The History of Hydrogen Bomb and Why It Should Be Banned.

By John Richard Shanebrook, PhD

One of the first applications of the atomic bomb after Nuclear War I was to serve as the trigger for much more powerful hydrogen bombs. The explosion of an atom bomb emits nuclear radiation, heat energy, and photons. These emissions compress fusion fuel to thermonuclear conditions.

From 1945 to 1949, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons until August 29, 1949, when the USSR exploded its first nuclear device. Edward Teller was already actively working on the design of hydrogen bombs, but J. Robert Oppenheimer opposed these efforts. It was President Harry S. Truman who approved the US program to design, build, and test hydrogen bombs.

Meanwhile, the USSR had been secretly working on nuclear weapons since 1941, with extensive help from several spies, including Klaus Fuchs. Both the United States and the USSR achieved early success with hydrogen bombs, as was demonstrated by hundreds of test explosions that spread radioactive fallout around the entire Earth.

It was the US BRAVO test of a huge hydrogen explosive device on March 1, 1954, that brought matters to a conclusion. The radioactive fallout proved to be lethal over thousands of square miles. The result was an international ban on testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere (1963).

However, the Wizards of Armageddon were busily preparing to fight, and maybe win, future wars fought with hydrogen bombs. These plans included risky maneuvers with live hydrogen bombs on planes, submarines, and other mobile devices. Accidents happened, and many hydrogen bombs were lost, blown apart, or simply abandoned.

The absolute worst aspect of hydrogen bomb explosions is global ecocide. The explosions are so powerful they harm the ozone layer and ignite huge fires on Earth that darken the skies. The latter was termed nuclear winter by Carl Sagan.

The conclusion of this book is very simple. All hydrogen bombs should be banned, forever

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504984850

John Richard Shanebrook, PhD

John Richard Shanebrook, PhD, received his engineering education at Syracuse University, where he also taught courses in aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering. His research was mentored by Dr. E. A. Eichebrenner, who previously was a student of the legendary professor I. Flügge-Lotz at Stanford University. After several years of teaching and research in mechanical engineering, Dr. Shanebrook wrote several books. These focused on energy issues such as nuclear technology. These included the following: 1.) Nuclear War I and Other Major Nuclear Disasters of the 20th Century, AuthorHouse, 2007 2.) The History of Nuclear War I, AuthorHouse, 2013 During his engineering career, the author published over ninety technical papers and invented or co-invented several biomedical engineering devices, including prosthetic heart valves and the Vortex Blood Pump. He has been an invited lecturer at many colleges and universities, including the United States military academies at West Point and Annapolis. His publications include measures to halt the horizontal and vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons and a proposal for an international treaty to protect nuclear facilities from acts of war.

Book preview

THE

HISTORY

OF

HYDROGEN BOMB

AND

WHY IT SHOULD

BE BANNED

John Richard Shanebrook

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© 2016 John Richard Shanebrook. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/17/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8484-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8483-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-8485-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904108

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Atom Bombs, Nuclear Radiation, and Photons

Atom bombs provide the triggers for hydrogen bombs by emitting nuclear radiation, heat energy, and photons.

Chapter 2 Four Years of Atom Bomb Monopoly

From 1945 to 1949, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons until the USSR exploded its first nuclear device on August 29, 1949.

Chapter 3 The Hydrogen Bomb Debate in America

Robert Oppenheimer opposed building hydrogen bombs, but Edward Teller was obsessed with constructing the most powerful nuclear explosives possible.

Chapter 4 The American Hydrogen Bomb Project

After President Truman approved work on hydrogen bombs, Edward Teller led the way to a successful design with megaton yields.

Chapter 5 The Russian Hydrogen Bomb Project

With help from Klaus Fuchs, the USSR started work on both fission and fusion nuclear weapons in 1941.

Chapter 6 Atmospheric Tests of Nuclear Weapons (Fallout).

The United States and other nations conducted hundreds of atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs. Radioactive fallout became a major problem on a global scale.

Chapter 7 The BRAVO Test (Hydrogen Bomb)

The BRAVO Test of a practical hydrogen bomb on March 1, 1954, produced so much radioactive fallout, over a vast area, that it resulted in an international ban on the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere (1963).

Chapter 8 Strategies for Thermonuclear War

The advent of modern hydrogen bombs challenged military planners to develop strategies to fight effectively, and possibly win, future nuclear wars.

