Edward Teller: The Fusion Bomb

Process of nuclear fusion release enormous about of energy It is a nuclear reaction where two atoms collide at a very high speed and join two crate a new type of atom .It needs two atomic nuclei to make a large nucleus it needs energy to make this happen though. Things that use this reaction are the sun and the stars to release energy.

“A nuclear bomb is defined as ‘an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter.’ “

On September 14, 1982 President Reagan and Dr. Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb) held a meeting to discuss how to develop the most effective method of defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Teller wrote Reagan a two-page letter in which he called his research “the most important one in strategic military affairs since

Joseph Rotblat was a polish physicist that helped create the first atomic bomb in the 1940s. The first test explosion of a hydrogen bomb was done by the USA in 1952, the year that Britain exploded its first test atomic bomb. The Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1953. In the 1950s by the end of world war Ⅱ the united states decided to launch the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Joseph Rotblat then devoted his life on the banning the usage of nuclear weapons and testing. Rotblat does this by joining groups like the pugwash conference on science and world affairs and also having a part in the Russell-einstein manifesto. Rotblat did this because he did not want his own work to cause mass destruction but to help create peace.

Edward Teller is the prolific scientist who helped create the most powerful weapon the world has ever seen, the hydrogen bomb. I will touch on his major discovery, a brief look into the 1940’s so we can understand him better for what he did in the 1950’s, and what his discovery led to in the world we live in today. Edward Teller affected not only the entire planet both negatively and positively in 1950’s, but also continues to affect and advance our scientific discoveries.

At the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II scientist started to develop new ways to to react to wars.Scientist like Julius Robert Oppenheimer with the help of Albert Einstein created the first atomic bomb called the “Little Boy” and the “FatMan”. Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He was incharge of gather the best minds to develop weapons of mass destruction. Oppenheimer along with 200 other physics developed weapons that would change the world forever.

Lecture 2 talks about nuclear energy and weapons and their impact on society. Overconfidence and too much optimism inhibit clear thinking and allow an avoidance in realizing the negative consequences and unpleasant ideas in the world. Also vital to understand is the concept that science and reality are not identical. Science describes reality, whereas our ideas reality are biased albeit unique. The fusion bomb, first created in 1952, is equal to 10 to 50 megatons of dynamite. It is 500 to 2500 times more powerful than the earlier created fission bomb. The fission bomb, as well as nuclear power plants, split large atoms into smaller atoms in order to create energy. The fusion bomb creates its larger energy by doing the reverse process. The

As time went on and other countries developed nuclear weapons, Russia created the hydrogen Bomb. The RDS-220 hydrogen bomb, also known as the Tsar Bomb, is the biggest and the most powerful thermonuclear bomb ever made. It was exploded by the Soviet Union on 30 October 1961 over Novaya Zemlya

Hogan's notes it is stated clearly that we can control fission bombs which is where you have an element and brealit apart, but fusion bombs where we have a small element and we make it bigger we cannot control. This shows that scientists are messing with things that are uncontrollable which can lead to dangerous outcomes and mankind is unaware of the jurassic damages we can do to our world. According to the website How Stuff Works it states that “Fusion bombs are also dangerous because they are 700 times more powerful than little boy bomb which is a fission bomb.” This is another reason the H bomb should be banned since government officials have these weapons and the use of them it is highly dangerous. This amount of power should not be able to be used by anyone since its ending outcome, but not intended outcome is slow extinction of mankind. Because the Hydrogen bomb is so deadly it should be banned. If we continue to use the Hydrogen bomb we will continue to be at risk of nuclear fallout and human extinction as well as nuclear

The hydrogen bomb has a blast radius of about 1.8 miles. Anything in that radius will be destroyed and the people will die immediately or later from radiation poison. There are two different types of nuclear bombs: fission and fusion. Fission means to break something apart and fusion means to merge. The fission bomb works on the principle that it takes energy to put together a nucleus with a lot of protons and neutrons. The fusion bomb’s initial energy is created by heating the hydrogen up to a tremendous temperature with a fission bomb as the first stage.

In 1945 two atomic bombs were dropped causing the nuclear arms race to begin between the two superpowers; United States and Soviet Union. Following the Korean War both United states and Soviet nuclear “buildup” was exponentially growing. The Manhattan Project in the United States, there were four main sites but the Los Alamos site built the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Edward Teller working at the site Los Alamos and wanted to keep and maintain the laboratory's work in theoretical development in the hydrogen bomb and refinement of atomic explosions. This would lead the United States in October 1952 to successfully test a thermonuclear device called Castle Bravo( hydrogen bomb) which was more powerful than the atomic bombs

Atomic bombs are made up of uranium, that has an isotope that creates a nuclear chain reaction. The immediate energy release per atom is about 180 million electron volts. It is caused by a sudden release of energy produced by splitting the nuclei of the fissile elements making up the bombs' core.

A thermonuclear weapon is a weapon intended to discharge energy in an unstable way as a consequence of atomic splitting, atomic combination, or a mix of the two procedures. Fusion weapons are regularly alluded to as nuclear bombs. Fission weapons are additionally alluded to as atomic bombs or, all the more ordinarily, hydrogen bombs; they are normally characterized as atomic weapons in which no less than a segment of the energyis discharged by atomic combination.

     To understand fusion, it is a good idea to know about fission. This is the splitting of the nuclei of atoms into two or more smaller nuclei by bombarding them with neutrons of low energy. It was discovered in the 1930's in an attempt to make transuranium elements (elements with atomic numbers greater than Uranium that do not exist in nature). They

The country that first invented the hydrogen bomb was the United States. The Americans were trying to be the first people to create a hydrogen bomb, and their competitors were the Soviet Union. Once the United States had blown up the first hydrogen bomb, they had a short advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. The hydrogen bomb is also called the Thermonuclear bomb but it is most commonly known as the hydrogen bomb. The hydrogen bomb is approximately one-thousand times more powerful than traditional nuclear devices. Eventually other nations had constructed hydrogen bombs, and by the 1970’s seven nations had constructed the hydrogen bomb (United States).