Hydrogen+bomb-p8

Patrick

The hydrogen bomb was invented by Edward Teller and was completed in 1952. The bomb creates a massive explosion five hundred times larger than the atomic bomb. It uses nuclear fusion to achieve this devastating result. Edward Teller

Teller was also responsible for some work on the atomic bomb. He helped found the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1952.

At first Teller's idea of a bomb more powerful than the fission powered atomic bomb was completely ignored. Scientists believed that a bomb that used fusion would be too hard to make, since the type of hydrogen needed has to be made synthetically. After they saw what the atomic bomb did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they didn't see why we would ever need a more powerful nuclear weapon. Atomic Bomb Exploding Over Hiroshima

This opinion changed in September of 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first fission bomb. Suddenly the United States was no longer the only country with nuclear weapons. This was the start of a major arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and lead to the Cold War.

In a fusion type bomb(the hydrogen bomb), a fission bomb(atomic bomb) is surrounded with hydrogen. When the fission bomb explodes, there are temperatures of about 10 million degrees Celsius, for a fraction a second. These high temperatures create a fusion reaction in the hydrogen.

The first fusion bomb to be exploded by the United States was tested on November 1, 1956. It was tested on Bikini Atoll, an island that is part of the Marshall Islands. The island was surrounded by a fleet of seventy two old navy ships. The bomb was dropped and the island completely disappeared and all of the ships either sunk or suffered heavy damage. This first test was named "the Mike Test."

"Mike Test"

"Hydrogen bomb." DISCovering Science. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. //Student Resource Center- Gold.// Thomson Gale. Cook Memorial Public Library. 12 Febuary 2007 http://find.galegroup.com/srcx/infomark.do/&contentSe+GSRC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodld=SRC-1&docld=EJ2103201341&source=gale&srcprod=SRCG&userGroupName=ccscm&version=1.0.

//The Hydrogen Bomb, Unleashing the Nuclear Age and Arms Race// Orr, Tamra, New York, Rosen Publishing Group Inc. 2005