live). The steel balls were emptied into a hopper
underneath the aircraft before flight, the steel balls could be re-inserted using a
funnel by rotating the bomb on its trolley and raising the hopper.
As shown in the diagram, one method used to decrease the likelihood of accidental
detonation used metal balls. The balls were emptied into the pit; this would prevent
detonation by increasing density of the hollowed pit. This design was used in the
Green Grass weapon, also known as the Interim Megaton Weapon and was also used
in Violet Club and the Yellow Sun Mk.1 bombs.
• Chain safety method
Alternatively, the pit can be "safed" by having its normally-hollow core filled with
an inert material such as a fine metal chain, possibly made of cadmium to absorb
neutrons. While the chain is in the center of the pit, the pit can't be compressed into
an appropriate shape to fission; when the weapon is to be armed, the chain is
removed. Similarly, although a serious fire could detonate the explosives, destroying
the pit and spreading plutonium to contaminate the surroundings as has happened
in several weapons accidents, it could not however, cause a nuclear explosion.
• Wire safety method

The US W47 warhead used in Polaris A1 and Polaris A2 had a safety device
consisting of a boron-coated-wire inserted into the hollow pit at manufacture. The
warhead was armed by withdrawing the wire onto a spool driven by an electric
motor. However, once withdrawn the wire could not be re-inserted.[37]
• One-point safety
While the firing of one detonator out of many will not cause a hollow pit to go
critical, especially a low-mass hollow pit that requires boosting, the introduction of
two-point implosion systems made that possibility a real concern.
In a two-point system, if one detonator fires, one entire hemisphere of the pit will
implode as designed. The high-explosive charge surrounding the other hemisphere
will explode progressively, from the equator toward the opposite pole. Ideally, this
will pinch the equator and squeeze the second hemisphere away from the first, like
toothpaste in a tube. By the time the explosion envelops it, its implosion will be
separated both in time and space from the implosion of the first hemisphere. The
resulting dumbbell shape, with each end reaching maximum density at a different
time, may not become critical.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to tell on the drawing board how this will play out.
Nor is it possible using a dummy pit of U-238 and high-speed x-ray cameras,
although such tests are helpful. For final determination, a test needs to be made with
real fissile material. Consequently, starting in 1957, a year after Swan, both labs
began one-point safety tests.
Out of 25 one-point safety tests conducted in 1957 and 1958, seven had zero or slight
nuclear yield (success), three had high yields of 300 kt to 500 kt (severe failure), and
the rest had unacceptable yields between those extremes.
Of particular concern was Livermore's W47 warhead for the Polaris submarine
missile. The last test before the 1958 moratorium was a one-point test of the W47
primary, which had an unacceptably high nuclear yield of 400 lb of TNT equivalent
(Hardtack II Titania). With the test moratorium in force, there was no way to refine
the design and make it inherently one-point safe. Los Alamos had a suitable primary
that was one-point safe, but rather than share with Los Alamos the credit for
designing the first SLBM warhead, Livermore chose to use mechanical safing on its
own inherently unsafe primary. The wire safety scheme described above was the
result.[38]
It turns out that the W47 may have been safer than anticipated. The wire-safety
system may have rendered most of the warheads "duds," unable to fire when
detonated.[38]
When testing resumed in 1961, and continued for three decades, there was sufficient
time to make all warhead designs inherently one-point safe, without need for
mechanical safing.
• Permissive Action Links
In addition to the above steps to reduce the probability of a nuclear detonation

arrising from a single fault, locking mechanisms referred to by NATO states as
Permissive Action Links are sometimes attached to the control mechanisms for
nuclear warheads. Permissive Action Links act solely to prevent an unauthorised
use of a nuclear weapon.
Designed for use on Trident II (D-5) submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the W88
entered service in 1990 and was the last warhead designed for the U.S. arsenal. It
has been described as the most advanced, although open literature accounts do not
indicate any major design features that were not available to U.S. designers in 1958.
The above diagram shows all the standard features of ballistic missile warheads
since the 1960s, with two exceptions that give it a higher yield for its size.
• The outer layer of the secondary, called the "pusher," which serves three
functions: heat shield, tamper, and fission fuel, is made of U-235 instead of U-
238, hence the name Oralloy (U-235) Thermonuclear. Being fissile, rather
than merely fissionable, allows the pusher to fission faster and more
completely, increasing yield. This feature is available only to nations with a
great wealth of fissile uranium. The U.S. is estimated to have 500 tons.
• The secondary is located in the wide end of the re-entry cone, where it can be
larger, and thus more powerful. The usual arrangement is to put the heavier,
denser secondary in the narrow end for greater aerodynamic stability during
re-entry from outer space, and to allow more room for a bulky primary in
the wider part of the cone. (The W87 warhead drawing in the previous
section shows the usual arrangement.) Because of this new geometry, the
W88 primary uses compact conventional high explosives (CHE) to save
space,[27] rather than the more usual, and bulky but safer, insensitive high
explosives (IHE). The re-entry cone probably has ballast in the nose for
aerodynamic stability.[28]
Notice that the alternating layers of fission and fusion material in the secondary are
an application of the Alarm Clock/Sloika principle.
[edit] Reliable replacement warhead
Main article: Reliable Replacement Warhead
The United States has not produced any nuclear warheads since 1989, when the
Rocky Flats pit production plant, near Boulder, Colorado, was shut down for
environmental reasons. With the end of the Cold War two years later, the
production line was idled except for inspection and maintenance functions.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, the latest successor for nuclear
weapons to the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy, has
proposed building a new pit facility and starting the production line for a new
warhead called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).[29] Two advertised safety
improvements of the RRW would be a return to the use of "insensitive high
explosives which are far less susceptible to accidental detonation," and the
elimination of "certain hazardous materials, such as beryllium, that are harmful to
people and the environment."[30] Since the new warhead would not require any
nuclear testing, it could not use a new design with untested concepts.
[edit] The Weapon Design Laboratories
[edit] Berkeley
Main article: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The first systematic exploration of nuclear weapon design concepts took place in the
summer of 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. Important early
discoveries had been made at the adjacent Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, such as
the 1940 production and isolation of plutonium. A Berkeley professor, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, had just been hired to run the nation's secret bomb design effort. His
first act was to convene the 1942 summer conference.
By the time he moved his operation to the new secret town of Los Alamos, New
Mexico, in the spring of 1943, the accumulated wisdom on nuclear weapon design
consisted of five lectures by Berkeley professor Robert Serber, transcribed and
distributed as the Los Alamos Primer. The Primer addressed fission energy, neutron
production and capture, nuclear chain reactions, critical mass, tampers,
predetonation, and three methods of assembling a bomb: gun assembly, implosion,
and "autocatalytic methods," the one approach that turned out to be a dead end.
[edit] Los Alamos

Main article: Los Alamos National Laboratory
At Los Alamos, it was found in April 1944 by Emilio G. Segrè that the proposed
Thin Man Gun assembly type bomb would not work for plutonium because of
predetonation problems caused by Pu-240 impurities. So Fat Man the Implosion
type bomb was given high priority as the only option for plutonium. The Berkeley
discussions had generated theoretical estimates of critical mass, but nothing precise.
The main wartime job at Los Alamos was the experimental determination of critical
mass, which had to wait until sufficient amounts of fissile material arrived from the
production plants: uranium from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and plutonium from the
Hanford site in Washington.
In 1945, using the results of critical mass experiments, Los Alamos technicians
fabricated and assembled components for four bombs: the Trinity Gadget, Little
Boy, Fat Man, and an unused spare Fat Man. After the war, those who could,
including Oppenheimer, returned to university teaching positions. Those who
remained worked on levitated and hollow pits and conducted weapon effects tests
such as Crossroads Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
All of the essential ideas for incorporating fusion into nuclear weapons originated at
Los Alamos between 1946 and 1952. After the Teller-Ulam radiation implosion
breakthrough of 1951, the technical implications and possibilities were fully
explored, but ideas not directly relevant to making the largest possible bombs for
long-range Air Force bombers were shelved.
Because of Oppenheimer's initial position in the H-bomb debate, in opposition to

large thermonuclear weapons, and the assumption that he still had influence over
Los Alamos despite his departure, political allies of Edward Teller decided he
needed his own laboratory in order to pursue H-bombs. By the time it was opened in
1952, in Livermore, California, Los Alamos had finished the job Livermore was
designed to do.
[edit] Livermore
Main article: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

