Hydrogen+Bomb-P5

__**Hydrogen Bomb**__
Gus

Even as work for the first atomic bomb was going successfully, scientists were thinking about a **hydrogen**, or **fusion**, bomb. As far back as the 1920s, scientists had been exploring the possibility that small nuclei might join together to make bigger nuclei. In 1938 the German-Austrian physicist, Hans Bethe, summarized much of his thinking in a theory that explained the production of energy in the stars. He showed how four hydrogen nuclei might fuse to produce a single helium nucleus with the release of enormous amounts of energy.

Many scientists realized that nuclear fusion could be used as a source of energy on earth, for either military or peaceful uses, if a method could be found to carry out and control the reaction. But that was a very large "if". For one thing nuclear fusion reactions require temperature in the neighborhood of about **40 million degrees**. Because of these high temperature requirements, fusion reactions are also referred to as thermonuclear reactions. The task of working at such high temperatures is incredibly dangerous.

The general concept for such a bomb is a fairly simple fisson bomb surrounded by a mass of fusion. When the fission bomb explodes the temperatures reach about **72,000,000 degrees** for a fraction of a second, but the bomb goes one step further. The high temperatures are large enough to initiate a fusion reaction in the hydrogen surrounding the fission bomb.