This article was published more than 5 years ago. Some information may no longer be current. More explosive: Compared with the atomic bomb the kind dropped on Japan in the closing days of the Second World War , the hydrogen bomb can be far more powerful — by 1, times or more, experts say. Atomic bombs rely on fission, or atom-splitting, just as nuclear power plants do. The hydrogen bomb, also called the thermonuclear bomb, uses fusion, or atomic nuclei coming together, to produce explosive energy.
Stars also produce energy through fusion. The amount of energy is huge. More compact: Hydrogen bombs can be made small enough to fit on a head of an intercontinental missile. What's the same: Both the A-bomb and H-bomb use radioactive material like uranium and plutonium for the explosive material. Here's an example of how much more destructive a hydrogen bomb can be than an atomic one, as calculated by the NUKEMAP tool designed by nuclear-weapons historian Alex Wellerstein.
The largest orange circle denotes the thermal radiation radius, the area where the explosion can cause third-degree burns; the green is the radiation radius, where radiation doses are high enough to kill most people over the course of hours or weeks.
If any of North Korea's previous atomic bombs had been dropped on Parliament Hill, the immediate devastation would be confined mostly to Ottawa's downtown core and neighbouring Gatineau. But a blast as powerful as the first-ever hydrogen bomb — codenamed Ivy Mike, detonated by the United States in — would devastate the greater Ottawa area and many neighbouring communities as well.
Although no other country has used such a weapon of mass destruction since World War II, experts say it would be even more catastrophic if a hydrogen bomb were to be dropped instead of an atomic one. Simply speaking, experts say a hydrogen bomb is the more advanced version of an atomic bomb. An atomic bomb uses either uranium or plutonium and relies on fission, a nuclear reaction in which a nucleus or an atom breaks apart into two pieces.
To make a hydrogen bomb, one would still need uranium or plutonium as well as two other isotopes of hydrogen, called deuterium and tritium. The hydrogen bomb relies on fusion, the process of taking two separate atoms and putting them together to form a third atom.
In both cases, a significant amount of energy is released, which drives the explosion, experts say. However, more energy is released during the fusion process, which causes a bigger blast. Morse said the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were each equivalent to just about 10, kilotons of TNT. Hydrogen bombs are also harder to produce but lighter in weight, meaning they could travel farther on top of a missile, according to experts. Both bombs are extremely lethal and have the power to kill people within seconds, as well as hours later due to radiation.
The high temperatures and pressures created by the plutonium fission cause the hydrogen atoms to fuse. This fusion process releases neutrons, which feed back into the plutonium, splitting more atoms and boosting the fission chain reaction. Governments around the world use global monitoring systems to detect nuclear tests as part of the effort to enforce the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty CTBT. There are signatories to this treaty, but it is not in force because key nations, including the United States, did not ratify it.
Since , Pakistan, India and North Korea have carried out nuclear tests. Nevertheless, the treaty put in place a system of seismic monitoring that can differentiate a nuclear explosion from an earthquake.
The CTBT International Monitoring System also includes stations that detect the infrasound — sound whose frequency is too low for human ears to detect — from explosions. Eighty radionuclide monitoring stations around the globe measure atmospheric fallout, which can prove that an explosion detected by other monitoring systems was, in fact, nuclear.
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