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Topic: Thermonuclear explosion

	Effects of nuclear explosions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		A nuclear explosion occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
		Atmospheric nuclear explosions are associated with "mushroom clouds" although mushroom clouds can occur with large chemical explosions and it is possible to have an air burst nuclear explosion without these clouds.
		The smoke trails are used to determine the position of the shockwave, which is invisible, in the milliseconds after detonation through the refraction of light, which causes an optical break in the smoke trails as the shockwave passes.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Nuclear_explosion (3046 words)

	Supernova - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Months after the explosion, when the outer layers have expanded to the point of transparency, the spectrum is dominated by light emitted by material near the core of the star, heavy elements synthesized during the explosion, most prominently iron-group elements.
		Heavier elements than iron are formed during this explosion by neutron capture, and from the pressure of the neutrinos pressing into the boundary of the "neutrinosphere", seeding the surrounding space with a cloud of gas and dust which is richer in heavy elements than the one the star originally formed from.
		By ignoring the first second of the explosion, and assuming that an explosion is started, astrophysicists have been able to make detailed predictions about the elements produced by the supernova and of the expected light curve from the supernova.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Supernova (3833 words)

	HighBeam Encyclopedia - hydrogen bomb
		The first thermonuclear bomb was exploded in 1952 at Enewetak by the United States, the second in 1953 by Russia (then the USSR).
		Neutrons from the atomic explosion cause the lithium to fission into helium, tritium (the isotope of hydrogen with mass number 3), and energy.
		The atomic explosion also supplies the temperatures needed for the subsequent fusion of deuterium with tritium, and of tritium with tritium (50,000,000°C and 400,000,000°C, respectively).
	www.encyclopedia.com /html/h1/hydrogn-bm.asp (903 words)

	Frequently Asked Questions
		The rock in the vicinity of the thermonuclear device is shattered by the passage of the explosions shock wave.
		This is in agreement with theoretical calculations that transient strain from underground thermonuclear explosions is not sufficiently large to trigger fault rupture at distances beyond a few tens of kilometers from the shot point.
		The largest underground thermonuclear tests conducted by the US were detonated in Amchitka at the western end of the Aleutian Islands and the largest of these was the 5 megaton codename Cannikin test which occurred on November 6, 1971.
	seismo.berkeley.edu /seismo/faq/nuke_2.html (611 words)

	Hydrogen Bomb - MSN Encarta
		Hydrogen Bomb, also known as H-bomb or thermonuclear bomb, nuclear weapon in which a thermonuclear fusion reaction takes place among heavy isotopes of hydrogen (either deuterium or tritium) to produce an explosion.
		A hydrogen bomb produces an extremely large explosion, equivalent to millions of tons of TNT (see Trinitrotoluene).
		The thermonuclear explosion resulting from the fusion creates great heat, enormous shock waves, high winds, and deadly radiation in the form of gamma rays and neutrons that destroys living matter and contaminates soil and water.
	encarta.msn.com /encyclopedia_761557090/Hydrogen_Bomb.html (686 words)

	Nuclear Weapons
		Because of the high temperatures required to initiate a nuclear fusion reaction, such devices are often called thermonuclear devices.
		A thermonuclear explosion can be created only by producing the required temperature, about a hundred-million Kelvins, and by forcing the material together so quickly that it will fuse rapidly.
		Because the thermonuclear explosive devices used hydrogen isotopes, (deuterium-tritium fusion), the resulting bombs were often called "hydrogen bombs".
	hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu /hbase/nucene/bomb.html (934 words)

	PMag v15n1p24 -- Pure Fusion Weapons?
		For this reason, all current generation thermonuclear weapons have a fission "primary" that sets off a fusion explosion in the "secondary." However, pure fusion weapons, that is, weapons that would not need a fission trigger, have long been thought of as "desirable" by nuclear weapons designers, in part because they would not produce fission-product fallout.
		It is clear that nuclear yields that derive from super-critical explosions, however small, are illegal, as is the case for all present nuclear weapons.
		An explosion is an interplay between the total amount of energy released, energy density, and the time in which the energy is released.
	www.peacemagazine.org /archive/v15n1p24.htm (3409 words)

