Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-26132150-20150709211850/@comment-26119768-20150710005615

The atomic bomb was invented by a group of scientists selected by the United States government to work on what was called "The Manhattan Project", an operation to produce the first atomic bomb. (The project actually took place I think in Arizona or close to that, the name was to confuse spies as to the location). While no one outside of the government actually knows the specifics of how a nuclear bomb works, the basic premise for a fission bomb is that a supercritical mass of uranium or plutonium (supercritical mass means it can create an exponentially growing nuclear chain reaction) either has another mass "shot" at it, which splits an atom, the split atom sends of particles which split more atoms, and so on, releasing enormous amounts of energy. The other method is the implosion method, which compresses a sub-supercritical mass into a supercritical mass and detonating it, (this only works with plutonium) using an explosive lens, (think a magnifying glass for explosions, which focuses the force). For fusion bombs, a fission bomb is used to heat and compress the fusion fuel (tritium, deuterium, or lithium deuteride). The fusion fuel is kept in a radiation reflecting container. When the fission bomb detonated, the radiation compresses and then heats the fusion fuel to thermonuclear temperatures. The fusion reaction creates high speed neutrons which induce fission in things that normally couldn't undergo fission (depleted uranium for example). There are other types of nuclear bombs, but those are less common.

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