Word: plutonium
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...Painful Pioneering. When the multibillion-dollar U.S. Manhattan Project pioneered the art during World War II, there was no such thing as nuclear technology. Starting with only a few scientific guidelines, the physicists had to create new instruments, materials, processes, even a new element: plutonium. They had to write new reference books in a new technical jargon. Their basic raw material, uranium, was a chemical curiosity. To get it in carload lots, they needed a new mining industry with a novel and tricky technology...
...detonator of a thermonuclear bomb is a fission bomb containing plutonium or uranium 235, and its explosion sets off the main charge of fusion material, which is essentially deuterium (heavy hydrogen). Fission detonators are expensive, but a single one can explode any amount of comparatively cheap fusion material. Result: the bigger the bomb, the cheaper it is in terms of explosive yield. Clark figures that a ten-megaton bomb costs somewhat more than $1,000,000, mostly for the detonator. But further increases in yield cost only about $5,000 per megaton, so that the price...
...DISCOVER elements," Glenn Theodore Seaborg once told an interviewer. And he certainly does: in less than 20 years. Chemist Seaborg shared in the discovery of nine new elements, all of them in the heavy, transuranium field. In 1940, when he was just 28, Seaborg and Physicist Edwin McMillan identified plutonium, and with it, the key to the atomic bomb; in 1951 Seaborg and McMillan received the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Working in a University of California laboratory, Seaborg and his associates gradually extended the periodic table of elements, usually named their discoveries for their place of origin (americum, berkelium...
With the discovery of plutonium, Seaborg moved into the forefront of nuclear science. In 1942 he went to Chicago as one of the key figures in the development of the atom bomb, spent the war years directing chemical research at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory-under the Army's Manhattan Project. Seaborg was largely responsible for the chemical separation processes used in the manufacture of plutonium at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Richland, Wash., in the tense months before Hiroshima...
...many nuclear bombs have the Russians? They have too many. In the early years of the 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...