What you are about to learn is a secret -- a secret that the United States and four other nations, the makers of hydrogen weapons, have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect.
The secret is in the coupling mechanism that enables an ordinary fission bomb -- the kind that destroyed Hiroshima -- to trigger the far deadlier energy of hydrogen fusion.
The physical pressure and heat generated by x- and gamma radiation, moving outward from the trigger at the speed of light, bounces against the weapon's inner wall and is reflected with enormous force into the sides of a carrot-shaped "pencil" which contains the fusion fuel.
"That, within the limits of [the previous] sentence, is the essence of a concept that initially eluded the physicists of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China," wrote Howard Morland for The Progressive in 1979, "that they discovered independently and kept tenaciously to themselves, and that may not yet have occurred to the weapon makers of a dozen other nations bent on building the hydrogen bomb."You can get the entire issue of the magazine, in PDF form, here. What nefarious methods did Morland employ to get this top secret info? I guess you'd call it journalism. Most of what he learned about how to make a hydrogen bomb he gained from published science papers. To fill in the gaps, he asked physicists. Turns out that, as closely guarded government secrets go, the H-bomb wasn't one. You can't really take a chunk out of physics and keep it secret -- the information is all there, all it takes is putting it together and solving mechanical problems... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
