Word: lithium
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...temperatures" and "thermonuclear reactions" merely by the old trick of accelerating charged particles. Just after Perón's first announcement, Richter hinted that an article by British Physicist Sir John Cockcroft told what line he was following. Cockcroft described how, in 1932, he shot protons against a lithium target and turned the lithium into helium plus energy...
Firemen and student bunkers attempted to extinguish the flames with water, whereupon a quart of hydrochloric said, a half pound of metalic sodium, two and a half pounds of lithium bromide, and five gallons of faming sulfuric acid exploded...
...reaction." Probably not enough deuterium atoms would collide squarely. The reaction would probably die out before much of the material had a chance to react, and thus the bomb would not be very destructive. It might be much better, says the author, to surround the uranium detonator with lithium hydride. When hydrogen and lithium atoms in this common chemical compound are given sufficient energy, they react with one another, forming two atoms of helium 4. It takes only 100,000 electron volts, says the article, to start the reaction. Each atomic collision yields an enormous amount of energy: 17.3 million...
...most convenient thing about the hydrogen bomb is the abundance of the ingredients. Rich deposits of uranium are rare, but enough ordinary hydrogen for hundreds of bombs could be drawn in a day from a bathroom faucet. Deuterium (heavy hydrogen) can be separated from natural hydrogen without much trouble. Lithium is plentiful too, and so are other elements that may be useful in a hydrogen bomb...
...ingredient tritium (hydrogen 3) is radioactive and is excessively rare in nature, but it is not hard to make. One method is to bombard lithium 6 with neutrons in a uranium pile. The reaction yields tritium and helium, which can be separated by simple chemistry. This job could be done in the plutonium-making piles at Hanford, but probably will be done in a special pile built without difficulty for the purpose...