	SN: Theoretical Research (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Supernovae are among the brightest phenomena in the Universe and serve as markers to measure the size and age of the Universe.
		The physical mechanisms of explosion by thermonuclear burning or gravitational collapse are challenging physics problems that are worthy of study in their own right.
		The other basic physical mechanism involved in supernova explosions is gravitational collapse of an evolved stellar core to produce a neutron star with the liberation of a huge flux of neutrinos.
	hej3.as.utexas.edu /~www/SN/theory.html (4950 words)

	Spaceflight Now \| Breaking News \| Chandra discovers eruption, pulsation in nova outburst
		Nova explosions occur on a white dwarf star (a star which used up all its nuclear fuel and then shrunk to the size of the Earth) that is orbiting a normal size star.
		Explosions erupt when gas is pulled from the companion star onto the white dwarf's surface, creating an explosive layer of dense, hot hydrogen.
		The primary purpose of the Chandra observation was to analyze the composition of the white dwarf surface using the X-ray spectrum.
	spaceflightnow.com /news/n0109/10chandranova (1293 words)

	Remarkable Three-Hour Nuclear Explosion on Neutron Star Details Unimagined Fury (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Strohmayer's results, which may mark the first observation of a carbon- fueled thermonuclear explosion on a neutron star, are presented today at the meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.
		The amount of carbon consumed in the explosion was about mass of Pluto or 1/10th the total mass of the Moon.
		The explosion itself is interesting to scientists because (1) it lasted so long, providing plenty of X-ray photons to analyze, and (2) it showed such unique fluctuations or patterns during those three hours, providing the meat for in-depth analysis of the physics of neutron stars, accretion, and thermonuclear reactions.
	www.spacedaily.com /news/neutron-star-00b.html (1103 words)

	Today in Technology History - Nov 1
		The word "thermonuclear" is also used to describe such weapons because of the extreme heat necessary for nuclear fusion to take place.
		The first thermonuclear explosion took place on November 1, 1952 on one of the islands in the Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands between Australia and Hawaii.
		The thermonuclear device exploded in the MIKE test had the same force as 10.4 megatons (10,400,000 tons) of TNT.
	www.tecsoc.org /pubs/history/2002/nov1.htm (416 words)

	IEER Conference: Nuclear Disarmament, the NPT, and the Rule of Law
		While the energies released are much smaller than in a thermonuclear weapons explosion, parameters such as temperature, pressure, and energy density are very close, so it gives you a lot of information about fusion reactions, how the fusion reaction might work in a weapon.
		IEER has developed a definition of a thermonuclear explosion that is quite clear and technically consistent: the definition of a nuclear explosion is ignition.
		It doesn't say that some forms of nuclear explosion are okay for the nuclear weapons states, but not for the non-nuclear weapons states, or that there are a different set of prescriptions for one versus the other.
	www.ieer.org /latest/npthish.html (1940 words)

	IEER: Energy & Security No. 6 / Science for Democratic Action V6N4 and V7N1: Pure Fusion Weapons?
		Thermonuclear explosions, unlike explosions caused by chain reactions in fissile materials like plutonium, do not require a minimum critical mass.
		This is because all nuclear explosions of possible military consequence are expected to occur in well under one millisecond.
		We propose that the definition of explosions as those achieved in ECF systems with a gain of one is a minimally satisfactory definition for the purposes of CTBT compliance.
	www.ieer.org /ensec/no-6/fusion.html (3686 words)

