H-bomb. History of the creation of powerful weapons

In the late 30s of the last century, the laws of fission and decay of the chemical element of uranium were discovered in Europe , and the hydrogen bomb from the category of fiction turned into real reality. The history of the development of nuclear energy is interesting and still represents an exciting competition between the scientific potential of countries: Nazi Germany, the USSR and the United States. The most powerful bomb, which any state dreamed of, was not only a weapon, but also a powerful political tool. The country that had it in its arsenal, in fact, became omnipotent and could dictate its rules.

The hydrogen bomb has its own creation history, based on physical laws, namely the thermonuclear process. Initially, it was wrongly called nuclear, and the reason was illiteracy. In 1938, scientist Bethe, who later became a Nobel Prize winner, worked on an artificial source of energy - the fission of uranium. 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 originally international.

Theoretically, the hydrogen bomb was invented, but now with the help of designers it had to acquire technical forms. It remained only 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 United States it is Edward Teller, and in the USSR - Andrei Sakharov.

In the US, the thermonuclear problem as early as 1942 began to deal with physicist Edward Teller. Under the order of Harry Truman, at that time the US president, the best scientists of the country worked on this problem, they created a fundamentally new weapon of destruction. Moreover, the order of the government was on a bomb with a capacity of at least one million tons of TNT. The hydrogen bomb Teller was created and showed its humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki its limitless, but destructive abilities.

A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, which weighed 4.5 tons with a uranium content of 100 kg. This explosion corresponded to almost 12,500 tons of TNT. The Japanese city of Nagasaki has erased a plutonium bomb of the same mass, but the equivalent is already 20,000 tons of TNT.

The future Soviet academician A. Sakharov in 1948, based on his research, presented a hydrogen bomb design called RDS-6. His research went on 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 HB shell, which initiates a thermonuclear reaction, as a result of which a neutron flash occurs. The process is accompanied by the release of a high temperature, which is necessary for further thermonuclear fusion. Neutrons start bombarding the liner from lithium deuteride, and it in turn under the direct action of neutrons splits into two elements: tritium and helium. The used atomic fuse forms the components necessary for the synthesis to flow into a bomb already in operation. This is such an uneasy principle of the action of the hydrogen bomb. After this preliminary action, a thermonuclear reaction begins in the mixture of deuterium and tritium. At this time, the temperature in the bomb increases more and more hydrogen is involved in the synthesis. If we follow the time of these reactions, the rate of their action can be characterized as instantaneous.

Subsequently, scientists began to apply not the synthesis of nuclei, but their division. When one ton of uranium is divided, 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 was equated to 57 (approximately) megatonnes of TNT. It was blown up in 1961 in the area of the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago.