Word: hydrogens
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...allies seemed politically mesmerized by the mushrooming cloud of the thermonuclear bomb (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Molotov adroitly played on man's justified concern over the power he now holds in his arsenals: "There can be no doubt that the employment of atomic and hydrogen weapons in a war . . . would mean the wholesale annihilation of civilians and the destruction of big cities ..." Here the aim was the usual-to excite the excitable world into banning atom-age weapons so that the wide-open U.S. would not be able to have any, while Iron-Curtained Russia could stockpile them at will...
...four years the hydrogen bomb grew in secret and silence, stirring like a quickened fetus in the guarded laboratories. Few qualified physicists, U.S. or foreign, cared to talk about it. They knew that their science would soon give monstrous birth, but they had been warned to keep quiet. When the pictures of the bomb's fury hit the public last week, not many laymen remembered that the scientists long ago predicted what was likely to happen (TIME...
...Fusion" of light elements, on which the hydrogen bomb depends, is the senior source of nuclear energy. More than 20 years ago, at Cambridge University, Physicists John D. Cockcroft and Ernest T. S. Walton shot hydrogen nuclei (protons) from a primitive high-voltage machine at a lithium target. A few of the protons hit lithium nuclei. The product of each such reaction: two atoms of helium and 17.3 million electron-volts of energy...
That experiment in 1932 was man's first taste of nuclear energy, but it was like the quick-fading taste of a single grain of sugar. Since most of the protons missed their targets, the hydrogen-lithium reaction gave a net loss of energy, and no one knew how to improve its efficiency. Other reactions of light elements yielded theoretical energy too, but all of them were overshadowed by the wartime development of atom-splitting uranium fission...
...similar thing happens at the light end of the series. If light atoms, e.g., hydrogen, are packed together into a larger atom, it weighs less than the pieces that form it. Here again, the loss of weight shows up as energy. A little figuring told the physicists that a given amount of a light element, forced to fuse, would yield more energy than the same amount of uranium. Besides, light elements are plentiful, while uranium is scarce...