Word: h-bomb
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...minute quantities in raindrops and groundwater. But the radioactive gas took on strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate of 5.5% a year, the gas must be regularly replenished if atomic weapons are to maintain their full explosive...
SCIENCE: Has the H-bomb's power been tamed...
...journal pushed forward its schedule and published the report by Pons and Fleischmann. But at week's end the more prestigious British journal Nature had not yet decided whether to print their findings. The scientific community, while not at all convinced by the claim that the power of the H-bomb had finally been harnessed, was at least taking it seriously...
Physicist Edward Teller has a reputation for thinking big: during World War II, as other Manhattan Project scientists were racing to build the first atom bomb, the Hungarian-born Teller was already working on the hydrogen bomb. While the H-bomb was both a technological tour de force and a hellishly effective weapon, however, one of Teller's more recent enthusiasms -- the X- ray laser -- could turn out to be an expensive dud. That possibility has ignited a fire storm of accusations that has set off a federal investigation into recent goings-on at the University of California's Lawrence...
...Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and visionary of Star Wars, to Gorbachev, whose response was so minimal that Reagan thought he had not heard the name. "This is the famous Dr. Teller," said the President. "There are many Dr. Tellers," replied Gorbachev coolly, seemingly haunted by his dissident H-bomb scientist Andrei Sakharov...