With its original mission no longer available, the Livermore lab tried radical new
designs, that failed. Its first three nuclear tests were fizzles: in 1953, two single-stage
fission devices with uranium hydride pits, and in 1954, a two-stage thermonuclear
device in which the secondary heated up prematurely, too fast for radiation
implosion to work properly.
Shifting gears, Livermore settled for taking ideas Los Alamos had shelved and
developing them for the Army and Navy. This led Livermore to specialize in small-
diameter tactical weapons, particularly ones using two-point implosion systems,
such as the Swan. Small-diameter tactical weapons became primaries for small-
diameter secondaries. Around 1960, when the superpower arms race became a
ballistic missile race, Livermore warheads were more useful than the large, heavy
Los Alamos warheads. Los Alamos warheads were used on the first intermediate-
range ballistic missiles, IRBMs, but smaller Livermore warheads were used on the
first intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic
missiles, SLBMs, as well as on the first multiple warhead systems on such missiles.[31]
In 1957 and 1958 both labs built and tested as many designs as possible, in
anticipation that a planned 1958 test ban might become permanent. By the time
testing resumed in 1961 the two labs had become duplicates of each other, and
design jobs were assigned more on workload considerations than lab specialty. Some
designs were horse-traded. For example, the W38 warhead for the Titan I missile
started out as a Livermore project, was given to Los Alamos when it became the
Atlas missile warhead, and in 1959 was given back to Livermore, in trade for the
W54 Davy Crockett warhead, which went from Livermore to Los Alamos.
The period of real innovation was ending by then, anyway. Warhead designs after
1960 took on the character of model changes, with every new missile getting a new
warhead for marketing reasons. The chief substantive change involved packing
more fissile uranium into the secondary, as it became available with continued
uranium enrichment and the dismantlement of the large high-yield bombs.
[edit] Explosive testing
Nuclear weapons are in large part designed by trial and error. The trial often
involves exploding a prototype.
In a nuclear explosion, a large number of discrete events, with various probabilities,

aggregate into short-lived, chaotic energy flows inside the device casing. Complex
mathematical models are required to approximate the processes, and in the 1950s
there were no computers powerful enough to run them properly. Even today's
computers and their codes are not fully adequate.[32]
It was easy enough to design reliable weapons for the stockpile. If the prototype
worked, it could be weaponized and mass produced.
It was much more difficult to understand how it worked or why it failed. Designers
gathered as much data as possible during the explosion, before the device destroyed
itself, and used the data to calibrate their models, often by inserting fudge factors
into equations to make the simulations match experimental results. They also
analyzed the weapon debris in fallout to see how much of a potential nuclear
reaction had taken place.
[edit] Light pipes
An important tool for test analysis was the diagnostic light pipe. A probe inside a
test device could transmit information by heating a plate of metal to incandescence,
an event that could be recorded at the far end of a long, very straight pipe.
The picture below shows the Shrimp device, detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini,
as the Castle Bravo test. Its 15-megaton explosion was the largest ever by the United
States. The silhouette of a man is shown for scale. The device is supported from
below, at the ends. The pipes going into the shot cab ceiling, which appear to be
supports, are diagnostic light pipes. The eight pipes at the right end (1) sent
information about the detonation of the primary. Two in the middle (2) marked the
time when x-radiation from the primary reached the radiation channel around the
secondary. The last two pipes (3) noted the time radiation reached the far end of the
radiation channel, the difference between (2) and (3) being the radiation transit time
for the channel.[33]


This article does not cite any references or sources. (November 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable
material may be challenged and removed.
An American nuclear test.
The energy released from a nuclear weapon detonated in the troposphere can be
divided into four basic categories[1]:
• Blast—40-50% of total energy

• Thermal radiation—30-50% of total energy
• Ionizing radiation—5% of total energy
• Residual radiation—5-10% of total energy
However, depending on the design of the weapon and the environment in which it is
detonated the energy distributed to these categories can be increased or decreased to
the point of nullification. The blast effect is created by immense amounts of energy,
spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, with the surroundings. Locations such as
submarine, surface, airburst, or exo-atmospheric determine how much energy is
produced as blast and how much as radiation. In general, denser mediums around
the bomb, like water, absorb more energy, and create more powerful shockwaves
while at the same time limiting the area of its effect.
The dominant effects of a nuclear weapon where people are likely to be affected
(blast and thermal radiation) are identical physical damage mechanisms to
conventional explosives. However the energy produced by a nuclear explosive is
millions of times more powerful per gram and the temperatures reached are briefly
in the tens of millions of degrees.
Energy from a nuclear explosive is initially released in several forms of penetrating

radiation. When there is a surrounding material such as air, rock, or water, this
radiation interacts with and rapidly heats it to an equilibrium temperature. This
causes vaporization of surrounding material resulting in its rapid expansion. Kinetic
energy created by this expansion contributes to the formation of a shockwave. When
a nuclear detonation occurs in air near sea level, much of the released energy
interacts with the atmosphere and creates a shockwave which expands spherically
from the hypocenter. Intense thermal radiation at the hypocenter forms a fireball
and if the burst is low enough, its often associated mushroom cloud. In a burst at
high altitudes, where the air density is low, more energy is released as ionizing
gamma radiation and x-rays than an atmosphere displacing shockwave.
In 1945 there was some initial speculation among the scientists developing the first
nuclear weapons that there might be a possibility of igniting the Earth's atmosphere
with a large enough nuclear explosion. This would concern a nuclear reaction of two
nitrogen atoms forming a carbon and an oxygen atom, with release of energy. This
energy would heat up the remaining nitrogen enough to keep the reaction going
until all nitrogen atoms were consumed. This was, however, quickly shown to be
unlikely enough to be considered impossible [2]. Nevertheless, the notion has
persisted as a rumour for many years.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Direct effects
o 1.1 Blast damage
o 1.2 Thermal radiation
• 2 Indirect effects
o 2.1 Electromagnetic pulse
o 2.2 Ionizing radiation
o 2.3 Earthquake
o 2.4 Summary of the effects
• 3 Other phenomena
• 4 Survivability
• 5 See also
• 6 References
[edit] Direct effects
[edit] Blast damage
Overpressure ranges from 1 to 50 psi of a 1 kiloton of TNT air burst as a function of

burst height. The thin black curve indicates the optimum burst height for a given
ground range.
An estimate of the size of the damage caused by the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. A modern hydrogen bomb would be tens[1] of times more powerful
and cause similar levels of damage at 2-5 times the distance.
The high temperatures and pressures cause gas to move outward radially in a thin,
dense shell called "the hydrodynamic front." The front acts like a piston that pushes
against and compresses the surrounding medium to make a spherically expanding
shock wave. At first, this shock wave is inside the surface of the developing fireball,
which is created in a volume of air by the X-rays. However, within a fraction of a
second the dense shock front obscures the fireball, causing the characteristic double
pulse of light seen from a nuclear detonation. For air bursts at or near sea-level
between 50-60% of the explosion's energy goes into the blast wave, depending on the
size and the yield-to-weight ratio of the bomb. As a general rule, the blast fraction is
higher for low yield and/or high bomb mass. Furthermore, it decreases at high
altitudes because there is less air mass to absorb radiation energy and convert it into
blast. This effect is most important for altitudes above 30 km, corresponding to <1
per cent of sea-level air density.
Much of the destruction caused by a nuclear explosion is due to blast effects. Most
buildings, except reinforced or blast-resistant structures, will suffer moderate to
severe damage when subjected to overpressures of only 35.5 kilopascals (kPa) (5.15
pounds-force per square inch or 0.35 atm).
The blast wind may exceed one thousand km/h. The range for blast effects increases
with the explosive yield of the weapon and also depends on the burst altitude.
Contrary to what one might expect from geometry the blast range is not maximal
for surface or low altitude blasts but increases with altitude up to an "optimum
burst altitude" and then decreases rapidly for higher altitudes. This is due to the
nonlinear behaviour of shock waves. If the blast wave reaches the ground it is
reflected. Below a certain reflection angle the reflected wave and the direct wave
merge and form a reinforced horizontal wave, the so-called Mach stem (named after
Ernst Mach). For each goal overpressure there is a certain optimum burst height at
which the blast range is maximized. In a typical air burst, where the blast range is
maximized for 5 to 20 psi (35 to 140 kPa), these values of overpressure and wind
velocity noted above will prevail at a range of 0.7 km for 1 kiloton (kt) of TNT yield;
3.2 km for 100 kt; and 15.0 km for 10 megatons (Mt) of TNT.
Two distinct, simultaneous phenomena are associated with the blast wave in air:
• Static overpressure, i.e., the sharp increase in pressure exerted by the shock
wave. The overpressure at any given point is directly proportional to the
density of the air in the wave.
• Dynamic pressures, i.e., drag exerted by the blast winds required to form the
blast wave. These winds push, tumble and tear objects.
Most of the material damage caused by a nuclear air burst is caused by a
combination of the high static overpressures and the blast winds. The long
compression of the blast wave weakens structures, which are then torn apart by the
blast winds. The compression, vacuum and drag phases together may last several
seconds or longer, and exert forces many times greater than the strongest hurricane.
Acting on the human body, the shock waves cause pressure waves through the
tissues. These waves mostly damage junctions between tissues of different densities
(bone and muscle) or the interface between tissue and air. Lungs and the abdominal
cavity, which contain air, are particularly injured. The damage causes severe
hemorrhaging or air embolisms, either of which can be rapidly fatal. The
overpressure estimated to damage lungs is about 70 kPa. Some eardrums would
probably rupture around 22 kPa (0.2 atm) and half would rupture between 90 and
130 kPa (0.9 to 1.2 atm).
Blast Winds: The drag energies of the blast winds are proportional to the cubes of
their velocities multiplied by the durations. These winds may reach several hundred
kilometers per hour.
[edit] Thermal radiation
Mushroom cloud height depending on yield for ground bursts.

