The United States, Britain, France, Russia (as the Soviet Union) and China are known to have conducted hydrogen weapon tests. All these nations are signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an agreement that seeks to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation atomic bombs, a more compact size, a lower mass or a combination of these benefits.
The Joint Chiefs made the case to Truman that the hydrogen bomb “would improve our defense in its broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy forces.”
A hydrogen bomb has never been used in battle by any country, but experts say it has the power to wipe out entire cities and kill significantly more people than the already powerful atomic bomb, which the U.S. dropped in Japan during World War II, killing tens of thousands of people.
A primary form of energy from a nuclear explosion is thermal radiation. Initially, most of this energy goes into heating the bomb materials and the air in the vicinity of the blast. Temperatures of a nuclear explosion reach those in the interior of the sun, about 100,000,000° Celsius, and produce a brilliant fireball.
The energy released by fusion is three to four times greater than the energy released by fission, giving the “hydrogen” bomb, or H-bomb, more power. The name comes from the fact that it uses a fusion of tritium and deuterium, hydrogen isotopes.
Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32, Moscow time. In a flash, the bomb created a fireball five miles wide. The fireball pulsed upwards from the force of its own shockwave. The flash could be seen from 1,000km (630 miles) away.
The H-bomb is the most destructive weapon ever created by man. The same power source that fuels the sun is used in the device. This is what makes it far more powerful than other nuclear bombs. Now North Korea claims to have successfully tested one underground.
The Sun is a main-sequence star, and, as such, generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen and makes 616 million metric tons of helium each second.
When a hydrogen bomb is detonated, the immediate effects are devastating: Looking in the general direction of the blast can cause temporary or permanent blindness, and the area at the center of the explosion is essentially vaporized.
