Re: Nuclear Weapons Material

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>]

Mikolaj Habryn says:
> > 
> > Fusion bombs I thought used tritium as fuel and needed a Plutonium
> > trigger or something.  They are supposedly set off with some kind of
> > inner mirrored ball with high powered lasers.  Fission then fusion I
> > believe.
> 
> 	The plutonium trigger is set off using conventional explosives
> to implode a hollow sphere of the material. While this technique is
> superficially similar to the gun-type triggering used by U-235 fuelled
> bombs, the geometry prevents the Pu-239 from fissioning prematurely.
> 	The tritium is used as a neutron source - it releases neutrons
> when sufficiently motivated to do so.

In a fusion, or H Bomb, the tritium (which is just hydrogen with an
extra two neutrons) is that which produces the boom -- the main fuel,
as it were. Its a "neutron source" only in the weakest possible sense
-- the same way dynamite might be considered to need nitroglycerine as
a "neutron source". (I'm not sure that people outside of the bomb
building industry really know *for sure* what the geometries used in
the atomic weapon that sets off the fusion reaction.)

Perry