!historychads pic related was taken 15 minutes after the nuke detonated.
It was dropped by the B-29 Bockscar, commanded by USAAF captain Frederick C. Bock
Here's a pic of Fat Man, it was an implosion type weapon and carried plutonium was fissile material.
The chonker responsible for anime
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Fun fact: fill a fission bomb with a lil bit of tritium and you can double the explosive power of the fissile material, aka boosted fission, aka fission-fusion-fission
!ifrickinglovescience !physics !burgers
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The Tsar Bomba worked that way didn't it?
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Sort of.
For more clarity for our viewers, here is how a Fission bomb works, and the how a Fission bomb acts as the ignition source for a Fusion bomb.
A Fission bomb uses either Plutonium or Uranium as its fuel source. The metal is shaped into a hollow sphere. The goal is to quickly smoosh all of that metal into as small of a size as possible so that all the fuel is it keep emitting neutrons at itself to create a nuclear chain reaction. This is done with non-nuclear explosives.
When the fission portion detonates, you get the equivalent of the Fat Man or Little Boy and blow up a small town. However, one of its effects is a massive amount of X-Rays, which is important.
Those X-Rays are the ignition source for the second part -- Fusion.
In a two-stage nuke, the Fission portion is merely fuze for the Fusion portion. To calculate the difference in energy release, just calculate E=mc² with m being the mass defect in the reaction.
@nuclearshill to answer your question, the Tsar Bomba is a three-stage nuke, with the two stages referenced having a third stage added. That is to say, the Fission stage ignites the Fusion stage, and then that Fusion stage ignites a larger Fusion stage with its X-rays.
Theoretically you can just keep adding more Fusion stages, but you get diminishing returns once you calculate the volume and all that shit.
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That's definitely one way to prevent STDs
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no way
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But what about a purified hydrogen bomb?
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The precious tritium?
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Well half deuterium and half tritium
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I learned everything I know about science from those 1960s Time-Life books (if you don't know what I'm talking about keep yourself safe immediately zoomer ) but I never knew this until about 5 years ago. They were very open about the basic concepts of fission -> fusion but fission -> fusion -> fission was I guess a secret in the '60s. And then after that the next generation just didn't give a shit about any of that if they weren't scientists.
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