Word: a-bomb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...valuable secrets that hastened the development of their own atom bomb is incontrovertible. But the allegation that physicists who are still idols in the world scientific community cooperated with the espionage network? "Gumshoe braggadocio," fumes Richard Rhodes, author of a 1986 Pulitzer- prizewinning book on the making of the A-bomb. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and a fervent anticommunist, scoffs at the idea that Fermi would ever have cooperated with the Soviets, because Fermi "clearly opposed the Stalinist nightmare...
...Americans might conduct such a successful experiment "in the near future"; he apparently did not know they had done it six months earlier. And Kurchatov was almost the last person from which that knowledge would have been kept: he headed the team of scientists working to produce a Soviet A-bomb...
...prove that it no longer builds nukes -- and to limit its arsenal to the 10 or 15 weapons the U.S. believes it now has. In exchange, Washington will deliver the 38 American-made F-16 jets Islamabad has paid for but hasn't received because of its suspected A-bomb efforts. In North Korea's case, the Administration is willing to live with one or two bombs in exchange for Pyongyang's acceptance of rigorous international inspections that would ensure that no further production takes place. "It's not so much a conscious decision," a State Department official explains...
...through nuclear fission, the breaking apart of such heavy atoms as uranium. That led to A-bombs and today's nuclear power plants. But fusion -- the forcing together of light atomic nuclei, like those of hydrogen -- can release even more energy. The problem is that hydrogen nuclei carry a positive electric charge, and thus they repel one another; they have to be slammed together with terrific force before they will stick. In an H-bomb, that force is provided by a powerful explosive -- an A-bomb, in fact. Inside the sun and other stars, it is a combination of high...
...A-bomb blasts are hardly practical in power plants, and the sun's internal pressure is impossible to duplicate on earth. So fusion scientists put their nuclei in a bottle -- not a physical one, since any contact with the walls would instantly cool the gas and kill the reaction -- but a bottle made of magnetic fields. The researchers would make up for the comparatively low pressure inside by raising the temperature to unheard-of levels. (A competing idea that shows promise uses converging laser beams to compress and ignite a stream of tiny, gas-filled glass pellets...