0 = Approx altitude commercial aircraft operate
1 = Fat Man
2 = Castle Bravo.
Nuclear weapons emit large amounts of electromagnetic radiation as visible,

infrared, and ultraviolet light. The chief hazards are burns and eye injuries. On
clear days, these injuries can occur well beyond blast ranges. The light is so
powerful that it can start fires that spread rapidly in the debris left by a blast. The
range of thermal effects increases markedly with weapon yield. Thermal radiation
accounts for between 35-45% of the energy released in the explosion, depending on
the yield of the device.
There are two types of eye injuries from the thermal radiation of a weapon:
Flash blindness is caused by the initial brilliant flash of light produced by the
nuclear detonation. More light energy is received on the retina than can be
tolerated, but less than is required for irreversible injury. The retina is particularity
susceptible to visible and short wavelength infrared light, since this part of the
electromagnetic spectrum is focused by the lens on the retina. The result is bleaching
of the visual pigments and temporary blindness for up to 40 minutes.
Burns visible on a woman in Hiroshima during the blast, darker colors of her
kimono at the time of detonation correspond to clearly visible burns on skin
touching parts of the garment exposed to thermal radiation. Since kimonos are not
form fitting attire, some parts were not directly touching her skin are visible as
breaks in the pattern. As well as tighter fitting areas approaching the waistline
where the pattern is much more defined.
A retinal burn resulting in permanent damage from scarring is also caused by the
concentration of direct thermal energy on the retina by the lens. It will occur only
when the fireball is actually in the individual's field of vision and would be a
relatively uncommon injury. Retinal burns, however, may be sustained at
considerable distances from the explosion. The apparent size of the fireball, a
function of yield and range will determine the degree and extent of retinal scarring.
A scar in the central visual field would be more debilitating. Generally, a limited
visual field defect, which will be barely noticeable, is all that is likely to occur.
When thermal radiation strikes an object, part will be reflected, part transmitted,
and the rest absorbed. The fraction that is absorbed depends on the nature and
color of the material. A thin material may transmit a lot. A light colored object may
reflect much of the incident radiation and thus escape damage. The absorbed
thermal radiation raises the temperature of the surface and results in scorching,
charring, and burning of wood, paper, fabrics, etc. If the material is a poor thermal
conductor, the heat is confined to the surface of the material.
Actual ignition of materials depends on how long the thermal pulse lasts and the
thickness and moisture content of the target. Near ground zero where the energy
flux exceeds 125 J/cm², what can burn, will. Farther away, only the most easily
ignited materials will flame. Incendiary effects are compounded by secondary fires
started by the blast wave effects such as from upset stoves and furnaces.
In Hiroshima, a tremendous fire storm developed within 20 minutes after detonation
and destroyed many more buildings and homes. A fire storm has gale force winds
blowing in towards the center of the fire from all points of the compass. It is not,
however, a phenomenon peculiar to nuclear explosions, having been observed
frequently in large forest fires and following incendiary raids during World War II.
Because thermal radiation travels more or less in a straight line from the fireball
(unless scattered) any opaque object will produce a protective shadow. If fog or haze
scatters the light, it will heat things from all directions and shielding will be less
effective, but fog or haze would also diminish the range of these effects.
[edit] Indirect effects
The mushroom cloud from the first "true" Soviet hydrogen bomb test in 1955.
[edit] Electromagnetic pulse
Main article: Electromagnetic pulse
Gamma rays from a nuclear explosion produce high energy electrons through
Compton scattering. These electrons are captured in the earth's magnetic field, at
altitudes between twenty and forty kilometers, where they resonate. The oscillating
electric current produces a coherent electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which lasts about
one millisecond. Secondary effects may last for more than a second.
The pulse is powerful enough to cause long metal objects (such as cables) to act as
antennas and generate high voltages when the pulse passes. These voltages, and the
associated high currents, can destroy unshielded electronics and even many wires.
There are no known biological effects of EMP. The ionized air also disrupts radio
traffic that would normally bounce off the ionosphere.
One can shield electronics by wrapping them completely in conductive mesh, or any
other form of Faraday cage. Of course radios cannot operate when shielded, because
broadcast radio waves can't reach them.
[edit] Ionizing radiation
About 5% of the energy released in a nuclear air burst is in the form of ionizing
radiation: neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, and electrons moving at
incredible speeds, but with different speeds that can be still far away from the speed
of light (beta particles). The neutrons result almost exclusively from the fission and
fusion reactions, while the initial gamma radiation includes that arising from these
reactions as well as that resulting from the decay of short-lived fission products.
The intensity of initial nuclear radiation decreases rapidly with distance from the
point of burst because the radiation spreads over a larger area as it travels away
from the explosion. It is also reduced by atmospheric absorption and scattering.
The character of the radiation received at a given location also varies with distance
from the explosion. Near the point of the explosion, the neutron intensity is greater
than the gamma intensity, but with increasing distance the neutron-gamma ratio
decreases. Ultimately, the neutron component of initial radiation becomes negligible
in comparison with the gamma component. The range for significant levels of initial
radiation does not increase markedly with weapon yield and, as a result, the initial
radiation becomes less of a hazard with increasing yield. With larger weapons,
above fifty kt (200 TJ), blast and thermal effects are so much greater in importance
that prompt radiation effects can be ignored.
The neutron radiation serves to transmute the surrounding matter, often rendering
it radioactive. When added to the dust of radioactive material released by the bomb
itself, a large amount of radioactive material is released into the environment. This
form of radioactive contamination is known as nuclear fallout and poses the
primary risk of exposure to ionizing radiation for a large nuclear weapon.
[edit] Earthquake
The pressure wave from an underground explosion will propagate through the
ground and cause a minor earthquake. [3] Theory suggests that a nuclear explosion
could trigger fault rupture and cause a major quake at distances within a few tens of
kilometers from the shot point. [4]
[edit] Summary of the effects
The following table summarizes the most important effects of nuclear explosions
under certain conditions.
Explosive yield / Height of Burst

Effects 1 kT / 20 kT / 1 MT / 20 MT /
200 m 540 m 2.0 km 5.4 km
Blast—effective ground range GR / km
Urban areas almost completely levelled
0.2 0.6 2.4 6.4
(20 PSI)
Destruction of most civilian buildings (5
0.6 1.7 6.2 17
PSI)
Moderate damage to civilian buildings
1.7 4.7 17 47
(1 PSI)
Railway cars thrown from tracks and
n/a 1.0 n/a n/a
crushed (0.63 kg/cm2)
Thermal radiation—effective ground range GR / km
Conflagration 0.5 2.0 10 30
Third degree burns 0.6 2.5 12 38
Second degree burns 0.8 3.2 15 44
First degree burns 1.1 4.2 19 53
Effects of instant nuclear radiation—effective slant range1 SR / km
Lethal2 total dose (neutrons and gamma
0.8 1.4 2.3 4.7
rays)
Total dose for acute radiation
1.2 1.8 2.9 5.4
syndrome2
1
) For the direct radiation effects the slant range instead of the ground range is
shown here, because some effects are not given even at ground zero for some burst
heights. If the effect occurs at ground zero the ground range can simply be derived
from slant range and burst altitude (Pythagorean theorem).
2
) "Acute radiation syndrome" corresponds here to a total dose of one gray, "lethal"
to ten grays. Note that this is only a rough estimate since biological conditions are
neglected here.
[edit] Other phenomena
As the fireball rises through still air, it takes on the flow pattern of a vortex ring
with incandescent material in the vortex core as seen in certain photographs. At the
explosion of nuclear bombs sometimes lightning discharges occur. Not related to the
explosion itself, often there are smoke trails seen in photographs of nuclear
explosions. These are formed from rockets emitting smoke launched before
detonation. The smoke trails are used to determine the position of the shockwave,
which is invisible, in the milliseconds after detonation through the refraction of
light, which causes an optical break in the smoke trails as the shockwave passes. A
fizzle occurs if the nuclear chain reaction is not sustained long enough to cause an
explosion, or if the explosion is of much less energy than expected. This can happen
if, for example, the yield of the fissile material used is too low, the compression
explosives around fissile material misfire or the neutron initiator fails.
[edit] Survivability
This is highly dependent on factors such as proximity to the blast and the direction
of the wind carrying fallout. Death is highly likely, and radiation poisoning is almost
certain if one is close enough within the radius of the blast, for example 3 to 4 miles
for a 1 megaton atmospheric blast

A nuclear fireball lights up the night in a United States nuclear test.
Nuclear weapons

Nuclear warfare
Nuclear arms race
Delivery systems
Nuclear espionage
United Kingdom - France - China -
India - Israel - Pakistan -
North Korea
The history of nuclear weapons chronicles the development of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are devices that possess enormous destructive potential derived
from nuclear fission or nuclear fusion reactions. Starting with the scientific
breakthroughs of the 1930s which made their development possible, continuing
through the nuclear arms race and nuclear testing of the Cold War, and finally with
the questions of proliferation and possible use for terrorism in the early 21st
century.
The first fission weapons, also known as "atomic bombs," were developed by the
United States during World War II in what was called the Manhattan Project. In
August 1945 two were dropped on Japan. An international team was dispatched to
help work on the project. The Soviet Union started development shortly thereafter
with their own atomic bomb project, and not long after that both countries
developed even more powerful fusion weapons also called "hydrogen bombs."
During the Cold War, these two countries each acquired nuclear weapons arsenals
numbering in the thousands, placing many of them onto rockets which could hit
targets anywhere in the world. Currently there are at least nine countries with
functional nuclear weapons. A considerable amount of international negotiating has
focused on the threat of nuclear warfare and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to
new nations or groups.
There have been (at least) four major false alarms, the most recent in 1995, that
resulted in the activation of either the US' or Russia's nuclear attack early warning
protocols.[1]
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Physics and politics in the 1930s

• 2 From Los Alamos to Hiroshima
• 3 Soviet atomic bomb project
• 4 The first thermonuclear weapons
• 5 Deterrence and brinkmanship
• 6 Weapons improvement
• 7 Anti-nuclear
• 8 Initial proliferation
• 9 Cold War
• 10 Second nuclear age
• 11 See also
• 12 References
[edit] Physics and politics in the 1930s