	IAC RESEARCHERS SHOW THAT A BLACK HOLE WAS CREATED FOLLOWING THE EXPLOSION OF A SUPERMASSIVE STAR (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		After detecting the remains of a violent thermonuclear explosion in a star that now orbits a fl hole in our Galaxy, IAC researchers, using the Keck Telescope, have shown that some fl holes are created after supernova or hypernova explosions of stars with 30 times that of the Sun.
		These chemical elements are produced only in supermassive stars, which alone are capable of contaminating their surroundings with them through stellar explosion in the form of supernovae or hypernovae.
		The composition of the ejected matter could determined due to the existence of a neighbouring star that survived the explosion, although it was significantly contaminated by the ejecta.
	www.iac.es /gabinete/noticias/1999/8sepeng.htm (689 words)

	[No title]
		Concerning the most recent incident, the letter written by John T. Conway, board chairman for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, did not make clear whether the explosive had been separated from the "soft-ball sized chunk" of plutonium which it encases at the time the explosives were almost dropped.
		A thermo nuclear explosion requires a very precicely timed and focused external explosive force to compress the plutonium to critical mass.
		Even if the core were dropped and the explosives surrounding it were to detonate from the impact (highly unlikely) the worst you would get is a dirty bomb effect in a relatively contained space.
	www.atsnn.com /story/30742.html (371 words)

	Summary of Research
		Before the explosion, all land was joined together in one land mass, but the explosive expansion of the core caused fissures to open up in the cold upper mantle...
		The tendency of gases and plasmas to diffuse, and the integrality of temperature and pressure, are very significant when one mulls over the fact that the universe is a gas and plasma universe.
		The nuclear core-explosion, and man-induced nuclear explosions, are all gas/plasma phenomena...
	www.normanspencer.co.nz /PsEarthScience/Summary.html (717 words)

	News Release - Rapid-fire thermonuclear explosion
		While weapons research requires only a single explosion to produce data, fusion meant to create virtually unlimited electrical power requires the high-yield implosion of a pea-sized deuterium-tritium pellet every few seconds, says Craig Olson, who organized the inertial fusion section of the Snowmass meeting.
		The problem has been that the power of a high-yield thermonuclear explosion would damage not only the pellet-target, which could be rapidly replaced, but also the last five feet of power lines connected to the target.
		This has been a stumbling block in envisioning Z as a source of real-world power, since a near-continuous stream of rapid-fire explosions is necessary to continuously create steam to turn turbines, says Derzon, who with principal collaborators Gary Rochau, Greg Rochau and Steve Slutz came up with the new concept.
	www.sandia.gov /media/NewsRel/NR1999/thermo.htm (838 words)

	Mainstreamweekly.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		Thermonuclear weapons, however, had no fixed outer boundary of destruction; they could become “weapons of genocide” and posed “a threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable”.
		On January 31, 1950 Truman ordered an examination of the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon, with the rate and scale of effort to be determined by the AEC and the Department of Defence.
		It added that a thermonuclear bomb would be more useful to the Soviet Union because the United States, with a much larger arsenal of atomic bombs, already had a military alternative to thermonuclear weapons.
	www.mainstreamweekly.com /annual_issue05/content/general19.asp (8429 words)

	4.4 Elements of Thermonuclear Weapon Design
		The original concept for creating a thermonuclear explosion was to create a thermonuclear combustion wave in a mass of liquid deuterium.
		It is striking that once Ulam's initial insight regarding the use of a nuclear explosion to compress the fuel was made, the other parts of the concept seem to develop almost inevitably from the effort to translate the concept to practice (which partly explains its reinvention by the Soviets, British, French, and Chinese).
		Although the prospect of making possible a self-supporting thermonuclear detonation wave appears to have been the initial attraction to both Ulam and Teller, it turns out that once the final Teller-Ulam concept was developed the character of the ignition problem was so completely changed that this issue ceased to be of major importance.
	nuclearweaponarchive.org /Nwfaq/Nfaq4-4.html (19238 words)

