Hydrogen bombs cause a bigger explosion, which means the shock waves, blast, heat and radiation all have larger reach than an atomic bomb, according to Edward Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at University of California, Berkeley.
Although no other country has used such a weapon of mass destruction since World War II, experts say it would be even more catastrophic if a hydrogen bomb were to be dropped instead of an atomic one. Simply speaking, experts say a hydrogen bomb is the more advanced version of an atomic bomb. An atomic bomb uses either uranium or plutonium and relies on fission, a nuclear reaction in which a nucleus or an atom breaks apart into two pieces.
To make a hydrogen bomb, one would still need uranium or plutonium as well as two other isotopes of hydrogen, called deuterium and tritium. The hydrogen bomb relies on fusion, the process of taking two separate atoms and putting them together to form a third atom.
In both cases, a significant amount of energy is released, which drives the explosion, experts say. However, more energy is released during the fusion process, which causes a bigger blast. Key Points A thermonuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon design that uses the heat generated by a fission bomb to compress a nuclear fusion stage. The nuclear fusion in an H-bomb releases neutrons much faster than a fission reaction, and these neutrons then bombard the remaining fissile fuel, causing it to undergo fission much more rapidly.
Show Sources Boundless vets and curates high-quality, openly licensed content from around the Internet. Licenses and Attributions.
CC licensed content, Shared previously. North Korean state media published photos Sunday of President Kim Jong Un inspecting a peanut-shaped device in front of a diagram, which led analysts to suspect it could be fitted into the nose cone of an intercontinental ballistic missile ICBM.
In a statement Sunday, the North Korean agency responsible for developing nuclear weapons described the manufacturing of an "H-bomb to be placed at the payload of the ICBM.
It is still unclear whether the weapon tested by North Korea was a hydrogen bomb but experts have begun analysis, using sniffer stations around the world that can detect radioactive pollution released by nuclear explosions. In particular, monitors will be looking for isotopes of a gas called xenon, which is typically present in H-bomb reactions. Analysis from Norsar, a Norweigan geoscience research foundation, suggests that the explosion created by Sunday's test is far greater than that seen in North Korea's last alleged H-Bomb test, which took place in September It estimates the explosive yield of the recently tested bomb to be at kilotrons TNT.
This compares to about 20 kilotrons TNT this time last year. Analysts suggest, however, that the tests could be an attempt by the North Korean President to uphold his regime and prevent interference by external leaders, rather than spark a mass conflict.
However, we still think that the North will not intentionally start a war," Anwita Basu, North Korea analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a press note Monday.
Energy is released when those neutrons split off from the nucleus, and the newly released neutrons strike other uranium or plutonium nuclei, splitting them in the same way, releasing more energy and more neutrons. This chain reaction spreads almost instantaneously.
The material used was uranium It is believed that the fission of slightly less than one kilogram of uranium released energy equivalent to approximately 15, tons of TNT. Compared to the one used on Hiroshima, the Nagasaki bomb was rounder and fatter. The material used was plutonium The fission of slightly more than one kilogram of plutonium is thought to have released destructive energy equivalent to about 21, tons of TNT.
Nuclear fusion is a reaction that releases atomic energy by the union of light nuclei at high temperatures to form heavier atoms.
0コメント