Word: fissioned
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...hard to come by. Pessimists feared that too much tritium would be required. They pointed out that each atom of tritium manufactured in a nuclear reactor costs about one atom of U-235 or plutonium, which could be used to better advantage, they thought, in old-style fission bombs...
...both behaved about the same. Now the situation is more complicated. Many light isotopes are suitable for fusion, and under the conditions in an exploding bomb, they may react with one another in many different ways. They also react with the products, e.g., neutrons, given off by the fission detonator, and with materials in the casing of the bomb. As the temperature changes, their behavior changes too. So a diagram describing the behavior of a fusion bomb can give only a few of the possible ingredients and tell only a few of the ways in which they may react...
...main trends of H-bomb development, however, are clear to all. An early step was to force the temperature of the fission detonator (atom bomb) as high as possible. One way to do this is to make the fission reaction more efficient. The early bombs "burned" only a fraction of their fissionable material. As they were improved, they burned more of it and reached higher temperatures. The improved bombs, even though not designed with hydrogen bombs in mind, were therefore more effective as detonators...
...fusion bomb can be made really "dry," with no tritium at all. a new era of nuclear energy has arrived. Every fission bomb in the world's stockpiles can then be upgraded into an H-bomb, with hundreds or thousands of times its original power. They will have to be reworked slightly and surrounded by a reasonable amount of lithium-six deuteride...
Unlike plutonium bombs, whose fission products are naturally radioactive, a lithium-six deuteride bomb is only a moderate producer of radioactive contamination. Its end product, helium, is not radioactive at all. The detonator yields the normal products of fission, but they are no worse than those of an old-style atom bomb. Side reactions may produce radioactive isotopes, but they can be minimized. Apparently, they were minimized effectively in the H-bomb that exploded in the Marshall Islands on March...