Word: fissionability
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...About 18 lbs. (8 kg.) of this enriched plutonium is needed to produce one fission bomb. The rods now contain enough material to make four or five bombs...
...true." says Chris Kagay, '94, another knowledgeble Quadling. "In fact, the Manhattan Project used the squash courts to build the first fission reactor. Of course, at that time it was at the University of Chicago...
When scientists began working on fusion half a century ago, they had no idea the process would be so hard. It had been relatively easy to get energy 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...
Opening the book on his government's nuclear-weapons program, De Klerk announced that after he became President in 1989, he ordered the dismantling and destruction of the secret "nuclear-fission devices" that had been manufactured in the 1970s. The government's strategy at that time, he said, was to use the weapons' "deterrent capability." If a Soviet-backed onslaught against South Africa became critical enough, the major powers would be told of South Africa's nuclear arms capacity to persuade them to intervene...
...prodigious World War II program to build an atom bomb, was set in motion by the fear that Hitler's Germany would produce the weapon first. Experts in the U.S. thought German science could have a lead in the race because a German chemist, Otto Hahn, had discovered nuclear fission in 1938. His countryman Werner Heisenberg was considered by many to be the world's leading physicist and was certain to be at the center of any Nazi A-bomb effort...