Word: lithium
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Only a little plutonium-about 10 lbs. -is needed, chiefly as a detonator. Modern nuclear weapons get most of their power from comparatively plentiful fusion materials, such as lithium and deuterium (heavy hydrogen). The nation that makes or acquires a few plutonium detonators can upgrade them without much difficulty into city-busting H-bombs. "The cost of deuterium," says one British scientist, "is about like good champagne...
...Atomic Age. it was difficult to turn out primitive A-bombs in quantity because they were made of plutonium or uranium 235. and both elements require enormous plants for production. The advent of the H-bomb was a big break for the Russians because H-bomb ingredients (deuterium, lithium, etc.) are comparatively cheap and easy to get. Chances are that the Russians have turned most of their plutonium and U-235 into detonators for H-bombs. This should give them enough nuclear explosives to wreck or poison most of the earth...
...missile missiles, it could do its job without spraying the ground below with radioactive fallout. But perhaps the most devastating effect of the N-bomb would be to make nuclear explosives available to all nations. Plutonium and uranium 235 for fission bombs are expensive and scarce, but fusion ingredients (lithium, deuterium, etc.) are comparatively cheap and plentiful. If they are the only major ingredients needed, the manufacture of N-bombs and big H-bombs to be triggered by them will be an easy matter, once the secret of their construction becomes common knowledge...
...Several stars or star clusters showing inexplicably wide deviations in their chemical composition. In some cases, they varied vastly in the amount of lithium and beryllium they contained, and one star (3 Centauri A) contained 100 times more phosphorus than the sun. The discovery poses the still unanswered question: Why do stars have such different contents if, as is generally supposed, they were all formed by similar processes...
...there would be little excitement. But U-235 is not an ordinary commodity; only a few-pounds, perhaps less, are now required to make the detonator for a hydrogen bomb that can smash the world's biggest city. The other nuclear ingredients of such bombs, deuterium and lithium 6, are comparatively easy to come by. High skill and knowledge are needed to assemble these devices, but both can be acquired by any purposeful nation, however small...