	SPACE.com -- To Nuke or To Nudge
		It is a bit like the difference between hitting a sandbag and a solid sandstone block with a sledgehammer -- the sandbag absorbs the impact with little disruption but the sandstone block shatters.
		Surprisingly, it is the intense radiation generated by the explosion that does the job.
		They also point out that there are ways to deflect asteroids that don't require nuclear explosions and we should be looking at these methods more closely.
	space.com /businesstechnology/technology/nudging_not_nuking_000211.html (1070 words)

	The Supernova
		A supernova is the mindbogglingly powerful explosion of certain kinds of stars at the end of their lives, typically giant stars that have exhausted their available fuel supply so that the core collapses while the outer layers are blasted away, the eruption briefly outshining an entire galaxy.
		In this way, there are two types of supernovae (the plural of "supernova") depending on the physical mechanism involved, either a core collapse or a white dwarf thermonuclear explosion.
		And for astronomers studying exotic objects such as neutron stars, pulsars, and fl holes, as well as the phenomenon of gamma-ray bursts, all of these are thought to be formed by or related to the core collapse supernova.
	imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov /docs/science/know_l1/sn_overview.html (1988 words)

	Type~Ia Thermonuclear Supernovae (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		These deviations may be important clues to the explosion mechanism, and to the nature of the SNIa progenitors.
		Type~Ia supernovae appear to be thermonuclear explosions of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs.
		The delayed detonation mechanism of the explosion, in which a subsonic deflagration becomes a supersonic detonation, give adequate kinetic energy and a range of nickel mass to account for both normal and subluminous Type~Ia events.
	www.aas.org /publications/baas/v26n4/aas185/abs/S2801.html (140 words)

	ch4-1 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		] Thermonuclear research began in the 1930s with the hypothesis that thermonuclear reactions are the energy sources of the Sun and stars.
		In 1942, Edward Teller began working on the possibility of initiating such reactions by means of an atomic explosion, but his initial conclusion was negative.
		Later the year, he attended a conference on thermonuclear reactions where the group agreed that tritium (isotope of hydrogen) should be studied as well as deuterium and concluded that a thermonuclear explosion could be accomplished.
	www.hq.nasa.gov /office/pao/History/SP-4404/ch4-1.htm (334 words)

	VU Astronomy News Release - June 10, 1997 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
		This is the first time direct chemical evidence of a classical nova explosion (the second most violent stellar explosion, exceeded only by a supernova) has been seen in a dwarf nova and thus provides the first evolutionary link between the two types of explosive objects.
		Once dumped onto the surface, hydrogen accumulates until it undergoes thermonuclear fusion reactions that trigger the classical nova explosion.
		However, until their Hubble detection of a past thermonuclear runaway, no dwarf nova had ever been chemically linked to a classical nova.
	www.astronomy.villanova.edu /whatnew/sionnr.htm (531 words)

	Evidence Links Black Hole to Supernova Explosion
		Scientists believe fl holes, the powerful gravitational fields that suck in matter like water going down a drain, result when a supernova collapses or by a tremendous thermonuclear explosion of a supernova.
		The large quantity of the elements has not been seen before in other stars and is synthesized only at very high temperatures which suggest a thermonuclear process such as a supernova explosion.
		In a commentary on the research, John Cowan of the University of Oklahoma said the most logical explanation for the higher abundance of the elements in the companion star of Nova Scorpii 1994 is that they resulted from a supernova explosion of the original massive star in the system.
	www.space.com /science/astronomy/blackhole_supernova_wg.html (406 words)

	Benchmark I
		The nuclei in thermonuclear weapons are fused and are comprised of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.
		Within one and three fourths of a mile at ground zero the explosion would kill ninety-eight percent of the population just from the flying debris and fire, not to mention the explosion.
		Some of the radiation will fall to the earth in a week or two of the explosion, this is called "early fallout." The wind carries the nuclear radiation creating a wider area of exposure lasting approximately ten years.
	www.zianet.com /sadobbyn/bm1sec1.htm (4453 words)

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