See the main articles at History of physics, Nazi Germany, and World War II.
In nuclear fission, the nucleus of a fissile atom (in this case, enriched uranium)
absorbs a thermal neutron, becomes unstable, and splits into two new atoms,
releasing some energy and between one and three new neutrons, which can
perpetuate the process.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, physics was revolutionized with
developments in the understanding of the nature of atoms. In 1898, French physicist
Pierre Curie and his Polish wife Maria Sklodowska-Curie had discovered that
present in pitchblende, an ore of uranium, was a substance which emitted large
amounts of radioactivity, which they named radium. This raised the hopes of both
scientists and lay people that the elements around us could contain tremendous
amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be tapped.
Experiments by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 indicated that the vast majority of an

atom's mass was contained in a very small nucleus at its core, made up of protons,
surrounded by a web of whirring electrons. In 1932, James Chadwick discovered
that the nucleus contained another fundamental particle, the neutron, and in the
same year John Cockcroft and Ernest Rutherford "split the atom" for the first time,
the first occasion on which an atomic nucleus of one element had been successfully
changed to a different nucleus by artificial means.
In 1934 the idea of chain reaction via neutron was proposed by Leó Szilárd, who
patented the idea of the atomic bomb. The patent was transferred [clarify] in secret to
England's navy in 1936. In a very real sense[who?], Szilárd was the father of the atomic
bomb academically.
In 1934, French physicists Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered that artificial
radioactivity could be induced in stable elements by bombarding them with alpha
particles, and in the same year Italian physicist Enrico Fermi reported similar
results when bombarding uranium with neutrons.
In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a
manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium
after bombarding uranium with neutrons;[2] simultaneously, they communicated
these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly
interpreted these results as being nuclear fission.[3] Frisch confirmed this
experimentally on 13 January 1939.[4]
Even before it was published, Meitner’s and Frisch’s interpretation of the work of
Hahn and Strassmann crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Niels Bohr, who was to
lecture at Princeton University. Isidor Isaac Rabi and Willis Lamb, two University
of Columbia physicists working at Princeton, heard the news and carried it back to
Columbia. Rabi said he told Fermi; Fermi gave credit to Lamb. Bohr soon
thereafter went from Princeton to Columbia to see Fermi. Not finding Fermi in his
office, Bohr went down to the cyclotron area and found Anderson. Bohr grabbed
him by the shoulder and said: “Young man, let me explain to you about something
new and exciting in physics.”[5] It was clear to a number of scientists at Columbia
that they should try to detect the energy released in the nuclear fission of uranium
from neutron bombardment. On 25 January 1939, an experimental team at
Columbia University conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United
States,[6] which was done in the basement of Pupin Hall; the members of the team
were Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G.
Norris Glasoe, and Francis G. Slack.[7]
As the Nazi army marched into first Czechoslovakia in 1938, and then Poland in
1939, beginning World War II, many of Europe's top physicists had already begun
to flee from the imminent conflict. Scientists on both sides of the conflict were well
aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but at the time no
one was quite sure how it could be done. In the early years of the Second World
War, physicists abruptly stopped publishing on the topic of fission, an act of self-
censorship to keep the opposing side from gaining any advantages.
[edit] From Los Alamos to Hiroshima
Main article: Manhattan Project
UC Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Allied scientific effort at Los
Alamos.
Proportions of uranium-238 (blue) and uranium-235 (red) found naturally versus
grades that are enriched by separating the two isotopes atom-by-atom using various
methods that all require a massive investment in time and money.
By the beginning of World War II, there was concern among scientists in the Allied
nations that Nazi Germany might have its own project to develop fission-based
weapons. Organized research first began in Britain as part of the "Tube Alloys"
project, and in the United States a small amount of funding was given for research
into uranium weapons starting in 1939 with the Uranium Committee under Lyman
James Briggs. At the urging of British scientists, though, who had made crucial
calculations indicating that a fission weapon could be completed within only a few
years, by 1941 the project had been wrested into better bureaucratic hands, and in
1942 came under the auspices of General Leslie Groves as the Manhattan Project.
Scientifically led by the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the project
brought together the top scientific minds of the day (many exiles from Europe) with
the production power of American industry for the goal of producing fission-based
explosive devices before Germany could. Britain and the U.S. agreed to pool their
resources and information for the project, but the other Allied power—the Soviet
Union under Joseph Stalin—was not informed.
A massive industrial and scientific undertaking, the Manhattan Project involved

many of the world's great physicists in the scientific and development aspects. The
United States made an unprecedented investment into wartime research for the
project, which was spread across more than 30 sites in the U.S. and Canada.
Scientific knowledge was centralized at a secret laboratory known as Los Alamos,
previously a small ranch school near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Uranium appears in nature primarily in two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-

235. When the nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it undergoes nuclear
fission, splitting into two "fission products" and releasing energy and 2.5 neutrons
on average. Uranium-238, on the other hand, absorbs neutrons but does not split,
effectively putting a stop to any ongoing fission reaction. It was discovered that an
atomic bomb based on uranium would need to be made of almost completely pure
uranium-235 (at least 80% pure), or else the presence of uranium-238 would quickly
curtail the nuclear chain reaction. The team of scientists working on the Manhattan
Project immediately realized that one of the largest problems they would have to
solve was how to remove uranium-235 from natural uranium, which was composed
of 99.3% uranium-238. Two methods were developed during the wartime project,
both of which took advantage of the fact that uranium-238 has a slightly greater
atomic mass than uranium-235: electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion—
methods which separated isotopes based on their differing weights. Another secret
site was erected at rural Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the large-scale production and
purification of the rare isotope. It was a massive investment: at the time, one of the
Oak Ridge facilities (K-25) was the largest factory under one roof. The Oak Ridge
site employed tens of thousands of employees at its peak, most of whom had no idea
what they were working on.
Massive new physics machines were assembled at secret installations around the
United States for the production of enriched uranium and plutonium.
Though uranium-238 cannot be used for the initial stage of an atomic bomb, when
U-238 absorbs a neutron, it transforms first into an unstable element, uranium-239,
and then decays into neptunium-239, and finally the relatively stable plutonium-239,
an element which does not exist in nature. Plutonium is also fissile and can be used
to create a fission reaction, and after Enrico Fermi achieved the world's first
sustained and controlled nuclear chain reaction in the creation of the first "atomic
pile"—a primitive nuclear reactor—in a basement at the University of Chicago,
massive reactors were secretly created at what is now known as Hanford Site in the
state of Washington, using the Columbia River as cooling water, to transform
uranium-238 into plutonium for a bomb.
For a fission weapon to operate, there must be a critical mass—the amount needed
for a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction—of fissile material bombarded with
neutrons at any one time. The simplest form of nuclear weapon would be a gun-type
fission weapon, where a sub-critical mass of fissile material (such as uranium-235)
would be shot at another sub-critical mass of fissile material. The result would be a
super-critical mass which, when bombarded with neutrons, would undergo fission at
a rapid rate and create the desired explosion. The weapons envisaged in 1942 were
the two gun-type weapons, Little Boy (uranium) and Thin Man (plutonium), and the
Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb.
In early 1943 Oppenheimer determined that two projects should proceed forwards:
the "Thin Man" project (plutonium gun) and the "Fat Man" project (plutonium
implosion). The plutonium gun was to receive the bulk of the research effort, as it
was the project with the most uncertainty involved. It was assumed that the
uranium gun-type bomb could then be adapted from it.
The two fission bomb assembly methods.

But in April 1944 it was found by Emilio Segrè that plutonium has too high a level of
background neutron radiation, and undergoes spontaneous fission to a very small
extent, due to the presence of impurities of the Pu-240 isotope. If plutonium were
used in a "gun assembly," the chain reaction would start in the split seconds before
the critical mass was assembled, blowing the weapon apart before it would have any
great effect (this is known as a fizzle).
So development of Fat Man, the implosion bomb, was given high priority. Chemical
explosives were used to implode a sub-critical sphere of plutonium, thus increasing
its density and making it into a critical mass. The difficulties with implosion were in
the problem of making the chemical explosives deliver a perfectly uniform shock
wave upon the plutonium sphere— if it were even slightly asymmetric, the weapon
would fizzle (which would be expensive, messy, and not a very effective military
device). This problem was circumvented by the use of hydrodynamic "lenses"—
explosive materials of differing densities—which would focus the blast waves inside
the imploding sphere, akin to the way in which an optical lens focuses light rays.
After D-Day, General Groves had ordered a team of scientists—Project Alsos—to

follow eastward-moving victorious Allied troops into Europe in order to assess the
status of the German nuclear program (and to prevent the westward-moving
Russians from gaining any materials or scientific manpower). It was concluded that
while Nazi Germany had also had an atomic bomb program, headed by Werner
Heisenberg, the government had not made a significant investment in the project,
and had been nowhere near success.
Historians claim to have found a rough schematic showing a Nazi nuclear bomb.[8]
Research was conducted in the german nuclear energy project. In March 1945, a
Nazi scientific team was directed by the physicist Kurt Diebner to develop a
primitive nuclear device in Ohrdruf, Thuringia.[8][9]
The atomic fireball at the "Trinity" nuclear test secretly rang in the atomic age.
By the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, the Manhattan Project
was still months away from a working weapon. That April, after the death of
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Vice-President Harry S. Truman
was told about the secret wartime project for the first time.
Because of the difficulties in making a working plutonium bomb, it was decided that
there should be a test of the weapon, and Truman wanted to know for sure if it
would work before his meeting with Joseph Stalin at an upcoming conference on the
future of postwar Europe. On July 16, 1945, in the desert north of Alamogordo, New
Mexico, the first nuclear test took place, code-named "Trinity," using a device
nicknamed "the Gadget." The test released the equivalent of 19 kilotons of TNT, far
mightier than any weapon ever used before. The news of the test's success was
rushed to Truman, who used it as leverage at the upcoming Potsdam Conference,
held near Berlin.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed tens of thousands of