Chapter 9 Hydrogen Bomb Accidents

With an arsenal of thousands of hydrogen bombs, the US military experienced many accidents. Hydrogen bomb warheads were lost, severely damaged, or simply left on the ocean floor.

Chapter 10 Hydrogen Bomb Ecocide

Ecocide is the large-scale destruction of the natural environment by human actions. This is a major consequence of hydrogen bomb explosions.

Chapter 11 Closing Comments

About the Author

Hydrogen bombs are extreme weapons of genocide, mass destruction, and ecocide. They should be eliminated from all nuclear weapons arsenals on Earth.

Introduction

Why Write a Book about the Hydrogen Bomb?

Why write a book about hydrogen bombs? Why read a book about hydrogen bombs? Here's the answer to these two questions:

The hydrogen bomb is perhaps the most useless invention of all time. Its only purpose is to deter a hydrogen bomb attack by another nation. That is, if you use them against us, we will retaliate and use them against you. That's it! J. Robert Oppenheimer described this situation as like two scorpions in a bottle.

The problem is that hydrogen bombs are extremely powerful weapons of mass destruction. They are roughly one thousand times more powerful than the nuclear weapons that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Nuclear War I (August 1945). They are genocidal, extremely destructive to all man-made structures, and ecocidal. The latter term refers to the large-scale destruction of the natural environment by human activities.

The purpose of this book is to inform the reader on the nature of hydrogen bombs and why they should be banned. An effort similar to that which produced a ban on biological and chemical weapons is needed.

It is noted that Nuclear War I was fought with atomic bombs, in which uranium and plutonium nuclei were fissioned (split) into two smaller nuclei by high-speed neutrons. Hydrogen bombs are directly opposite to this. That is, they work by fusing together hydrogen nuclei. This is possible only at very high temperatures of the order of 100 million degrees Celsius. These temperatures are comparable to the temperature of the sun and the stars in the universe. This process, which requires enormous heat energy to slam together hydrogen nuclei so that they stick and fuse together, is called thermonuclear fusion. This fusion process releases enormous energy in the form of visible light, heat, and nuclear radiation. Like the fission process, the amount of energy released is exactly equal to the amount of mass converted into energy. It was Albert Einstein who first expressed this energy conversion process, in which the energy released is equal to the mass times the speed of light squared.

It is perhaps ironic that hydrogen bombs are possible only because of atomic bombs. That is, the 100-million-degree condition for thermonuclear fusion can be achieved only by exploding an atomic bomb. This was known as early as 1941, during the Manhattan Project, when scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, designed and tested the world's first nuclear device (July 16, 1945).

Basically, what happens is that the high temperature created by the atomic bomb explosion ignites (burns) the fusion fuel (hydrogen). The explosive yield of the weapon, Y, comes from both fission and fusion processes. Fission splits heavy nuclei, and fusion combines light nuclei. Both processes convert some mass of the affected nuclei into energy. The yield of atomic bombs is limited to about 500 kilotons of TNT (equivalent). There is no limit to the yield of hydrogen bombs, which is measured in megatons of TNT (equivalent). The only limit is established by the designers of hydrogen bombs, per the amount of fusion fuel in the bomb itself. Stars and the sun also have a lifetime limit. That is, all stars die when they run out of fusion fuel. Our sun will exhaust its store of fusion fuel in some five billion years from now. Thus, humans must plan ahead to exit Earth sometime in the very distant future.

Figures 1 through 4 are presented here to help the reader visualize the following discussions on hydrogen bombs. Figure 1 depicts the two isotopes of hydrogen---deuterium and tritium---that are used in all modern hydrogen bombs. Deuterium, sometimes called heavy hydrogen, is found in nature. Tritium is radioactive (half-life of about twelve years) and is not found in nature. It must be manufactured.

Tritium can be produced inside nuclear reactors by bombarding certain elements with neutrons (e.g., lithium-6). Tritium gas is collected and forms part of the atom bomb trigger for hydrogen bombs. During the atom bomb explosion process, the tritium fuses with deuterium placed at the center of the bomb. This process boosts the explosive yield by increasing the number of neutrons needed for the chain reaction.

Tritium is also manufactured during the hydrogen bomb explosion process by bombarding solid lithium deuteride (LiD) with neutrons. This tritium then fuses with deuterium and greatly increases the explosive yield of the weapon. The size of the yield depends on the quantity of fusion fuel (deuterium and tritium) inside the casing of the hydrogen bomb.

