At the end of the 30s of the last century, the laws of fission and decay of the chemical element of uranium were already discovered in Europe , and the hydrogen bomb from the category of science fiction turned into reality. The history of nuclear energy development is interesting and still represents an exciting competition between the scientific potential of countries: Nazi Germany, the USSR and the USA. The most powerful bomb that any state dreamed of owning was not only a weapon, but also a powerful political tool. The country that had it in its arsenal actually became omnipotent and could dictate its own rules.
The hydrogen bomb has its own history of creation, which was based on physical laws, namely the thermonuclear process. Initially, it was incorrectly called atomic, and the illiteracy was to blame. In 1938, the scientist Bethe, who later became a Nobel Prize laureate, worked on an artificial energy source - uranium fission. This time was the peak of the scientific activity of many physicists, and in their midst there was an opinion that scientific secrets should not exist at all, since the laws of science were initially international.
Theoretically, the hydrogen bomb was invented, but now with the help of designers it was supposed to acquire technical forms. It only remained to pack it in a certain shell and test it for power. There are two scientists whose names will forever be associated with the creation of this powerful weapon: in the USA it is Edward Teller, and in the USSR Andrei Sakharov.
In the USA, the physicist Edward Teller began to deal with the thermonuclear problem in 1942 . By order of Harry Truman, then president of the United States, the best scientists of the country worked on this problem, they created a fundamentally new weapon of destruction. Moreover, the government’s order was for a bomb with a capacity of at least a million tons of TNT. Teller’s hydrogen bomb was created and showed humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki its limitless, but destructive abilities.
A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that weighed 4.5 tons with a 100 kg uranium content. This explosion corresponded to nearly 12,500 tons of TNT. The Japanese city of Nagasaki erased a plutonium bomb of the same mass, but already equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.
The future Soviet academician A. Sakharov in 1948, based on his research, introduced the design of a hydrogen bomb under the name RDS-6. His research went along two branches: the first was called “puff” (RDS-6c), and its feature was the atomic charge, which was surrounded by layers of heavy and light elements. The second branch is the “pipe” or (RDS-6t), in which the plutonium bomb was in liquid deuterium. Subsequently, a very important discovery was made, which proved that the direction of the "pipe" is a dead end.
The principle of the hydrogen bomb is as follows: first, a charge explodes inside the shell of HB, which initiates a thermonuclear reaction, as a result a neutron burst occurs. In this case, the process is accompanied by the release of high temperature, which is needed for further thermonuclear fusion. Neutrons begin to bombard the liner of lithium deuteride, and it, in turn, under the direct action of neutrons is split into two elements: tritium and helium. The atomic fuse used forms the components necessary for the synthesis to take place in the already activated bomb. Here is such a difficult principle of the hydrogen bomb. After this preliminary action, the fusion reaction begins directly in a mixture of deuterium and tritium. At this time, the temperature in the bomb increases more and more, and an increasing amount of hydrogen is involved in the synthesis. If you follow the time course of these reactions, then the speed of their action can be described as instantaneous.
Subsequently, scientists began to use not nuclear fusion, but their fission. By dividing one ton of uranium, an energy equivalent to 18 Mt is created. Such a bomb has tremendous power. The most powerful bomb created by mankind belonged to the USSR. She even got into the Guinness Book of Records. Its blast wave equated to 57 (approximately) megatons of TNT. It was blown up in 1961 in the area of ​​the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.