Japanese civilians.
After hearing arguments from scientists and military officers over the possible uses
of the weapons against Japan (though some recommended using them as
"demonstrations" in unpopulated areas, most recommended using them against
"built up" targets, a euphemistic term for populated cities), Truman ordered the use
of the weapons on Japanese cities, hoping it would send a strong message which
would end in the capitulation of the Japanese leadership and avoid a lengthy
invasion of the island. There were suggestions to drop the atomic bomb on Tokyo,
the capital of Japan, but concerns about Tokyo's cultural heritage changed the plan.
On August 6, 1945, a uranium-based weapon, "Little Boy", was let loose on the
Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a plutonium-based weapon, "Fat
Man", was dropped onto the city of Nagasaki. The atomic bombs killed at least one
hundred thousand Japanese outright, most of them civilians, with the heat,
radiation, and blast effects. Many tens of thousands would die later of radiation
sickness and related cancers.[citation needed] Truman promised a "rain of ruin" if Japan
did not surrender immediately, threatening to eliminate Japanese cities, one by one;
Japan surrendered on August 15.[citation needed] Truman's threat was in fact a bluff, since
the US had not completed more atomic bombs at the time.[citation needed]
[edit] Soviet atomic bomb project

See the main article at Soviet atomic bomb project.
The Soviet Union was not invited to share in the new weapons developed by the
United States and the other Allies. During the war, information had been pouring in
from a number of volunteer spies involved with the Manhattan Project (known in
Soviet cables under the code-name of Enormoz), and the Soviet nuclear physicist
Igor Kurchatov was carefully watching the Allied weapons development. It came as
no surprise to Stalin when Truman had informed him at the Potsdam conference
that he had a "powerful new weapon." Truman was shocked at Stalin's lack of
interest.
The Soviet spies in the U.S. project were all volunteers and none were Russians. One
of the most valuable, Klaus Fuchs, was a German émigré theoretical physicist who
had been a part in the early British nuclear efforts and had been part of the UK
mission to Los Alamos during the war. Fuchs had been intimately involved in the
development of the implosion weapon, and passed on detailed cross-sections of the
"Trinity" device to his Soviet contacts. Other Los Alamos spies—none of whom
knew each other—included Theodore Hall and David Greenglass. The information
was kept but not acted upon, as Russia was still too busy fighting the war in Europe
to devote resources to this new project.
In the years immediately after World War II, the issue of who should control atomic
weapons became a major international point of contention. Many of the Los Alamos
scientists who had built the bomb began to call for "international control of atomic
energy," often calling for either control by transnational organizations or the
purposeful distribution of weapons information to all superpowers, but due to a
deep distrust of the intentions of the Soviet Union, both in postwar Europe and in
general, the policy-makers of the United States worked to attempt to secure an
American nuclear monopoly. A half-hearted plan for international control was
proposed at the newly formed United Nations by Bernard Baruch ("The Baruch
Plan"), but it was clear both to American commentators—and to the Soviets—that
it was an attempt primarily to stymie Russian nuclear efforts. The Soviets vetoed the
plan, effectively ending any immediate postwar negotiations on atomic energy, and
made overtures towards banning the use of atomic weapons in general.
All the while, the Soviets had put their full industrial and manpower might into the
development of their own atomic weapons. The initial problem for the Soviets was
primarily one of resources—they had not scouted out uranium resources in the
Soviet Union and the U.S. had made deals to monopolise the largest known (and
high purity) reserves in the Belgian Congo. The USSR used penal labour to mine the
old deposits in Czechoslovakia—now an area under their control—and searched for
other domestic deposits (which were eventually found).
Two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, the U.S. government released an official
technical history of the Manhattan Project, authored by Princeton physicist Henry
DeWolf Smyth, known colloquially as the Smyth Report. The sanitized summary of
the wartime effort focused primarily on the production facilities and scale of
investment, written in part to justify the wartime expenditure to the American
public. The Soviet program, under the suspicious watch of former NKVD chief
Lavrenty Beria (a participant and victor in Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s),
would use the Report as a blueprint, seeking to duplicate as much as possible the
American effort. The "secret cities" used for the Soviet equivalents of Hanford and
Oak Ridge literally vanished from the maps for decades to come.
At the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos, Arzamas-16, physicist Yuli Khariton led the
scientific effort to develop the weapon. Beria distrusted his scientists, however, and
he distrusted the carefully collected espionage information. As such, Beria assigned
multiple teams of scientists to the same task without informing each team of the
other's existence. If they arrived at different conclusions, Beria would bring them
together for the first time and have them debate with their newfound counterparts.
Beria used the espionage information as a way to double-check the progress of his
scientists, and in his effort for duplication of the American project even rejected
more efficient bomb designs in favor of ones which more closely mimicked the tried-
and-true "Fat Man" bomb used by the U.S. against Nagasaki.
The first Soviet bomb, "Joe-1," was tested on August 29, 1949.
Working under a stubborn and scientifically ignorant administrator, the Soviet

scientists struggled on. On August 29, 1949, the effort brought its results, when the
USSR tested its first fission bomb, dubbed "Joe-1" in the U.S., years ahead of
American predictions. The news of the first Soviet bomb was announced to the
world first by the United States, which had detected the nuclear fallout it generated
from its test site in Kazakhstan.
The loss of the American monopoly on nuclear weapons marked the first tit-for-tat
of the nuclear arms race. The response in the U.S. was one of apprehension, fear,
and scapegoating, which would lead eventually into the Red-baiting tactics of
McCarthyism. Before this, though, President Truman would announce his decision
to begin a crash program to develop a far more powerful weapon than those which
were used against Japan: the hydrogen bomb.
[edit] The first thermonuclear weapons

Hungarian physicist Edward Teller toiled for years trying to discover a way to make
a fusion bomb.
Main article: History of the Teller-Ulam design
The notion of using a fission weapon to ignite a process of nuclear fusion can be
dated back to 1942 . At the first major theoretical conference on the development of
an atomic bomb hosted by J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California,
Berkeley, participant Edward Teller directed the majority of the discussion towards
Enrico Fermi's idea of a "Super" bomb which would utilize the same reactions
which powered the Sun itself. It was thought at the time that a fission weapon would
be quite simple to develop and that perhaps work on a hydrogen bomb 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." Only
Teller continued working on the project—against the will of project leaders
Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe.
After the atomic bombings of Japan, many scientists at Los Alamos rebelled against
the notion of creating a weapon thousands of times more powerful than the first
atomic bombs. For the scientists the question was in part technical—the weapon
design was still quite uncertain and unworkable—and in part moral: such a
weapon, they argued, could only be used against large civilian populations, and
could thus only be used as a weapon of genocide. Many scientists, such as Bethe,
urged that the United States should not develop such weapons and set an example
towards the Soviet Union. Promoters of the weapon, including Teller, Ernest
Lawrence, and Luis Alvarez, argued that such a development was inevitable, and to
deny such protection to the people of the United States—especially when the Soviet
Union was likely to create such a weapon themselves—was itself an immoral and
unwise act.
Oppenheimer, who was now head of the General Advisory Committee of the
successor to the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, presided over
a recommendation against the development of the weapon. The reasons were in part
because the success of the technology seemed limited at the time (and not worth the
investment of resources to confirm whether this was so), and because Oppenheimer
believed that the atomic forces of the United States would be more effective if they
consisted of many large fission weapons (of which multiple bombs could be dropped
on the same targets) rather than the large and unwieldy predictions of massive
super bombs, for which there were a relatively limited amounts of targets of the size
to warrant such a development. Furthermore, were such weapons developed by both
the U.S. and the USSR, they would be more effectively used against the U.S. than by
it, as the U.S. had far more regions of dense industrial and civilian activity which
would serve as ideal targets for the large weapons than the Soviet Union did.
The "Mike" shot in 1952 inaugurated the age of fusion weapons.
In the end, President Truman made the final decision, looking for a proper response
to the first Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949 . On January 31, 1950, Truman
announced a crash program to develop the hydrogen (fusion) bomb. At this point,
however, the exact mechanism was still not known: the "classical" hydrogen bomb,
whereby the heat of the fission bomb would be used to ignite the fusion material,
seemed highly unworkable. However, an insight by Los Alamos mathematician
Stanislaw Ulam showed that the fission bomb and the fusion fuel could be in
separate parts of the bomb, and that radiation of the fission bomb could first work
in a way to compress the fusion material before igniting it. Teller pushed the notion
further, and used the results of the boosted-fission "George" test (a boosted-fission
device using a small amount of fusion fuel to boost the yield of a fission bomb) to
confirm the fusion of heavy hydrogen elements before preparing for their first true
multi-stage, Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb test. Many scientists initially against the
weapon, such as Oppenheimer and Bethe, changed their previous opinions, seeing
the development as being unstoppable.
The first fusion bomb was tested by the United States in Operation Ivy on November
1, 1952, on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak (or Eniwetok) Atoll of the Marshall
Islands, code-named "Mike". "Mike" used liquid deuterium as its fusion fuel and a
large fission weapon as its trigger. The device was a prototype design and not a
deliverable weapon: standing over 20 ft (6 m) high and weighing at least 140,000 lb
(64 t) (its refrigeration equipment added an additional 24,000 lb as well), it could not
have been dropped from even the largest planes. Its explosion yielded 10.4 megatons
of energy—over 450 times the power of the bomb dropped onto Nagasaki— and
obliterated Elugelab, leaving an underwater crater 6240 ft (1.9 km) wide and 164 ft
(50 m) deep where the island had once been. Truman had initially tried to create a
media blackout about the test—hoping it would not become an issue in the
upcoming presidential election—but on January 7, 1953, Truman announced the
development of the hydrogen bomb to the world as hints and speculations of it were
already beginning to emerge in the press.
The basics of the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb: a fission bomb uses
radiation to compress and heat a separate section of fusion fuel.
Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union exploded its first thermonuclear device,
designed by the physicist Andrei Sakharov, on August 12, 1953, labeled "Joe-4" by
the West. This created concern within the U.S. government and military, because,
unlike "Mike," the Soviet device was a deliverable weapon, which the U.S. did not
yet have. This first device though was arguably not a "true" hydrogen bomb, and
could only reach explosive yields in the hundreds of kilotons (never reaching the
megaton range of a "staged" weapon). Still, it was a powerful propaganda tool for
the Soviet Union, and the technical differences were fairly oblique to the American
public and politicians. 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 most pronounced by the security hearings in early
1954 which revoked former Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer of his
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, a role which resulted in his virtual expulsion from the
physics community.
On February 28, 1954, the U.S. detonated its first deliverable 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. The device
yielded 15 megatons of energy, over twice its expected yield, and became the worst
radiological disaster in U.S. history. The combination of the unexpectedly large blast
and poor weather conditions caused a cloud of radioactive nuclear fallout to
contaminate over 7,000 square miles, including Marshall Island natives and the
crew of a Japanese fishing boat, as a snow-like mist. The contaminated islands were
evacuated (and are still uninhabitable), but the natives received enough of a
radioactive dose that they suffered far elevated levels of cancer and birth defects in
the years to come.[citation needed] The crew of the Japanese fishing boat, Fifth Lucky
Dragon, returned to port suffering from radiation sickness and skin burns. Their
cargo, many tons of contaminated fish, managed to enter into the market before the
cause of their illness was determined. When a crew member died from the sickness
and the full results of the contamination were made public by the U.S., Japanese
concerns were reignited about the hazards of radiation and resulted in a boycott on
eating fish (a main staple of the island country) for some weeks.[citation needed]
Fallout from a large nuclear exchange would potentially blanket a country—