Figure 2 is a schematic diagram of the classical super hydrogen bomb as designed by Edward Teller. It was never tested, because preliminary calculations indicated it would not work.

Figure 3 is a schematic diagram of Teller's alarm clock design for a hydrogen bomb. The USSR had a similar design called the layer cake, and it was successfully tested.

Figure 4 is a schematic diagram of a modern hydrogen bomb, in which the neutron generator (NG) fires a stream of neutrons at the atom bomb trigger at the instant of detonation.

The reader will find these four diagrams useful in the following chapters in visualizing the various hydrogen bombs that were analyzed by both the United States and the USSR. It is noted that the so-called hydrogen bomb relies on its two isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to produce an efficient thermonuclear explosion.

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Chapter 1

Atom Bombs, Nuclear Radiation, and Photons

Atom bombs provide the triggers for hydrogen bombs by emitting nuclear radiation, heat energy, and photons.

Atom bombs work by using chemical explosives to compress a small ball of plutonium into a much smaller supercritical state, in which a nuclear chain reaction occurs. This process of violent and rapid compression, called implosion, was used to detonate the plutonium atom bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. A key element in the design of atom bombs is the neutron generator, which releases millions of neutrons at the start of the nuclear chain reaction.

The Nagasaki bomb employed a grape-sized device located at the center of the plutonium sphere. Designed by Hans Bethe, it was called Urchin and was highly compressed during the implosion process. This caused a beryllium and polonium reaction that released millions of neutrons that flowed radially outward into the plutonium-239 sphere. A nuclear chain reaction then commenced that, in less than one millionth of a second, generated sufficient heat energy to blow the entire bomb apart with an explosive yield equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT. In this book, this will be written as 20 kt (TNT), where kt denotes kilotons. Later, the explosive yield of hydrogen bombs will be written in millions of tons of TNT; that is, expressed in Mt (TNT), where Mt denotes megatons.

After Nuclear War I ended in August 1945, the United States continued work on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Much of this work focused on improving the efficiency of atom bombs by increasing the number of plutonium fissions during the explosion process. This work proved to be very successful in producing much smaller atom bombs without sacrificing yield. One innovation was to employ two different neutron generators for the atom bomb triggers used to ignite hydrogen bombs. One neutron generator was external to the bomb, and the other was internal and located, like Urchin, at the center of the plutonium sphere.

The external device fired a stream of neutrons directly at the plutonium sphere. The new Urchin used a deuterium-tritium thermonuclear reaction to release lots of neutrons that boosted the yield of the atomic trigger. This technique of boosting the yield of atom bombs will be discussed in a later chapter. It is noted that the external device is designated NG in Figure 4.

Nuclear Radiation

At the very instant of denotation of the atom bomb's trigger, nuclear radiation pours out of the region of plutonium fission. Much of this radiation is in the form of gamma rays that move at the speed of light. This stream of radiation is extremely powerful and originates from nuclear processes. It is noted that X-rays are also emitted, but the gamma rays are much more energetic. Both gamma rays and X-rays are forms of electromagnetic radiation, characterized by waves that propagate through space with a certain frequency and wavelength. Gamma rays have a shorter wavelength than X-rays, and their energies are measured in hundreds of thousands of electron volts.

The concept of an electron volt is a convenient way to express the energy levels of all electromagnetic radiation. One electron volt is the amount of kinetic energy that an electron gains when it is accelerated through a potential difference of one volt.

It is noted that gamma rays were first discovered by Paul Villard while he was working in Paris in 1900. Uranium was observed to decay by emitting an alpha particle (helium nucleus), and further decay involved the emission of gamma rays. In this way, radioactive elements transform into other elements. The emission of gamma rays reduces the energy level of the nucleus.

Gamma rays are also common in astrophysical processes such as those in the stars. Our sun burns hydrogen by thermonuclear fusion, and it emits gamma rays during this process. In fact, outer space is full of this form of nuclear radiation from stellar processes, including supernova explosions. Astronauts must be shielded from this radiation by spacecraft designed to protect human occupants. Likewise, humans on spaceship Earth are protected from gamma rays and all cosmic rays by Earth's atmosphere and its ozone layer.

Finally, gamma rays can pass through matter but lose energy when they do so. For example, when gamma rays intersect