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Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear Weapons, explosive devices, designed to release nuclear energy on a large scale, used primarily in military applications. The first atomic bomb (or A-bomb), which was tested on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, represented a completely new type of artificial explosive. All explosives prior to that time derived their power from the rapid burning or decomposition of some chemical compound. Such chemical processes release only the energy of the outermost electrons in the atom. See Atom and Atomic Theory. Nuclear explosives, on the other hand, involve energy sources within the core, or nucleus, of the atom. The A-bomb gained its power from the splitting, or fission, of all the atomic nuclei in several kilograms of plutonium. A sphere about the size of a baseball produced an explosion equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. The A-bomb was developed, constructed, and tested by the Manhattan Project, a massive United States enterprise that was established in August 1942, during World War II. Many prominent American scientists including the physicists Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the chemist Harold Urey, were associated with the project, which was headed by a U.S. Army engineer, Major General Leslie Groves. After the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission became responsible for the oversight of all nuclear matters, including weapons research. Other types of bombs were developed to tap the energy of light elements, such as hydrogen. In these bombs the source of energy is the fusion process, in which nuclei of the isotopes of hydrogen combine to form a heavier helium nucleus (see Thermonuclear, or Fusion, Weapons below). This weapons research has resulted in the production of bombs that range in power from a fraction of a kiloton (1000 tons of TNT equivalent) to many megatons (1 million tons of TNT equivalent). Furthermore, the physical size of the bomb has been drastically reduced, permitting the development of nuclear artillery shel... Please login to view comments from other users.
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