perhaps even the whole world—with radioactive fission products.
The hydrogen bomb age had a profound effect on the thoughts of nuclear war in the
popular and military mind. With only fission bombs, nuclear war could be
considered something which could easily be "limited." Dropped by planes and only
able to destroy the most built up areas of major cities, it was possible to consider
fission bombs simply a technological extension of previous wartime bombing (such
as the extensive firebombing which took place against Japan and Germany during
World War II), and claims that such weapons could lead to worldwide death or
harm were easily brushed aside as grave exaggeration. Even the decades before the
development of fission weapons there had been speculation about the possibility for
human beings to end all life on the planet by either accident or purposeful
maliciousness, but technology had never allowed for such a capacity. The far greater
power of hydrogen bombs made this seem ever closer.
The "Castle Bravo" incident itself raised a number of questions about the
survivability of a nuclear war. Government scientists in both the U.S. and the USSR
had insisted that fusion weapons, unlike fission weapons, were "cleaner" as fusion
reactions did not result in the dangerously radioactive by-products as did fission
reactions. While technically true, this hid a more gruesome point: the last stage of a
multi-staged hydrogen bomb often used the neutrons produced by the fusion
reactions to induce fissioning in a jacket of natural uranium, and provided around
half of the yield of the device itself. This fission stage made fusion weapons
considerably more "dirty" than they were made out to be, a fact made evident by
the towering cloud of deadly fallout which followed the "Bravo" test. When the
Soviet Union tested its first megaton device in 1955 , the possibility of a limited
nuclear war seemed even more remote in the public and political mind: even if a city
or country was not the direct target of a nuclear attack, the clouds of fallout and
harmful fission products would disperse along with normal weather patterns and
embed themselves in the soil and water of non-targeted areas of the planet as well.
Speculation began to look towards what would happen as the fallout and dust
created by a full-scale nuclear exchange would affect the world as a whole, rather
than just the cities and countries which had been directly involved. In this way, the
fate of the world was now tied to the fate of the bomb-wielding superpowers.
[edit] Deterrence and brinkmanship

See the main articles at Nuclear testing, Nuclear strategy, and Nuclear warfare.
The emergence of nuclear-tipped rockets reflected a change in both nuclear
technology and strategy.
Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s a number of trends were enacted between
the U.S. and the USSR as they both endeavored in a tit-for-tat approach to disallow
the other power from acquiring nuclear supremacy. This took form in a number of
ways, both technologically and politically, and had massive political and cultural
effects during the Cold War.
The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were large, custom-
made devices, requiring highly trained personnel for their arming and deployment.
They could be dropped only from the largest bomber planes—at the time the B-29
Superfortress—and each plane could only hold a single bomb in its hold. The first
hydrogen bombs were similarly massive and complicated. This ratio of one plane to
one bomb was still fairly impressive in comparison with conventional, non-nuclear
weapons, but against other nuclear-armed countries it was considered to be a grave
danger. In the immediate postwar years, the U.S. expended much effort on making
the bombs "G.I.-proof"—capable of being used and deployed by members of the
U.S. Army, rather than Nobel Prize–winning scientists, and in the 1950s a program
of nuclear testing was undertaken in order to improve the nuclear arsenal.
Starting in 1951 , the Nevada Test Site (in the Nevada desert) became the primary
location for all U.S. nuclear testing (in the USSR, Semipalatinsk Test Site in
Kazakhstan served a similar role). Tests were divided into two primary categories:
"weapons related" (verifying that a new weapon worked or looking at exactly how it
worked) and "weapons effects" (looking at how weapons behaved under various
conditions or how structures behaved when subjected to weapons). In the beginning,
almost all nuclear tests were either "atmospheric" (conducted above ground, in the
atmosphere) or "underwater" (such as some of the tests done in the Marshall
Islands). Testing was used as a sign of both national and technological strength, but
also raised questions about the safety of the tests, which released nuclear fallout into
the atmosphere (most dramatically with the Castle Bravo test in 1954, but in more
limited amounts with almost all atmospheric nuclear testing).
Hundreds of nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site in the USA.
Because testing was seen as a sign of technological development (the ability to design
usable weapons without some form of testing was considered dubious), halts on
testing were often called for as stand-ins for halts in the nuclear arms race itself, and
many prominent scientists and statesmen lobbied for a ban on nuclear testing. In
1958 , the U.S., USSR, and the United Kingdom (a new nuclear power) declared a
temporary testing moratorium for both political and health reasons, but by 1961 the
Soviet Union had broken the moratorium and both the USSR and the U.S. began
testing with great frequency. As a show of political strength, the Soviet Union tested
the largest-ever nuclear weapon in October 1961, the massive Tsar Bomba, which
was tested in a reduced state with a yield of around 50 megatons—in its full state it
was estimated to have been around 100 Mt. The weapon was largely impractical for
actual military use, but was hot enough to induce third-degree burns at a distance of
62 mi (100 km) away. In its full, "dirty" design, it would have increased the amount
of worldwide fallout since 1945 by 25%.
In 1963, all nuclear and many non-nuclear states signed the Limited Test Ban
Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere,
underwater, or in outer space. The treaty permitted underground tests.
Most tests were considerably more modest, and worked for direct technical
purposes as well as their potential political overtones. Weapons improvements took
on two primary forms. One was an increase in efficiency and power, and within only
a few years fission bombs were being developed which were many times more
powerful than the ones created during World War II. The other was a program of
miniaturization, reducing the size of the nuclear weapons themselves. Smaller
bombs meant that bombers could carry more of them, and thus become even more
of a threat against even the most rigorous air defenses, and they could also be used
in conjunction with the development in rocketry during the 1950s and 1960s. U.S.
rocket efforts had received a large boost in the postwar years, largely from the
acquiring of engineers who had worked on the Nazi rocketry program during the
war, such as Wernher von Braun, who had been involved in the design and
manufacture of the V-2 rockets which were launched across the English Channel. An
American program, Project Paperclip, had endeavored to move scientists of this sort
into American hands (and kept out of Soviet hands) and put them to work on
projects for the U.S.
[edit] Weapons improvement

The first nuclear-tipped rockets, such as the MGR-1 Honest John, first deployed by
the U.S. in 1953 , were surface-to-surface missiles with relatively short ranges
(around 15 mi/25 km maximum) with yields around twice the size of the first fission
weapons. The limited range of these weapons meant that they could only be used in
certain types of potential military situations—the U.S. rocket weapons could not, for
example, threaten the city of Moscow with the threat of an immediate strike, and
could only be used as "tactical" weapons (that is, for small-scale military situations).
Long-range bomber aircraft, such as the B-52 Stratofortress, allowed for a wide
range of "strategic" nuclear forces to be deployed.
For "strategic" weapons—weapons which would serve to threaten an entire country

—for the time being, only long-range bombers capable of penetrating deep into
enemy territory would work. In the U.S. this resulted in the creation of the Strategic
Air Command in 1946 , a system of bombers headed by General Curtis LeMay (who
had previously presided over the firebombing of Japan during WWII), which kept a
number of nuclear-armed planes in the sky at all times, ready to receive orders to
attack Moscow whenever commanded.
These technological possibilities enabled nuclear strategy to develop a logic

considerably different than previous military thinking had allowed. Because the
threat of nuclear warfare was so awful, it was first thought that it might make any
war of the future impossible. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's doctrine of
"massive retaliation" in the early years of the Cold War was a message to the USSR,
saying that if the Red Army attempted to invade the parts of Europe not given to the
Eastern bloc during the Potsdam Conference (such as West Germany), nuclear
weapons would be used against the Soviet troops and potentially the Soviet leaders.
With the development of more rapid-response technologies (such as rockets and
long-range bombers), this policy began to shift. If the Soviet Union also had nuclear
weapons and a policy of "massive retaliation" was carried out, it was reasoned, then
any Soviet forces not killed in the initial attack, or launched while the attack was
ongoing, would be able to serve their own form of nuclear "retaliation" against the
U.S. Recognizing this to be an undesirable outcome, military officers and game
theorists at the RAND think tank developed a nuclear warfare strategy that would
eventually become known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
Submarine launched ballistic missiles made defending against nuclear war an

impossibility.
MAD divided potential nuclear war into two stages: first strike and second strike. A
first strike would be the first use of nuclear weapons by one nuclear-equipped
nation against another nuclear-equipped nation. If the attacking nation did not
prevent the attacked nation from a nuclear response, then a second strike could be
deployed against the attacking nation. In this situation, whether the U.S. first
attacked the USSR or the USSR first attacked the U.S., the end result would be that
both nations would be damaged perhaps to the point of utter social collapse.
According to game theory, because starting a nuclear war would be suicidal, no
logical country would willfully enter into a nuclear war. However, if a country were
capable of launching a first strike which would utterly destroy the ability of the
attacked country to respond in kind, then the balance of power would be disturbed
and nuclear war could then be safely undertaken.
MAD played on two seemingly opposed modes of thought: cold logic and emotional
fear. The phrase by which MAD was often known, "nuclear deterrence", was
translated as "dissuasion" by the French and "terrorization" by the Russians. This
apparent paradox of nuclear war was summed up by British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill as "the worse things get, the better they are"—the greater the
threat of mutual destruction, the safer the world would be.
This philosophy made a number of technological and political demands on
participating nations. For one thing, it said that it should always be assumed that an
enemy nation may be trying to acquire "first strike capability," something which
must always be avoided. In American politics this translated into demands to avoid
"missile gaps" and "bomber gaps" where the Soviet Union could potentially "out
shoot" American efforts (most of these supposed "gaps" proved to be political
figments, but this hardly mattered at the time). It also encouraged the production of
thousands of nuclear weapons by both the U.S. and the USSR, far more than would
be needed to simply destroy the major civilian and military infrastructures of the
opposing country.
With early warning systems, it was thought that the strikes of nuclear war would
come from dark rooms filled with computers, not the battlefield of the wars of old.
The policy also encouraged the development of the first early warning systems.
Conventional war, even at its fastest, was fought over time scales of days and weeks.
With long-range bombers, the time from the start of an attack to its conclusion was
reduced to mere hours. With rockets, it could be reduced to minutes. It was
reasoned that conventional command and control systems could not be expected to
adequately respond to a nuclear attack, and so great lengths were taken to develop
the first computers which could look for enemy attacks and direct rapid responses.
In the U.S., massive funding was poured into the development of SAGE, a system
which would track and intercept enemy bomber aircraft using information from
remote radar stations, and was the first computer system to feature real-time
processing, multiplexing, and display devices—the first "general" computing
machine, and a direct predecessor of modern computers.
[edit] Anti-nuclear
Bombers and short-range rockets were not reliable: planes could be shot down, and
earlier nuclear missiles could cover only a limited range— for example, the first
Soviet rockets' range limited them to targets in Europe. However, by the 1960s, both
the United States and the Soviet Union had developed intercontinental ballistic
missiles, which could be launched from extremely remote areas far away from their
target; and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which had less range but could be
launched from submarines very close to the target without any radar warning. This
made any national protection from nuclear missiles increasingly impractical.
The military realities made for a precarious diplomatic situation. The international
politics of brinkmanship led leaders to exclaim their willingness to participate in a
nuclear war rather than concede any advantage to their opponents, feeding public
fears that their generation may be the last. Civil defense programs undertaken by
both superpowers, exemplified by the construction of fallout shelters and urging
civilians about the "survivability" of nuclear war, did little to ease public concerns.
A joke known by most Russians during the Cold War said that when one heard the
air raid sirens, one should pick up a shovel and quietly proceed to the nearest
cemetery, to dig your own grave. A similar joke in the U.S. recommended that one
stay calm, put one's head between one's legs, and kiss your ass goodbye, a parody of
the "duck and cover" routines practiced by schoolchildren across the country.
U-2 photographs revealed that the Soviet Union was stationing nuclear missiles on
the island of Cuba in 1962 , beginning the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The climax of brinksmanship came in early 1962 , when an American U-2 spy plane
photographed a series of launch sites for medium-range ballistic missiles being
constructed on the island of Cuba, just off the coast of the southern United States,
beginning what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. administration
of John F. Kennedy concluded that the Soviet Union, then led by Nikita
Khrushchev, was planning to station Russian nuclear missiles on the island, which
was under the control of Communist Fidel Castro. On October 22, Kennedy
announced the discoveries in a televised address, and declared that a naval
quarantine would be put around Cuba to turn back any Soviet nuclear shipments,
and warned that the military was prepared "for any eventualities." The missiles
would have a range of 2,400 miles (4,000 km), and allow the Soviet Union to easily
destroy many major American cities on the Eastern Seaboard if a nuclear war were
started.
The leaders of the two superpowers stood nose to nose, seemingly poised over the
beginnings of a third world war. Khrushchev's ambitions for putting the weapons
on the island were motivated in part by the fact that the U.S. had stationed similar
weapons in Britain, Italy, and nearby Turkey, and had previously attempted to
sponsor an invasion of Cuba the year before in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. On
October 26, an offer was sent from Khrushchev to Kennedy offering to withdraw all
missiles if Kennedy would commit to a policy of no future invasions of Cuba.
Khrushchev worded the threat of assured destruction eloquently:
"You and I should not now pull on the ends of the rope in which you have
tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter the knot will
become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person
who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to
be cut. What that would mean I need not explain to you, because you yourself
understand perfectly what dreaded forces our two countries possess."
Nikita Khrushchev urged Kennedy not to cut the "knot of war" created by nuclear
deterrence.
A day later, however, the Russians put forward another offer, this time demanding
that the U.S. remove its missiles from Turkey before any missiles would be
withdrawn from Cuba. On the same day, a U-2 plane was shot down over Cuba and
another was almost intercepted over Russia, and Soviet merchant ships were
nearing the quarantine zone. Kennedy responded by accepting the first deal
publicly, and sending his brother Robert to the Soviet embassy to accept the second
deal in private. On October 28, the Soviet ships stopped at the quarantine line and,
after some hesitation, turned back towards the Soviet Union. Khrushchev
announced that he had ordered the removal of all missiles in Cuba, and U.S.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk was moved to comment, "We went eyeball to eyeball,
and the other fellow just blinked."
The Crisis was later seen as the closest the U.S. and the USSR ever came to nuclear
war and had been narrowly averted by last-minute compromise by both
superpowers. Fears of communication difficulties led to the installment of the first
hotline, a direct link between the superpowers which would allow them to more
easily discuss future military activities and political maneuverings. It had been made
clear that with their missiles, bombers, submarines, and computerized firing
systems, the escalation of any situation to Armageddon could be done far more
easily than anybody desired.
After stepping so close to the brink, both the U.S. and the USSR worked to reduce
their nuclear tensions in the years immediately following. The most immediate
culmination of this work was the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 , in
which the U.S. and USSR agreed to no longer test nuclear weapons in the
atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space. Testing underground continued,
allowing for further weapons development, but the worldwide fallout risks were
purposefully reduced, and the era of using massive nuclear tests as a form of saber-
rattling had primarily ended.
In 1981, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan's administration pushed the arms race to
new levels of higher tension with the USSR, one million people marched for nuclear
disarmament and abolition in New York City. As the nuclear abolitionist movement
grew, over 2,000 people were arrested in a two-day period in 1988 at the gate of the
Nevada Test Site. Four of the significant groups organizing this renewal of anti-
nuclear activism were Greenpeace, The American Peace Test, The Western
Shoshone, and Nevada Desert Experience.
[edit] Initial proliferation

In the fifties and sixties, three more countries joined the "nuclear club."
Main article: Nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom had been an integral part of the Manhattan Project following
the Quebec Agreement in 1943 . The passing of the McMahon Act by the United
States in 1946 unilaterally broke this partnership and prevented the passage of any
further information to the United Kingdom. The British Government under
Clement Attlee determined that it would be essential for there to be a British Bomb.
Because of the involvement in the Manhattan Project Britain had extensive
knowledge in some areas, but not in others. An improved version of 'Fat Man' was
developed, and on 26th February 1952, Prime Minister Winston Churchill
announced that the United Kingdom also had an atomic bomb and a successful test
took place on the 3rd October 1952. At first these were free-fall bombs and then
there was a missile, Blue Steel, and a later-canceled MRBM, Blue Streak. Anglo-
American cooperation on Nuclear weapons was restored by the 1958 US-UK Mutual
Defence Agreement. As a result of this and the Polaris Sales Agreement, the United
Kingdom has bought United States designs for submarine missiles and fitted its own
warheads. It retains full independent control over the use of the missiles. It no
longer possesses any free-fall bombs.
France had been heavily involved in nuclear research before World War II through
the work of the Joliot-Curies. This was discontinued after the war because of the
instability of the Fourth Republic and the lack of finance available[1]. However, in
the 1950's a civil nuclear research program was started, a byproduct of which would
be plutonium. In 1956 a secret Committee for the Military Applications of Atomic
Energy was formed and a development program for delivery vehicles started. With
the return of Charles de Gaulle to the presidency of France in 1958 the final
decisions to build a bomb were taken, and a successful test took place in 1960 . Since
then France has developed and maintained its own nuclear deterrent.
In 1951 China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement whereby China would
supply uranium ore in exchange for technical assistance in producing nuclear
weapons. In 1953 China had established a research program under the guise of
civilian nuclear energy. Throughout the 1950's the Soviet Union provided large
amounts of equipment, but as the relations between the two countries worsened, the
amount of assistance was reduced, and in 1959 the donation of a bomb for copying
purposes was refused. Despite this, rapid progress was made with the test of an
atomic bomb on the 16th October 1964 at Lop Nur, a nuclear missile on 25th
October 1966, and of a hydrogen bomb on the 14th June 1967. Nuclear warheads
were produced from 1968 and thermonuclear warheads from 1974 . The Cultural
Revolution slowed the pace of progress, but it is thought that tactical nuclear
weapons have been developed. It is also thought that Chinese warheads have been
successfully miniaturised from 2200kg to 700kg through the use of designs obtained
by espionage from the United States. The current number of weapons is unknown
owing to strict secrecy, but it is thought that up to 2000 warheads may have been
produced, though far fewer may be available for use. China is the only one of the
nuclear weapons states to have guaranteed the non-first use of nuclear weapons.
[edit] Cold War

ICBMs, like the American Minuteman missile, allowed nations to deliver nuclear
weapons thousands of miles away with relative ease.
After World War II, the balance of power between the Eastern and Western blocs,
resulting in the fear of global destruction, prevented the further military use of
atomic bombs. This fear was even a central part of Cold War strategy, referred to as
the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction ("MAD" for short). So important was
this balance to international political stability that a treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty (or ABM treaty), was signed by the U.S. and the USSR in 1972 to curtail the
development of defenses against nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles which
carry them. This doctrine resulted in a large increase in the number of nuclear
weapons, as each side sought to ensure it possessed the firepower to destroy the
opposition in all possible scenarios and against all perceived threats.
Early delivery systems for nuclear devices were primarily bombers like the United
States B-29 Superfortress and Convair B-36, and later the B-52 Stratofortress.
Ballistic missile systems, based on Wernher von Braun's World War II designs
(specifically the V2 rocket), were developed by both United States and Soviet Union
teams (in the case of the U.S., effort was directed by the German scientists and
engineers). These systems, after testing, were used to launch satellites, such as
Sputnik, and to propel the Space Race, but they were primarily developed to create
the capability of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with which nuclear
powers could deliver that destructive force anywhere on the globe. These systems
continued to be developed throughout the Cold War, although plans and treaties,
beginning with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), restricted
deployment of these systems until, after the fall of the Soviet Union, system
development essentially halted, and many weapons were disabled and destroyed (see
nuclear disarmament).
There have been a number of potential nuclear disasters. Following air accidents
U.S. nuclear weapons have been lost near Atlantic City, New Jersey (1957);
Savannah, Georgia (1958) (see Tybee Bomb); Goldsboro, North Carolina (1961); off
the coast of Okinawa (1965); in the sea near Palomares, Spain (1966) (see Palomares
hydrogen bombs incident); and near Thule, Greenland (1968). Most of the lost
weapons were recovered, the Spanish device after three months' effort by the DSV
Alvin and DSV Aluminaut. The Soviet Union was less forthcoming about such
incidents, but the environmental group Greenpeace believes that there are around
forty non-U.S. nuclear devices that have been lost and not recovered, compared to
eleven lost by America, mostly in submarine disasters. The U.S. has tried to recover
Soviet devices, notably in the 1974 Operation Jennifer using the specialist salvage
vessel Hughes Glomar Explorer.
On January 27, 1967, more than 60 nations signed the Outer Space Treaty, banning
nuclear weapons in space.
The end of the Cold War failed to end the threat of nuclear weapon use, although
global fears of nuclear war reduced substantially.
In a major move of de-escalation, Boris Yeltsin, on January 26, 1992, announced

that Russia planned to stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons.
[edit] Second nuclear age

Although it has started before the end of the Cold War, the second nuclear age -
proliferation of nuclear weapons among lesser powers and for reasons other than
the American-Soviet rivalry - really began with the end of the Cold War.[10]
India's first atomic-test explosion was in 1974 with Smiling Buddha, which it
described as a "peaceful nuclear explosion". India tested fission and perhaps fusion
devices in 1998 , and Pakistan successfully tested fission devices that same year,
raising concerns that they would use nuclear weapons on each other. All of the
former Soviet bloc countries with nuclear weapons (Belarus, Ukraine, and
Kazakhstan) returned their warheads to Russia by 1996 , though recent data has
suggested that a clerical error may have left some warheads in Ukraine[citation needed].
In January 2004, Pakistani metallurgist and weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan
confessed to having been a part of an international proliferation network of
materials, knowledge, and machines from Pakistan to Libya, Iran, and North
Korea.
South Africa also had an active program to develop uranium-based nuclear

weapons, but dismantled its nuclear weapon program in the 1990s. It is not believed
that it actually tested such a weapon though it later claimed to have constructed
several crude devices which it eventually dismantled. In the late 1970s American spy
satellites detected a "brief, intense, double flash of light near the southern tip of
Africa." [2] Known as the Vela Incident, it was speculated to have been a South
African or possibly Israeli nuclear weapons test, though a later scientific review of
the data indicated that it may have been caused by natural events.
Israel is widely believed to possess an arsenal of potentially up to several hundred
nuclear warheads, but this has never been officially confirmed or denied (though the
existence of their Dimona nuclear facility was more or less confirmed by the leaks of
the dissident Mordechai Vanunu in 1986).
North Korea announced in 2003 that it also had several nuclear explosives though it
has not been confirmed and the validity of this has been a subject of scrutiny
amongst weapons experts. The first detonation of a nuclear weapon by the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea was the 2006 North Korean nuclear test,
conducted on October 9, 2006.
In Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production,

stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons on August 9, 2005. The full text of the fatwa
was released in an official statement at the meeting of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. [3] Despite this, however, there is mounting
concern in many nations about Iran's refusal to halt its nuclear power program,
which many fear is a cover for weapons development.

Nuclear Weapon

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Nuclear Weapon

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Nuclear weapon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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History of nuclear weapons

Main article: History of nuclear weapons

The aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima

U.S. and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945-2005

Types of nuclear weapons

Main article: Nuclear weapon design

In fission weapons, a mass of fissile material (enriched uranium or plutonium) is

A major challenge in all nuclear weapon designs is to ensure that a significant

Thermonuclear bombs work by using the energy of a fission bomb in order to

Main article: Nuclear warfare

Main article: Nuclear weapons delivery

Nuclear weapons delivery—the technology and systems used to bring a nuclear

Additional treaties have governed nuclear weapons stockpiles between individual

Nuclear weapon design

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• Fusion-boosted fission weapons improve on the implosion design. The high

History of nuclear weapons

[edit] Nuclear reactions

Holding an exploding bomb together is the greatest challenge of fission weapon

[edit] Tritium production

A nuclear reactor is necessary to provide the neutrons. The industrial-scale

[edit] Pure fission weapons

[edit] Gun-type assembly weapon

Diagram of a gun-type fission weapon

[edit] Implosion type weapon

[edit] Plutonium pit

[edit] Levitated-pit implosion

[edit] Two-point linear implosion

[edit] Two-point hollow-pit implosion

[edit] Fusion-boosted fission weapons

Main article: Boosted fission weapon

Another benefit of boosting, in addition to making weapons smaller, lighter, and

[edit] Two-stage thermonuclear weapons

Main article: Teller-Ulam design

Pure fission or fusion-boosted fission weapons can be made to yield hundreds of

A spherical secondary can achieve higher implosion densities than a cylindrical

• The best way to store deuterium in a reasonably dense state is to chemically

The W87 warhead for the Minuteman III missile.

• For the secondary to be imploded by the hot, radiation-induced plasma

In a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, three types of energy emerge from the

[edit] Specific designs

[edit] Hydrogen bombs

However, in the public perception, hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs, are multi-

In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer was labeled a hydrogen bomb opponent. The

[edit] Alarm Clock/Sloika

[edit] Clean bombs

[edit] Cobalt bombs

Main article: Cobalt bomb

[edit] Fission-fusion-fission bombs

In 1954, to explain the surprising amount of fission-product fallout produced by

[edit] Neutron bombs

Main article: Neutron bomb

ERWs were two-stage thermonuclears with all non-essential uranium removed to

So although most neutrons are absorbed by the casing in a 1-megaton bomb, in a 1-

[edit] Oralloy thermonuclear warheads

[edit] Reliable replacement warhead

Main article: Reliable Replacement Warhead

[edit] The Weapon Design Laboratories

Main article: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory